Parakeets make delightful pets. We cage them or clip their wings to keep them where we want them. Scot McKnight contends that many, conservatives and liberals alike, attempt the same thing with the Bible. We all try to tame it.
McKnight’s The Blue Parakeet has emerged at the perfect time to cool the flames of a world on fire with contention and controversy. It calls Christians to a way to read the Bible that leads beyond old debates and denominational battles. It calls Christians to stop taming the Bible and to let it speak anew for a new generation.
In The Blue Parakeet, McKnight touches the hearts and minds of today’s Christians, challenging them to rethink how to read the Bible, not just to puzzle it together into some systematic theology but to see it as a story that we’re summoned to enter and to carry forward in our day. He calls his bold new approach to the Bible the “Third Way,” a path that walks confidently—and joyfully—between theological extremes. The Third Way is rooted in the Bible as Story, in the Bible as God’s Word to which we listen, in the Bible as revealing a life that we can apply anew in our day.
In his own inimitable style, McKnight sets traditional and liberal Christianity on its ear, leaving readers equipped, encouraged, and emboldened to be the people of faith they long to be. The Blue Parakeet is an engaging, warm narrative that is both deeply reasoned and spiritually sound. It is a book that will appeal to disenfranchised Christians who will be drawn to it because of its refreshing—and liberating—new approach to reading the Bible.
