EAT This Book takes its title from Revelation 10:9 when an angel tells John: “Take it, then eat it. It will taste sweet like honey, but turn sour in your stomach.”

Eugene H. Peterson, author of The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language, believes Christians should do the same with God’s word. “There is only one way of reading that is congruent with our Holy Scriptures, writing that trusts in the power of the words to penetrate our lives and create truth and beauty and goodness,” Peterson writes. “Spiritual reading, reading that enters our souls as food enters our stomachs, spreads through our blood, and becomes holiness and love and wisdom.”
In this illuminating book Peterson builds on his introduction to The Message in which he unpacks spiritual reading, known through the ages by its Latin name Lectio Divina.

Peterson explores why we should “eat this book” in the first 78 pages, dedicates 40 pages to Lectio Divina characterised by the steps Read, Think, Pray and Live and spends the last 56 pages on those known as God’s Secretaries — Bible translators.
In my experience few Bible readers have read the introduction to their Bible and know where it has come from, who translated it and the manner in which it was done. Peterson, for example, always intended The Message to communicate the Gospel in everyday language, not to replace study Bibles.

Of JB Phillips, one of Britain’s most famous Bible translators, Peterson writes: “Philips not only invited me into and made me at home in the world of God’s revelation by means of his translation, he showed me how to do it, sowed the seeds that sixty years later would be harvested as The Message.

“What was done for me, I found myself wanting to do for others, doing everything I could to show men and women that the Scriptures are livable — that God’s word is personal address, inviting, commanding, challenging, rebuking, judging, comforting, directing — but not forcing. Not coercing. We are given space and freedom in these biblical pages to answer, to enter into the conversation.  More than anything else the Bible invites our participation in the work and language of God.”

Eat This Book will certainly help Peterson achieve that goal.


February 22, 2010  Vol 68 Issue 6