Jordan Peterson: Christians Have Had It All Wrong for 2,000 Years
My post yesterday provoked a vigorous debate, so I thought I would follow up with a response to my critics.
First, let me recap my position. I have been following Jordan Peterson with great interest and admiration for some years now. The depth and breadth of his erudition is a wonder to behold, and his rhetorical gifts are second to none. Peterson is a powerful ally to conservatives fighting the culture wars, and we should welcome his tremendous contributions to advancing that cause.
Because Peterson has been “with us” so much of the time and has had great influence as a public intellectual, I hoped he was also with us at a deeper ontological level. In other words, I hoped that he had grounded his brilliantly expressed opinions in eternal verities. That is why I was deeply disappointed when I reluctantly came to the conclusion that this is not the case. He is just another materialist who is utterly incapable of grounding his views in the transcendent, because, by definition, he does not believe in the transcendent. It can be hard to suss this out (at least it was for me) because he uses Biblical imagery and words like “transcendent” all of the time, and on the surface, he seems to take the ontological claims of the Bible seriously. But dig just a little deeper and one finds that is not true at all. For him, the Bible has force only as a representation of Jungian Archetypes, an approach I refer to as “Jungian Woo.”
Thus, the two conclusions of my article yesterday: (1) Peterson is a powerful ally in the culture war. (2) Peterson is dangerous at a deeper level because he seeks to strip Christianity of its essential truth claims. Below, I will list some of my critics’ responses (which fall into two main categories) and my reply.
1. Peterson Does Not Claim to be a Christian Minister
That is true as far as it goes but not relevant to my larger point because Peterson makes false claims about Christianity that, if believed, are affirmatively harmful. This was on display only yesterday in an interview Peterson gave about his wife being admitted to the Catholic Church this Easter. Peterson was asked, “What is stopping you from embracing the faith of your wife?” Peterson responded: “We are very confused about what “faith” is in the modern world. We think that faith is your verbal assent to a collection of descriptive statements.” Instead, according to Peterson, at a deeper level faith is nothing more than “the willingness to presume that being and becoming is good despite tragedy and malevolence . . . but from the psychological perspective . . . we know that voluntary confrontation with what disturbs and blocks you is the universal pathway forward . . . and the crucifixion is the limit case of that.”
Think about Peterson’s response for just a moment. He says we are “confused” when we think of “faith” as assenting to a collection of description statements. Well.
Consider the following:
I believe in God,
the Father almighty,
Creator of heaven and earth,
and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died and was buried;
he descended into hell;
on the third day he rose again from the dead;
he ascended into heaven,
and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty;
from there he will come to judge the living and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic Church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and life everlasting.
Amen.
You might recognize this collection of descriptive statements as the Apostle’s Creed. For nearly 2,000 years, there has been near universal agreement among Christians that the Creed describes the bedrock beliefs of Christianity. At its most fundamental level, the “Faith” is literally assent to these propositions. And refusal to assent to these descriptive statements, by definition, places one outside of the classification “Christian.”
But Peterson is here to tell you that for nearly two millennia Christians have been deeply confused about this. The value of the crucifixion is not the redemptive work of the God-man Jesus Christ. Nope, the crucifixion is valuable as the “limit case” of the psychological method of “voluntary confrontation with what disturbs and blocks you,” which is the “the universal pathway forward.” He assures us this is “undisputed.”
This is wrong and dangerous. Yes, Peterson does not claim to be a minister. But he does claim to tell us the true meaning of the crucifixion, and it is not what Christians have always said it is. Anyone who believes Peterson and puts his claims into practice places his immortal soul in jeopardy. That is why his message is so dangerous.
Besides individuals, he also places the polity at greater risk. The Christian worldview is critical to the success of the American constitutional project. John Adams famously said, “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” What happens when the American elite decide to delink the Republic from the religious foundation on which it was built? We are in the process of finding out.
Dennis Prager has a wonderful metaphor that he refers to as “cut flowers.” Cut a bunch of flowers from the garden and put them in a vase. For several days you will not be able tell the difference between them and living, thriving flowers, but after a while they will inevitably wilt and rot. We have been in the “cut flowers” stage of this nation’s cultural history for several decades. Our polity has been severed from the Christian garden in which it was grown and first flourished. The rot is running very deep, and I sometimes despair and wonder if we can find our way back.
But if we are going to find our way back it is not through embracing Peterson’s Jungian Woo. And that is another danger of his message. Instead of saying “Don’t worry; you can have the cultural benefits of Christianity without actually believing in Christ,” we must insist that Christ is risen and the only way to salvation is through putting one’s faith in his redemptive work on Calvary. Otherwise, the flowers will continue to rot.
2. Peterson Speaks the Truth About Many Things
One of my critics wrote: “If we only listened to and learned from believers we would lack much knowledge, depth and breadth. Our faith would grow weaker. Echo chambers do not make whole minded thinkers or debaters.” Another wrote that Peterson “is an unusually astute observer of the human condition and of cause and effect in human behavior.”
Both of these things are true and I never said otherwise. Indeed, I prefaced my remarks with similar observations. Yes, Peterson is brilliant. Yes, much of what he says is undeniably true. And as Christians we should welcome that truth even if it is advanced by a non-Christian. Augustine was surely right when he said, “all truth is God’s truth.”
The whole point of my post was that Peterson is a powerful ally when he stays in his lane. But he is a dangerous wolf in sheep’s clothing when he undermines the Christian faith by working to replace the eternal truth of the cross with Jungian psycho-babble. In a way, my critics reinforce my point with their observations. If Peterson were just another materialist flailing away at the Faith like so many before him, it would be easy enough to dismiss him. But the very fact that he interlaces his false teachings with so much truth is what makes him so dangerous. It is a common enough observation that the best lie is mostly true. And because so much of what Peterson says is true, it can be difficult to suss out the error. As I said, it was for me.