I decided to read this book largely because the title and cover intrigued me and grabbed my attention. What in the world do blue parakeets have to do with reading the Bible? Well, Scott McKnight is a birdwatcher himself and one summer observed a strange new bird appearing in his backyard. After going through several options of what it might be, he concluded it was actually someone’s pet parakeet which had escaped its cage.
This parakeet was observably out of place among the other birds that frequented the yard. McKnight equates the blue parakeet with passages in the Bible that seem out of place and strange and which often raise questions about how we read the Bible. How do we handle these questions? Do we cage them up? Do we tame them? Do we completely ignore them? These are the questions McKnight tries to answer, which ultimately will answer one far-reaching question: How are we to live out the Bible today?
McKnight encourages his readers to view the Bible as a story rather than compartmentalizing it as collections of laws, blessings, and promises. By reading the Bible as a story with power, we will be able to understand how the Bible is to be applied to in our ways in our days. No longer will Christians be stuck in traditional habits that are no longer useful to the culture we live in.
The last chapter of the book is devoted to a single example of one of the biblical blue parakeets, as McKnight attempts to give his readers an approach on how to handle these tough and often sensitive issues. The issue at hand is women in church ministries today. This topic is sure to raise some hairs and ruffle some feathers amongst Christians and I applaud McKnight for tackling it.
I do recommend The Blue Parakeet to anyone interested in the Bible (which should include all Christians). I found that it was not a heavy read. It was very easy to get through and kept my attention throughout while at the same time using good use of repetition throughout. At times I was concerned that reading the Bible in the way described by McKnight may cause us to lose some of its heart. It seems that by implementing too much of our cultural values so freely on Scripture, we can make it say whatever we want it to say. I don’t think McKnight is to that point necessarily, but I think it is possible that readers of this book could come to that.
