Eat This Book
A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Eugene Peterson's landmark Spiritual Theology series is foundational reading for the twenty-first century Church.
The product of Peterson's many years' experience as both pastor and professor of the highest calibre, this series combines first-class scholarship and genuine, lived application. Beautifully written, its presents a fresh and urgent evaluation of contemporary Christian spirituality.
'St John walks up to the angel and say, "Give me the book."' writes Peterson. 'The angel hands it over, "Here it is; eat it, eat the book." And John does. He eats the book - not just reads it - he got it into his nerve endings, his reflexes, his imagination. The book he ate was Holy Scripture.'
Eat This Book encourages the art of the reading the Bible so that it becomes a text for living and growing, not just thinking or behaving, and recasts the ancient discipline of lectio divina - spiritual reading - for a postmodern culture.
Also available in the Spiritual Theology series: Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, The Jesus Way, The Word Made Flesh and Practise Resurrection.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Peterson is a retired pastor and popular author best known for The Message, a paraphrasing of the Bible into modern idiom. In this slender book, he invites Christian readers to encounter the Bible anew. Drawing on language in Ezekiel and Revelation, Peterson says that we ought not read the Bible the same way we read a cookbook, a textbook, or even a great novel. Rather, Christians are to absorb, imbibe, feed on and digest Scripture. Peterson recommends a type of Bible-based prayer called lectio divina, in which the person praying meditates on a short passage of Scripture and listens for God to speak through the text. Peterson's exposition of lectio divina is one of the fullest to appear in recent years. Throughout, he cautions that lectio is not a systematic way of reading, but a "developed habit of living the text in Jesus' name." The last chapter, in which Peterson ruminates on his own experience translating the Bible, will be fascinating to Peterson's devotees, but is more myopic than the rest of the book. However, this is a worthy sequel to Peterson's 2004 hit Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places.
