Review: As Kingfishers Catch Fire by Eugene Peterson

An intelligible and applicable message

I received As Kingfishers Catch Fire from Blogging for Books  (a fun program that involves free books and a place to talk about them) in exchange for this review.

“As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame…Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors each one dwells.” In these words, 19^th century poet Gerard Manley Hopkins depicts the intended harmony between the identity and actions of each of God’s creations. Similarly, in his book As Kingfishers Catch Fire, Eugene Peterson explores the harmony, or “congruence” as he terms it, between who a Christian is and how he lives.

As Kingfishers Catch Fire is a collection of sermons that Peterson preached to his congregation over 30 years. The sermons reflect Peterson’s own journey of connecting his identity as a Christian to the ordinary activities of his daily life, focusing on the need to make “the means by which we live…congruent with the ends for which we live.” 

Although Peterson’s overall theme in his book is the idea of congruence, each of the forty-nine sermons he includes touches on a different topic related to Christian living. For example, Peterson’s discussion of Psalm 110 highlights the importance of being “a people of God who listen…to the Word of God,” while his sermon on Romans 3 identifies two central questions—"Does God show himself? And if he does, will we recognize him?”—and expounds on Paul’s emphatic “Yes.” The book’s seven sections focus respectively on seven Biblical preachers (Moses, David, Isaiah, Solomon, Peter, Paul, and John) and scripture passages with which tradition associates them. Peterson skillfully interprets each text, bringing to it a wealth of historical context, personal experience, quotations from perceptive thinkers (including G.K. Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers, Teresa of Avila, T.S. Eliot, and many others), and conversational paraphrases.

As an author, Peterson is probably most famous for his Bible paraphrase The Message. In this work, scripture quotations come from traditional Bible translations, but his preaching style still reflects a desire to make God’s message intelligible and applicable to modern Christians.