Dear Friend,
I have decided to craft this little essay in a letter to you as a way of gathering my thoughts on the topic. I know you share a similar interest in Jordan Peterson as I do, even if that interest is built on a love-hate relationship. I think both you and I see good and bad in Peterson. For myself, talking about Peterson has always been a challenge. On the one hand, I disagree with almost every single thing he says. On the other hand, he approaches the world from the same point of view as I do (or did at one time). Indeed, his approach to Christianity is nearly identical to my own, although mine is changing even as I speak. I have long desired to put some of these thoughts into words, but the Jubilee video “Jordan Peterson versus 20 Atheists” has given me the additional motivation I needed to actually do so.
Without dancing around the issue, my primary similarity to Jordan Peterson is his and my mutual inability to think of the Bible through a literalist lens. I have always been prone to thinking of basic theological statements such as “God exists” and “Jesus rose from the dead,” as spiritual declarations rather than statements of fact. As you know, Peterson has time and again stated he does not like being asked whether he believes God exists or whether he believes Jesus rose from the dead. He often refuses to discuss these basic questions on the grounds that, “It depends on what you mean by God,” or believe, or rose, or dead, or any of the words people use to ask these basic questions. While this is a point of frustration for Christians and atheists alike, I understand exactly where Peterson is coming from.
Many Christians are frustrated by Peterson because the Bible says things like “believe in your heart and confess with your lips that Jesus Christ is Lord.” For Christians, actually stating your belief in God and Jesus is a necessary feature of believing, whereas Jordan Peterson, throughout his career and throughout the Jubilee video, holds a position that one can both be a true believer and refuse to confess their faith at the same time. Most Christians will tell you this is Biblically false, and some will go as far as to say that Peterson is actually deceiving and leading people away from true Christianity.
On the other hand, atheists get frustrated by Peterson because they believe he is twisting the meanings of basic vocabulary, as though words like “believe” and “true” were somehow too profound in the depths of their meaning to ever be spoken, or as though the proposition “God exists” did not have a commonly understood meaning, even if that meaning does not capture the very essence of God. Jordan Peterson sure says an awful lot about God only to turn around and question what the heck anybody means by the word “God.” It is therefore completely understandable that many atheists, and indeed some theists, will accuse Paterson of “word salad.”
Nevertheless, I personally find myself quite at home with Jordan Peterson’s refusal to answer these questions. These are, in fact, the sort of questions that I myself do not like to answer. My own personal reason for this is largely due to the sort of faith that I was brought up with. I am, on the one hand, highly attracted to religion due to my belief in morality and my “relationship with the infinite,” as Peterson might put it. But I have serious reservations about accepting the Biblical claims of a God who commissions the genocide of the Canaanites, or a God who demands animal sacrifice, or a God who would demand cutting off a boy’s foreskin. That sort of God – that is to say, the God actually described by the Bible – has always felt to me unworthy of the titles “moral” or “infinite.”
As you know from watching Peterson, when confronted about these sorts of Biblical claims, Peterson has a tendency to act as though the historical accuracy of these claims didn’t matter. Instead, what matters is the spiritual meaning or significance behind the claim. Thus, when Peterson is asked whether he believes the exodus from Egypt really happened, he turns the story into a metaphor and claims that “In a sense, it’s still happening.” Or elsewhere, as in the Jubilee video, Peterson can take a prophet like Elijah and claim that Elijah defined God as conscience, which is quite a nonsensical claim. One does not test one’s conscience as Elijah tested God, by calling upon it to rain fire from heaven to consume a sacrificial offering. But yet, that is exactly what Peterson says.
Still, I understand Peterson’s point of view. One of my problems with Christianity – and I do mean my problem, as this is specific to me – is that I grew up thinking the world was made of material stuff and spiritual stuff, and the spiritual stuff was realer and more important that the material stuff. I was told I had a soul, and this soul was somehow more real than my body. I was told that my soul had sin, and that believing in Jesus would save my soul from sin. I was told not to fear the one who could hurt my body but to fear Satan and demons who attack the soul. In short, I grew up believing that religion was all about soul-stuff. Souls, spirits, demons, angels, incorporeal worlds, things you can’t see but have to believe on faith – this soul-stuff was everywhere!
If you spend all your time thinking about soul-stuff as I did – focusing on your own soul, on the hell your soul deserves, on sin you can’t measure, on demons you can’t prove – and even defining faith itself as “assurance of things unseen,” it isn’t too long before everything becomes soul-stuff. The story of the exodus becomes soul-stuff. The crucifixion becomes soul-stuff. The Bible becomes soul-stuff. Jesus himself becomes soul-stuff. Everything turns into a damn spiritual reality that exists on a plane completely independent of the physical universe! I remember having a realization around the age of 20 that when I said “Jesus was crucified,” that this might actually be a statement meant to describe physical, historical reality. The thought had never occurred to me before. To me this was always understood as a spiritual reality. Sure, we used physical terms to describe it, but really the physical terms didn’t matter. What mattered was what happened on a spiritual level. Yes, Christians use terms like “incarnation” and say things like “Jesus is risen,” but if, at the end of the day, all I care about is the state of my soul, then what difference does it make whether the sentence “Jesus is risen,” is literally true or only spiritually true? All that matters is that confessing it saves my soul.
I approach religion as "soul-stuff." Peterson approaches religion as "meaning." Neither one of these approaches requires any commitment to historical facts.
You are aware that Peterson has described himself time and again as a pragmatist. The basic idea of pragmaticism is that the value of a truth claim does not depend upon whether the claim describes reality. The value of the claim depends on whether that claim is effective in bringing forward fruitful results. As Peterson puts it in one of his discussions with Sam Harris, “the truth of a statement or process can only be adjudicated with regards to its efficiency in attaining its aim.” (Video) This definition of truth would also seem to correspond with the Bible’s admonition that, “by their fruits you shall know them.” (I say it only seems to correspond because I hold a different interpretation I will not get into here.) And indeed, most Christians today will tell you they are Christian because of some sort of spiritual fruitfulness in their lives. They had a personal encounter with the divine; Jesus rescued them from a life of sin; they felt the power of the Holy Spirit; they have a personal relationship with Christ; they have received the assurance of heaven; et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
There is a definite way to be a Christian pragmatist, but there is a big problem with this worldview considered in isolation. The moment the truth of Christianity is dependent upon the results Christianity has on the believer, and those results are measured entirely in terms of saving your soul, the natural corollary of this worldview is that the truth of Christianity need not be dependent upon facts. If Jesus is real because he saves my soul from everlasting damnation, does it make any difference if he lived 2000 years ago in Judea? If the sacrifice of Jesus is real because I have experienced the saving grace of the crucifixion, does it really matter whether the crucifixion was a bodily crucifixion or a spiritual one?
This problem I am describing is an old Christian problem. In fact, one group of ancient Christians, the Docetists, believed that Jesus did not actually have a physical human existence. He appeared to be human but was not. He looked like he had a body, but he didn’t. The Docetists were condemned by the early church, but Docetism, as an idea, is still very much alive and well today. Many modern Christians gravitate towards it without even realizing. I was raised, quite unintentionally, as a sort of neo-Docetist.
As I have made clear, I grew up in such fear of hell and demons and the state of my soul that the nature of Jesus simply did not matter to me. All I cared about was the soul-stuff, the spiritual stuff. What did I care about history? What concern is the nature of it all? If Jesus needed to be a physical human to save my soul, then so be it. But if Jesus were merely a phantom human, that also makes no difference to me as long as he saved my soul. Or if Jesus was pure fiction and never existed, but our belief in him saved our souls, then I would gladly believe for the sake of my soul. The results are what’s important. Christianity is a matter of pragmatism, and in this regard, I was just being a pragmatist when I dismissed questions like whether Jesus rose from the dead.
This is how I grew up thinking. And this is also how Jordan Peterson thinks. You see, Jordan Peterson calls himself a pragmatist, but all of Christianity is pragmatic. Christians believe in Jesus because they are looking for the results of belief in Jesus. They want to be saved. Peterson looks for these results too. However, for people such as myself and Peterson, we recognize the tension of this situation. Most Christians make an automatic leap from their pragmatic religion to a statement of historical fact, as though their salvation through Jesus proved that Jesus existed. From the viewpoint of Christian doctrine, they are right to make that logical leap. However, what people like me and Peterson realize is, there is no logical necessity linking the historical Jesus to our salvation. I know that for myself, I cannot force myself to make that leap. And so, I too question exactly what we mean by words like “believe.”
My friend, I have many more things I wish to say on this topic, but my letter is already long enough. I will just add one more personal note. Easter will come up again in just three months; and every Easter, Christians like to post on social media, “He is risen!” And every Easter, this makes me very uncomfortable, and I refuse interact with any of these posts. Why do I refuse? That question must have its own essay to analyze in full, but there is a connection to the current topic. For years and years of my life, I believed that my soul needed to be saved, and so I never once took the Resurrection seriously. Why should I? There is nothing spiritual about the resurrection. The whole point is that the Resurrection was not a spiritual event. It is about flesh and blood.
I will leave with this one question: If it is souls that are important, then what good does a bodily resurrection do? Or, to ask this from Peterson’s perspective, if meaning is what is important, then what good is the body? I might have some answers to that question, but I will cut this letter off here as a thought provocation.
Fair well and take care.
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