Book Review: The Blue Parakeet

I read this book a few months ago, but I'm just now getting around to writing a review.  Scot McKnight authored The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read The Bible.  It's a book that deals in heavy and complicated subjects but McKnight does a wonderful job of making his thoughts accessible to those without a theological education.  Compared to other hermeneutics books I've read, Blue Parakeet is a book one could possibly navigate in a few days.

Blue parakeets, according to McKnight, are those squirrely Bible passages that seem ever-so difficult to understand.  They're the Bible passages that seem odd compared to the rest.  We're afriad of them, or we ignore them, or shoo them away, or cage them, but in any case, we never seem to know what to do with those pesky blue parakeets that fly into our roost.  What do we do about those Bible passages that just don't seem to make sense or rub us the wrong way?  McKnight insists that instead of trying to tame the parakeets, we should listen to them, let them be and "Let the Bible be the Bible."  He provides 3 ways to begin reading the Bible, blue parakeets and all.

First, he insists that we read the Bible as story, not as a book of laws, propositions, or promises.  McKnight says the Bible is a STORY, made up of tinier stories which are each held together by THE STORY, and the way we make sense of the blue parakeets is to set each of those tiny stories in the context of THE STORY of scripture.  What's the plot to THE STORY?  According to McKnight, 1. God created people in his image (oneness) 2. Those images got cracked (otherness) 3. Those people formed a covenant community (otherness expands) 4. Christ, the perfect image redeems those people (oneness in Christ) 5. Consummation (Perfectly one).

So what does all that mean?  It just means that as you're reading passages of Scripture like the rape of Dinah or when Elijah calls a Bear out of the woods to devour a group of teenagers, instead of straining to discern the practical life lessons from such stories, it's much better to observe that God placed those stories into Scripture, not as an isolated unit, but as a peice of the bigger picture.  The Story of the Rape of Dinah might not tell us much about redemption in Christ, but it certainly tells us about the broken image of God, and it speaks to the importance of the covenant community.  Every law, proverb, psalm, story, perable, or letter finds it's way into a peice of the greater Biblical plot.

The second key to interpreting the Blue Parakeets, according to McKnight, is that we must listen.  This is a simple point.  Rather than simply observing facts in Scripture, reading the Bible compells us to a redeemed and continually reformed relationship with God.  It's one thing talking about what the Bible is, but the bigger question is "Are we listening to what it's saying to us?"

The third key is discernment.  This section felt alittle more slippery than his other ones but the basic premise was that we must recognize that EVERYONE, whether we like it or not, whether we want to admit it or not, "pick and choose" when it comes to reading and applying the Bible.  Though some pontificate, "God said it.  I believe it.  And that settles it," the reality is much more complicated when you dive into the vast array of nuances in Biblical literature.  For instance, most protestants almost instinctively believe that when Jesus said, "This is my body" at the last supper, he was speaking figuratively, not literally.  Why?  There's no specific reason in the text.  It's simply a decision in discernment that we've made.

Now, McKnight does not teach us HOW to discern, but he does offer an extended treatise on the way he understands the Biblical "problem" passages related to women and ministry (i.e. 1 Tim. 2; 1 Cor. 14, 1 Cor. 11, etc.).  The last third of the book is devoted to this topic.  But according to McKnights own process of discernment, he appears to advocate a "Redemptive-Movement Hermeneutic" a la William Webb (Slaves Women, & Homosexuals).  This was a theory published by Webb in 2001, and the idea is that one cannot limit the application he or she draws from a Biblical passage to the isolated words of a specific text.  You must observe the momentum of redemption and the trajectory of grace as one moves from the original surrounding cultures of the ancient Scriptures to the inspired words of both testaments. 

IN OTHER WORDS . . . Here's a practical paradigm of this interpretive method as Webb (and it appears, McKinght) might suggest: 1. Women in the ancient near eastern culture generally enjoyed very few rights.  2.  Laws and stories concerning women in the old Testament, though they seem archaic and androcentric to modern ears, offered significantly more freedom and dignity to women than the world around them offered.  3.  Examples of women in the New Testament, while they didn't enjoy full equality with men, enjoyed more freedom and dignity than women in the Old Testament as well as the surrounding Greaco-Roman culture.  4. Therefore, even though the specific words of certain isolated texts in both Old and New Testament appear to restrict a woman's role in society, the general trend of Scripture, the trajectory, appears to be moving TOWARD more equality, more dignity, more honor, and general egalitarianism.  So as we apply Scripture, we are right to extrapolate principles based on the trajectory, not on the isolated texts.

As I said, this portion of McKnights book was much more slippery, and one I have more difficulty swallowing.  First of all, I read Webb's book a few years ago and was not convinced by the "redemptive-movement hermenuetic" and so I was no more enthusiastic to see it in Blue Parakeet.  Second, while I appreciate McKnight's effort to provide us with a thorough practicum in his methodology, I wished  he had chosen a subject matter that hadn't already garnered as much attention as the ever volatile issue of women in ministry.  It felt like McKnight simply ended up rehashing old egalitarian arguments and not really showing why his book and his view is unique.  There are flashes of very interesting and unique discussions in his book I would have much rather seen him explore, such as a discussion about premarital sex or Jesus' use of hyperbole in the Sermon on the Mount.  It seems like he missed a great opportunity by focusing on the issue of women in ministry, only restating what countless other scholars have said many times before in many books, journals, and lectures for the past 20 years.

When all is said and done, what The Blue Parakeet offers is a a book that will raise alot of GREAT questions, force you to think, provide SOME direction, but leaves most of the Biblical "blue parakeets" many people wrestle with unresolved and alittle flat.  McKnight is a fantastic writer, an author many people will be able to pick up and read.  But I think I was hoping for alittle more.  I think McKnight, himself, says it best: "What this book is advocating is not new" (143).

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