The Blue Parakeet

As a measure of closure, I've decided to start reviewing books once I've finished with them.

My most recent read was titled The Blue Parakeet. It was an interesting read to say the least, about parakeets, hyenas, and the Bible. A co-worker of mine saw me reading it recently and asked me what it was about, after thinking for a moment, I responded with, "it's really just about the Bible". To which she responded, "Wow, a Christian book about the Bible. Don't see many of those." Funny, but I didn't appreciate the tone, so I went with, "He's actually one of the first authors I've read who acknowledges that the Bible makes no mention about the morality or immorality of the act of premarital sex. What do you think about that?" And she backed off.

But really, the author, Scott McKnight, makes a very convincing analogy about a Blue Parakeet. Apparently in his back yard, this blue parakeet flew in one day, out of the blue (forgive the pun), and totally freaked out his regular birds that he feeds. Every day the thing would fly in, all the sparrows and parrots would scatter and let it take whatever it wanted. Because it was so unfamiliar, the other birds didn't know how to fit it in with their day-to-day activities. The Blue Parakeet is an analogy for passages in the Bible that regular people of today scatter when we make the mention of. Things like (and he lists several), how the Gentiles can be exempt from things like divorce or circumcision in certain situations but not other laws, what the role of women is in the church, surrendering all our possessions to the poor, the death penalty - supported in the old testament and Romans 13, but not what Jesus taught, tongues, tithing, becoming "all things to all things" - I Corinthians 9:19-23, and even why the Bible seems to support an earth-centered universe.

However, Scott clearly says dozens of times that the purpose of his book is not to confront these issues head on. What he wants to do is offer a suggestion on how we are reading this book we call the Bible. The first part of his book is devoted to all the wrong ways of reading the Bible. He lists them:

1) Morsels of Law - this consists of reading the Bible to exclusively gain more knowledge and facts about morality. He quotes a friend when discussing this names F. F. Bruce, "I think that Paul would be rolling over in his grave if he knew that his words were being turned into Torah." He believes that those with this style of reading like to create a list of what not to do, and simply leave it at that.

"[In this,] God becomes the Law God, usually a little ticked off and impatient. Our relationship to God becomes conditioned by whether we are good citizens. The ugly element to the mistake of making the Bible a law book is when we consider what it does to us."

2) Morsels of Blessings and Promises - In the same way, when we divide the Bible up into little morsels of good and bad things, it becomes easier to pick and choose what we want. He quotes a friend, Edith Humphrey, when considering quotes like "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" from David and Jesus, "It is unfortunately the case that some contemporary expressions of Christianity have forgotten, or are embarrassed by, this moment of dark reflection, and instead espouse an unrealistic and warped view of spiritual victory. Relentlessly upbeat moods lead to false security and canned joy."

"It is important to know the blessings and to rely on God's promises. Please don't misunderstand, the blessings and promises of God in the Bible emerge from a real life's story that also knows that we live in a broken world and some days are legitimately tough."

3) Mirrors and Inkblots - this constitutes instead of "being swept into the Bible's story, these thinkers sweep the Bible up into their own story".

4) Puzzling together the pieces to map God's mind - We can figure God out with the Bible. Probably the one the resonated the most with me. When we turn the Bible into a map by using a man-made system, we often ignore pieces that don't fit, or find altogether that it is impossible. We try and take the writings of dozens of authors and pull them together to understand God like we would pull together dozens of 19th century authors to try to understand Charles Dickens' thinking and social ideas.

"The most frequent way we have of getting rid of the puzzling or unpleasant difficulties in the Bible is to systematize it, organizing it according to some scheme or other that summarizes 'what the Bible teaches.' If we know what the Bible teaches, we don't have to read it anymore, don't have to enter the story and immerse ourselves in the odd and unflattering and uncongenial way in which this story develops, including so many people and circumstances that have nothing to do, we think, with us."
-Eugene Peterson

5) Maestros - Maestro is defined by Scott as the master of something, or a Rabbi. He sees people looking to the Bible as a collection of Maestros under the bigger Maestro, Jesus. This is best supported by the over-popular question, "What would Jesus do?" More often than not, however, Maestro Jesus is either ignored or overwhelmed by Maestro Paul.

"Even when we dipped into the Gospels, especially at Christmas and Easter, we used maestro Paul to inform us about what Jesus was really doing and saying."


The second part of Scott's book moves into what I can only describe as his best suggestion for how we can and should read the Bible. Story. "God chose to communicate in language, since language is always shaped by context, and since God chose to speak to us over time through many writers, God also chose to speak to us in a variety of ways and expressions. Furthermore, I believe that because the gospel story is so deep and wide, God needed a variety of expressions to give us a fuller picture of the Story.

He uses a coined term called "Wiki-Storied". Basically, all the stories of the Bible, from all the different authors, are miniature versions of "The Story", which is what God wants to convey to us. Since we in the Western world are so obsessed with our individual salvation and relationship with God, we like to read the Bible as morsels or blessings and promises instead of becoming aware of our "oneness with others". This is what Scott portrays as "The Story": this "oneness with others" and "oneness with God". And it's here where he gets to be very philosophical. His writings become very deep and, honestly, pretty confusing to anyone not already engaged in dialogue with his train of thought already. He gets into this 'oneness', some 'otherness', and really gets into the idea of Eikons (which is humanity ...I think).

Thirdly, and lastly, Scott backs up his contention of The Story with some thoughts and then an examply. He's a professor by trade, and so when he brings up all sort o difficulties with the Bible to his students, the most common response he gets is "That was then, but this is now". Unfortunately for me, that doesn't begin to answer a lot of the things mentioned, but Scott seems relatively content with leaving it at that.

Mostly, he know gets into our relationship with the Bible.

He hates the authority approach to the Bible, "to make sure the Bible's authors got things right, God's spirit was at work inspiring what they wrote. Because God, who is always true, produced the Bible, it is inerrant. As God's true Word, therefore, it is our final authority, and our response to the Bible must be one of submission." He quotes the Psalmist several times to show us how we need to delight in God's commandments by praying, "I delight in your derees; I will not neglect your word (119:16)" instead of praying, "Your words are authoritative, and I am called to submit to them." I found this quite humorous.

He speaks of separating the person from the paper by using an examply of his teaching career where many professors were engaged in teaching a subject instead of teaching students. Loving the words of our spouse (for instance) instead of loving our spouse would be ridiculous, we need to begin loving God by means of his communications instead of loving his communications. I absolutely loved this idea when I read it, because for years I've used this line with a very many people "God is bigger than the Bible", and most of the people who heard it were not really able to understand it.

"If I do what God says, doesn't that show that my view of the Bible is the right one?"
"We have too many that say, 'now that you've got the right view of the Bible, you're on the right side of the angels'."
Matthew 21:28-32
"Our relationship to the God of the Bible is to listen to God so we can love him more deeply and love others more completely."
"Listening... is an act of love."

So then we come to discernment. This is where he feels it necessary to bring up several controversial topics from the Bible that are popular (and also unpopular) Blue Parakeets.
He ranges from how Jesus teaches us to be 'perfect' (Matthew 5:48), how Jesus' commandment on lust could really only apply to married people, how anger is murderous, how in most translations Jesus teaches us to recite the Lord's prayer whenever we pray (Luke 11:1-4), how gays and lesbians should participate in the church, how Gentiles are exempt from some Jewish laws like circumcision and divorce in some cases (so does that make them exempt from all but Jesus' commandments?), the death penalty, the earth-centered universe (Job 9:6, Proverbs 8:27, Revelation 7:1, Job 38:4-7, etc), the death penalty (supported in Exodus 22:18, 22:20, Leviticus 24:13, Deuteronomy 21:18-21, 22:22, Numbers 15:32-36; and where it's not used, Genesis 4, Exodus 21:12-14, Numbers 35:6-34, Deuteronomy 4:41-43, Numbers 35:25), Charismatic Gifts, and the potentially devastating controversiality of I Corinthians 9:19-23 where Paul advocates becoming all things to save all peoples.

Like I said, he does not confront these issues head on, but suggests reading the Bible as a story with tradition instead of through tradition. After this, he does go into one specific (for about 4 chapters) of the role of women in the church. I'm negatively interested in this topic, so I basically skimmed it. His conclusion is the same - don't take the Bible too literally, it's a story bound by the limit of peoples' knowledge and their cultures. Always take these into account.

Very interesting read, but became kind of redundant. I recommend it!