Eat This Book Quotes

“Christians don't simply learn or study or use Scripture; we assimilate it, take it into our lives in such a way that it gets metabolized into acts of love, cups of cold water, missions into all the world, healing and evangelism and justice in Jesus' name, hands raised in adoration of the Father, feet washed in company with the Son.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading

“The task of liturgy is to order the life of the holy community following the text of Holy Scripture. It consists of two movements. First it gets us into the sanctuary, the place of adoration and attention, listening and receiving and believing before God. There is a lot involved, all the parts of our lives ordered to all aspects of the revelation of God in Jesus.

Then it gets us out of the sanctuary into the world into places of obeying and loving ordering our lives as living sacrifices in the world to the glory of God. There is a lot involved, all the parts of our lives out on the street participating in the work of salvation.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading

“It is useful to reflect that the word 'liturgy' did not originate in church or worship settings. In the Greek world it referred to publish service, what a citizen did for the community. As the church used the word in relation to worship, ti kept this 'public service' quality - working for the community on behalf of or following orders from God. As we worship God, revealed personally as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in our Holy Scriptures, we are not doing something apart form or away from the non-Scripture=reading world; we do it for the world - bringing all creation and all history before God, presenting our bodies and all the beauties and needs of humankind before God in praise and intercession, penetrating and serving the world for whom Christ died in the strong name of the Trinity.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading

“the Bible, all of it, is livable; it is the text for living our lives. It reveals a God-created, God-ordered, God-blessed world in which we find ourselves at home and whole.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading

“The Holy Scriptures are story-shaped. Reality is story-shaped. The world is story-shaped. Our lives are story-shaped. 'I had always,' wrote G.K. Chesterton in accounting for his Christian belief, 'felt life first as a story, and if there is a story, there is a story-teller.' We enter this story, following the story-making, storytelling Jesus, and spend the rest of our lives exploring the amazing and exquisite details, the words and sentences that go into the making of the story of our creation, salvation, and life of blessing. It is a story chock full of invisibles and intricate with connections. Imagination is required.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading

“Language is not primarily informational but revelatory. The Holy Scriptures give witness to a living voice sounding variously as Father, Son and Spirit, addressing us personally and involving us personally as participants. This text is not words to be studies in the quiet preserves of a library, but a voice to be believed and loved and adored in workplace and playground, on the streets and in the kitchen. Receptivity is required.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading

“We are fond of saying that the Bible has all the answers. And that is certainly correct. The text of the Bible sets us in a reality that is congruent with who we are as created beings in God's image and what we are destined for in the purposes of Christ. But the Bible also has all the questions, many of them that we would just as soon were never asked of us, and some of which we will spend the rest of our lives doing our best to dodge. The Bible is a most comforting book; it is also a most discomfiting book.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading

“Paul Ricoeur has wonderful counsel for people like us. Go ahead, he says, maintain and practice your hermaneutics of suspicion. It is important to do this. Not only important, it is necessary. There are a lot of lies out there; learn to discern the truth and throw out the junk. But then reenter the book, the world, with what he calls 'a second naivete'.' Look at the world with childlike wonder, ready to be startled into surprised delight by the profuse abundance of truth and beauty and goodness that is spilling out of the skies at every moment. Cultivate a hermaneutic of adoration - see how large, how splendid, how magnificent life is.

And then practice this hermaneutic of adoration in the reading of Holy Scripture. Plan on spending the rest of our lives exploring and enjoying the world both vast and intricate that is revealed by this text.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading

“But sooner or later we find that not everything is to our liking in this book. It starts out sweet to our taste; and then we find it doesn't sit well with us at all, it becomes bitter in our stomachs. Finding ourselves in this book is most pleasant, flattering even, and then we find that the book is not written to flatter us, but to involve us in a reality, God's reality, that doesn't cater to our fantasies of ourselves.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading

“Obedience is the thing, living in active response to the living God. The most important question we ask of this text is not, 'What does this mean?' but 'What can I obey?' A simple act of obedience will open up our lives to this text far more quickly than any number of Bible studies and dictionaries and concordances.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading

“Meditation is the primary way in which we guard against the fragmentation of our Scripture reading into isolated oracles. Meditation enters into the coherent universe of God's revelation. Meditation is the prayerful employ of imagination in order to become friends with the text. It must not be confused with fancy or fantasy.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading

“The time and intelligence that our ancestors spent on understanding the sovereignty revealed in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are directed by our contemporaries in affirming and validating the sovereignty of our needs, wants, and feelings.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading

“Spirituality means, among other things, taking ourselves seriously. It means going against the cultural stream in which we are incessantly trivialized to the menial status of producers and performers, constantly depersonalized behind the labels of our degrees or our salaries.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading

“We don't form our personal spiritual lives out of a random assemblage of favorite texts in combination with individual circumstances; we are formed by the Holy Spirit in accordance with the text of Holy Scripture. God does not put us in charge of forming our personal spiritualities. We grow in accordance with the revealed Word implanted in us by the Spirit.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading

“An interest in souls divorced from an interest in Scripture leaves us without a text that shapes these souls. In the same way, an interest in Scripture divorced from an interest in souls leaves us without any material for the text to work on.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading

“All serious and good writing anticipates precisely this kind of reading-ruminative and leisurely, a dalliance with words in contrast to wolfing down information.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading

“It is not sufficient to place a Bible in a person’s hands with the command, ‘Read it.’ That is quite as foolish as putting a set of car keys in an adolescent’s hands, giving him a Honda, and saying, ‘Drive it.’ And just as dangerous.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading

“Having and defending and celebrating the Bible instead of receiving, submitting to, and praying the Bible, masks an enormous amount of nonreading.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading

“Liturgy puts us to work along with all the others who have been and are being put to work in the world by and with Jesus following our spiritually-forming text. Liturgy keeps us in touch with all the action that has been and is being generated by the Spirit as given witness in the biblical text. Liturgy prevents the narrative form of Scripture from being reduced to private individualized consumption.

Understood this way, 'liturgical' has little to do with choreography in the chancel or an aesthetics of the sublime. It is obedient, participatory, listening to Holy Scripture in the company of the holy community through time (our two-thousand years of responding to this text) and in space (our friends in christ all over the world). High-church Anglicans, revivalistic Baptists, hands-in-the-air praising charismatics, and Quakers sitting in a bare room in silence are all required to read and live this text liturgically, participating in the holy community's reading of Holy Scripture. there is nothing 'churchy' or elitist about it; it is a vast and dramatic 'story-ing,' making sure that we are taking our place in the story and letting everyone else have their parts in the story also, making sure that we don't leave anything or anyone out of the story. Without sufficient liturgical support and structure we are very apt to edit the story down to fit our individual tastes and predispositions.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading

“Liturgy gathers the holy community as it reads the Holy Scriptures into the sweeping tidal rhythms of the church year in which the story of Jesus and the Christian makes its rounds century after century, the large and easy interior rhythms of a year that moves from birth, life, death, resurrection, on to spirit, obedience, faith, and blessing. Without liturgy we lose the rhythms and end up tangled in the jerky, ill-timed, and insensitive interruptions of public-relations campaigns, school openings and closings, sales days, tax deadlines, inventory and elections. Advent is buried under 'shopping days before Christmas.' The joyful disciplines of Lent are exchanged for the anxious penitentials of filling out income tax forms. Liturgy keeps us in touch with the story as it defines and shapes our beginnings and ends our living and dying, our rebirths and blessing in this Holy Spirit, text-formed community visible and invisible.

When Holy Scripture is embraced liturgically, we become aware that a lot is going on all at once, a lot of different people are doing a lot of different things. The community is on its feet, at work for God, listening and responding to the Holy Scriptures. The holy community, in the process of being formed by the Holy Scriptures, is watching, listening to God's revelation taking shape before an din them as they follow Jesus, each person playing his or her part in the Spirit.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading

“Not that the study is not important. A Jewish rabbi I once studies with would often say, 'For us Jews studying the bible is more important than obeying it because if you don't understand it rightly you will obey it wrongly and your obedience will be disobedience.

This is also true.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading

“We are part of a holy community that for three thousand years and more has been formed inside and out by these words of God, words that have been heard, tasted, chewed, seen, walked. Reading Holy Scripture is totally physical. Our bodies are the means of providing our souls access to God in his revelation: eat this book. A friend reports to me that one of the early rabbis selected a different part of our bodies to make the same point; he insisted that the primary body part for taking in the Word of God is not the ears but the feet. You learn God, he said, not through your ears but through your feet: follow the Rabbi.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading

“The Christian life requires a form adequate to its content, a form that is at home in the Christian revelation and that respects each person's dignity and freedom with plenty of room for all our quirks and particularities. Story provides that form. The biblical story invites us in as participants in something larger than our sin-defined needs, into something truer than our culture-stunted ambitions. We enter these stories and recognize ourselves as participants, whether willing or unwilling, in the life of God.
Unfortunately, we live in an age in which story has been pushed from its biblical frontline prominence to a bench on the sidelines and then condescended to as "illustration" or "testimony" or "inspiration." Our contemporary unbiblical preference, both inside and outside the church, is for information over story. We typically gather impersonal (pretentiously called "scientific" or "theological") information, whether doctrinal or philosophical or historical, in order to take things into our own hands and take charge of how we will live our lives. And we commonly consult outside experts to interpret the information for us. But we don't live our lives by information; we live them in relationships in
the context of a personal God who cannot be reduced to formula or definition, who has designs on us for justice and salvation. And we live them in an extensive community of men and women, each person an intricate bundle of experience and motive and desire. Picking a text for living that is characterized by information-gathering and consultation with experts leaves out nearly everything that is uniquely us - our personal histories and relationships, our sins and guilt, our moral character and believing obedience to God. Telling and listening to a story is the primary verbal way of accounting for life the way we live it in actual day-by-day reality. There are no (or few) abstractions in a story. A story is immediate, concrete, plotted, relational, personal. And so when we lose touch with our lives, with our souls - our moral, spiritual, embodied God-personal lives - story is the best verbal way of getting us back in touch again. And that is why God's word is given for the most part in the form of story, this vast, overarching, all-encompassing story, this meta-story.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading

“The Scriptures, read and prayed, are our primary and normative access to God as He reveals Himself to us. The Scriptures are our listening post for learning the language of the soul, the ways God speaks to us; they also provide the vocabulary and grammar that are appropriate for us as we in our turn speak to God.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading

“I am trying to teach my mind to bear the long, slow growth of the fields, and to sing of its passing while it waits.
The”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading

“The most important question we ask of this text is not, “What does this mean?” but “What”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading

“Christian reading is participatory reading, receiving the words in such a way that they become interior to our lives, the rhythms and images becoming practices of prayer, acts of obedience, ways of love.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading

“Reading the Scriptures is not an activity discrete from living the gospel but one integral to it. It means letting Another have a say in everything we are saying and doing. It is as easy as that. And as hard.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading

“The Bible is basically and overall a narrative - an immense, sprawling, capacious narrative.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading

“audacious quip of Teresa of Avila when she was energetically engaged in reforming the Carmelite monasteries, traveling all over Spain by oxcart on bad roads. One day she was thrown from her cart into a muddy stream. She shook her fist at God, "God, if this is the way you treat your friends, no wonder you don't have many.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading