Jordan Peterson surged to fame in right-wing circles several years ago when he took a brave stance against the compelled use of made-up pronouns. He has since joined the Daily Wire and written several books, the latest of which is We Who Wrestle with God. The recommendations on the back jacket of the book almost make Peterson out to be a new Jerome. “This book revitalizes ancient wisdom and builds a bridge between human biology and theology,” says evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein. “This book will mint new Christians and stir old ones. With this book, Peterson will make the same impact on our theology that he has made on our culture,” raves comedian and podcaster Russell Brand.
One wonders whether the same book they read was released to the public. I don’t worry about the impact of Peterson’s book on readers’ theology because it is unlikely anyone will be able to understand him. However, no one should be under any illusions: this is not a Christian book, and Christians should not be getting their theology from Jordan Peterson.
Is There an Editor in the House?
Anyone who watched Jordan Peterson’s early videos will recall his rambling style that leaped from Solzhenitsyn to Pinocchio to something about lobsters, leaving many impressed with his intellectual range and certain he had said something profound, though some warned against an “emperor’s new clothes” effect even then. This idiosyncrasy in communication has been allowed to run wildly unchecked, and his book is largely unreadable because of it.
To give just one example of the dizzying leap between concepts in the first pages of the book, Elijah wrestled with God and appeared at Jesus’ transfiguration, which can also be termed a metamorphosis like a caterpillar into a butterfly—which is literally psyche—and butterflies are great navigators, just as humans spread from Africa throughout the world (per the evolutionary account of human history that Peterson wholeheartedly accepts) (Peterson 2024, xv–xvii). This style makes it hard to understand what Peterson is trying to convey. His writing also calls into question whether he is trying to convey anything at all or just trying to impress the reader with the scope of his knowledge.
Many people think that it is a sign of intelligence when someone makes pronouncements no one can understand. However, intelligent people can bring even complex ideas into words that their intended audience can understand. Someone who befuddles his audience with every sentence is often bluffing along, saying things even he doesn’t fully understand, hoping that no one will call him out on it.
Is There a Fact-Checker in the House?
Someone who attempts as wide a range of topics as Peterson does is likely to be wrong as often as he is right. He says that Pinocchio’s Lampwick is suggestive of Lucifer, but actually, according to the Disney wiki, he is called Lampwick because he was thin.
To give some biblical examples, he said Elijah was also known as Elias (Peterson 2024, xv), but those are two ways of transliterating the Hebrew name ’Eliyyahû, which means “Yahweh is my God.” Elijah is the English translation directly from Hebrew, and Elias is the transliteration of the Greek form of his name used in the New Testament.
On the same page, he says, “That term, transfiguration, was employed by the Latin translators of the original Greek text, who referred to that event with the word metamorphoō, with its connotations of the qualitative transformation of caterpillar into butterfly” (Peterson 2024, xv). However, he gets things backward. The word metamorphoō was used in Greek literature, most famously in Ovid’s Metamorphosis, to speak about fundamental changes in kind, such as when a god from the Greek pantheon changed a human into an animal or plant. I could find no use of the term metamorphosis to refer to insect development before it was scientifically understood, which postdates the New Testament by about 1,500 years.
A page later, he says psyche literally means “butterfly,” but he has it backward again: Psyche literally means “wind” or “soul,” and from there came to mean “butterfly” after the idea that butterflies were the spirits of the dead. Why do I nitpick over these comparatively small errors? Because these examples occur in the first pages of the book, and carelessness in small details does not bode well for the rest of the book.
Jordan Peterson Rejects Scripture’s Plain Meaning
Peterson does not accept the biblical narrative as history, but even if he did, one gets the idea that the history would be subordinate to the archetypes he sees at the foundation of reality. So he doesn’t ask what the garden of Eden tells us about God, but rather who God is in the garden of Eden vs. who God is in the burning bush. He does not see God as the unchanging Creator but as some sort of primary motivating force. Much like the Marxist uses language, Peterson uses the same vocabulary as the Christian but with a different dictionary.
Importantly, it is left unclear whether the Bible has anything unique to communicate or whether it is a repackaged telling of the same old “universal myths”: “Seeing how this spirit is reflected in a culture’s deepest stories helps us understand the eternal value of the archetypal characters of the narrative world: the Dragon of Chaos, the Great Mother, the Great Father, and the Divine Son” (Peterson 2024, 20).
Peterson does not accept the plain meaning of one person or event as stated in Scripture. Worse, he refuses to state plainly what he believes it actually means. The one thing Adam can certainly not be, in Peterson’s worldview, is the actual first man from whom all of us are descended. The one thing Noah’s flood cannot be is an actual global watery judgment through which Noah was saved on the ark.
It is not surprising that someone who is demonstrably not a believer seeks to refashion Scripture to his liking. What is surprising is how many Christians are reading and recommending it.
Jordan Peterson Needs Jesus
Peterson has historically refused to straightforwardly answer whether he believes in God or not, usually with a word salad questioning what God even is. Who is God? “An animated spirit—creative, mobile, and active—something that does, and is. God is, in short, a character whose personality reveals itself as the biblical story proceeds” (Peterson 2024, 1). “God is what has encountered us when new possibilities emerge and take shape. God is what we encounter when we are moved to the depths” (Peterson 2024, 1). “God is therefore the spirit who faced chaos: who confronts the void, the deep; who voluntarily shapes what has not yet been realized, and navigates the ever-transforming horizon of the future” (Peterson 2024, 2). One could forgive these flowery, theologically bereft pronouncements if he even once made something approaching a statement that God exists as a personal being who created the world and sacrificed himself to offer mankind eternal life with him.
This shows up powerfully on the rare occasion where Peterson puts himself in a position to be taken to task by Christians, as in a recent interview. The interviewer explained the gospel to Peterson, and Peterson predictably prevaricates when prompted to profess belief in Christ.
Peterson doesn’t believe in God in the way that Christians do, and it is dishonest for him to speak in a way that will delude his less careful readers into believing that he does. Peterson has not bent the knee to Jesus Christ, and thus, Christians should see him as someone to pray for and evangelize, not a guru to learn from.
Peterson is the proverbial blind man who will lead those who follow him into a theological ditch. If Peterson truly wanted to understand the Bible (and help others, too), he would publicly recant his books and turn to Christ—not his psychologized, mythological ideal of a “perfected” image of God but the actual biblical God-man who lived, taught, and gave himself up to death on the cross for our sins then rose from the dead (not as a metaphor for defeating the chaos within oneself, but actually, literally rose from the dead, defeating death itself).
