You Tube Theology

We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine is a big book. The #1 New York Times bestseller by Jordan Peterson is large in terms of length (544 pages) and vast in intellectual scope. Peterson addresses the biblical stories that shape narratives of our culture from Hamlet to Wicked, from Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov to Disney’s Lion King. In We Who Wrestle with God, Peterson focuses particular attention on the stories of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah, the Tower of Babel, Abraham, Moses, and Jonah.

To interpret these stories, Peterson draws on his expertise in clinical psychology, as well as on evolutionary biology, political history, and insights from Milton, Nietzsche, Jung, Popper, Solzhenitsyn, and JK Rowling. In comparison to his earlier YouTube lectures on the Bible, We Who Wrestle with God shows considerable development in depth and breadth, in part by drawing on insights gleaned from his online seminars on Exodus.

Peterson begins by noting that a vast number of objects present themselves to our senses. There are also a vast number of ways to focus our sense perceptions. So, how do we prioritize our perceptions?

What we value enables us to turn the chaos of sense perception into the order of human action. As Peterson puts it, “We perceive, therefore, in accordance with our aim.” If I give you $1,000 for each blue thing you notice in your vicinity, you’ll start to notice blue things that you didn’t notice before. If the reward were for finding living things, you’d focus on them instead of blue things.

Aims shape our perceptions, and narratives shape our aims. The stories we are told and the stories we tell ourselves shape what we seek. Here, Peterson echoes the insight of Alasdair MacIntyre who wrote in After Virtue, “Man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal. . . . I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’” Stories also shape our desires. As René Girard notes, “We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.” Stories teach us what others desire, thereby shaping our own desires.
Given this framework, Peterson’s book is not reserved for those who view the Bible as divinely inspired or those who “believe in God,” a phrase Peterson problematizes in a way similar to Thomas Aquinas, who distinguishes three senses of believing in God. In Peterson’s view, every one of us is fated to wrestle with God, though perhaps not as Jacob did in the biblical story (Genesis 32:22–32). “God” is, in one of Peterson’s characterizations, whatever our final end is—that to which other things are ultimately ordered and sacrificed. If we are to move forward, we need a goal. Proximate goals arise because of more remote goals, and the ultimate goal functions for us as “God.” In this analysis, Peterson echoes Aristotle’s understanding of human action in the Nicomachean Ethics as well as Paul Tillich’s idea that our “God” is whatever is the object of our ultimate concern. As Peterson puts it, “When attention must be prioritized and action taken, no atheism is possible. Something must be elevated and all other things sacrificed.” Peterson sees the biblical stories as portraying God as various “characters.” God is a creative spirit walking with Adam. God is the summons to prepare given to Noah. God is the call to adventure for Abraham. God is the dreadful spirit of freedom for Moses. And God is a voice of truth urging Jonah to break his lying silence for the good of his enemies.

With all due respect to some of his critics, Peterson is not aiming to provide a historical-critical interpretation of Scripture in the literal sense. His attention to context, ancient languages, and multiple translations shows he is also not by any means ignoring the specificity of the biblical text. But he isn’t writing for scholars interested in Akkadian loanwords in biblical Hebrew. He is writing for those who want to think deeply about the stories that shape our culture. Judging Jordan Peterson’s archetypal reading of biblical stories as a poor historical-critical interpretation is like judging Michael Jackson’s Thriller as a bad sculpture.

Peterson notes, “The narrative is not political—or if it is, it is so only in service of a higher or deeper meaning. The same can be said of many of the biblical narratives that mention specific societies or even specific people: they are to be regarded as types or patterns, with what is specific and identifiable used only to characterize a deeper truth.” This seeking of the deeper and more universal insight of Scripture is found throughout Peterson’s book. The stories are not just about the particular people involved but also about the ever-recurring challenges of the human experience.

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