The mission of Issues in Perspective is to provide thoughtful, historical and biblically-centered perspectives on current ethical and cultural issues.

Jordan Peterson is a cultural phenomenon.  He has been called both “the world’s most famous public intellectual” and “the stupid man’s smart person.”  His most famous book is 12 Rules for Life, which is an unusual mix of existential philosophy and common sense pronouncements.  The Economist reports that an entire Peterson industry has flourished around him:  There is a Jordan Peterson newsletter (“Mondays of Meaning”), a “Peterson Academy ($500 a year gets you lectures on a variety of “manly” topics) and a “self-authorizing program.”

Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, Director of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University and rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel in New York,  provides a summary of Peterson’s spiritual pilgrimage:  “Peterson, a Canadian psychologist, tells me he was a ‘casual attendee’ at a church whose denomination has since been ‘absolutely laid waste’ by the trends of postmodernity. When he was unimpressed as a teenager with a clergyman’s inability to reconcile Scripture and science, he stopped going to services.  Having left religion behind, Mr. Peterson studied psychology thanks to his ‘obsession with totalitarianism and malevolence.’ In a striking way, his interest in the nature of evil led him back to faith. As an adult, he ‘stopped believing in God but . . . started to believe in Satan.’ ‘The problem with believing in Satan,’ he says, is that ‘you end up stuck with God again.’  His horror at evil provided a mirror that revealed the deep truths of Scripture, whose celebration of man as created in God’s image, Mr. Peterson writes, is ‘perhaps the greatest idea ever revealed.’ He adds that a ‘lack of that belief or faith” destroys relationships and political societies, leaving us with “the true hell that they far too often become.’”

Peterson thus offers an important insight: “A culture that forgets biblical teaching not only loses its own identity; it is in danger of becoming a hell.” And that observation is critical for we live in an age of profound biblical ignorance. Last year, an episode of “Jeopardy!” featured a clue that only decades ago nearly everyone could have answered: “This Bible book gives us the line ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.’ ” All three contestants stared blankly until the buzzer sounded.

For that reason, Peterson’s most recent book, We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine, is important.  But, Peterson’s understanding of the Bible is suspect and necessitates serious analysis.  For example, he casts the Exodus story as a combination of poetic and mythological elements, as well as descriptions of events that “likely” occurred. Theologian Brad East shows how Peterson’s view of Scripture falls short of a genuinely Christian approach to God’s Word.  Matt Reynolds of Christianity Today summarizes East’s critique:  As East writes, “a specter haunts this book: the specter of Protestant liberalism. Prominent in the West over the last two centuries, this movement has also read the Bible through a human-focused lens. It has shucked the shell of myth and miracle, seeking the moral kernel within.  That kernel was the brotherhood of man, a this-worldly message of social uplift and political progress. It turns out, though, that when the church is reduced to a vaguely spiritual charity or activism club, it loses its reason for being. A godless gospel is scarcely worth living for, much less dying for. An unrisen Christ is no Christ at all.”

In We Who Wrestle with God, Peterson leads us from the Creation, the Garden of Eden, 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.   Alastair Roberts, adjunct senior fellow at the Theopolis Institute, provides one of the best critiques of Peterson I have read.  Permit me a summary of his observations:

• 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.”  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.”
• 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.’”
• 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 . . . .” 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. . . .”
• In his treatment of the David and Goliath story 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.”

Roberts’s conclusion is perceptive and accurate:  “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.”

Is this positive?  Perhaps. This trend may be a much-needed beachhead for the evangelization of righteous pagans.  But, believers in genuine biblical Christianity must be wary of Jordan Peterson.  His reading of Scripture is virtually identical to German higher criticism of the 19th century, which is now mainstreamed in much of mainline Protestant denominationalism.  His God and His Christ are not the God and Christ of the Bible.  The end result is a shallow, superficial embrace of Scripture, leaving one with a lack of certainty about truth and absolutes.  For that reason, one must be extremely cautious and critical in reading Jordan Peterson.

See Alistair Roberts, “Jordan Peterson’s God: in First Things (19 December 2024); Matt Reynolds, CT Books (23 December 2024); The Economist (23 November 2024), pp. 72-73; and Meir Soloveichik in the Wall Street Journal (6 December 2024).