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Peterson’s greatest strength as a Biblical thinker is evidenced in this book: His ability to show the continuity between biblical texts and ordinary life. Many parts of how he reads Scripture track with what I’ve read Biblical scholars say, such as God forming order from chaos in creation or the themes of freedom versus tyranny. But he can also take a passage from Scripture, and then show with psychology, anecdotes, science, philosophy and literature how what the Bible instructs is validated by the rest of human experience.
For example, Peterson discusses how the Bible’s portrayal of suffering and evil is deeply in line with what we know elsewhere about reality. The Bible — and much of the psychology research, according to Peterson — portrays a great deal of the suffering and evil in life as a result of not conforming to truth or the moral order.
Peterson draws out this pattern in the stories of Cain (who kills his brother rather than accept that he’s the one who needs to sacrifice differently), The Tower of Babel (which uses technology to reshape the world to its whim), Abraham and Jacob (both who try to use lies to shape other people’s perceptions of the world to get their way) and links that to the social psychology of narcissists, the writing of Dostoyevski, the legend of Faust and the ideology of the Soviet Union.
This explanation of evil deeply resonates with my own experience, particularly when and why it tempts me. And how he describes it reminds me why it’s ultimately a self-destructive path. Peterson does that with other Biblical stories as well. He talks about God as an ideal father for Abraham because He pushes him toward adventure and responsibility. He talks about prayer as actively “wrestling” with God. He talks about how “truth” has to be more like a person than a dead fact because truth encompasses both facts and values (such as love is better than hate and freedom is better than slavery).
That, I think more than anything, is his contribution to the rise in young men’s return to Christianity. For many people — particularly men — the problem has not been the supernatural elements of Christianity. It’s been the experience that what the Bible teaches about the natural world isn’t true. And if what the Bible teaches about the world one experiences is untrue, how can it be trusted?
For example, Christianity is typically framed as a love story about God’s grace toward us. But men typically find that their lives get better – and life is more beautiful – when they focus on their actions and be the hero of their story. When Peterson described how the Bible’s vision for life answers the questions that men have today, I cried more than I have at any church service I’ve ever been in: “You have a woman to find, a garden to walk in, a family to nurture, an ark to build, a land to conquer, a ladder to heaven to build, and the utter catastrophe of life to face, in truth, devoted to love and without fear.”
Unfortunately, many who would benefit from these ideas — particularly those who haven’t listened to Peterson before — will have a hard time understanding them in this book. Peterson has a tendency to ramble, and even more so in his writing. Here, the prose is astonishingly difficult to read even for someone familiar with Peterson’s ideas like myself, let alone someone who’s never been exposed to them.
Nearly every sentence is a run-on. He meanders before getting to his point, which comes halfway through the sentence. Then, within the next couple of paragraphs, he will repeat what he just said in a much shorter and simpler manner. This makes you wonder why he didn’t do that the first time.
But it’s substance and style that holds the book back. Despite the title, Peterson does very little time “wrestling” with what the Biblical text is saying. When he asks what a Biblical text means, he will typically either simply assert what it means or argue what it must mean based on the scientific research of human nature or similar stories in human literature.
Peterson claims that when Noah hears God’s voice and Moses is given the law, they’re listening to intuition. How does he know? He doesn’t say. He says that the story of the sacrifice of Isaac is about “giving up your child to God” by not coddling him too much. How does he know that’s what the text is trying to say to us? It’s not clear. He claims that Jonah being in the belly of the whale signifies being protected from your stupidity and ignorance by the values and institutions of the culture you inherited. I won’t even begin to figure out how he got there from that story.
You can see the difference clearly when Peterson talks about scientific facts or psychological studies. There, footnotes are everywhere, citing studies, experts and other sources. But not with the Bible. Peterson seems to think consulting a Biblical scholar is (mostly) unnecessary, unless they agree with him. With science, he wrestles, but with the Bible he appears to shadowbox. Peterson does make solid arguments for his interpretations sometimes, but the ratio is very skewed.
I spoke to my old Biblical scholar professor Dr. Dru Johnson (author of “Human Rites” and “What Hath Darwin to Do with Scripture”) about Peterson’s style of Biblical interpretation in his series on The Book of Exodus for Daily Wire+ back when that series first came out.
Johnson noted that much of what he saw Peterson and his other panelists do was “using the biblical text to riff.” The Bible, he added, “is more like a mirror for their ideas”:
“In biblical studies, this kind of biblical reading is called reader-response, a literary theory that came with post-modernism,” He said. “The text is less of an objective reality to study and the focus is to think about how the text strikes and compels us as its reader. It’s not a question of right or wrong interpretation, it’s just a technique. However, it does tend to de-center the inner logic of the text.”
Johnson clarified that there’s nothing wrong with Peterson not being a Biblical scholar (or even a Christian) and interpreting the Bible. However, he added: “What is important is the priority of listening to the text first and then putting its language, concepts of reality, and its priorities in conversation with later traditions. Biblical scholars tend to do that more, but none of us are blameless about imposing our ideas on the text rather than listening carefully to its logic and language.”
There’s irony here. Peterson often rages against “the postmodernists” — although much of his style is firmly in their tradition. He praises conforming to the truth and condemns reshaping reality to how you want it. But he conforms to science and reshapes the Bible however he wants. Both of these are not giving your best to God and trying to twist reality to your preferences. These are the same things he claims are the sins of Cain. Alternatively, if he doesn’t actually believe that the Bible is filled with truth, but he’s still claiming its divine status to give validation to his own views, he’s doing what he claims is a violation of the commandment: “Do not take the Lord’s name in vain.”
Peterson’s refusal to listen to the Bible tragically makes it impossible to hear others, too. He insists that the question of whether any of the events in the Bible “literally” happened doesn’t matter, and speaks of people who prioritize this version of “truth” (Christian or atheist) with disdain. Of course, those people are right. It matters for how we live our lives whether Jesus did literally rise from the dead and offer the same to us. Peterson recently reluctantly admitted to agnostic Alex O’Connor that he “suspected” Jesus literally rose from the dead, but it takes prying. It takes a certain kind of tragicomic arrogance to insist that the psychological approach to the scripture is the only legitimate one – and that every Christian believer throughout the world today and in history is wrong – without even making the argument as to why.
Peterson’s style is especially problematic because of how harmful some of his interpretations themselves are, even just psychologically. I’ve praised Peterson for emphasizing human heroism in the Biblical story. But Peterson does harm by placing too much emphasis there. To him, the Holy Book is about how everything depends on us. Our only hope to hear God’s voice is if we walk so much by the truth it becomes automatic. Our only hope for a better life is if we make the proper sacrifices. Our only hope for a return to paradise is by collectively attaining moral advancement.
Leaving aside the question of how realistic that hope is (which, given Peterson’s own reflections on the nature of man’s evil, doesn’t seem very realistic at all), it seems to me mentally unhealthy to place that burden on people and that all their hope rests on them. On the one hand, it might encourage the very attempts to use technology and totalitarianism to create such a society that Peterson repeatedly warns about.
Largely, that responsibility might just break people. Peterson is big on saying that the meaning of life is to find the biggest weight you can and bear it. But most people I know crack under the pressure of believing everything depends on them. One of the benefits they experience when they come to faith is the knowledge that not everything depends on them, but that they are in the arms of a loving God. That’s one likely reason why people who went to church regularly were the only group of people whose mental health went up — rather than down — during the pandemic: Being reminded over and over that they’re loved and cared for.
People aren’t meant to be all weight-bearing. We know children, to grow up psychologically healthy (as Erika Komisar discusses in her Wall Street Journal piece “The Politicization of Motherhood”) need to be wrestled with by their father (Peterson’s vision of God), but also held close by their mother (having the experience of being completely and totally dependent and still loved and cared for).
Now, Peterson might say I’m speaking too confidently about psychology without being a psychologist. He’s right. And he’s not a Bible scholar. Or a Christian.
If Peterson had read what the Bible had to say in the story of Abraham and Isaac, he might have noticed that it ends this way: Abraham names the rock where he nearly sacrificed Isaac “The Lord Provides” (Gen 22:14). Perhaps, that’s a hint at what the story is actually trying to convey. Jesus later gives a similar comfort in Matthew 10:29-31: “Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?”