Author EUGENE PETERSON
Publisher HODDER AND STOUGHTON
ISBN 0-340-99517-4
For well over fifty years Eugene Peterson has been a pastor and more lately, a professor at Regent College in Vancouver, now emeritus, he continues to write and share the riches of the knowledge and wisdom he has accumulated over the many years of his walk with the Lord. This particular book is one of his “Spiritual Theology” series and is beautifully written and extremely profitable in the insights it offers as to Jesus and His conversations in prayers and stories. The book is profoundly contemporary as its author develops his expositions because he applies the wealth contained in the words of Jesus to the prevailing tendencies toward superficiality that are frequently manifest in the church of today, but he does not overdo it and is never coldly critical. Peterson is best known for his paraphrase of the Bible known as “The Message.” Any who have read that will realize that this author loves words, loves language and is at work to honor it and save it from its slide into a degraded state. A personal friend of ours was at Regent College and reported that he felt that Peterson could not lecture at all. I can appreciate that, his writings reveal a freedom from ‘point number one, two, and three’ and instead carry the reader beyond into that which although it contains words and thought is beyond those too. Here, there is wonder. The neat compartmentalizing of Christian truth is not what this author aims at; he is after the merging of all things we call sacred and secular into one life and is against doctrinaire schema in favor of relational living. Anyone familiar with Peterson will not be disappointed in reading the way he exposits the stories Jesus told on his journey from Galilee to Jerusalem as found in the Gospel of Luke. These significant parables are thrown into the mix of conversation and are shown to be significant indeed. The second half of the book examines the prayers Jesus prayed beginning with the Lord prayer and concluding with the “Father, in to Your hands I commit my spirit.” Peterson lifts us in every page; the ennobling of language is much needed in these days. The church needs to wake up to this fact and this writer can help raise us. Those seeking nice neat points which, if they learn them, means that they have mastered the subject, will find none of that here, instead, they will be treated to the finest vintage wine well aged and God will be glorified as they read.
