What To Do With Blue Parakeets?

Blue Parakeet:
Rethinking How We Read the Bible Review

With this book, Scot McKnight, more
than ever, is building an ancient-future perspective of theology and
hermeneutics.  As in A Community Called Atonement, McKnight is tackling the issue of
hermeneutics, particularly the interpretation of blue parakeets (passages that
create tension, division, and bewilderment) with a common sense approach that
does not navigate the either/or of modernism but instead follows a pragmatic
post-modern view, what some call critical realism, that sees the necessity of
tackling issues with a "both/and" perspective. 

The thesis of McKnight’s book, which he works out in the large
case study on Women in Church Ministries Today, is that:

A)    We
recognize that we read the Bible through our own particular lens…or, we are all
pickers and choosers, and we must accept this as fact.

B)     We
need to read the Bible with tradition, not through tradition.

The first part of McKnight’s
thesis is why he wrote the book, because he believes

many of us want to know why we
pick and choose. Even more importantly, many of us want to know how to do this
in a way that honors God and embraces the Bible as God’s Word for all times. (13)

The second part of McKnight’s thesis is what makes this an
ancient-future book and not a paleo-orthodox book or a book praising
theological nostalgia.  McKnight desires
that we stop thinking of tension as a bad thing, and when we see and read blue
parakeets in the Scriptures, we should not ignore them or distort them or cage
them within our traditions.  Instead,
McKnight desires we live in the tension and wrestle with the blue
parakeets.  We are to have a deep love
and respect for church tradition, according to McKnight, but sometimes, because
of the biases or particular lens of the church fathers and mothers, tradition
has gotten it wrong, and thus we must move from ancient to future, which are
our own interpretations and living-out of blue parakeet passages.  Like in A
Community Called Atonement, where McKnight uses the analogy of a golf bag
with many clubs that all serve a purpose as a metaphor for how we should look
to the many different definitions of Christ’s atonement as a mosaic "both/and"
and not as a divisive "either/or," Blue
Parakeet is a book that demands we recognize the difficulty of biblical
interpretation and have the humility to recognize our personalities and church
cultures play a role in interpretation. 
And with that humility, we must come alongside tradition and wrestle
through issues in interpretation from the early church to the present.  Most importantly, McKnight give license for
differing with Christian tradition when the blue parakeets come to be seen in a
different cultural context.

McKnight is
not straying into liberal "la-la" land here—he is being highly critical and
humble in the case study on Women in Church Ministries Today presented at the
end of the book.  In making a case for
Women in Ministry, McKnight is presenting a balanced perspective for cultural
criticism and the Spirit’s role in interpretation with tradition and not through
tradition.  In order to engage in this
broadened hermeneutic, McKnight stresses we must not read the Bible as system
but instead as a Story made up of stories (wiki-stories, in McKnight’s
parlance).  The re-orientation from the
Bible as systematic theology to the Bible as Story made up of little-stories
encourages us to approach the Bible orally, and not textually.  Instead of analyzing the Bible, we should
listen to the Bible and discern wisely from it. 
The Bible is not to be analyzed for data but to be critiqued and applied
as a Story of stories that enriches and informs how we live out our personal
story.  This narrative theology McKnight
espouses is both topical (connecting the stories of women throughout the Bible
to inform our hermeneutic and application of the Story to ecclesiology) and
canonical (viewing books of the Bible as wiki-stories of the authors, i.e.
reading John’s works together and Paul’s works together).

The book is a quick read, and McKnight writes in a pastoral
and conversational tone that invites the less nuanced or "learned" reader into
complex theological and hermeneutical discussions without all the jargon
(jargon I have been using in this review!). 
The accessibility of this book, along with its even-keel approach to
interpretation as a humble act of navigating the waters of tradition, culture, individual,
and the Spirit, makes it a must read for those of us who are wondering what to
do with all those blue parakeets, and when McKnight tells us we cannot do much
but try and be happy in trying, we can find the contentment of living in a
Story that informs our own stories which are still being written.

Title Information:

Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How We Read the Bible
Scot McKnight
ISBN: 0310284880
Zondervan