The Blue Parakeet: A review
Comments
4 responses to “The Blue Parakeet: A review”
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Not a bad book. I posted my review today too. I may need to give it a reread, but I agree, a very conversational approach.
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Hey Eric – Nice job on the review. I actually had the same thought you did about about whether it might have been more effective to treat a few different “blue parakeet” issues rather than focusing on just one. But I guess I needed to hear what he had to say (and I needed to think about how he got there) in depth on the one issue.
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Thank you for the review. I have not read the book yet. From what you have described, God has led me to several parakeet verses. I have 2 reasons for parakeet scripture.
1. I think part of the parakeet dynamic is that the scriptures are “spiritually diserned”, not mentally discerned. The Spirit has sovereignty over when we realize a given truth from a given passage. Only He knows of our readiness to hear and obey. I think it is very easy for believers to digress into assuming they understand a scripture because they mentally understand the words. This is specially true in the seminary setting where things can get so cerebral with Greek, Hebrew, and walls of commentaries with thousands of words of technical nuance. God does not funnel his wisdom through those who professionalize in this stuff. God has outright told us he has not chosen many wise after the worlds standards of academia.
2. God has instructed us to always test what we are told by the experts or any believer, compare it with the scriptures to see if it is true. Acs 17:11 The Berean Dynamic. From my life, when I did this, God’s Word was revealed to my life that is not available from any book, preacher, etc. It was as simple as checking out the wider context. Sometimes it was from looking up a word in Vines. These were parakeet moments. So many believers ignore this dynamic and suck in a lot of distorted opinions of men. Thus, they flock only with birds of their own feather and miss the beauty God has designed for them to experience.
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Tim – Based on your comments, I believe you’d really enjoy this book. McKnight doesn’t reference the academics of biblical interpretaion in this book (though he could – he’s an academic by vocation) – he actually builds an really good discussion about how each of us, no matter how literally and simply we believe our approach to Scripture is, invokes some other grids through which we decide what is for us in the here and now. Thinking through these issues is part of being a Berean, don’t you think?
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