Jordan Peterson’s “God”

We Who Wrestle with God:
Perceptions of the Divine
by jordan b. peterson
portfolio, 576 pages, $35

A man who disbelieved the Christian story as fact but continually fed on it as myth would, perhaps, be more spiritually alive than one who assented and did not think much about it.” So claimed C. S. Lewis in his 1944 essay “Myth Became Fact.” Lewis insisted that myth lies at the heart of the faith—even if it embarrasses those moderns who would cover over the mythic imagery of Scripture with the whitewash of literalism, replacing lively stories with morals, principles, and ideas. The similarities between the Christian faith and the myths of the pagans need not occasion unease, Lewis argued; rather, they manifest a “mythical radiance” that should be preserved within our theology.

Long before Jordan Peterson came to prominence through his opposition to Canada’s draconian gender legislation, his work had focused on the importance of myth, most notably in Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (1999). Myths, for Peterson, give us what science cannot: a dramatic world with motivational power, emotional resonance, and existential coordinates, in which we can act with a purpose. And reading the Bible has always been an integral part of Peterson’s larger project, not least within his enormously successful 2017 series of lectures on the psychological significance of the biblical narratives. Though Peterson has referred to the Bible on several occasions in his popular self-help works, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (2018) and Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life (2021), it is in his new book, We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine, that he finally gives sustained treatment to this important aspect of his work.

In We Who Wrestle with God, Peterson traces much the same path as he did in his 2017 video series, which focused on Genesis. He leads us from the Creation, Garden, and Fall to Cain and Abel, the Flood, and Babel. Almost half of the book is devoted to the first eleven chapters of Genesis. The rest focuses on Abraham, Moses (who receives two chapters), and Jonah. Peterson’s choice of material is perhaps unsurprising. For the most part, these are the passages of Holy Scripture that are most open to the sort of reading he exemplifies. There is less room for a symbolic and archetypal reading of books such as Chronicles, where we encounter a more familiar historical account.

What is the Bible, for Peterson? In 12 Rules for Life, he calls it 

for better or worse, the foundational document of Western civilization. . . . A truly emergent document—a selected, sequenced and finally coherent story written by no one and everyone over many thousands of years. The Bible has been thrown up, out of the deep, by the collective human imagination, which is itself a product of unimaginable forces operating over unfathomable spans of time. Its careful, respectful study can reveal things to us about what we believe and how we do and should act that can be discovered in almost no other manner.

Peterson’s is a Jungian approach. He sees the Bible as a distillation of the collective unconscious and its archetypes, disclosing deep truths that are of vital and perennial importance. Peterson is a man who regards myth as a matter of immense gravity, and the Bible contains the myths that, more than any others, have been the life-giving springs of Western civilization. As he argues in the preface to We Who Wrestle with God, when the West is unsettled, it is to these myths that we must return for civilizational renewal—though of course, other myths also have an important role, and Peterson often draws parallels between the Bible and stories drawn from pagan mythologies. Despite points of contact, this approach clearly contrasts with a Christian understanding, within which the Holy Scriptures are uniquely divinely inspired and authoritative.

When his topic is the Bible, Peterson can speak and write with a preacher’s diction and intensity. Confronting human depravity, he reminds people of the existence of radical evil, while summoning them to look and live towards an ideal that promises nothing less than transformation of their existence. Peterson can preach this gospel with an astonishing urgency, because nothing less than salvation from “hell” and the path to “heaven” depend upon it. Our salvation requires humble and serious moral exertion that reckons with the extreme stakes.

But Christian readers might need to remind themselves that, though Peterson shares much of our vocabulary, he does not typically use the words with the same sense. Whether or not the stories of the Bible are faithful accounts of concrete historical events is very much a secondary consideration for Peterson. As such, they would be a “mere description of some state of affairs.” Beliefs are “true,” without regard to their correspondence to real states of affairs, merely in proportion to their necessity for our survival. Writing of the importance of belief in the inherent dignity of every person, Peterson asks:

At what point must it be admitted that a “necessary fiction” is true precisely in proportion to its necessity? Is it not the case that what is most deeply necessary to our survival is the very essence of “true”? Any other form of truth runs counter to life, and a truth that does not serve life is a truth only by an ultimately counterproductive standard—and thereby not fundamentally “true.”

Though this understanding of “truth” might account for certain neglected dimensions of the term, going beyond brute facticity to include reliability and dependability (“tried and true”), Peterson also seems to neglect the importance of actual convictions about the objective state of affairs.

The concept of “God,” a central theme of this book, is one such “truth” for Peterson. Peterson’s “God” is variously the voice of conscience, Noah’s intuition of an impending flood, that which is elevated to the position of highest value and to which sacrifice is made by Abraham, the principle of order at the foundation of the cosmos and society, the spirit of inspired adventure that summoned Abram to leave Ur, Jacob’s hypostatization of the principle that animated his praiseworthy ancestry, and the Father who “will even and eternally sacrifice his own son to that which is truly holy.” Yet although the commanding and inspiring presence of Peterson’s God is projected across the pages of this book, the more one recognizes the presence of Man behind the curtain, the more this “God” seems specious and insubstantial. Those who sought the face of such an entity would be engaging in a category error.

Rudolf Bultmann and some other mid-twentieth-century theologians sought to demythologize Holy Scripture, removing the mythological husk of supposedly implausible tales from the “core” of the Christian message. That core could then be communicated in some culturally resonant form, such as the tradition of existentialism that runs through Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre. Peterson’s project is the mirror image of Bultmann’s: For him, existentialism needs to be remythologized, communicated in spirited tales of dragons, heroes, demons, villains, death and resurrection, apocalypses, and Chaoskampf that evoke the deep Jungian archetypes by which human agency is most fully animated. Whatever the interest of this approach, it has the same weakness as Bultmann’s: It reduces the historical narratives of Scripture to a delivery system for an existentialist theology or philosophy. This is a significant departure from the gospel proclamation of divine redemption wrought in the fullness of time and a Christ without whose actual and historical bodily resurrection our faith is in vain.

In his treatment of the David and Goliath story, for instance, Peterson claims that the moral of the story is that the true hero defeats the tyrant of the state; he likens David to heroes of other mythologies, such as Gilgamesh, Thor, Sun Wukong, and Theseus. In this instance, as often (though not always) in the book, Peterson is picking up on something that is genuinely present in the text. However, the connections and morals he draws are almost invariably generic, inattentive to the particulars of the story. And it is in the particulars that much of the meaning of texts—even their archetypal or symbolic meaning—is to be found.

The archetypal significance of the story of David and Goliath, for instance, is seen much more clearly when the story is read with close attention to its literary form and context, and in relation to the wider biblical canon. Goliath is dressed in scaly armor and is defeated with a head wound by a lad—recalling the serpent in Genesis whose head will be crushed by the seed of the woman. (An earlier enemy in 1 Samuel had a name that literally meant “serpent”—Nahash.) Goliath is also a giant with a spear—connecting him with King Saul (who is taller than any in Israel, according to 1 Samuel 10:23).

The books of Samuel are, among many other things, a sophisticated treatment of themes of power, authority, rule, and tyranny. Yet Peterson’s approach leaves us with a generic story and a general conclusion. At other points, indeed, he makes careless and inaccurate claims, such as his repeated suggestion that the Canaanites were the descendants of Cain. His work also suffers from his dependence upon a limited range of scholarly Christian interlocutors (he uses biblehub.com for almost all the Christian commentary with which he interacts).

The forbidding length of We Who Wrestle with God, and its unfamiliar subject matter, may discourage many in Peterson’s wider audience. Peterson most shines in his inspiring lectures, where his presence, voice, and intensity can animate the material. In written form, the same material often feels digressive and disjointed, even flat. I have previously chosen to listen to Peterson’s reading of his books in order to recapture some of the energy of his speech, and I suspect We Who Wrestle with God would benefit from the same approach.

This will be a frustrating book for many Christian readers. Peterson’s “God” is a prop for his existentialist doctrine and, even on those occasions when he speculates about the actual existence of God, the “God” in view is an unknown god, serving as the universe’s deep resonance with and confirmation of our existential convictions. Whether or not any god is enthroned in the heavens, what matters is that the idea of “God” is firmly enthroned in our consciousness. Writing of Noah, Peterson asks:

Does God exist for Noah? Does Noah believe? Here is the situation, properly construed: God is for Noah by definition what guides him, what seizes him, as he makes his way forward, no matter what he decides to do. . . . Why conceptualize this, specifically, as faith in “God”? Because Noah must elevate something to the highest place (something that therefore is functionally equivalent to “God”) so that every other choice has been sacrificed and foregone, that which now guides established as fundamental or superordinate, and movement forward made possible. The fact that this uniting spirit is “God” would remain true even if Noah explicitly disavowed any so-called “religious” belief.

All that said, Peterson’s readings frequently respond to real features of the Holy Scriptures to which many modern Christian readers can be inattentive. His Jungian concern for symbols and archetypes, and his emphasis on the existential revelation to be found in stories, brings him to some challenging and inspiring insights, in contrast with the strained and flat moral lessons that are often drawn by modern preachers. Such preachers might approach the Holy Scriptures as fact, yet have little sense of them as “myth.”

Here someone like Peterson might recall Christians to the best of our own tradition, which, through attention to the symbolic and typological character of Holy Scripture, has had its eyes elevated to higher spiritual, moral, and heavenly truths. In the Church’s historic reading of Scripture, it has appreciated divinely established analogies between historical realities and their fulfilment in Christ; between salvation history and the moral life of the Christian; and between earthly realities and heavenly. For instance, Jesus speaks of his body as the temple (John 2:19), and in his body he fulfills the typological meaning of the historical destruction of the temple by the Babylonians and its rebuilding after the exile. The Apostle Paul describes our body (both corporately and severally) as the temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 3:16–17; 6:19–20), drawing a moral lesson from this image. And then the earthly temple is connected to the heavenly (Heb. 8:5).

Peterson’s reading of Scripture takes aspects of its analogies seriously but misses much of what is really going on in it. If the God of Holy Scripture really exists, nothing less than a Copernican Revolution in our existential understanding must occur. In a world ordered around the living God revealed in Jesus Christ, forgiveness, grace, thanksgiving, dependency, devotion, worship, and prayer take on a completely new aspect and transform our lives. Whatever its merits, Peterson’s project would need to be rebuilt on a new basis to reckon with such a revolution.

Jordan Peterson is an especially vivid example of one who feeds upon the Christian story as myth, while not believing it as fact. He is far from alone, and though We Who Wrestle with God is not a true Christian reading of Holy Scripture, it represents an encouraging trend of serious thinkers recognizing the vital cultural significance of the Bible. This trend may be a much-needed beachhead for the evangelization of righteous pagans—and a spur to Christians to return to a spiritual reading of Holy Scripture. In myth, as Lewis recognized, meaning is encountered neither as abstract nor as bound to the particular, but as reality. And in the Incarnation, myth and fact are joined.

Alastair Roberts is adjunct senior fellow at the Theopolis Institute.

Image by Gustave Doré, public domain. Image cropped.