If there’s one thing Jordan B. Peterson has proved in his almost-decade run as an internationally known public intellectual, it’s that he can fight. Since his 2016 criticism of a Canadian law for effectively compelling speech related to the use of certain gender pronouns, the professional psychologist and academic has taken on a host of rhetorical sparring partners on Canadian, British, and Australian television; he’s also argued with prominent politicians, scientists, academics, and bloggers. Perhaps we should then not be surprised to find him going at it with no less than God in his new book, We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine.
This wrestling is, however, much less contentious than the debates cited above; Peterson evinces a profound appreciation for the Bible, and the “wrestling” as such is not combative but evocative of Jacob’s wrestling with God as described in Genesis 32: a vigorous human encounter with the divine that deepens and transforms man in the process. In the biblical text, Peterson sees stories pulsating with value and meaning that contemporary readers would be irresponsible to dismiss as merely fantastical superstition or a proto-nationalist justification for Israel’s conquests in the Levant. Given both American society’s embarrassing biblical ignorance—less than half of Americans know the first book of the Bible nor even half of the Ten Commandments—and rising skepticism toward the Bible’s validity, Peterson’s honoring of the biblical corpus is most welcome. Whether or not that respect translates into meaningful scriptural exegesis is another thing.
Why is Peterson, who has no academic background in biblical studies and whose personal religious beliefs remain obscure, doing this? He explains fairly early in the book:
For better or worse, the story is the thing—and for better or worse, the story on which our western psyches and cultures are now somewhat fragilely founded … is most fundamentally the story told in the library that makes up the biblical corpus, the compilation of drama that sits at the base of our culture and through which we look at the world. This is the story on which Western civilization is predicated. It is a collection of characterizations not only of God, whose imitation, worship, or indeed embodiment is held to be the highest of all possible aims, but of man, and of woman, whose characters are held to exist in relationship to that God, and of society.
That we should know the Bible because it is the foundational text of Western civilization is a decent argument, and one familiar to anyone who has sat through classes on “the Bible as literature.” Then again, just because it’s the West’s mythos does not necessarily mean it’s a good mythos.
Yet Peterson also seems to think that Scripture speaks many things that are true and insightful about the human condition. For example, he describes Scripture as depicting a series of uphill climbs that lead to personal transformation, improving and strengthening man’s character. And the mechanism by which Scripture often teaches these moral lessons—stories of fallible but courageous individuals—is more intellectually complex and interesting than that employed in the service of other ancient heroes, who often seem one-dimensional. This is true, he argues, regardless of the Bible’s historicity: “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’?”
Peterson’s approach, no surprise, is a thoroughly psychological one, seemingly informed by the ideas of Jung, Freud, and Nietzsche, among other critical commentators on human thought and society. He regularly returns to contributors to the Western canon: Dostoyevsky, Milton, Faust, Tolstoy. Notably absent, by comparison, are any references to rabbinic or patristic sources. As far as I could tell, his only citations of biblical scholars—Edward Lipiński, Charles John Ellicott, and Joseph Benson—all appear in the same chapter on the Tower of Babel. He does briefly cite, however, St. John Henry Newman’s discussion of conscience.
We Who Wrestle with God is focused primarily on motifs and images: the “oft-dangerous attraction of the strange ideas and customs that can invade and permeate a society under the guise of the creative, sophisticated, and new”; “the widow as representative of ‘vulnerability, powerlessness, and existence on the social and economic fringe.’” There is certainly a venerable tradition of this type of biblical exegesis, though Peterson’s themes typically relate to the same subject matters (such as our social distemper) for which he is famous.
Sometimes this works in his favor, and the results are quite interesting. For example, Peterson directs his (often controversial) commentary on sexual difference to the Fall, speculating that Adam and Eve were tempted by different things based on sexual difference: A warping of feminine instincts to love becomes a grasping at control; the masculine instinct to show off strength to females becomes a craven desire to please. Again reflecting on sexual differences, he observes in the rhetorical style that made him famous that women want a strong man to defend them against monsters, but not one so strong that he becomes monstrous himself. “Women dispense with most men in their choice of partner because finding someone who optimally walks the line is very difficult—not least because it is genuinely difficult in fact to walk it.”
Yet the more Peterson applies his unique perspective to scriptural exegesis, the more his mining the text for Jungian typologies seems to have only a tangential connection to the text. Cain and Abel “embody and represent two archetypal and fundamentally opposed modes of being and becoming, which set or constitute the pattern for all human work.” Babel is a story about how “when the proper foundation is carelessly destroyed; when the transcendent spirit of upward striving and truth is forgotten—everyone becomes inarticulate, and everything undefined.”
The moral of these motifs always seem to boil down to some version of pursuing adventure and willingly enduring suffering. The moral of the story of Cain and Abel is “the insistence that life more abundant requires a complete and total commitment, with every glance, with every word, with every action. We are called upon, in the face of life’s overwhelming difficulties and opportunities, to offer no less than absolutely everything we have.” Elsewhere he writes: “We can respond, or turn away, from the clarion call of opportunity, of adventure. If we reject the calling, however, the doorway disappears.” It doesn’t take long for this kind of thing to grow tedious. I groaned aloud at the title of chapter six: “Abraham: God as Spirited Call to Adventure.”
It’s not necessarily that Peterson is wrong. Most biblical scholars would presumably agree that the story of Cain and Abel teaches a lesson about justice and that Abraham’s story exemplifies heroism. Rather, it’s inadequate. Both stories, the biblical narrative seems to indicate, are indissolubly tethered to the concept of faith: sacrifice is offered not primarily because every human action should be done with all available energy and dedication, but because one believes it is the right thing to do, regardless of what happens.
Indeed, to offer sacrificially the very best of one’s possessions to a mysterious, invisible God seems on the face of it patently absurd. Only someone who actually believed in a personal, just God capable of intervening in the lives of men would destroy his very best animals as a demonstration of trust in that deity. Moreover, if the God to whom one sacrifices is the creator of the universe, what could possibly be the benefit to Him of killing some of one’s best livestock? He’s God. As the Psalmist says: “For every beast of the forest is mine, the cattle on a thousand hills” (Ps. 50:10). In contrast, for the one doing the sacrificing, especially in an ancient context, the animals are an integral element of his quite tenuous livelihood.
The God Peterson gives us is less a personal God of grace who enters into covenant with those who trust in Him and more an impersonal Platonic principle with a Pelagian soteriology. “What answers emerge from the biblical corpus, piecemeal, step-by-step?” Peterson asks rhetorically. “It is all on you—with God as Guide. That is an unbearable burden, although a noble burden; certainly a challenge; possibly the ultimate challenge; possibly the secret to life and of the return to Paradise itself.” In his analysis of Noah, he writes: “Questions of faith: When you believe the storm is approaching, do you batten down the hatches and prepare, or not? Do you hearken to your intuition, or not? Do you trust yourself, or not?” Faith is about trusting … yourself?
We Who Wrestle with God effectively empties the Bible of its transcendent meaning in favor of Kantian moral exhortations and psychoanalytic inquiry. The Exodus story is not a story of God miraculously rescuing and forming a people to be uniquely His own in covenant relationship but about striving for freedom to grow and morally improve. The Jonah story is not about God calling a less-than-enthusiastic prophet to preach repentance to Israel’s pagan enemies but a moral lesson “that every man who fails to offer his best and who hides his light and his talent leaves a hole in the world that the offering of his best could have filled.”
In his conclusion, Peterson urges readers “to reestablish our covenant with the God whose magic words structure our consciousness and our societies, insofar as they are functional and productive.” Yet who is this God but an impersonal principle manifested in our conscience, and the character of the covenant but a clinically informed utilitarian pragmatism? One is reminded of the German-French polymath Albert Schweitzer’s description of biblical scholars peering down the well of history only to see themselves.
Long before it became the object of secular academic study and debate, the Bible was a liturgical text. It was read, prayed over, discussed, and debated in the synagogue, the temple, and the church. Yes, the Bible has in time become much more, but even the reason for this cannot be separated from the fact that its influence was grounded in religious belief and praxis. Any approach that effectively severs interpretation from those traditions, however noble the interpreter’s aim, will present a deeply incomplete if not false understanding of the meaning and function of this holy text. Peterson is to be commended for his obvious admiration of Scripture, and even for bringing his own unique perspective to bear on its reading. But in the end, We Who Wrestle with God says much more about Jordan B. Peterson than it does about God or the Bible.
