The concept
of a Berean Baptist is more about promoting an attitude towards scripture than
it is a specific movement or doctrine. And this attitude is pretty much summed
up by 2 Timothy 3:16-17 “All Scripture
is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training
in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for
every good work” (emphasis added). It means that the blank page between the Old
and New Testament in your bible belongs in the bin, because ALL scripture is
useful. This definitely has implications on how we read the Bible, often
referred to as ‘hermeneutics’, which would then have implications on what one
believes and practices, and why. So I thought that I should take some time to
read about hermeneutics. On the recommendation of a review by The Gospel Coalition,
I recently read The Blue Parakeet:
Rethinking How You Read the Bible by Scot McKnight. And its premise and
concept is quite unique and thoughtful.
Defining the Blue Bird
Scot was inspired to
develop the metaphor of the Blue Parakeet by an incident in his backyard. One
morning, an escaped blue parakeet had noisily come in and disrupted his predictable
viewing of sparrows peacefully feeding. In this experience, he recognised that
this is some people’s experience when they read the Bible. According to
McKnight, the Blue Parakeets are those difficult verses in scripture that
challenge our theology, but we’d rather keep caged up and controlled instead of
letting them fly free and speak for themselves. These are the inconvenient
verses ‘we would like to shoo
away’ (25) And so the aim of McKnight’s
book is to answer the question: what do we do with the Blue Parakeets? And what
he proposes is a way to read
the Bible ‘that does not treat difficult verses like unwelcome pests’ (Tallon).
The existence and handling
of Blue Parakeets is a reality I engage with on my blog, as I seek to highlight
and explain the ‘blue parakeets’ many have regarding their theology of Torah
etc… And it wasn’t until I had someone point them out to me, that I discovered
there were a number of passages that I had often overlooked or ignored.
Initially I had attempted to ignore them. But like trying to block out a squawking parakeet (not
the best analogy for the Word of God, but you get the idea), it proved
fruitless. I then attempted to tame them and conform them to what I thought
they should mean. But in the end, I had to submit to what they were saying. And
this is what McKnight says in his book: “God did not give the Bible so we could
master him or it; God gave the Bible so we could live it, so we could be
mastered by it. The moment we think we’ve mastered it, we have failed to be
readers of the Bible" (52).
Understanding the Blue Bird
So, excited by the premise
of the introduction and keen to become a better handler of those Blue
Parakeets, I read on. And what it came down to was that we as readers need to
exercise discernment of those difficult passages with the hermeneutic of the
Bible as a developing story as God interacted with humanity. Thus, when it
comes to applying and living out Scripture we need to conclude either, ‘that
was then, but this is now’, or ‘that was then, and also now.’ I found myself
somewhat frustrated as McKnight never really explained
how we discern that. For
example, he writes “Yes, I think the first Jewish Christians probably kept
kosher. That’s not for today” (28). But he never really explains why. Now of
course his book isn’t on the place of food laws for today, but McKnight could
have at least explained how he came
to that conclusion. But, I suppose that the reason he never really explained
that is because of his hermeneutic. For him, if we read the Bible as a rule
book then we’ve missed the point. Rather, our primary hermeneutic should be to
read the bible as a story in which different people speak God’s story in their
way for their day (64). And I agree with Scot here. This is a principle that is
good and helpful because not all of scripture is prescriptive, and not all
scripture applies equally to all. There are instructions in Leviticus that
apply to only the Aaronic priesthood, so of course they’re not for us. There are
instructions for sin offerings in Leviticus. Since Jesus is our final sacrifice
for the atonement of sin, those aren't for us either. But this hermeneutic has
a somewhat arbitrary nature to it. McKnight explains that discernment, and his
book, “is about the grey and fuzzy areas” and not the clear teachings “with
which most Christians agree” like murder and pre-marital sex (131). But what is
grey is defined by ones hermeneutic. For those Scot defines as literalists, nothing in the bible is grey. Also, is majority agreement the best
measure of black and white? Maybe we should ask Martin Luther.
In reading, I found that McKnight’s
hermeneutic lacks clear definition of boundaries. He explains that “Any idea of
imposing a foreign culture, age, or language on another… quenches the dynamic
power of the gospel and the Bible” (28). And this is true, we need to distinguish between culture/tradition and Truth. But because of his
hermeneutic, McKnight interprets most ‘expressions of the gospel’ in the bible as cultural.
To use a couple of examples from above, because Scot considers eating kosher and
keeping Sabbath are ‘Jewish’, they therefore don’t apply to us. But to categorise
parts of the Old Testament Law, the divinely articulated manifestation of the
righteousness of God and the values of the Kingdom as ‘culturally Jewish’, is
flawed. Why is the Sabbath (part of the ten commandments) Jewish, but not
murder? Perhaps it’s because they’re the main group who keep it. Is it Jewish
because it was given to Israelites? So was the sermon on the mount, and the
great commission. Had he read the bible wider, he would see the Blue Parakeets
to his theology that prescribe the Law for both the native born and the
stranger. Whether kosher and Sabbath are actually for today is a different
conversation, but to write them off as merely cultural only ignores more Blue
Parakeets than it tries to acknowledge.
The book finishes with a case
study of the issue of women in ministry. To actually see him work through a
Blue Parakeet issue was helpful. Firstly, he took the ‘silent women’ passages
from Paul and considered them in their historical context. Then he looked at
other biblical examples in both the New and Old Testament of women in ministry
to conclude that God does in fact use women for ministry. But, this is where
Scot becomes a bit inconsistent again. Why is he using examples from then, to make a case for doing something
now? How do we know that women in
ministry isn’t “from a bygone era… and a bygone form of expression… [with]
precious little [significance] for most of us today” (28)? Now don’t get me
wrong, I'm not saying it is. I'm not disagreeing with his conclusions; I’m questioning the inconsistency
of his approach. Yes, his examples do challenge the banning women from
ministry, but he does so using a method he criticised and doesn't develop well.
Conclusion
In the end, because his process
was not explained very well, and was at times inconsistent, I found myself
disappointed that the exciting promises McKnight made in his introductions to
help us make sense of difficult passages fell short. But that’s not to say I
got nothing from the book. He made many points and raised many good questions that
challenged me and helped me to refine my own hermeneutic.
I think if I were to take anything
from reading McKnight’s book, it is the way it teaches us and encourages us to
be willing to challenge traditional interpretations of scripture. When building
our theology, we need to considering the wider context of the Bible and we
should be willing to allow the ‘Blue Bird’ passages to sing and reshape our
theology. Not that we reject ‘traditional’ interpretations outright – that
would be chronologically arrogant. Men and women who are smarter and wiser than
us have gone before us – but we should be willing to reject those
interpretations which are based more on the prejudices, opinions, agendas, and
traditions of men rather than the Word of God.
References:
McKnight, Scot. The Blue Parakeet. Zondervan: Grand
Rapids. 2008.
Tallon, Philip. “The Blue
Parakeet Faces Inconvenient Verses”, christianitytoday.com.
27 Feb 2009.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2009/january/37.69.html
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