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Book Review: Jordan B. Peterson, We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine (Allen Lane, 2024)

Jordan Peterson has become a well-recognized contemporary cultural voice who has garnered mixed reviews from Christians through his unorthodox interpretations and applications of Scripture to practical psychology. Notwithstanding this criticism, he has positively impacted a generation of young men disoriented in the modern world, and has effectively become some kind of father and pastor to them by helping them to assume responsibility in their lives.

Why is Jordan Peterson so effective? Firstly, his virtues are evident. Peterson was first catapulted into the public eye when he courageously refused to submit to the University of Toronto’s transgender pronoun regulations. This led to his recent legal challenges to the state’s College of Psychologists’ revocation of his practitioner’s licence. He displayed remarkable perseverance amid significant health issues of his own and within his family.

Secondly, he is hopeful for the future, and energetic in confronting it. His many endeavours in business, speaking, writing, research, and professional practice are astonishing. These include his weekly podcast and partnership with The Daily Wire, his contribution to the Essay writing software, his co-founding the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), and most recently his Peterson Academy endeavour to transform tertiary education.

Finally, he speaks with an understanding of the wisdom of a civilisation. Peterson reads serious books seriously. In all things, he draws upon a reservoir of integrated ideas from the great writers and great stories of the world. Although most deeply impacted by the twentieth century psychoanalysts like Freud, Jung, and Rogers, he also draws on much history, art, and mythology to illustrate his teaching. He is convinced of the worth of this, and so he invites his listeners to join him in earnest contemplation and application.

Brad East has captured this seriousness in his review of We Who Wrestle with God: “Peterson was speaking about the Bible as if it were the most important thing in the world, as if the stakes were a matter of life and death, as if the stories and themes of Scripture demanded an immediate existential decision on the part of everyone who encountered them.”[1]

We Who Wrestle with God is quintessential Peterson. Drawing on material from his lectures and seminars in Genesis and Exodus and his foundational ideas set forth in his scholarly Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (1999), he writes what might be described as a Bible commentary like no other. It is a kind of “spiritual” commentary. This has a threefold meaning, the first concerning his thesis, the second his hermeneutic, the third his ethic.

His thesis is that stories, rather than facts, orient us in the world and provide an interpretive framework for the phenomena we daily encounter. The biblical stories are those which most deeply represent the wisdom and social imaginary (zeitgeist – “time-spirit”, or “spirit of the age”) of Western civilization. Assuming an evolutionary worldview, Peterson posits that these stories derive from countless generations of retelling, refining and condensing into a veritable singularity of truth. Consequently, they provide inestimable riches of wisdom to those who pay close attention to them. Recovering an understanding of them could help us to rediscover who we are, and serve as a powerful polemic against cancerous ideologies that promote civilizational self-hatred, such as gender theory, communism, and anti-human environmentalism. In his words, these stories “illuminate the eternal path forward up the holy mountain to the heavenly city, while simultaneously warning of the apocalyptic dangers lurking in the deviant, the marginal, the monstrous, the sinful, the unholy, the serpentine, and the positively demonic.”[2]

Peterson’s hermeneutic focuses on strange details or images within the narrative and abstracting them according to their archetypal, symbolic significance. He will then compare them with similar images or symbols in mythical and artistic presentations as wide ranging as the Sumerian, Egyptian, Hindu, Buddhist, Greco-Roman, as well as Christian traditions of story, art and iconography, music, philosophy, and literature. This method has some links with historical Christian ‘spiritual’, allegorical and tropological (moral) hermeneutics employed most notably by Origen (d.254). However, it lacks the crucial literal element that Christianity and the Scriptures themselves insist upon (e.g. Acts 7) and the theological guard-rails to guide his interpretation. Many Christians will chafe at his failure to take biblical history seriously as history.

In the discussion of the creation of woman (Gen. 2:18) the difficult expression ezer k’negdo may literally be rendered “a helper according to his opposite” (ESV: “a helper fit for him”). Peterson analyses these terms broadly before exploring an alternative: “a beneficial adversary, a partner in play” – one that joins the game as man’s opponent for their mutual benefit, a partner in a dance.[3] She was taken from Adam’s side (unlike Athena from Zeus’ head) while unconscious and her role is to bring forth that which he has not consciously known or may have overlooked. He later explores the way in which those women who are typically more discriminating in selecting a husband incentivise men to be better, and to aim higher for the welfare of the family and community (cf. Simba and Nala in The Lion King).

Again, Peterson explores the garden of Eden as paradise, an enclosed park, in which the man was to make that which was good, better, by ordering everything into its proper place (2.1).[4] He applies this directly to the natural endeavour of the modern homeowner to make his domain well-defined, ordered, beautiful, peaceful, and secure. It becomes a place for opportunity, community, and hospitality.

At the heart of Peterson’s ethic is the inward war between two spirits, the one leading upward, the other downward. One finds oneself grappling with the upward aiming spirit of Abel whose work as a shepherd exemplifies true leadership and represents true sacrifice, and the downward aiming vindictive and brooding spirit of Cain, who rather than repenting, destroys the very ideal at which he aims. Likewise, the spirit of Ham, who delights in uncovering the shameful nakedness of his father, the failures of the tradition which saved the world.

One of the most distinctive qualities of this book is its style. As mentioned earlier, Peterson maintains an intense and weighty tone throughout the book. Although this may be exhausting for prolonged reading, I am certainly glad for it. Many commentaries today carry either a cold scholarly objective tone or a soft and warm devotional tone; but Peterson preaches. Interrogating, reprimanding, warning, Peterson calls his audience (of mostly young men) to serious contemplation of the world, examination of their own lives, the abandonment of self-pity in taking up their cross and aiming upwards.

A downside is that this work becomes repetitive as the same stories are referenced again and again. Classic Disney tales including Pinocchio, Peter Pan, Beauty and the Beast, and The Lion King are among his favourites together with the Babylonian Enuma Elish and the Egyptian Contendings of Horus and Seth myths. Moreover, Peterson’s analysis is one that wanders through a forest of ideas and stories, too often deviating down a side track before returning to continue the analysis of the story. As he considers the story of Elijah, in ten pages he also mentions the Transfiguration, 1 Corinthians 11:13, various characteristics of butterflies, bodily assumptions, Jacob’s ladder, the shining of Moses’ face, the myth of Sisyphus, The Lion King, The Water of Life (Brothers Grimm), the contrasting characters of Moses and Pharoah, the Mosaic regulations regarding gleaning, and right-hemisphere neurological systems. This is quite the disorienting experience for the reader!

We may be thankful that Jordan Peterson’s work is introducing a generation of young men to the biblical stories and core cultural texts of Western civilization. They are warned against destructive ideologies prevalent on university campuses. However, the reader is offered only law and no gospel. In this manner, Peterson resembles Bunyan’s Mr Worldly Wiseman who directs the pilgrim to the Hill Legality which he cannot climb. “Do you see yonder high hill?”[5] Peterson sees no other path upward. Nevertheless, this presents Christians with the opportunity to imitate Evangelist who set him back on the straight and narrow. Young men are searching for guides, and are rejecting what is novel in favour of tradition. It is certain that the greatest societies were built by Calvinist Protestants. If we can reclaim this, our heritage, there is a great opportunity to minister to such men who are looking to Rome or Orthodoxy, or to teachers like Jordan Peterson. May we pursue this aim with serious determination, a spirit of jovial gratitude and a sure hope.

– Elijah Harris

[1] Brad East, ‘Jordan Peterson Loves God’s Word. But What About God?’, Christianity Today, 19 November 2024 <https://www.christianitytoday.com/2024/11/jordan-peterson-we-who-wrestle-with-god-review/&gt;.

[2] Jordan B. Peterson, We Who Wrestle With God: Perceptions of the Divine (Allen Lane, 2024), p. xxxi.

[3] Ibid., p. 23.

[4] Ibid., p. 41.

[5] John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. by William R. Owens, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 20.