Eugene Peterson: “Eat This Book”
We were blessed to hear Eugene Peterson’s address to the January Series yesterday (audio is available) and meet with him as a Worship Institute staff this morning, in preparation for his multiple presentations to Symposium in the coming days.
Yesterday, Rev. Peterson began by reading from the introduction to his new book, Eat This Book, where he summarizes his theme:
In order to read the Scriptures adequately and accurately, it is necessary at the same time to live them. Not to live them as a prerequisite to reading them, and not to live them in consequence of reading them, but to live them as we read them, the living and reading reciprocal, body language and spoken words, the back-and-forthness assimilating the reading to the living, the living to the 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.
Later in the book, Peterson writes about “liturgical reading,” in his attempt to “recontextualize our reading of Scripture, our eating of this book, into a huge holy community of others who are also reading it. There is a millennia-deep and globe-encircling community of others who are also at the table eating this book.”
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