Eat This Book -- A Review of Eugene Peterson's book
By Richard Kew+

Eat This Book -- A Conversation in the Art of Spirital Reading by Eugene H. Peterson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006)

The other day I heard of a large congregation in a denomination whose theology and style mean it presents itself as far more conservative and orthodox than my own. Indeed, they make great play of their willingness to place themselves under the authority of Scripture. The pastor of this congregation was discovered to have been sexually involved with a female staff person for a considerable time. When the matter came before the staff and the board there was a strong move to retain that pastor's services before it was headed off by a vigilant staff person who pointed out that this man had contravened the very fundamentals of Christian morality.

The point of this story is that it does not matter where we look today, the churches are being shaped more and more by the prevailing culture than by the mind of the God who called them into being. It is voices like that of Eugene Peterson who remind us that if we are the People of God then we cannot allow ourselves to be formed by the culture, we must put ourselves in the place where we are formed by God -- which means rediscovering how to read, nourish, and form ourselves through our drenching in God's Word. He says, "An enormous amount of damage is done in the name of Christian living by bad Bible reading" (Page 82).

Eat This Book is a slender volume by Peterson standards, a mere 180 pages, but it took me two months to get through it. Part of the reason for this was that I did not have the time to sit down and read it with a lot of continuity, but part of the reason was that even if I had had such time, I would not have been able to hurry along because there is too much in here to rush over.

the rest at The Kew Continuum