Remember those small cardboard pictures we got as kids that when you slightly tilted them a new picture appeared? Like an elephant would suddenly become a giraffe with just a tiny move of the picture.

The elephant in the room, or more accurately, the parakeet in the room is the Bible. Scot McKnight’s The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible addresses some popular ways the Bible is assumed to be read accurately, but actually is not. One of Scot’s main suggestions is that everyone of us, I repeat, everyone reads the Bible selectively. We intentionally avoid the blue parakeets perched throughout the biblical text. What does that mean? “Take up and read.”

What I appreciate about Scot McKnight is that he is both a recognized New Testament scholar and a down-to-earth-friend of people in local churches. As a scholar and teacher, he presses us to think for ourselves. Too many other Christian leaders these days are reluctant to let people think for themselves. They believe that people are too stupid, too easily carried away by every wind of doctrine that they need an evangelical elite to tell them what and how to believe. Not Scot. He studies the issues, gathers his data, keeps in touch with average people and then writes. His books end up being not only a stimulant for conversation and Christian formation, they honor the readers as thinking, discerning people. Scot does not spoon feed his audience. He respects them. This is especially true of The Blue Parakeet.

A searing topic of the day is the role of women in ministry. Scot works his ideas about the Bible toward that topic and expands the issues, combs the Scriptures, challenges our thinking, and directs our practice. Scot will not sit idly by and let worn-out arguments and slippery slope fear relegate our sisters in Christ to “second string” status (my words).

I imagine some militant neoReformed types and bloviating fundamentalists will scream the loudest and write the meanest about this excellent book by Scot McKnight. It will be fun to watch.

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