Reading Scripture constitutes an act of crisis. Day after day, week after week, it brings us into a world that is totally at odds with the species of world that newpaper and television serve up to us on a platter...[Scripture] is a world where God is active everywhere and always, where God is fiery first cause and not occasional afterthought, where God cannot be procrastinated, where everything is relative to God and God is not relative to anything. Reading Scripture involves a dizzying reorientation of our culture-conditioned and job-oriented assumptions and procedures...Scripture calls into question the domesticated accomodations we are busily arranging for the gospel. The crisis into which the act of reading Scripture brings us...[means] solemn awareness, repeated as often as daily, that the world of reality to which we have vowed ourselves in belief and vocation is a divinely constituted world in which God calls upon us; it is not a humanly constituted world in which we, when we feel like it, call upon God...to lose that awareness is to lose our lives.
--Eugene Peterson, Working the Angles
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What does Peterson mean when he says, “Reading Scripture constitutes an act of crisis” (p.131-34)?
I've just now seen your reply to the post, Bruce, sorry it took me so long.
I think what Peterson is getting at is the tension that Scripture places on us relative to the world in which we live. When we read that we are commanded to love our neighbors and then recall how we have treated people in our lives (near or far), that is a crisis. When we read about not placing any idols before God and then consider that which gets first priority in our lives, that is a crisis.
This is what Peterson is getting at. Reading Scripture makes it near impossible to live comfortably within our culture, because (generally speaking) our culture is in direct opposition to Scripture.
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