A Burning in My Bones: The Authorized Biography of Eugene H. Peterson, Translator of The Message

by Winn Collier

“Eugene saw that God-part of people. He saw that and defined me in that way—the other stuff didn’t define me. That was astounding.”

May that be me.

faithful presence and insistence to wait with me before God brought about deliverance that only comes when someone really moves into the neighborhood of one’s soul and decides to stay, to love and care. Too many Christian ministers get impatient with slow learners and profoundly broken people like me.

He named me as no one ever had, and now I find myself living into that name.”

finish Leap over a Wall.

But I am uneasy with [the] term “evangelical” as it is being used so much. Doesn’t it foster sectarianism? Pride? Immaturity? Why do we need an adjective—at least one so prominently used?…I find that I am a little irritated at the compulsive self-identification that goes on…under that label. I don’t mind the positive meanings that are represented, but rather the implicit (maybe explicit) criticism of others who don’t share the label. Too much wall-building takes place in an over-use of the term.

Yep

I think the primary thing that I want them to hear is that they simply must quit taking themselves so seriously. Not taking the Lord seriously, and not taking their vocations seriously, but themselves. Evangelical pastors take themselves seriously, but they don’t by and large take theology seriously, they don’t take the Bible seriously, they don’t take congregations seriously: theology is a means to an end, the Bible is a tool for teaching/preaching, congregation is a raw material for programs and causes. But all of that destroys growth in the Spirit, growing up in Christ. We keep trying to do the work of the Trinity ourselves. And we are not the Trinity. I would want to tell pastors to quit being so busy and learn quiet, to quit talking so much and learn silence, to quit treating the congregation as customers and treat them with dignity as souls-in-formation. The primary thing that we are dealing with as pastors is the Word of God. And the primary stance we must learn both as pastors and congregations is to listen. There can be no language that works at all if someone is not listening. And since God is the primary voice in this gospel world, we pastors have to lead the way in listening, doing it ourselves and encouraging others to do it. By and large evangelical pastors are not deficient in energy or motivation or knowledge. But they are not conspicuously attentive, reverently listening to the voice/word of God and in being totally and personally present with the people w...

Ihear it now. Could I orwould I have heard it then? Abba, give me ears to hear and help me listen.

“We don’t always finish so well.” Eugene longed to finish well, to live a faithful life. To be consumed, to the end, by God’s fiery love. To become a

Trygve

Jewish ritual cleansing bath (miqvah),

Leif’s novel Catherine Wheels

illustrated children’s book The Christmas Troll.

“Where the Streets Have No Name”—a

Run with the Horses. Several days later,

heuristic

Christ Plays, he immediately opened to the first

The Pastor hit

Holy Luck, a collection of poems he had written over seventy years, and As Kingfishers Catch Fire, a never-before-published collection

everything Eugene taught and lived could be gathered into this expansive word he spoke so often: prayer.

Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Prayer as the best book on the subject and Edith Stein

he walked alongside people as they moved toward God, as they stepped more solidly into their lives—and

When we pray, he wrote to one inquiring soul, we don’t become more like anyone else, especially the “great ones,” we become more ourselves.

David James Duncan, the author of The Brothers K and The River Why—novels Eugene thoroughly enjoyed.

To be unbusy, you have to be disengaged from egos—both yours and others—and start dealing with souls. Souls cannot be hurried.

There are wheat and tares, sheep and goats—and while we strive to know and do right, we must live in humility and recognize we cannot always separate the two. These inclinations yielded an open, generous,

Perhaps the ongoing difficulty is in treating the biblical text as “inerrant.” Language always must be understood in context. Words in isolation have no meaning—they only pick up their meaning from the way they are used. And most words can mean half a dozen things depending on the way the sentence works, the tone of voice in which it is spoken. Language is ambiguous, and especially ambiguous when it employs metaphors, which the biblical text does in spades. If God had wanted to communicate with us “inerrantly” he would have used the language of mathematics, which is the only truly precise language we have. But of course you can’t say “I love you” in algebra.

Hmmmm

The controversy swirling around Rob Bell’s book Love Wins is fresh evidence on how cantankerous the American church is. Because of the endorsement I gave to the book, people keep trying to draw me into [the] fracas. And [a] fracas it certainly is. How the so-called Christian community can generate so much hate is appalling. Haven’t we learned anything about civil discourse? Will we ever? And it is so debilitating—we have this glorious gospel to proclaim and give away and we gang up against one another and throw dogma-rocks.

But, you’re right, the Bible doesn’t allow for dogmatism or certainty on it. So what I think is, the ambiguity of scripture is deliberate on God’s part. It wouldn’t be good for us to be too sure of ourselves in this regard. The tenor and thrust of both scripture and theology and yes, life itself is universalistic.

emergent church

Eugene believed schism and the failure to love (to believe Jesus things in the Jesus way) were American evangelicalism’s greatest sins. He wanted to leave the door open as wide as possible, open to as many as possible. He wanted to keep the conversation going.

Whatever one’s position on sexuality, the image of God in every beloved human—and the call to love our neighbor as ourselves—was bedrock to Jesus’s teaching and Christian faith.

recorded 2014 Q&A at Western Theological Seminary)

Thomas W. Currie’s article “Muddled in the Middle” in the Presbyterian Outlook, a piece Eugene admired and circulated

Jesus seems much more interested in those who are hurting than he is in those who think they have Scripture on their side.”

Eugene reread old favorites, returning to the novels of Wallace Stegner, Wendell Berry, Marilynne Robinson, and Georges Bernanos. Lots of poetry too: Denise Levertov, Billy Collins, George Herbert, Mary Oliver. “I’d rather read poets than pastors,” he said. Eugene loved Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser’s remarkable Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry, which was “an assertion in favor of poetry and against credentials.” Concerned with our ecological meltdown, Eugene read Terry Tempest Williams and Rick Bass, who lived in the Yaak Valley, a remote corner of northwest Montana,

Eric squeezed, with affection, speaking the first line of Julian of Norwich’s blessing: “All shall be well and all shall be well.” Eugene looked at Eric like a light had turned on, words welling up from deep memory and long habit. “And all manner of thing shall be well,” he answered.

“Let’s go!” he said energetically. Was it coincidence that these were the same two words that opened the Levertov poem Eugene

“Together, we are witnesses to this glad fact: that in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life, through Christ Jesus our Lord, I declare that the baptism of Eugene Hoiland Peterson is now complete. ‘Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord…,’ says the Spirit, ‘that they rest from their labors, and their works follow them.’ ” Leif, through tears, added, “Sure is nice to have a priest in the family.”