Eat this Book

Eat this Book by Eugene H. Peterson, 2006, Eerdmans

For the second topic in Eugune Peterson's overview of spiritual theology, he touches on the practice of spiritual reading, or reading the Bible in the proper way, a way that brings you into God's presence and God's work in the world. In comparison to the first book in the series, this book is rather short, clocking in at less than 200 pages. Still, it's quality, not quantity, that counts. Luckily, the quality here is high.

The book is divided into three sections. First, the author gets at Bible reading in general, why it is important, what our real goal should be in reading the Bible, that kind of thing. It was good, but not groundbreaking. Just basic, common sense stuff that I suspect many people need a refresher (or original expsorure) on. The second section gets deeper, beginning with the warning to "let the reader beware" and some cautions about reading too much or too little into scripture, or for taking it out of context. This is good stuff, but once again, not ground breaking. What was ground breaking for me was the last part, the discussion about translations of the Bible. Knowing that the author did most of the work on The Message, a modern-English translation of the Bible, I feared that it would turn into an info-mercial of sorts. Luckily, this turned out to be the best part of the book, with some really great stories of translation, what it means for us that the Bible we read is not the original text, and some warnings about improperly handled translations.

The last section is probably worth the price of the book by itself, but since you get the whole thing for the same price, I highly recommend picking this little guy up. It isn't long, but it will have you thinking long and hard about your Bible before you are done with it.