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Book Review: Jonah: Under the Unpredictable Plant ::
It’s always a good idea to read the occasional `flavour of the month’ book, if only to work out what to avoid! Michael Fischer reviews such a book.
Source: Perspective Vo4 No4 © Perspective 1999
Author: Eugene H. Peterson
Published: Eerdmans, 1992
Reviewer: Michael Fischer
JONAH GETS SHADY TREATMENT
It’s always a good idea to read the occasional `flavour of the month’ book, for no other reason than to keep abreast of what the average person in the pew is filling their minds with. You might be into a weighty tome on justification by faith, but they’re not. They’re into the likes of Frank Peretti, Max Lucado and Eugene Peterson.
Well, maybe not Peterson. The difference here is that while Eugene Peterson indeed seems to be the flavour of the month, it’s not the man in the pew who’s soaking him up. No, it’s more likely to be the other members of your local ministers’ fraternal, because Peterson has written a trilogy of books aimed at helping pastors. So, having just been given a copy of “Under the Unpredictable Plant,” I set out to discover what this celebrated man has to say.
I wasn’t far into the book and already I had a bad case of literary heart-burn. After telling us how he found his understanding of the Christian life inadequate for coping in the ministry, Peterson explains how he found a ‘metaphor’ for ministry in the book of Jonah which set him straight. Before launching into explaining what he found in Jonah, though, Peterson first has to justify what he calls his “playful” handling of the scriptural text. He claims that the book “invites” us to approach it in this way (p.10). Frankly, this is nothing more than a thin excuse for the age-old practice of foisting external meaning on the text. In other words, it’s plain old allegory. Why is it that the medieval quadriga is continually revived by people who really should know better? The amazing thing is that in spite of this, Peterson reminds us at a number of points of the need to handle the Word of God in a way which is honest to the text. But as you watch him handle the book of Jonah in his “playful” way, you’re left wondering at his definition of “honesty”.
As I read on, it became apparent that novels mean a lot more to Peterson than the text of the Bible. For it is the sizeable array of novels he quotes from, rather than the Bible itself, which seems to provide him with the grounds for understanding his ministry as a pastor. I was left thinking that it wouldn’t have made any difference to the book if he’d left out his treatment of Jonah altogether.
For all that, Peterson does have some good advice to give us about pastoral ministry (such as the need for pastors to stick it out in their churches for the gospel’s sake, and not pack off to a different church every few years for ‘career’ reasons). But it’s never that straightforward to read. For while Peterson has amazing powers of expression, all is not necessarily clear. Sure, you FEEL that what you’re reading is profound and clear. But that’s not the really the case, because Peterson’s rule seems to be that if you want to make something sound profound, all you have to do is write in a cloudy, mysterious, unclear sort of way.
I don’t know what the other two books in Peterson’s ‘trilogy’ are like (Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work and Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity), but with titles like that you can’t help wondering if all we would be in for is the same ‘playfulness’ with the Biblical text, and the same vague, ‘profound’ style of writing. The bit that really stinks is that, in his efforts to help pastors in the task of ministry, Peterson has ended up bolstering what has to be the main failing of so many ‘ministries’: dishonest handling of the Biblical text.
Score: 2 ½ lemons out of 3.
Michael Fischer is pastor of the Australind Baptist Church in Western Australia