Eat This Book

I finished Eugene Peterson's second volume in his forthcoming five volume spiritual theology collection last night. This in my opinion is better than "Christ Plays in 10,000 Places" and is worth reading if you are interested in what it means to read Scripture not just for information and what we can get out of it but for allowing God to transform us through it. The last chapter of the book is a very interesting "apologetic" for The Message translation and how the whole thing came about.

I'll just leave you with a few passages from the book:

"It is far too common among us to develop a problem-solving habit of approach to the Bible, figuring out what doesn't seem to fit and then sanding off the rough edges, so that it slips into our way of thinking more easily. We want to use it for comfort, and if it doesn't work comfortably we reconfigure it so that it will. One good friend warns his students against becoming expert text-nicians. Text-nicians learn this text, master it inside and out, so that they can repair it when we sense it's a little "off," so that it will run smoothly and get us where we want to go with our needs and want and feelings. But nothing in our Bibles is one-dimensional, systematized, or theologized. Pg. 65

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." Pg. 66

And finally a great reminder on the importance of good exegesis (this is in the context of not letting our exegesis divert us from Jesus and helping us to submit to the text):

"But without exegesis, spirituality gets sappy, soupy. Spirituality without exegesis becomes self-indulgent. Without disciplines exegesis spirituality develops into an idiolect in which I define all the key verbs and nouns out of my own experience. And prayer ends up limping along in sighs and stutters." Pg. 58