EAT THIS BOOK

review by

Larry Shallenberger

EAT THIS BOOK: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading

by Eugene H. Peterson

(Eerdmans)

Reader Appeal: Adults

Genre: Spirituality

Over the years, Eugene Peterson’s writings have inspired, motivated, and at times, irritated me. Sometimes insightful, sometimes curmudgeonly, Peterson always offers strong, valuable insights into Christian living. Eat This Book is the second of five volumes in his “spiritual theology” series. Peterson is writing with the goal of intersecting sound academic theology with practical advice for daily life. And so, Eat This Book explores the issue of how Christians are to relate to Scripture.

Peterson challenges the popular notions of using the Bible as a self-help book or as a collection of morality stories that have been popularized by the church and many Christian publications. Peterson uses his pastoral voice to remind us that Scripture is God’s story and he invites us to lose ourselves in it, and to find our place in God’s story. The author recommends an ancient method of reading Scriptures that is true to the text—lectio divina. This ancient practice involved four steps: we read the text, mediate the text, pray the text, and live the text. This method prevents us from approaching the text with an unhealthy detachment. Instead, we are to approach the text with an expectation of encountering God and being changed by his word.

Peterson’s appeal his is warm pastoral voice. He brings a shepherd’s warms and a sound academic perspective to his writing. The aithor is a master storyteller who adds enough of a personal touch to keep Eat This Book from teetering into the world of academia. However, Peterson isn’t hesitant to admonish what he believes to be excesses in how Scripture is handled in some mega-church settings. Peterson takes fewer of these jabs in Eat this Book than in previous works, however they are there. From my perspective, Peterson is often correct in his assessments, however, he treats mega-churches like some monolithic organization and, in so doing, he sometimes throws out the baby with the bath water. That’s a minor complaint, though, and one that’s probably related to my personal biases about church growth.

One of the highlights of this book for me was the author’s recollection of how the wildly popular Message translation (which he wrote) came to be. He never set out to write his own translation. Instead, he wrote a few paraphrases to arrest the attention of a sleepy adult Sunday School class. His group responded to these paraphrases and encouraged their pastor to keep on. The eventual result was Peterson quitting his church to focus on the immense task of writing a uniquely “American” translation of the Bible.

Also of interest—Peterson includes an appendix of his favorite books that have aided him with the art of spiritual reading. This appendix alone is worth the price of the book for a disciple looking to deepen his or her relationship to scripture.

Overall, Eat this Book and it’s predecessor Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places are valuable additions to anyone’s library.

FAMILYFANS RATING:  A-

--LS