I’ll start out by saying this: There are a lot of rabid Scot McKnight fans. I’m not one. I like Scot. I’ve seen him speak once and thoroughly appreciated his approach. I’ve read his blog a few times, but I don’t get the RSS feed (generally, he is too much to handle for me). I haven’t read Jesus Creed or any other book of his.

But the rest of this book keeps up with the first chapter, I may be doing all of those things soon enough.

Chapter One
On top of Scot’s engaging and accessible writing, The Blue Parakeet gets at the heart of today’s reactions to the modern church: how do we pick and choose what we are reading in the Bible? In modernism, the fight was between the right and the left, each with their own set of verses to wield. As the fight has gone on, many of us are left wondering if it is not Darth Vader versus the Emperor (and we’re not totally sure which one is which).

I’m interested to see where Scot will go from here. The introduction leads me to believe he’ll talk about being aware and intentional about how we read Scripture. I’m also hoping he gets into a third way, something more holistic. However, he seems to indicate he doesn’t think it is possible. We’ll see.

So far, so good.

Too graphic, too much detail, excessive violence. You’d think
God would have gone for a more family-friendly rating, something Christians could recommend that their friends go see, but instead we have a book crammed full of shocking stories about people doing unbelievably destructive things.

Genocide, polygamy, incest, cutting people up into pieces and mailing the chunks to different parts of the country—and that’s just the first few books.

Thoughts?