Dr. Jordan Peterson’s “We Who Wrestle with God” is a compelling book brimming with thoughtful analyses of the Bible, or what he identifies as “the frame through which the world of facts reveals itself” and “the foundation of the West, pure and simple.”
What does the story of Cain and Abel tell us about the possibility for essential conflict? Or the burning sword east of Eden about heaven’s prerequisite purification? What have Auschwitz and Japan’s Unit 731 to do with the Tower of Babel? Or the abyss below to teach us about the infinite expanse above? Peterson’s answers are rich, and his insights are many.
There is no mistaking Peterson’s respect for the Bible and gratitude for the civilizational fruits of this ultimate map of meaning. There is, however, something unsettling that runs throughout the text.
He appears to regard the Bible as the most complex, comprehensive, cohesive, and positive instructional moral narrative ever assembled, but the god with whom Peterson wrestles seems to be less a literal who and more a metaphoric what.
Peterson has been asked on many occasions whether he believes in God.
He indicated in a lecture that there is a “heavy moral burden” that comes along with answering in the affirmative, especially since “[he] can’t see how you can make a higher moral claim than that.” When asked by Piers Morgan in October 2023, he answered, “I don’t think that’s anybody’s business” — an interesting response for a wrestler responsible for an over-500 page book discussing perceptions of the divine.
While uncomfortable with the question, Peterson has on at least one occasion confirmed his belief, only to inspire additional doubts about whether he is a theist in the traditional sense.
Peterson told atheist Sam Harris that “part of the conception of God that underlies the Western ethos is the notion that whatever God is is expressed in the truthful speech that rectifies pathological hierarchies. … It also confronts the chaos of being itself and generates habitable order. That is the metaphysical proposition.”
“I would think about it as a transcendent reality that’s only observable across the longest of time frames,” continued Peterson. “God is how we imaginatively and collectively represent the existence and action of consciousness across time.”
Peterson further noted that “God is the highest value in the hierarchy of values,” and “God is the voice of conscience,” and “God is the future to which we make sacrifices.”
It is not altogether clear whether the god Peterson refers to is the triune being whom Christians hold to be the literal ‘one true and living God.’
In his new book, Peterson notes that God is presented in Genesis “as the process of spirit guided by the aim of having all things exist and flourish; the spirit guided by love.” Later, he states that God is that “around which everything else arranges itself.” Elsewhere in the book, God becomes a metaphor for the “encounter with something that is both enduring in its being and furiously becoming, simultaneously”; “the ultimate up in the upward aim”; “the unity that exists at the foundation or stands at the pinnacle”; and the “source of the impetus to develop, personally.”
It is not altogether clear whether the god Peterson refers to is the triune being whom Christians hold to be the literal “one true and living God, creator and lord of heaven and earth, almighty, eternal, immeasurable, incomprehensible, infinite in will, understanding and every perfection[;] … in reality distinct from the world, supremely happy in himself and from himself, and inexpressibly loftier than anything beside himself which either exists or can be imagined,” in whose image we are made, whose face is human, and upon which all contingent reality depends for existence.
We either are made in the image of God or have fashioned yet another god in our image.
I would be more than happy to discover that I am off base, but it appears that Peterson is instead referring to an imagined yet actionable moral aim; the symbolic center of a network of ideas that has been named and called into reality; a “necessary fiction” that’s “true” by virtue of its necessity; an idealized imago hominis refined over the course of eons’ worth of trial and error to become “better and better and, simultaneously, deeper and deeper” in a product “that is the action, so to speak, of Jung’s collective unconscious.”
God is not, however, some collectively imagined vision board for moral should-haves and social could-haves — an ideal turned noospheric idol to which evolution has made us sensitive. The Bible is likewise not a useful collection of utopian myths for soulless creatures in an accidental universe.
We do indeed navigate the world with stories, but the Christian proposition hinges on this story being real, literal.
Christ actually died and rose from the dead — or he didn’t.
If he didn’t, then the missionary’s pitch is: Here is a Jewish lifestyle cult built around a mad Nazarene executed after claiming kingship and communion with God the Father — who, by the way, is a flexible human fabrication.
While the world can be home to heavenly states and living hells, there is an afterlife or there’s not. If not, then the tomb, if empty, was robbed and the promise of Easter along with it.
The God with whom we wrestle is either Creator or creature. We either are made in the image of God or have fashioned yet another god in our image.
The Bible is the foundation of the West, as Peterson has written. But God the literal creator is fundamental to this text. Without Him, we are left with what they call Christian atheism: a noncommittal materialist fandom that enjoys the fruits and appreciates the roots of Christianity but discounts the Gardener.
In “We Who Wrestle with God,” Peterson shares a great deal of interesting commentary about the fruits and the roots and makes a strong argument both to those who have written off the Bible as naive and to those who “presume that the scientific and the religious are somehow diametrically opposed” that the tree is life-giving.
Extra to the enjoyment such readers may receive from reading Peterson’s book, their appreciation for the Bible might give way to an embrace of the Gardener who not only made the tree but died on one to literally save us from sin and death.