Category Archives: homo religiousus

How to Use Jordan Peterson, We Who Wrestle With God: Perceptions of the Divine

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In my previous essay I made some suggestions about how to read Jordan Peterson, We Who Wrestle With God. In that essay I asserted that we should not read the book as if it were Christian theology, philosophy, psychology, or sociology. It is rather a “phenomenology of homo religiosus” or religious man; that is to say, it is a study of the ways in which human beings perceive and respond to the divine. In this essay I will suggest a few ways in which the book can be useful to Christians.

Why Read Peterson?

First, it is important not to be afraid to incorporate the wisdom of non-Christian thinkers into our thinking. Of course, we must do this with care. But faithful church leaders and even apostles have done this from the beginning. In Acts 17, Paul quoted two Greek poets, Epimenides (6th century B.C.) and Aratus (4th and 3rd centuries B.C.), approvingly: “In him we live and move and have our being” and “We are his offspring.” Paul taps into the near universal belief and experience that the divine is near, around, within, and active everywhere. The pressing question within the religious horizon of the Old and New Testaments was not “Is there a god?” but “What is the true nature of the divine?” and “Who is God?” And that is what Paul proclaimed to the Athenians that day.

We, however, cannot presume that our contemporaries experience the overwhelming, self-evident presence of the divine. They do not. It is doubtful that even we who believe in the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit experience it as well as the pagans in Athens did. We wrestle with the question of the existence and presence of God in a way no ancient person did. For many people, belief requires heroic effort. This modern feeling of divine absence is why we need to listen to Jordan Peterson and other thinkers who can awaken us to the universal divine presence felt so vividly by the Athenians and all premodern people.

The Question of God is Inescapable

As I argued in the first essay, Peterson reads biblical texts for their witness to the universal experience of the divine. Human beings are by nature religious, that is, human consciousness is so constructed that we cannot help but raise religious questions, questions of meaning, of life and death, being, eternity, and divinity.  Unless we are taught otherwise, we experience the power and beauty of nature, the inner call of conscience, the threat of death, and the lure of love as intimations of the divine. We feel the tension between the upward call toward the good, true, and the beautiful and the downward pull into sensuality and chaos. Peterson criticizes such modern errors as scientism, race and gender ideology, and utopian revolutionary theories (“idiocy” he would say) that blind us to what lies open before us: We live in Someone else’s world and we can never become what we could be unless we respond sacrificially to the divine call.

From a Christian point of view, Peterson does not provide satisfactory answers to the two questions Paul posed and answered in Acts 17: (1) “What is God?” Paul’s answer: “God is the Creator of heaven and earth!” And (2) “Who is God?” Paul’s answer: “God is the One who raised Jesus Christ from the dead.” But Peterson sets the conditions wherein these questions make sense. If we come to perceive the divine all around and within us, and if we feel compelled to choose between seeking the divine and falling into chaos, the next step naturally appears before us. It is to ask: “What and Who are you, Lord? How may I seek you and find you? What would you have me do?”

Peterson and the Bible

Peterson does not read the Bible as the canonical text for the Christian church. Nor does he read it according to the modern historical critical method, which seeks, not to hear the religious/moral message of the text with a view to obeying it, but to uncover the history of the composition of the present texts and to reconstruct the “true” historical events behind the text, neither of which we can know for sure. Peterson takes the biblical texts seriously as speaking universal truth learned in genuine encounters with the divine. Unlike modern historical interpretation, Peterson finds an existentially relevant and religiously compelling message in the Bible. It articulates a command built into human nature that we must obey or disobey. Once we have heard it, we can never return to our naive secular existence.

The church, like Peterson, reads the Bible for its religious/moral message. Unlike Peterson, however, the church reads the Bible as its authoritative scripture, as the normative story by which it measures all its teaching, theological and moral. But it does not contradict the ecclesial reading of the Bible to read it also as a witness to the universal human “perceptions of the divine” as does Peterson. Believers read the Bible as more but not less than Peterson. And this is why a person who is not a Christian can recognize their experience in many biblical texts and a Christian can recognize their experience in some pagan and secular texts. God has not left himself without witness in nature and in human consciousness! Peterson is on the side of the angels here. In my view, then, Christian preachers, teachers, apologists, and theologians could make good use of his work and the work of others like him.

Next Time: Perhaps I will follow up these essays with some reflections on Peterson’s moral and social ideas.

How to Read Jordan Peterson, We Who Wrestle With God: Perceptions of the Divine

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A Reading Guide

I just finished reading Jordan Peterson’s most recent book, We Who Wrestle With God: Perceptions of the Divine. In this 505-page, quirky, provocative book Peterson wrestles with certain biblical characters and stories, among which are the creation story, the fall, Cain and Abel, Abraham, Moses, and Jonah. As my essay title indicates, I will not be doing a full review. My aim, rather, is to give you my perspective on what the book is and is not, what it does and does not do; that is to say, I want to help you get the most out of reading it.

What the Book is Not

Not Christian Theology

Don’t read this book as if it were an exercise in Christian theology. Peterson is not a theologian. You will completely miss its important message if you measure his interpretations by the standards of Christian theology, orthodox, progressive, or liberal. Mistakenly reading it in this way will lead you to think at one moment that he is orthodox, the next heretical, and the next completely off the wall. Peterson does not read the Bible as the canonical scripture of the Christian church and does not adopt the methods and language of Christian theology. Don’t critique the book for not doing well what it makes no pretense of doing at all.

Not philosophy

We Who Wrestle is not a book of philosophy. Peterson is not a philosopher and does not attempt to deduce a system of metaphysics from self-evident axioms. Nor does he use logical analysis to clarify traditional philosophical problems and arguments. It’s not philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, moral philosophy, or philosophical anthropology. The book is much too mystical, hermeneutical, eclectic, and as I said above, quirky for that. Indeed, at points it reads like a stream of consciousness riff on a theme. So, don’t look for an internally consistent philosophy. You will be disappointed.

Not Christian Apologetics

Peterson is not a Christian apologist, though he could be mistaken for one. Peterson often asserts the “truth” of the religious and moral message of the Bible. He speaks of “inspired” prophets who open themselves to “revelations” of the “divine” and “reality.” And he consistently uses the words “God” “spirit” and “Logos” to refer to the highest Reality toward which we should aim. We should not, however, assume that he uses these words in exactly the same sense as they are used in the worship and theology of the Christian church. He does not. And he always qualifies assertions of “truth” and “reality” with question marks or other markers of tentativeness. In the end, Peterson poses the question of the “reality” of the divine as a decision between directing one’s aspirations toward the good, true, and beautiful or surrendering to the downward pull of evil, falsehood and the ugly. God is defined as the adequate ground of all we hold to be worthy of highest human aspiration. Listen to these words from his conclusion:

All these great, profound and unalterably memorable stories are characterizations of God…God is presented as the unity that exists at the foundation or stands at the pinnacle. In the absence of that unity, there is either nothing that brings together and harmonizes, in which case there is a deterioration into anarchy and chaos, or there are the various replacements that immediately swoop in, in their foul way, to usurp and dominate: the spirit of power that characterizes the Luciferian realm and produces the scarlet beast of the degenerate state. 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…It is real as the force that opposes pride and calls those who sacrifice improperly to their knees. It is real as the further reaches of the human imagination, striving fully upward (pp. 502-504).

Not Historical and Literary Study

Peterson does not interpret the Bible in the traditional ecclesiastical or the modern historical and literary way. Don’t expect to learn much about the historical context of the events recounted in the texts or the setting and process of their literary composition. He does not concern himself with whether or not the events recounted in Genesis, the rest of the Pentateuch or Jonah really happened. Interestingly, Peterson’s method of interpretation has more in common with patristic and medieval than modern interpretation. The church fathers and medieval interpreters read the scriptures on four levels: literal, moral, allegorical, and anagogical or spiritual. The word “anagogical” means “leading upward.” In other words, to interpret biblical texts in an anagogical way means to seek in the text a mystical or spiritual truth about God and the soul. Peterson does something similar. He seeks evidence in biblical texts of human “perceptions of the divine.” The medieval interpreters were guided by their conviction that God spoke in the texts and if we purify ourselves and listen carefully, we can hear his voice speaking deep truths and mysteries. Similarly, Peterson assumes that these texts, as evidenced by their power to shape definitively and inescapably the culture we live in—that is, what we consider to be good, true, and beautiful—have proved themselves reservoirs of deep truth about the divine and the human. This truth, these perceptions, is what Peterson seeks to articulate.

Not Psychology, Sociology, or Politics

Peterson is a psychologist and draws on his knowledge and experience as a therapist. But this book is not a book of psychology. Despite his many studied observations, opinions and off-handed comments about society and the political order, do not read the book as primarily about society or the state.

What the Book is

A Study of “Perceptions of the Divine”

As the subtitle indicates, Peterson listens to the biblical stories for “perceptions of the Divine.” Think about each word in this expression. First, these “perceptions” are human perceptions. The place where the divine is perceived is in the human psyche; hence the book is a study of the human soul as the locus of divine revelation, not a theology that attempts to speak about God in himself. Second, to perceive is not the same as to think or to theorize. Perception is, if not precognitive, at least preconceptual. In perception, we meet a reality that causes changes in us that we feel but cannot yet name. Peterson is careful to warn us that our “perceptions” of the divine can never be exhaustively translated into clear thought. God is always beyond our comprehension. Third, Peterson speaks in his subtitle of the “divine.” The “divine” is a general term that covers many different “characterizations” of the divine. Whereas “perceptions of the divine” are universal in human experience, the divine is named and characterized only in specific religious traditions. This book is about the universal human openness to and experience of the infinite, the upward call toward perfect unity and perfection, which as Peterson reminds us many times, is “by definition” the divine (e.g., p. 234).

A Phenomenology of “Homo Religiosus”

Peterson does not preface his book with a discussion of his methodology. He talks a bit about meaning and paradigmatic and archetypical stories. And when I hear such discussions I think of the psychology of C.G. Jung, the scholar of archaic religion Mircea Eliade, and phenomenologist of religious experience Rudolph Otto. Having read the book, I would characterize Peterson’s method as a phenomenology of “homo religiosus” (Eliade) or the religious human being. Phenomenology is the study of how things come to appear in human consciousness. Peterson listens to biblical texts, which were produced by prophets and deeply religious individuals, for their perceptions of the divine. That is to say, how and in what ways did the divine—the highest and the best—come to appear in their consciousness? And what kind of transformations happen to people who perceive the divine and made the sacrifices required to respond appropriately?

According to Peterson, these biblical texts voice something universally human. The book’s title is We Who Wrestle With God; not “They” or ‘Those” but “We.” Peterson challenges his readers to understand themselves as part of the “We.” Human beings by virtue of their humanity have no choice but to wrestle with God. The divine is always near, pressing in on us, calling us upward. Our destiny as individuals and as a society will be determined by whether we obey the upward call or in sloth or malice sink downward into chaos and destruction.

Next Time: In Part Two I will propose some ways the book can be useful to the individual Christian, the church, and society.