Reading the Bible Relationally

I am rereading Scot McKnight, The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008). The first time I read the book was 2008. I can’t believe it is 2012 now. Reading Scot Mcknight urges me to read and study the Bible with seriousness and delight. God spoke to different generations through Moses, Joshua, David, Solomon, Jeremiah, Hosea, Paul, Peter, etc…God speaks to our generation through us. It is our noble task to make God’s truth timely. In other words, we need to contextualize the word of God in our contexts in our days in our ways. God spoke to the previous generation in their contexts in their days in their ways. As Scot McKnight writes, “Our task is to take the timely timelessness of the Bible and make it timely timeliness for our world. We need to go back to the Bible’s timely timelessness so we can come forward to live out the Bible in our timely timeliness” (p. 35).

One of the examples that McKnight uses to turn the two-dimensional Bible reading into a three-dimensional divine encounter is this:

Who of us, once having read C. S. Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, can forget the scene where Eustace Scrubb and Lucy and Edmund Pevensie stare at a picture on a wall of a Narnian ship when suddenly the picture draws them into a whole new world? Suddenly that picture on the wall comes alive and they begin to feel the breeze, smell the air, and hear sounds. The kids are magically drawn into the painting and find themselves in the water, where they are helped into a boat with the enticing name The Dawn Treader. These kids, now in a new reality, travel to distant lands looking for the seven lost lords of Narnia. At the end of their adventures they find a lamb that turns into Aslan. Great story (p. 42).

Bible reading is not to get information out of the Bible. Getting Bible knowledge is not wrong. It ought not to be our only purpose. In any meaningful relationship, we don’t merely get a piece of information about a person. Whenever we are more interested in pieces of information about the person more than knowing the person, we depersonalize the person. We get to know the person for the sake of knowing. True friendship is based on pure knowing. Knowing God precedes acquiring information about God. Knowing God comes before knowing about God. Bible reading is an act of immersing ourselves into the Story of God. It is exactly like how we interact with our good friends. We get to know each other in the presence of others through ordinary days, meals, and events. We enter into the stories of others with listening, discerning, and nurturing. We get to know more about each other by invitation only. I think this is the way we read God’s word as story. We don’t turn the Bible into a system. We listen and discern God’s story. We pay attention to the plots of this story just as we pay attention to the plots of our friends’ stories, such as school, career, marriage, children, career change, etc…