Jordan Peterson and Christianity: Doctrine and Truth (Part I)

“Like Pelagius, Peterson thinks we can achieve salvation through our own efforts of will, without the grace of God. Like the aforementioned Gnostics, Peterson repeatedly argues that we each have a spark of the divine in us, so can manifest the divine here and now in our damned world of suffering.”

I find Jordan Peterson interesting, and I’ve written in praise of Peterson before, as his discussions of suffering are moving in their honesty. However, while Peterson the psychologist and self-help motivator is an interesting thinker born of long experience and deep knowledge, Peterson the theologian is less convincing. None of this would be an issue, but Peterson has called himself a Christian, and from what I’ve read and heard him say, he doesn’t fit any conception of being a Christian that I’m aware of. I’m far from an authority or expert on theology, but I’ll present a few ways I believe he is mistaken. I will be writing from a specifically Christian perspective, so I’m aware that many will disagree with both that and my criticism of Peterson itself. Many criticisms of Peterson and his ideas have been in incredibly bad faith, not worth the ink or pixels in which they’re displayed. They don’t add anything to the conversation and instead contribute to the vitriolic rancor that swirls around every aspect of the culture war. I’ve endeavored to keep as far away from that as I can in this essay. If people disagree with what I say, that’s fine, but I hope they can see that I’ve argued in good faith. In this piece, I’ll focus on where Peterson goes wrong in his approach to Christian doctrine, married to his approach to truth. In the second part, I’ll focus on how this relates to his view of culture.

To begin, let’s look at Peterson’s approach when considering God. He defines God by way of a collection of abstractions that allow him to give an elastic definition, stripped of the transcendent and immanent nature of God as most Christians would recognize it. In a debate with Sam Harris in Vancouver in the summer of 2018, he described God as “how we imaginatively and collectively represent the existence and action of consciousness across time” and “that which eternally dies and is reborn in the pursuit of higher being and truth.” God is “the highest value in the hierarchy of values,” is the “voice of conscience,” and is the “source of judgment and mercy and guilt.” He is the “future to which we make sacrifices and something akin to the trascendental repository of reputation,” and “that which selects among men in the eternal hierarchy of men.”

For Christians, God and truth are bound together. The lack of clarity around Peterson’s conception of God also pertains to the meaning he attaches to “truth.” As with morality, Peterson sees truth through a Darwinian lens.

Christ, according to Peterson, is the logos, that which draws order out of chaos through speech, achieving total balance of Being in all things. Peterson’s take on the Resurrection is that if we can achieve the same balance of Being, perfectly striking the line between archetypal chaos and order, we could do the same. This description of Christ is Jungian rather than Christian, with Gnostic echoes that have troubling implications. Much of this bears little relation to the scriptural God of Christianity: if one does not accept that Christ is who he says he is in the Bible, and that he was not incarnated and resurrected as laid out, then one is not a Christian—that is, unless one redefines “Christian” to mean something completely different.