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Jordan Peterson Wrestles with God
What kind of book is the Bible? Is it a book of history, fables, useful moral principles, or ancient superstition? Does it even matter whether the God of the Bible exists and is active in human history, or can we profitably reinterpret him as a literary construct designed to help us grapple with human psychology and guide our search for meaning?
These are the questions readers of Jordan Peterson’s We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine will grapple with. But after 505 pages of creative and occasionally insightful interpretation of biblical stories, readers will probably be no closer to understanding his answers. This is a book that purports to reveal God by illuminating Scripture. What it actually does is obscure and redefine both.
Storehouse of Wisdom
Since soaring to fame in 2016, Canadian clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson has interacted freely with traditional and religious ideas. Anyone who has read his best-selling self-help books (12 Rules for Life and Beyond Order), listened to him on podcasts, or watched his media appearances knows that when he’s not quoting Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, he’s referencing Scripture. But he’s not exactly preaching.
For Peterson, the Bible functions like a treasury of social and psychological wisdom that, if unlocked, can organize people’s lives and revivify civilization. The power of stories is central to his approach to Scripture, as he believes they reveal aspects of humanity’s “collective unconscious”—the ideas, symbols, and “maps of meaning” all people supposedly share (xxix–xxxi).
Thus, Peterson punctuates each biblical tale by asking, “What does this mean?” (310). What does it mean when God creates Adam in his image? What does it mean when the first couple falls into sin? What does it mean when Cain kills Abel, when Noah weathers the flood, when Abraham offers Isaac, or when Moses encounters the burning bush? In Peterson’s telling, each of these stories exists primarily as “an attempt by the collective human imagination to distill, transmit, and remember the essentials of good and bad into a single narrative” (103).
He certainly admires the Bible, describing it as “both sophisticated and great,” “true literature” (256), and “the most compelling meta-story conceivable” (445). “It is a miracle,” he writes of the account of Cain and Abel in Genesis 4, “how much information can be compacted into so little space” (99). The information he means isn’t theological but psychological. He thinks the Bible is stuffed with “archetypal characters of the narrative world”—Jungian figures like “the Dragon of Chaos, the Great Mother, the Great Father and the divine Son” (20).
Peterson believes this trove of themes evolved over millennia through a process in which people told and retold stories, preserving only the bits that resonated with universal human experience. This is how such stories “became better and better and, simultaneously, deeper and deeper.” Rather than say no one wrote them, we ought to say everyone wrote them (104). According to Peterson, this is just a “bottom-up” description of what Christians mean when we speak of “divine inspiration” (445).
Inspiring Myths
What meaning does he mine from Scripture’s stories (specifically the Pentateuch)? In the creation account, he finds a suggestion that each of us, being made in God’s image, wakes every morning brooding over the figurative waters of chaos (infinite potential), which we must order in imitation of the Creator. Eden signifies a Mandala, an area of experimentation and potential anchored in the center by the rod of nonnegotiable tradition (which also corresponds with Moses’s staff): the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. To steal from that tree is to challenge the world’s moral foundations—to usurp God’s rule. And this is the essence of sin: a step away from balance and back into primordial chaos.
Peterson believes the Bible evolved over millennia through a process in which people told and retold stories, preserving only the bits that resonated with universal human experience.
The near-universal human practice of religious sacrifice begins, in Peterson’s telling, with the discovery that creation rewards deferred gratification. Like Abel, we must learn to bring forward our best, and unlike Cain, we must resist the envious temptation to murder the ideal that condemns our shoddy offerings.
In imitation of Abraham, we must heed the “call to adventure” that inevitably summons each of us, refusing comforting lies that keep us from shouldering responsibility to bless our world. We must, in turn, hold our blessings lightly, being willing to figuratively “sacrifice” even our children when the highest ideal demands it, having faith that we will, like Abraham, receive them back (312). And like Jacob, we must allow the adventure of life to transform us, to wound us, and to give us a new name, which is to say we must wrestle with what Peterson calls “God.”
These are a few of his dark sayings. Traversing the accounts of creation, fall, Cain and Abel, Noah, the Tower of Babel, Abraham, Moses, and Jonah, Peterson blends biblical plots and other ancient epics with modern literature and psychological and political reflection. The result is a heady (and often wordy) brew of soft-scientific mysticism reminiscent of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, drawing conclusions that often require interpretive leaps but that clearly hew to Peterson’s monomythical template.
Talking About God
Some of it is genuinely insightful, grasping themes and typology that do exist in Scripture and showing that the Bible is more than a gazette of God’s doings. It’s subtle literature that reads you as you read, addressing deep and ancient questions of the human spirit and imparting wisdom by osmosis. Even a nonbeliever can see this. Peterson is right to treat Scripture as pregnant with meaning—enough to fill a lifetime of attentive reading. After all, “the testimony of the LORD is sure, making wise the simple” (Ps. 19:7).
Yet amid this deluge of “meaning,” it’s easy to lose sight of the Bible as revelation that contains straightforward claims about divine intervention in history and about the God doing the intervening. For Peterson, Bible stories seem capable of any meaning except the most obvious, the one believers have always insisted on, and he becomes cagey when pressed on this issue.
It isn’t even clear that he believes in God in any traditional sense. When asked, he typically obfuscates the meaning of the words “believe” and “God” (or else retorts, “It’s none of your d*** business”). In this latest book, he carries on with these gymnastics, treating God as a concept useful to human survival and psychological health, rather than as a Being who could audibly demand Peterson take off his loafers before treading holy ground. And although he devotes space to critiquing atheistic materialism, his real problem with figures like Richard Dawkins isn’t that they reject the Apostle’s Creed but that they don’t buy into his alternative world of Jungian abstractions. A person who has truly wrestled with God shouldn’t be doing gymnastics. He should be limping.
Peterson variously defines God as “The spirit within us that is eternally confident in our victory” (137), “What is to be properly and necessarily put in the highest place” (137), and the ideal to which we commit and sacrifice (171). The closest he comes to affirming something Christians would recognize is in critiquing Dawkins’s reductive view of the universe. He calls scientific atheists “moral dwarfs” (485) and argues that their belief in an evolutionary process that shaped consciousness implies consciousness must be fundamental to reality:
Why would we presume that the spirit giving rise to being and becoming itself is something dead, unconscious, pointless, and lacking identity when adaptation to that reality has required consciousness, teleology and purpose, and personality? . . . If the concept of God as Personality works, so to speak, in the time-tested manner—in the pragmatic manner—why is that model not aptly regarded as most accurate? (366)
Myth Without Fact
Christian readers whose ears perk up at Peterson’s god-talk will be disappointed, though. He takes away with his left hand what he gives with his right, closing the book with an impersonal, utilitarian confession that has him wishing God into existence because believing is good for us:
Does that make the divine real? This is a matter of definition, in the final analysis—and, therefore, of faith. It is real insofar as its pursuit makes pain bearable, keeps anxiety at bay, and inspires the hope that springs eternal in the human breast. It is real insofar as it establishes the benevolent and intelligible cosmic order, that infinite place of sinful toil or faithful play. It is as real as the force that opposes pride and calls those who sacrifice improperly to their knees. It is as real as the further reaches of the human imagination, striving fully upward. (504)
In other words, God is real as an inspiring myth—humanity’s highest ideal. But beyond that, Peterson’s creed remains a mystery.
He doesn’t specifically cover Jesus or the New Testament in this book (that’s likely coming in a future volume), but he seemed to express a desire to believe in Christ during a 2021 interview with liturgical artist Jonathan Pageau. Since then, I’ve been among the Christian observers and Peterson appreciators hoping for a breakthrough. He’s certainly engaging with the Bible more vigorously than ever, but I regret to say We Who Wrestle with God isn’t his good confession.
Peterson blends biblical plots and other ancient epics with modern literature and psychological and political reflection.
In “Myth Became Fact,” C. S. Lewis defended the legitimacy of treating Christianity as a myth. “We must not be ashamed of the mythical radiance resting on our theology,” he wrote. But we mustn’t forget that it really happened, and that’s why the myth—and all myths that resemble it—truly matters: “The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the dying god, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history.”
Jordan Peterson is comfortable in the heaven of legend and imagination. And there is, without a doubt, much to wrestle with in his archetypal reading of Scripture. But it remains unclear whether he’s ready to embrace any of it as fact, to let theology disciple psychology, or to believe his Opponent when he insists, “I AM.” Peterson’s earlier books offered sound advice and even wisdom. This one also beckons readers to a form of godliness, but it’s a form of godliness that ultimately denies its power (2 Tim. 3:5).
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