An excerpt

from Eat This Book by Eugene Peterson: (no comment from me needed!)

"What we must never be encouraged to do, although all of us are guilty of it over and over, is to force Scripture to fit our experience. Our experience is too small; it's like trying to put the ocean in a thimble. What we want is to fit into the world revealed by Scripture, to swim in this vast ocean.

"What we are after is first noticing and then participating in the way the large world of the Bible absorbs the much smaller world of our science and economics and politics that provides the so-called world-view in which we are used to working out our daily concerns.

"This means we have to abandon all condescending approaches to the Bible. Most of us have been trained in what is sometimes termed a "hermeneutics of suspicion." People lie a lot. And people who write lie more than most. We are taught to bring a healthy suspicion to everything we read, especially when it claims authority over us. What's going on here? What's the hidden agenda? What's behind all of this? The three modern masters of the hermeneutic of suspicion are Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud. They taught us well to take nothing at face value.

"Much of this is useful. We don't want to be taken in, manipulated by clever wordsmiths or enticed by skilled publicists and advertisers to buy things we don't want and will never use, involved in some soul-destroying program by a smooth-talking propagandist. In matters that have to do with God, we are doubly on our guard, suspicious of everything and everyone, including the Bible. We've learned to our sorrow that religious people lie more than most others -- and lies in the name of God are the worst lies of all.

"But as we narrow our eyes in suspicion, the world is correspondingly narrowed down. And when we take these reading habits to our reading of Holy Scripture, we end up with a small sawdust heap of facts.

"Paul Ricoeur has wonderful counsel for people like us. Go ahead, he says, maintain and practice your hermeneutics of suspicion. It is important to do this. Not only important, it is necessary. There are a lot of lies out there; learn to discern the truth and throw out the junk. But then reenter the book, the world, with what he calls "a second naivete." Look at the world with childlike wonder, ready to be startled into surprised delight by the profuse abundance of truth and beauty and goodness that is spilling out of the skies at every moment. Cultivate a hermeneutics of adoration -- see how large, how splendid, how magnificent life is.

"And then practice this hermeneutic of adoration in the reading of Holy Scripture. Plan on spending the rest of your lives exploring and enjoying the world both vast and intricate that is revealed by this text."