“At every moment of consciousness, we are fated to wrestle with God.” (Pg. xxxi)
Dr. Jordan Peterson is one of the most influential conservative voices in the world. Many Christians have actively tried to discern his theological positions. Does Peterson believe in God, if so, what does that mean? What does he think of Jesus? These questions have been bandied about online for years, most recently in Peterson’s admission to Alex O’Connor (internet atheist nonetheless!) that if a Panasonic camera was pointed at Jesus’ tomb, on Easter Sunday, its LCD screen would show “a man walking out of ” it. To said question Peterson responded, “I suspect yes…” which generated thunderous applause from Christians except that Peterson continued a mere seconds later saying, “…I have no idea what that means and neither did the people who saw it.”[1]
Or in a more recent exchange Peterson’s claim that Jesus was God.[2] But as with anyone and certainly with someone like Dr. Jordan B Peterson, one must ask, “What do you mean by that?”
There is no shortage of people who believe Jesus “was God” that would fall outside the realm of Christian orthodoxy. Mormons and Hindus often have no issue affirming this statement but no one within Christian orthodoxy would affirm their status as believers in any traditionally orthodox sense because what they mean by Jesus being God is markedly different than what Christianity writ large means.
Peterson’s new book We Who Wrestle With God: Perceptions of the Divine might possibly contain answers both in what Peterson believes and in what he teaches. Regardless of whether Peterson is a Christian in any traditional sense of the word it is true that many have come to Christianity because of him[3][4] and that many Christians learn from him. Peterson is one of the most popular public intellectuals on the “side of Christianity” in the world currently and he isn’t going away any time soon.
His most recent book is a window into how he thinks about faith, scripture and theology.
I would consider it Peterson’s commentary on the Pentateuch with a foray into the symbolism of the book of Jonah. Peterson starts with a lengthy analysis of the Prophet Elijah and the still small voice to set the stage (a motif he would return to throughout the book):
“It is at this moment that Elijah -and through him, mankind-comes to u understand that God is not in the wind, no matter its ferocity, nor in the earthquake, regardless of its magnitude, but is something within; the voice of conscience itself…” (pg. xxiv)
“If we heed the call of conscience and calling – we can have the redemptive romantic adventure of our life, transforming ourselves as we do so into the giants who once walked the earth; transmuting into the true Sons and Daughters of God, called upon to do greater things than did the single Son who has already and so famously made His appearance and revealed Himself.” (pg. 505)
Peterson starts chapter one in the garden of Eden, at creation, and follows the biblical story through the first five books of the Old Testament strategically zooming into particular stories. He looks in depth at Creation, the Fall, Cain and Abel, the Tower of Babel, Noah, Abraham, Moses (the longest section) and Jonah.
It is not important to Peterson whether the events really happened. Of the story of Jonah he writes:
“The existence of tropes such as the devouring cetacean of the story of Jonah does make it hard going for scientists too daft and self-satisfied to learn anything about literature and, equally, for those believers who insist upon a naïve literalism. That is not a problem, however, that should preoccupy or concern anyone conducting a serious investigation into narrative significance…” (Pg. 482)
“Do we believe this story? Do we believe what it states and implies? First: What does it mean to believe?” (pg. 6)
“These stories (biblical/archetypal stories) provide the structure through which we apprehend the facts and communicate the hierarchy of value that lends weight to one fact over the other.” (pg. 11)
“Thus, history becomes fictionalized, although “fiction” is best regarded in such a context as the creation of abstracted meta-truths, rather than the antithesis of “fact” and, therefore, of truth itself.” (pg. 159)
It is important then to note that while Peterson does not necessarily believe these stories “happened” he would not indicate that they “did not happen” either. For Peterson, what the stories represent, the history of ordering civilization that they carry, matters much more than the brute fact of whether or not they actually happened. There is deeper meaning in all these things than historical reliability – a sussing out of the divine within all of us.
These stories do something or were meant to show something to those that told them. This is why Peterson will seamlessly weave in examples from the Enuma Elish, Tao Te-Ching, and others. Peterson seems to indicate that those stories were meant to do a similar thing but that it is the biblical corpus that is most cohesive and structures itself in such a manner that we are then best enabled to understand the correct hierarchy of values as a society.
This could speak to why Peterson is so hesitant to speak boldly about whether Jesus truly rose from the grave as Christianity insists. While Peterson will admit something happened at the tomb it is seemingly more important for Peterson to understand what that story is intended to do rather than the reality of whether or not the physical resurrection happened.
When Peterson breaks down the stories in scripture it is clear that he views each story as a revelation of what it means to discover the divine. Each carries with it a moral and with that moral a separate glimpse into what the divine really is.
“God is, in short, a character whose personality reveals itself as the biblical story proceeds.” (Pg 1)
All these great, profound and unalterably memorable stories are characterizations of God -and, inevitably, of the men and women who live inevitably in some form of relationship with or to that God.” (pg. 502)
Thus, the biblical corpus (as Peterson calls it) is a collection of archetypal events meant to reveal the reality of the divine in each of us. The struggle of life is in discovering the still small voice (something he refers to as conscience as well, using the imagery of jiminy cricket in the Pinocchio story; almost interchangeably Peterson uses the word “spirit” and “Logos” for this as well.) within each of us and then, in heeding its call and guidance into the grand adventure. This still small voice is at odds with the “serpentine” voice of the devil in the garden (something he also calls the Luciferian spirit or desire to usurp) which calls a person to self-indulgence, hedonistic impulses and a desire for power (or at least the blaming of the powerful and the desire to “usurp” the truly highest calling).
Within this context he divides the biblical narrative into the archetypal figures of Cain and Abel (seemingly his favorite archetypal story). Peterson draws on Cain’s giving of second best and killing of his own ideal (Abel) throughout the text and brings forward the battle of Abraham and Moses against such forces in their own stories. Cain typifies the spirit that yields to the voice of the usurper while Abel typifies the spirit that aims for the highest possible good, a good that while seeable is not practically attainable as Peterson indicates that as we pursue it receded further beyond our reach.
“The story of Cain and Abel is an attempt by the collective human imagination to distill, transmit, and remember the essentials of good and bad into a single narrative.” (pg. 103)
Peterson absolutely thinks deeply and profoundly about many things. I was struck by the truth of what he said on multiple occasions throughout. His recognition of the moral ambiguity of the conquest of Canaan in relation to their connection with the evil passions of Cain is profound. His forays into psychological analysis of the current human condition strike me as more correct than not as well.
“It also turns out that the pursuit of sexual gratification in the absence of its own purposes – while simultaneously putting everything stable about psyche and society at risk… If sex is devoted to God, then all shame and fear thereof vanishes, and the spirit of true play can emerge with full and enthusiastic enjoyment.” (pg. 277-278)
“Perhaps it is not religion that is the opiate of the masses. Perhaps it is instead that a rationalist, materialist atheism is the camouflage of the irresponsible.” (pg. 367)
Peterson also goes to bat for religious thought, thoroughly debunking and defeating the arrogant work of Richard Dawkins (pgs 363-366) in many spaces as well as dismissing determinism as a theory worthy of consideration.
“Consequently, we cannot apply a set of deterministic rules and make our way forward, even in principle. No algorithm allows us to unerringly compute the transforming horizon of the future – not in a world that is not, even in principle, deterministic.” (pg. 31)
There are, without a doubt, gems throughout the book that I will be mining for quite some time, and for that reason it is well worth the read, challenging as it may be and confusing as it may be at times theologically.
The value of Peterson’s work is in his dismantling of hollow and evil philosophies. As he dissects the archetypal Cain, Peterson points to the fact that the spirit of Cain lives on in the Marxists systems that are utilized to remake the world through envy:
“Karl Marx is Cain to the core, construing society as nothing but a battleground for power; assuming that any qualitative judgment regarding the value of comparative sacrifice is a game rigged by the victors.” (Pg. 105-106)
Many of these nuggets exist within We Who Wrestle with God and seem to me to get important things right and are often more right than not, however, what of the most important things? What of God? What of Jesus?
To understand this as best we can we must mention Peterson’s clearest influences. Peterson is clearly heavily influenced by the works of C.G. (Carl) Jung, a late 19th early 20th-century Swiss psychiatrist. Jung’s own faith journey seems to mirror Peterson’s in many ways. Jung saw history through the lens of archetypal (models of reality) stories and figures.[5]
It is in Jung’s understanding of God and the biblical texts that we find Peterson swimming, even if he takes the reality of God’s existence a step further than Jung might.[6] In many ways Jungian thought penetrates much of Peterson’s perspective on the biblical corpus, he quotes from Jung extensively throughout the book and has made references to Jung often in lectures. Jung considered himself a Christian, in a sense:
“I am definitely inside Christianity and, as far as I am capable of judging about myself, on the direct line of historical development…. If the Reformation is a heresy, I am certainly a heretic too.” – C.G. Jung[7]
However, Jung hardly embraced an orthodox theology. Jung’s critics pointed to his “psychologizing” of the theological. He perceived the Trinity as a psychological reality and spoke of God as the inner self. These are all similar to themes Peterson draws on.
“This collaboration continued for tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of years. Stories thus told and remembered became better and better and, simultaneously, deeper and deeper. And no one wrote them or invented them, precisely; or, more accurately, perhaps, everyone did: and that is the action, so to speak, of Jung’s collective unconscious.” (Pg. 104)
Peterson, likewise, sees God as a sort of innate conscience that calls the inner man to the highest possible aim.
“…the spirit of God is that which warns us against acting incautiously in relation to the eternal serpent in the garden; that which advises us to beware of the temptation to take on, in the wrong attitude, more than we can rightfully bear.” (pg. 64)
But it would be too simplistic to say that Jung is the sole influence on Peterson. Throughout his works it is clear that Peterson is also influenced by Eastern Orthodox theology and, perhaps, a touch of Arian thought.
It is no secret that Peterson is close with Jonathan Pageau, a French-Canadian sculpture and Eastern Orthodox thinker. Peterson relied on Pageau extensively in his Exodus seminar series released last year by DailyWire+. Peterson’s discussion of “fringe” and “center” seems connected to his friendship with Pageau (pg. 54-55 and elsewhere). Peterson’s connection to Eastern Orthodoxy invites some mystical and mysterious elements within this work as well, inviting the reader to experience the spiritual as truly spiritual and not merely psychological as Jung might otherwise encourage. In that vein it is clear that this influence lends credence to Peterson’s embrace of God as something more than the “collective unconscious” espoused by Jung.
There are a myriad of other influences throughout Peterson’s work as well. John Milton’s Paradise Lost for one, as well as Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and The Brother’s Karamazov along with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s work The Gulag Archipelago. All of these works help to bolster Peterson’s psychologizing of biblical literature and creates a cohesive and convincing structure to his philosophy of the divine.
But where does it fall short?
Peterson’s treatment of the scriptures falls short in understanding the true reality of the words on the pages. Instead of viewing scripture as God coming down to us Peterson views scripture as the collective conscious of people immemorial making their way up to God.
By viewing Elijah, Jesus and others as archetypes rather than historical figures (though Peterson believes they could also be that) Peterson makes the mistake of applying their lives and pursuits to each other psychologically (rather than theologically) and thus driving the reader to the conclusion that pursuit of the highest order (the mountain peak) is what the divine is not what the divine does. Elijah accomplishes this and is lifted to Heaven. Jesus accomplishes this in another vein and is resurrected and placed atop the mount of transfiguration along with Elijah and Moses.
In viewing the Bible as the story about us instead of a story about God written for us Peterson inverts the very gospel message of Jesus.
I must pause here to indicate that, perhaps, Peterson will rectify this in a forthcoming work on the gospels.
While there are certainly archetypes of sin, suffering and righteousness within the pages and stories of scripture it is not all they are. And it is not all the biblical corpus is doing.
In distilling each story of scripture into archetypal structures Peterson says things like this in the story of David and Goliath, “The moral of the story? The true hero is he who defeats the giant tyrant of the state” (pg. 215).
But that is not the moral of the story. Goliath is not some symbol of the evil state, but a pagan warrior bent on demeaning Yahweh and his people (the God of Israel) and Saul’s feckless leadership leads to the reliance of the army on a small shepherd boy. But this shepherd boy understands something that Israel’s king has forgotten – that it is God, not David, that fights for Israel. While Peterson’s treatment could be true in a sense, it is not true in total and this is often how he approaches biblical narratives.
While he could loosely be connected to Christianity, I would think he would more closely align with someone like Arius rather than Augustine. Since Peterson sees nearly all the biblically significant narratives through the lens of archetype his treatment of Jesus is the same.
To understand what Peterson means by saying Jesus was God one must first understand Peterson’s concept of God (touched on briefly above). God is not, to Peterson, an entity to simply be “believed in” the material fact of God’s existence is not he primary question at hand.
“Modern people are obsessed with the idea of “believing in” God, as if that decision is one of positing, or refusing to posit, some material existence or absence thereof or some mere description, like such a formulation in the same manner that a table exists – or in the manner that an imaginary table truly does not exist… To believe is much more truly usefully to commit to; to sacrifice everything to; to be voluntarily possess by. True belief is therefore the ultimate relationship, not the mere description of some state of affairs… This is a state of affairs that has little to do, once again, with the existence of God, as material fact.” (pg. 171)
A ring of truth ran through with a dismissal of the reality of the physical (spiritual?) fact of whether a being called God exists, ontologically speaking. To Peterson it is the commitment to the archetype, the highest calling, that tells you that God exists in the still small voice regardless of the material facts. To Peterson’s credit he has a view of God that sees Him (if Peterson would even call God “Him”) as ultimately ineffable to the human mind.
“God is therefore reliably portrayed as what must be placed properly atop both the psychological and social hierarchy; what is signified properly by the gold cap at the pinnacle of the pyramid; what serves as the proper all-seeing eye or sage on the mountaintop, lest everything disintegrate – including, but not least, the ability to see and speak.” (pg. 217)
If this is Peterson’s concept of God, then He (God) is nothing more than the process of “being” and “becoming” that which is the highest possible aim. Of which, Peterson concludes that voluntary self-sacrifice is chief.
This brings us to his view of Jesus as God. Jesus is not God because he has two natures (fully God and fully Man) as the council of Nicaea clarified. Jesus is God because he embodies the highest possible aim and paved the way for humanity to follow suit and find true “salvation” amidst a minefield of competing values.
“Alternatively, perhaps: do not arrogate yourself the right to become God, without engaging in the proper sacrifices – precisely those that because they are aimed at the highest possible pinnacle must be of the most complete, comprehensive, and dramatic nature… What is the price? To become God, in the absence of pride – or perhaps more subtly but accurately one with God – is to give up everything that is not God: happiness, security, wealth…. This of course requires nothing less than the sacrifice that is ultimate.” (pg. 230)
Again, there is a close tie to reality in many ways here, but to boil becoming God (or one with God) as sacrifice of everything to the pursuit of the highest order maintains little of Christian orthodoxy particularly regarding soteriology.
“Then the question arises: If the cost of reality is death, how might reality manifest itself, to justify that price? That is the ultimate question, with the paradisal dream providing the impossible answer… If the requirement to strive forward in the world is accepted, the reward is limitless: a life well-lived, the establishment of a genuine and stellar reputation, the founding of a nation, and a blessing on the entire world. Is that sufficient to pay for death? There is no a priori answer. That is the curse of the true existential dilemma. Is it worth it? You are fated to find out along the way.” (pgs. 249-250)
That is to say that victory over death is the achievement of pursuing the highest possible aim, it leaves legacy, unites one with the divine, and defeats the sting of death. Again, this is almost accurate to Christian theology, but it misses the crucial piece that the striving was accomplished completely in Christ precisely because He is God. The sacrifice does not make Jesus God, Jesus is God and this is why He became man to give of himself.
In that, we get a glimpse into Peterson’s Christology:
“This is why the Christ who redeems is also the spirit that takes the sins of the world upon itself (John 1:29; 2 Cor. 5:21). The essence of man and God is the will to take on the heaviest possible burden in life.” (pg. 247)
At the beginning of February 2025, I went to a theology conference in Chicago. One of the speakers at this conference was church historian Dr. Donald Fairbairn[8]. In celebration of the Nicene Creed’s 1700th anniversary the first three session of the conference were dedicated to the creed. Dr. Fairbairn, an expert in the creed’s formation, touched on the Arian controversy. Of course, he noted, that the primary issue was the nature of the son (Jesus) as begotten not made but there was also an issue of soteriology.
According to Fairbairn (and others) one of the most important statements of the Nicene Creed was that Jesus “came down from heaven”[9] because Arius taught that Jesus was the first exemplar of how to reach up to heaven being the created being through which all other creation was accomplished[10]. Jesus, according to Arius, aspired to the highest place because he exemplified what it meant to be a perfect created being. Arius believed not that Jesus descended to be with man so that he could pull us up himself but that Jesus became a man that achieved the possibility of reaching up towards God. One could argue that Arius saw Jesus as the archetypal man through which all other men could aspire to the highest end. Whether Peterson would recognize this or not it seems his view of Jesus is at least similar to that of Arius.
“The reward granted to Jesus for His embrace of betrayal, pain, mortality, and hell is the Kingdom of Heaven and the triumph over death and evil.” (pg. 256)
“Those who have looked deeply into things become those who speak with the strange and marked authority attributed so frequently to Christ himself… Jesus wields the authority of one who has done the work and truly knows.” (pg. 330)
But in Nicene Christianity Jesus’ authority does not come from his experience and work but from his being. He IS God and is of the same essence as the Father, thus, he had no need to refer to the sages and rabbis of the past. Peterson’s view makes soteriology archetypal and thus only a way of overcoming in the here and now, not the humble repentance of the wayward sinner in need of grace to be granted eternal life.
“The sacrifice that eternally protects – the blood of the lamb, in this case – is the willingness to offer up everything, so that the tyrant can be defeated.” (pg. 356)
In light of this consider this lengthy quote:
“This (the crucifixion of Christ) is the existential catastrophe we have all been attempting to voluntarily face and contend with, like the poisoned Israelites in the desert (Numbers 21), for the two thousand years of the dominion of Christianity in the West. There is simply no worse and then better fate than that of Christ. We have chosen to place the crucifix, the terrible symbol of all that, at the very center of the central place of our cathedrals and churches – the place where the Holy Sacrifice that unites psyche and community is eternally offered… put firmly in place to mark the ideal and establish the psychological and social order that is good or very good. In this manner we duplicate the redemptive ritual of exposure that God offered the Israelites in their misery, and lift up the Son of Man so that we do not perish of desperation while bearing the burdens of our lives…” (pg. 451)
However, Christians believe that the crucifix is not intended to mark the ideal but is to remind of the savior and not the savior that showed us the way to God but is in fact THE WAY to Heaven being God in himself. Again, while Jesus is the ideal man that is not all he is. There is a bit of missing theological clarity here, an almost but not quite feeling. To put a bow on my position that much like Arius, Peterson sees Jesus as the archetypal man that can help humanity reach toward heaven he states this as he speaks of the end of Moses’ life and his failure to enter the promised land:
“Is this an example (Moses’ final reward) of the aforementioned possibility that a fully lived life justifies itself, rife with tragedy and error though it may be – ending in death though it inevitably does?” (pg. 453)
And
“God is well-characterized as conscience, although not only as conscience…” (pg. 492)
“… we are called upon and directed by conscience to embody and incarnate, so that we can once again become the inhabitants of the Garden of Eden and play forever in the Kingdom of God.” (pg. 493)
Saying that a “fully lived life” can “justify itself” points to this very belief of transfiguring through self-sacrifice. That Jesus was the example of how to achieve God-like status, that Jesus, who was God was only God insofar as he sets the standard for self-sacrifice. At best this view would see Jesus as homoiousia (of a similar substance) to God and not homoousia (of the same substance) of God because God is a state of highest aim and not a being with an ontological reality in any substantive sense. This is not the gospel as told by the Church fathers. This is not the gospel according to the apostles.
This, of course, is not Arianism proper but it carries with it a similar strain of thought when it concerns the purpose and work and of Jesus Christ, thus it seems to me that Peterson’s theology more closely resembles Arianism than orthodoxy. Perhaps we could call it Jungian Arianism in which God becomes a psychological pursuit and Christ was God in such a way that he provided an example to connect with the conscience or still small voice, in a way that we had not seen before.
Peterson uses conscience as a synonym (albeit an incomplete one) for God and says we, as humans, ought to be directed by it to “embody and incarnate”. Again, to become similar to the example of the Son of Man.
“Does that make the divine real? That is a matter of definition, in the final analysis – and, therefore, or faith. It is real insofar as its pursuit makes pain bearable, keeps anxiety at bay, and inspires the hope that springs eternal in the human breast. It is real insofar as it establishes the benevolent and intelligible cosmic order… it is as real as the further reaches of the human imagination, striving fully upward.” (pg. 504)
Finally, according to Peterson God is “ineffable” and thus, he admittedly does not seek to fully define him within the context of this book. In that vein he is different than Jung in that he reifies the idea of God as personality to some degree:
“Why would we presume that the spirit giving rise to being and becoming itself is something dead, unconscious, pointless, and lacking identity when adaptation to that reality has required consciousness, teleology and purpose, and personality… If the concept of God as Personality works, so to speak, in the time-tested manner – in the pragmatic manner – why is that model not aptly regarded as most accurate?” (pg. 366)
Peterson closes his book with a clarion call to the reader to be the person that speaks up when called upon by conscience (Jonah) and closes it by juxtaposing himself against Nietzsche who claimed to have witnessed the death of God:
“God is dead?
No
Deus Renatus est.” (God is Reborn) (pg. 505)
Position himself (Peterson) as the anti-Nietzsche.
To be fair, it is possible that I am misreading Peterson’s ultimate position on Christ as he promises a follow-up work that would likely focus on the gospels that could shed more light than this work did.
However, if I could I would endeavor to ask Peterson this question: If self-sacrifice is the highest aim and that is what it means to embody the divine then why do we know this? How did we discover this truth about our psyche is simply the collective stories of humanity’s psyche, or could it be that a real and active personal God has led him to this realization and that Jesus Christ is not simply an exemplar of cosmic perfection but the divine Logos of the second person of the Trinity himself made flesh to dwell among us and save us from the futility of this upward striving that we cannot and will not attain apart from his intercession?
In the end the book is dense but deeply thoughtful. It is both an important work and a dangerous one. Important as it effectively dismantles arguments for atheism, totalitarianism, and Marxism but dangerous in that it positions itself as an authority on the divine while either ignoring or flat out denying the core tenants of orthodox Christian theology. If someone comes to this work with little knowledge of Christianity they will walk away with a mutated version of it that is robbed of its ultimate saving power. It may be helpful to calling people to strive toward a higher ideal of self-sacrifice but it likely will not lead people to their eternal Savior but instead to seek to embody being a savior in and of themselves.
Christianity is not about striving to carry the heaviest burden of self-sacrifice but about recognizing the saving act of sacrifice by the God-Man Jesus who carried the burden on our behalf and so calls us to follow him, not as an exemplar to reach to the heights of the Divine but as a savior that grants us access to the Almighty through his death and bodily resurrection through no qualifications of our own. His yoke is easy, and his burden is light (Matt. 11:28-30) and for that reason we call him Lord.
Notes
[1] https://youtu.be/T0KgLWQn5Ts?si=L93pDbcAoo9Qw8gO&t=1510
[2] https://youtu.be/Hik6OY-nk4c?si=jXE4YxIqZJwaOLFU&t=7229
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/JordanPeterson/comments/1h9rp6a/jp_got_me_back_into_christianity_now_what/?rdt=44375
[4] https://youtu.be/Z1dgbBBkir8?si=pUg6KJGTNw5Y2zWV
[5] https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=4676#
[6] ibid
[7] “Letter to the Rev. H.L. Philip,” 26 October 1956; Letters, II, 334-335.
[8] https://www.gordonconwell.edu/faculty/current/donald-fairbairn/
[9] https://christthesavioroca.org/files/2020-Resurrection-Classes/The-Nicene-Creed-of-325.pdf
