The Blue Parakeet Quotes

“God did not give the Bible so we could master him or it; God gave the Bible so we could live it, so we could be mastered by it. The moment we think we’ve mastered it, we have failed to be readers of the Bible.”
― Scot McKnight, The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible

“Any method of Bible study that doesn’t lead to transformation abandons the missional path of God and leaves us stranded.”
― Scot McKnight, The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible

“God was on the move; God is on the move; and God will always be on the move. Those who walk with God and listen to God are also on the move. Reading the Bible so we can live it out today means being on the move—always. Anyone who stops and wants to turn a particular moment into a monument, as the disciples did when Jesus was transfigured before them, will soon be wondering where God has gone.”
― Scot McKnight, The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible

“What we are looking for in reading the Bible is the ability to turn the two-dimensional words on paper into a three-dimensional encounter with God, so that the text takes on life and meaning and depth and perspective and gives us direction for what to do today.”
― Scot McKnight, The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible

“God gave the Bible not so we can know it but so we can know and love God through it.”
― Scot McKnight, The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible

“Until we learn to read the Bible as Story, we will not know how to get anything out of the Bible for daily living.”
― Scot McKnight, The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible

“I love my wife, Kris; I do not love Kris’s words. I encounter Kris through her words, but I am summoned to love her, not her words. Sometimes I say to her, “I love what you say to me,” but that is a form of expression. What I’m really saying is, “I love you, and your words communicate your love for me.”
― Scot McKnight, The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible

“Oneness cannot be achieved just between God and self; rather, oneness involves God, self, and others, and the world around us.”
― Scot McKnight, The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible

“We in the Western world are obsessed with our individual relationship with God, which leads us to read the Bible as morsels of blessings and promises and as Rorschach inkblots. But reading the Bible as Story opens up a need so deep we sometimes aren’t aware we need it: oneness with others under the King who rules his Kingdom.”
― Scot McKnight, The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible

“readers. The story of the Bible is creation, fall, and then covenant community—page after page of community—as the context in which our wonderful redemption takes place.”
― Scot McKnight, The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible

“We aren’t called to live first-century lives in the twenty-first century, but twenty-first-century lives as we walk in the light of the revelation God gave to us in the first century.”
― Scot McKnight, The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible

“JUNIA: An Apostle above Other Apostles Do you know who Junia is?3 Here’s all we know: “Greet Andronicus and Junia, my fellow Jews who have been in prison with me. They are outstanding among the apostles, and they were in Christ before I was” (Romans 16:7, emphasis added). Here are words of utter profundity, words that have been silenced like a blue parakeet perhaps more than any other words in the Bible about women: “outstanding among the apostles.” Junia is an outstanding apostle, though to be sure, being a woman had little to do with it. What mattered were her intelligence, her giftedness, and her calling.”
― Scot McKnight, The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible

“Some people read the Bible as if its passages were Rorschach inkblots. They see what is in their head. In more sophisticated language, they project onto the Bible what they want to see.”
― Scot McKnight, The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible

“God did not give the Bible so we could master him or it; God gave the Bible so we could live it, so we could be mastered by it.”
― Scot McKnight, The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible

“God did not give the Bible in order that we could master him or it; God gave the Bible so we could live it, so we could be mastered by it. The moment we think we’ve mastered it, we have failed to be readers of the Bible. Of course, I think we should read the Bible and know it—but it is the specific element of reading for mastery versus reading to be mastered that grows out of this shortcut.”
― Scot McKnight, The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible

“The question we need to ask today is this, and this question strikes to the heart of how we read the Bible: Do we seek to retrieve that cultural world and those cultural expressions, or do we live the same gospel in a different way in a different day?”
― Scot McKnight, The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible

“It tells us that God gave the Bible a mission: God speaks to us so we will be the kind of people he wants and will live the way he wants us to live.”
― Scot McKnight, The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible

“But Augustine knew the Bible’s main mission: so that we can become people who love God and love others. If our reading of the Bible leads to this, the mission is accomplished. If it isn’t …”
― Scot McKnight, The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible

“The test results also suggest that, even though we like to think we are becoming more like Jesus, the reverse is probably more the case: we try to make Jesus like ourselves. Which means, to one degree or another, we are all Rorschachers; we all project onto Jesus our own image.”
― Scot McKnight, The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible

“Since—and this is why it changed how I read the Bible—God chose to communicate in language, since language is always shaped by context, and since God chose to speak to us over time through many writers, God also chose to speak to us in a variety of ways and expressions. Furthermore, I believe that because the gospel story is so deep and wide, God needed a variety of expressions to give us a fuller picture of the Story.”
― Scot McKnight, The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible

“It is important to know the blessings and to rely on God’s promises. Please don’t misunderstand my point. But the blessings and promises of God in the Bible emerge from a real life’s story that also knows that we live in a broken world and some days are tough. The stories of real lives in the Bible know that we are surrounded by hurting people for whom Psalm 22:1 echoes their normal day.”
― Scot McKnight, The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible

“They set the kindling afire to consume the body of a man who had but one goal—to make the Bible readable for everyone.”
― Scot McKnight, The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible

“In his incarnate life, when he becomes one with us, Jesus recapitulates, or relives, Israel’s (our) history. He becomes one of us. In fact, he becomes all of us in one divine-human being. Jesus is all Adam and Eve were designed to be, and more; he loves the Father absolutely and he loves himself absolutely and he loves others absolutely and he loves the world absolutely. He is the Oneness Story in one person.”
― Scot McKnight, The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible

“God’s idea of redemption is community-shaped.”
― Scot McKnight, The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible

“The gospel is capable and designed to strike home in every culture, in every age, and in every language.”
― Scot McKnight, The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible

“This otherness problem is what the gospel “fixes,” and the story of the Bible is the story of God’s people struggling with otherness and searching for oneness.”
― Scot McKnight, The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible