As the second in Eugene Peterson’s proposed five-volume series on spiritual theology, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading, focuses on the Scriptures and how thoughtful, spiritual disciples should read them.

One way to appreciate this volume is to consider what it is not. It is not an apologetic defense of the Bible’s accuracy or inspiration. It is not a how-to manual for personal Bible study or an argument for why we should read the Bible every day. It is not a synopsis of the Bible’s content. Nor is it an ode to the beauty and power of God’s written word. And yet, all of these messages find their way woven into the subliminal background of Peterson’s beautifully written and spiritually challenging work.

What the book is is a strong encouragement to internalize the scriptures through meditative reading of a text that has the power to transform not merely inform. Peterson comes close to a purely mystical approach to Bible reading but does not cross the line, as some others have done, into a careless, almost anti-intellectual approach to the inspired text. For readers who have drifted into that swamp Eat This Book will be a challenge to engage the mind. For overly cognitive disciples who see the Bible as nothing more than fodder for chart making, Peterson serves as a goad toward godly character formation.

Much of the book, but certainly not all of it, acquaints the reader with the ancient discipline of “lectio Divina,” a practice of reading and rereading a portion of text with the purpose of internalizing it (i.e. “eating” it). Peterson does a good job of selling the idea of incorporating the discipline to one’s life but the task of actually doing so is (painfully) beyond the scope of any book. One can easily read this book and get no benefit from it if a change in schedule does not follow.

For the Christian academic, a part of the book that may be appreciated more than by other readers is Peterson’s musings about the nature of words and language. It is because God is a verbal God (e.g. He created everything by saying words) and we are made in his image that we connect to him primarily through hearing, reading, and saying words. The contrast to other religions that seek to empty oneself of verbiage and find a “wordless state” seems starker after reading this foundational part of Peterson’s thought. It also serves as a caution against overly emotional/less rational/almost pagan styles of Christian worship that seem to be gaining in popularity.

Here is Peterson’s purpose statement of the book. His words here can motivate you to make this work an important part of your personal discipleship library better than mine can:

I want to counter this widespread practice of taking personal experience instead of the Bible as the authority for living. I want to pull the Christian Scriptures back from the margins of the contemporary imagination where they have been so rudely elbowed by their glamorous competitors, and reestablish them at the center as the text for living the Christian life deeply and well. I want to confront and expose this replacement of the authoritative Bible by the authoritative self. I want to place personal experience under the authority of the Bible and not over it. I want to set the Bible before us as the text by which we live our lives, this text that stands in such sturdy contrast to the potpourri of religious psychology, self-development, mystical experimentation, and devotional dilettantism that has come to characterize so much of what takes cover under the umbrella of ‘spirituality.’ (page 17)

Reviewed by: Randy Newman