The Sean McDowell Show - We Who Wrestle With God | Reviewing Jordan Peterson's New Book

Episode Date: March 3, 2025

Today, Dr. Scott Rae and I review Jordan Peterson's newest book which explores ancient, foundational stories of the Western world from the Old Testament. Through a psychological lens, Peterson looks at the Biblical accounts of rebellion, sacrifice, suffering, and redemption that have long stabilized, inspired, and united culture. We discuss some remarkable insights from the book and some areas of disagreement. READ: We Who Wrestle with God (https://amzn.to/4gG8JST) *Get a MASTERS IN APOLOGETICS or SCIENCE AND RELIGION at BIOLA (https://bit.ly/3LdNqKf) *USE Discount Code [SMDCERTDISC] for 25% off the BIOLA APOLOGETICS CERTIFICATE program (https://bit.ly/3AzfPFM) *See our fully online UNDERGRAD DEGREE in Bible, Theology, and Apologetics: (https://bit.ly/448STKK) FOLLOW ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Twitter: https://twitter.com/Sean_McDowell TikTok: @sean_mcdowell Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmcdowell/ Website: https://seanmcdowell.org

Well-known Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson has come out with a brand new book entitled We Who Wrestle with God, subtitled Perceptions of the Divine, showing you and I have wrestled seriously with this book. This is a massive tome, but with lots of really good insights, and I think lots to talk about in terms of our interaction with him. So let's jump in here. First, tell our audience here, who is Jordan Peterson, in case you've had your head in the sand for the last decade and have never heard of him. Uh, who is he and why is, why is he so popular?

Jordan Peterson is a psychologist. He's a mega best-selling author, speaker, influencer. He's from Canada. And he's really become one of the leading voices today that you might say, this might be too simplistic, but kind of the anti-woke crowd that's pushed back against certain ideas that have popped up. He's emerged as this voice.

And I think part of his popularity, number one, he's just brilliant. He's brilliant. There's many times reading his book, hearing him speak, where you have these, like, aha, light bulb go on kind of moments. That happened regularly with this book. And he just sees things the way a lot of people don't. I think that attributes to it.

Second, he's bold. He partly launched into kind of public awareness, I don't know, maybe it was seven years ago or so, where he was being forced in Canada, being told to use preferred pronouns. And it wasn't that he wouldn't do it personally for somebody, but the idea of the government forcing somebody to do so, he stood in the gap and was like, nope. So he's fought back against a lot. I mean, he writes in the book about certain totalitarian ideas that are repressive. He's a bold guy who's just stood up and said, no more.

But and it's cost him. It has cost cost him personally, it's cost him his license to practice psychology in Canada. That's right. Which goes into a lot of this book. And I think my third point of why he's so popular is he sees life as a drama. It's like this great unfolding drama. And will you sacrifice? Will you be the hero?

Will you step up? And I think especially to a lot of young men who felt beaten down. and in many ways, you might say just white young men who feel like they've been the victim of everything. At least that's how a certain narrative paints it. Jordan Peterson is like, you can be great, you can make a difference,

stand up and be bold, and this book writes like you're a part of a drama. I mean, it's not this just kind of cold, analytical take on these stories. He's motivating us to be like Abraham, be like Moses. And I think the last thing is he draws out these points that just... I'm not a psychologist, I know you're not. So maybe to a psychologist, it's not that deep. But to me, I'm like, wow, that's really helpful.

So he's talking about the story of Cain, and he draws out how Cain, once he murders his brother, he could have repented. He could have turned and done what is right, and he doesn't. And so he draws out on, by the way, page 189, I accidentally ordered the large print. It wasn't intentional, and I'm 48.

So when I saw this, I'm like, oh, actually this is helpful. I didn't mean to. So my page numbers might not match up with your real copy. But he draws out and he says, we have this aphorism, hurt people, hurt people. And I use that. I think there's a lot of truth to that.

He says, but also the temptation towards say resentment might loom large, particularly when a person has been betrayed as well as damaged and that's how Cain felt. The pact with sin simply does not have to be made, let alone encouraged, cultivated, and nurtured. In other words, he says you have agency. You can make a difference. You are not a victim of your genes or some forces outside of you. And I think there's a lot of people that are just resonating with that message. And as you said, his example. Well, I think for one, he that message, I think is inspiring. I think it is. And I think I mean, we should be fair to I mean, Peterson does have his detractors.

Of course. Culturally. Uh, because there are people who have labeled him as misogynistic, as sexist, uh, as racist. Uh, he, I mean, he's sort of, I mean, he's got, I mean, all of the charges that you could get... He's a lightning rod. ...from the culture, uh, he's got. Um, but I think that what I've found so encouraging about him

is his courage in the midst of people who I think, I think largely are mislabeling him. Now, he said some things I think that are outside the box. Sure. And that we would take issue with. And we'll take issue with a number of things in the book too. But I think he is giving voice to a segment of the culture that I think does feel beaten down and a bit hopeless

and needs to know that, no, you can do this. That's right. Your genes are not your destiny. Your race or your gender is not your destiny. You can transcend these things. And so part of it, I understand why he is so popular and I think why he is such a lightning rod. And I think they're just two sides of the same coin.

They probably go together in our provocative social media culture. They tend to go together. Well, and he's good. I mean, he's good at our provocative social media culture. They tend to go together. Well, and he's good. I mean, he's good at being provocative. Yes, no doubt. 100%. But I think once you dig a little deeper, you know, beyond the, you know, the headline that he's making, I think you see there's, you know, there's a lot of thought and a lot

of wisdom. And I just found lots of places where I said, wow, this is just brilliant, what he said. So anyway, I found, I had to work hard to get there. And by the way, I read that he said this, at least my book is like 700 pages. He turned in a 1500 page manuscript and they trimmed it down to this. How many pages is that real hard? It's like 500-ish.

Yeah, or low 500s. Three times that length he turned in and trimmed it down. So there was even more. Alright, so Sean, just summarize for our audience here, what is this book about? Because I think you could probably subtitle it, you know, God, the universe, and other related matters. Because it just touches, it touches, it touches, I mean, there's just, there's hardly anything that got left untouched. You know, maybe some of the, maybe some, maybe some abstract chemistry or physics. Fair enough. But that's about it. So he's taking these key biblical stories from the Old Testament,

although the New Testament is all riddled through it. And one thing I appreciate is that he does, he sees the Old Testament, New Testament as being deeply tied together on their themes. Oftentimes, whether it's the new atheists, or whether it's other critics who divorce them, he's like, no, there are common themes running through this. So he cites Jesus in the New Testament all the time, but he's taking the creation story, Cain and Abel, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jonah, and he's looking at them through what you might call kind of an archetypal narrative lens. Which being translated means...

So he's not saying did these happen historically and is this, is there archaeology that supports it. He's saying what lessons do we learn about the human condition? What morals can we draw from this? So when he looks at Cain and Abe, he'll break down and they'll say things like, okay, you know, what's the difference between somebody who works with animals and somebody who works with the land? Well, there's a difference in their psychology between Cain and Abel. I'd never really thought about that, but that's the lens that he brings. So on my page 362, he says, he says, in the story of Cain and Abel, God is the highest good to which sacrifice must be devoted,

and the spirit who admonishes when the best is not forthcoming. That's kind of the moral he draws out of it. The Tower of Babel, God is characterized as the spirit that must be ensconced at the very top, otherwise everything will catastrophically disintegrate. The story of Abraham is this call to adventure and leaving comfort behind. So he looks at these different stories

and just draws out these big life lessons from them, but connects them with other literature. He's always bringing in like the Terminator movies or Pinocchio, or other religions, because he's kind of seeing these universal moral themes about the human condition, but uses the biblical text, because he considers them kind of the founding texts of Western culture through which to understand those ideas.

I found it very encouraging with how familiar he is with the Bible. I agree. And I think his familiarity with the Bible puts some of our fellow brothers and sisters in Christ to shame because it's not, it's not quite, we can talk about this a little bit further too too It's not quite clear whether he believes all of it is true. That's right But there's no doubt that it has it has some sort of transcendent value and It is it's the kind of thing that demands his close attention

Now we'll talk we'll talk further about how he handles the biblical text. There's a whole story for that. But I just, I found it very respectful that he was so familiar with the biblical text and connected a lot of dots that maybe the average person in the pew doesn't connect and doesn't hear connected in their preaching. So I found that really helpful. I agree. His command of the text was remarkable. Right. Now you made reference to the way the New Atheists sort of separate Old and New Testament. How does, overall, that's one area that contrasts. But how would you say that Peterson's approach to the biblical text compares and contrasts

with Dawkins, Sam Harris, the New Atheist crowd? This is a really interesting question because Justin Briarley wrote a book on kind of the rise and fall, or he calls it the surprising rebirth of belief in God. And how from like early 2000s to maybe mid-2010s, people like Dennett and Dawkins and Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, dominated the conversation about God. And these are firm, strong, committed materialists and atheists who have nothing really but disdain

for the Judeo-Christian tradition. Their approach in this, or Peterson's approach, is completely different. He holds the text with a sense of kind of reverence, a sense of learning from it, a sense of respect, a sense of like, let's dive in and learn from this. Now, for example, the New Atheists would say, well, what about like in the Old Testament, you had things like warfare, there can't be a God,

and Dawkins famously calls them all these kind of adjectives to just attack him personally. Peterson brings that up in the text and he goes, it raised the question, how could a God command this? But he doesn't raise that until he's dove really deep on what's going on in the story. How is God presented?

Rather than writing this off, might there be a warning for us about how we're to relate to the divine? Like he's just approaching this so differently. And as I was reading this, I thought, you know what? The new atheist critiques are so shallow and they're so minimalist and they don't even take the time to understand, not for the most part, the deep richness of these texts and how they've shaped all of

Western society. They just nitpick these areas that are difficult areas and Peterson's like, no, we got to dive in and look at the depth and the meaning and he'll talk about how Western culture itself is built upon these kinds of ideas. So to me, I'm just reading through this and he says this is the story on which Western civilization is predicated. You never read a New Atheist say that. The biblical story in its totality is the frame through which the world of facts Reveals itself insofar as the West itself is concerned

He says the Bible is the library of stories in which the most productive freest and most stable and peaceful societies the world has ever Known are predicated the foundation of the West plain and simple So basically, you have the new atheists saying, if we could just get rid of God, get rid of religion, brings bigotry, hatred, bloodshed, then we'd be happy. And Peterson's like, wait a minute, everything good about Western culture is predicated on these stories? Let's spend 500 to a thousand pages wrestling with what this means

and what life lessons we might garner from it. So that shift in the conversation in itself just made me so happy for lack of a better term. Well, I actually, I think there's good evidence that some of the new atheists have shifted also because Dawkins has come out not too long ago and basically said, I don't believe any of this stuff is true, but I wouldn't want to live in a culture

that didn't take this stuff seriously. Yeah, I said that. So there, maybe some of Dawkins' more recent reflections have anticipated some of the things that Peterson has done in much greater depth, which I find very encouraging. I think so too. And I want to get one other example is at the root of like Dawkins is just this entrenched conflict

between science and faith. They're completely at odds. Peterson's got this like five page section that just intrigued me on the parallels between prayer and secularized thought. So rather than saying their odds, he's saying, I wonder what they have in common. He says, first, there's an admission of insufficiency. If you pray, you have insufficiency.

If you're a scientist, insufficiency. You must be beset by a problem. You must believe that the problem is worth addressing. You must have faith that such an answer can be found or resolved. And he intentionally used the word faith. He said even on both sides, there's an apprenticeship of somebody learning how to pray, learning how to do science. He says there's a willingness on the part of the thinker to sacrifice previous conceptualizations in the pursuit of truth. He says the scientist must open himself up to a hypothesis that can be corrected.

I mean, he goes on and on. And his final one is then the scientist and the believer are both kinds of evangelists for what they believe. So I just I don't want people to miss how radically this this conversation is shifting as Peterson addresses it. So there's an openness and a welcomeness to science and faith rather than just attacking it and trashing it. And I think that's in part what people positively see in Peter's book. Yeah, and I think, as we've said before, that science and faith are not in conflict. It's the philosophy of science and Christian faith, the philosophy of philosophical naturalism that what we perceive with our senses is all that there is in terms of reality. That's what conflicts

with Christian faith. But there's no conflict between science well done and faith properly understood. It's more on the philosophical side that there is that conflict. And we've, you know, that's not breaking news to our listeners and viewers, but I think it's important to recognize that I think that's the way Peterson would view it Also, I think that's right. What's breaking news is someone so significant as Peterson helping to shift the conversation And he attributes much of the scientific revolution if I read him correctly to beliefs in Western culture Christian tradition. That's absolutely true. Now one more thing I got, I just got to draw out, and this is kind of in my lane a little bit,

but how different this is from the New Atheist. He says, page 428, whatever that means, he says, it is- To me, in my version, nothing. He said, it is instead religious contrasting with a sexual revolution. It's religious married couples who appear to have the most active sex lives a more ironically comical Psychological or sociological empirical observation is hardly imaginable this far into the 1960s inspired sexual revolution and then the next page he says 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. That's right! I get goosebumps thinking about like the openness to these conversations and then, okay, what does it mean for sex to be devoted to God? That's the next conversation. But Peterson is pushing and pulling on these ideas that I think are number one fascinating but true just give us hooks to engage our culture from a biblical perspective. Now let's be clear too for our viewers that what he's doing here, he gets a deep dive into basically Genesis and Exodus. A particularly deep dive into about Genesis 1 to 4 with Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel. And I thought the part he

talks about in Genesis 11 on the Tower of Babel, absolutely brilliant. It's fascinating. Absolutely brilliant about the trend toward totalitarianism. And then we get a lot on the life of Moses. But then it's just not so much after that. There's a little bit of stuff on the rest of the other three books of the Pentateuch, and then there's a significant chapter on Jonah and his going to Nineveh. So this is not, you know, it starts out like it's going to be this really deep dive into all of the Old Testament. That's not where... It's selective. It's very selective. That's right. But one of the things

that is not... it's not really a focus of his work, but it helps frame the discussion of Moses, Abraham, Jonah, and other characters, is the story about Elijah. And that... I took that as really one of the central parts of the narrative that he's trying to recreate here. So how do you see the story of Elijah, and how is that important for understanding some of these other characters that we get these real significant deep dives into? This is a really important question, because he opens with an analysis of Elijah and he talks about how he defeats the prophets of Baal. He talks about a bunch of other things that are interesting. For example, he talked about like with Elijah how

when when King Ahab is being wicked he's promised that there there's no rain it won't rain for a while and so when somebody wicked rains it affects the physical ground which we see in the Lion King, when the king is deposed from his brother, there's a drought. Like, he makes these just super cool connections that I find fascinating. So he comes to this moment where Elijah has defeated the prophets of Baal, flees to Mount Sinai, Mount Horeb,

and then God appears to him in the earthquake, appears to him in the wind, appears to him in the fire. And you have this moment of this still small voice. Now, he interprets this, that God is not in the wind, not in the earthquake, not in the fire, but it's the voice of conscience itself. And then he takes that voice of conscience and says, Abraham was responding to the voice of conscience itself. And then he takes that voice of conscience and says,

Abraham was responding to the voice of conscience. Jonah was responding to the voice of conscience. Moses was responding to the voice of conscience. Now, if you just read this story in 1 Kings 19, it's not about him having his conscience. He doesn't go sit on the mountain and reflect within and have this feeling, though ironically some Christians interpret it this way. This was an audible voice.

If you were there with Elijah, you would have heard the wind and felt it, seen the fire, felt the earthquake, and actually heard that audible voice. And so removing God speaking objectively to Elijah allows him, I think, somewhat to universalize these stories and say, this is the kind of still small voice. God is all calling us to adventure. God is all calling us to adventure, goddess all calling us to this. And so I can, that gave me pause, because if that frames the way he looks at all of these different heroes, I'm thinking, wait a minute,

these are real historical figures called by God audibly to a particular task. And I think this is an example where he's kind of an importing a certain worldview on to the text itself Rather than let the text speak for itself That gave me pause right at the beginning especially because it comes through like a thread in all these different stories This see Shawn this raises one of the main questions that I have about how he's understanding the text.

I think he's done a yeoman's job in trying to really get at what the author intended. I think the value that he sees is largely in the overarching worldview that is being communicated by this narrative and what kind of lessons that the characters have for a person who's trying to live a flourishing life. But it's not clear to me that he's actually doing full justice to the author's intent. And I think there are probably some places where I think he's taking some hermeneutical liberties with the text because he wants to shape it into a mold that is somewhat less supernatural than it actually is, and therefore able to be received by people who

want to be skeptical about the supernatural part. But as we've talked about numerous times, the supernatural part is what gives it its transcendent value. And I so appreciate him wanting to elevate the worldview within the narrative to a transcendent place. And he's got a lot of different names for God that I found odd. He calls him the spirit of being, conscience. the voice of God is called conscience, the spirit of being and becoming, and there's a whole host of these. And it just raised the question for me, to what degree does he believe that these narratives are actually historical in the same way that we would talk about, you know, the Abrahamic narrative being historically accurate, or the creation narrative being a matter of space, time, and history. That's less clear to me, and although I think, to be honest,

I think he gets a lot of mileage out of the biblical narrative without necessarily being clear about whether he believes that it's true or not. I think he believes that it's relevant and that it is timeless and that it has a whole lot to say that's insightful about the human condition. Especially how we deal with struggle and how we deal with adversity and how we flourish in the midst of those things. Because I mean, after all, almost all of the characters that he describes,

they have a pretty familiar narrative to their lives. They do, yeah. And I think what I'd want to emphasize, and I think this is for our listeners who have, you know, maybe pastors who teach on different characters in the Bible and people listen to those messages, almost without exception, the hero of all of those stories is not the character in the script. It's God who's the hero. And in many cases, it's God who is the hero

and accomplishes things in spite of the shortcomings of the characters, not because of them. And I think that, that I think is an overall point that gets lost. That's a real, that I think is the central focus of these narratives. Now, I think there's a lot that we can glean, and he's, and he has gleaned some incredibly insightful things. For sure. Really good stuff. And he's applied it to matters of politics and culture and economics that we don't often hear from our popes.

That's right. And I wish, in fact, maybe this is maybe stretching it a bit, but I would like to see us teach Bible exposition in some of the ways he's doing it. By bringing out the relevance of the text, the relevance of the author's intent to matters of cultural importance, matters of how society's structured, matters of how government is done. I think you can do that without being partisan.

He's clearly not being partisan here. At best, he is partisan toward liberal, small L liberal democracy, sort of classic, sort of the classic liberalism of the founding fathers of America. And I think he's right to get that essentially from the biblical narrative. I'm not sure the founding fathers had a specific chapter and verse in mind, but they clearly had the overall big story of the Bible that you can get from natural law as part of the founding. And I think he's rightly recognized that and gone into, I think, pretty significant depth in the analysis of that. Now, whether all of that can be drawn

from the biblical text is another matter. And I think in most of these cases, the biblical text is a jumping-off place that enables him to go into a direction that he wants to go that probably was not where the biblical author was intending it. But I'm not sure the biblical authors would actually stand up and object to some of the applications that are being made, even though they might say, they might put it that this is true, but it's not derived from that. From the text itself. I think that's a really fair point. In some ways, he's thinking biblically about a whole host of issues and draws out principles from Cain and Abel. And then he'll draw the connection to like, Karl Marx had this kind of spirit within him,

the Cain spirit within him. And he'll explain, for example, like Cain and Abel, it was just it was jealousy. Well, you look at the story of Marxism, there's a kind of jealousy that's built in there's haves and there's have-nots. I want what you have. You can't have more and be better. We're going to make everything equal. So he walks through like this spirit of Lucifer that he calls it, lived out through Cain,

that you see in Marxism. I mean, that's completely brilliant. He gives the example of like some of the Pharisees and how modern-day protesters are just out proclaiming their goodness and their virtue to the world. And we talk about virtue signaling. That is a clear Pharisee-like spirit. Those are dots I've never connected. Yeah, that's exactly what it is. I think it's brilliant now This is a whole separate conversation, but you're right in terms of what he thinks about truth. I

He doesn't define truth in the way you and I as philosophers wish that he would in many ways. He kind of has a Pragmatic approach to truth. He'll say things like if this helped not these words But if this helps humans flourish the most, then it's gotta be true. But what he means by true is it just describes and characterizes the human condition, not something that matches up objectively with reality the way we would define it as a whole.

I think he's closer to that than you might think. Now, I was going to keep going because I think he dances around that kind of pragmatic approach. But then there's moments where he makes these connections. And I wrote a few of them down where he's like, this actually describes society reality and he'll use that term. So there's kind of this tension between the two of them that is in the book. Now interestingly enough, he's had some interviews with atheists like the Cosmic Skeptic, who's done as good a job as anybody. Like he was playing the role of the Christian, who's kind of remarkable,

and he's pushed him going, okay, if they had a camera at the tomb, would they see Jesus physically walk out, At the tomb would they see Jesus physically walk out? Trying to get his view of truth and he kind of danced around it and didn't want to answer it I don't know why But I think he basically believes we can draw these stories these principles out of them whether they're true or not and Christians are saying yes many of these principles we can draw, but it's also true. So this isn't just a story,

this is the story of reality. So I appreciate, he starts off talking about worldview, although he doesn't use that term, and he kind of defines a worldview as a story, which I thought was profound and accurate the way he's describing this. He said,

we have a map to guide our navigation through unknown territory, which would otherwise be lost. We tell a story. He describes how we see the world with our aim. He goes, what is the story, detail and aim of all of its consequences? It's a description of the structure through which we see the world. So he's right to talk about how there's a story by which we see the world and then sometimes I think you're correct there's these moments where he goes, oh

this is actually describing reality. But I would just want to say, I think he thinks, I think the disconnect is that he's viewing Christianity as a story that best captures the human predicament. And Christians are going, yes, it does. But it's the objective true story. And the reason we see parallels in literature throughout the history of the world is because they are reflecting the true story found in Christianity. I don't think he would take it that far.

You may be right. And I think, you know, as far as, I think as far as his understanding of the text and his application goes, I think one of the his understanding of the text and his application goes, I think one of the things I want to caution our viewers about is I think he views the biblical characters as sort of necessarily examples to follow and sins to avoid.

That's right. And in many cases, I think the example is one to follow, and the sins are ones to avoid, but they're not the point of that particular text. And so the question I'd want to push him to wrestle with, as he's wrestling with the biblical text, is not so much what does the story tell us, but why does the author include that story? What's the purpose for that story being included where it is in the biblical narrative? And that's what gives us the best clue to what the author's point is and what the application should be. So if I could offer just sort of one sort of hermeneutical hint, you know, without

having him sit through a whole course on it, but one hermeneutical hint, that's the one I would want to have him give a bit more attention to. And that involves, I think, viewing the text as a narrative, you know, the passages in which he's looking at view those not as the overall narrative, but as a mini narrative within that passage, and why, you know, why is the author including that at that particular time? You know, for example, I think with the Tower of Babel, he makes some brilliant, I think, comments that jump off from the Tower of Babel. Totally. But the point of the Tower of Babel narrative is to show that once people reject God,

not that their languages, that their ability to communicate gets confused, which it does, languages are, that their ability to communicate gets confused, which it does, but what they, the purpose for building the Tower of Babel was to defy God's command to spread out and populate the whole world, is to keep them together. I think for them mainly because they failed to trust that God would have their best interests at heart as He sent them out to the various parts of the world. That's the point. And the point of confusing their languages was precisely to get them to spread out and to unify among different language groups and to spread out appropriately so. I'm not sure, although I think his observations about the totalitarian part of that are accurate and true, I don't think that has much to do with the intent of the narrative of the Tower of Babel. That

would just be one example. I think you could actually make it much richer in terms of the application if it were more consonant with, I think, the actual intent for why the author included that narrative and put it in the place that he did. I think you're getting to the heart at some of my, I don't know if reservations are the right word, but differences and cautions I would have. That he's bringing this psychological perspective, doesn't interact with it as far as I could tell a lot of biblical commentaries, Jewish or Christian, kind of looks at it through that lens.

Although he does allow other parts of scripture to comment on scripture, which I commend him for that. He does that very well. Good point. Now I think sometimes he gets what you said right. Sometimes I would differ. So I was flipping this passage in Exodus 18. So this is, they've come out around Exodus 14, splitting the Red Sea, they come out of

slavery, Exodus 19 into 20, they start to get the law. Well it says here in Exodus 18 when Moses is judging everybody in the land himself. Jethro, his father-in-law, who's a Midianite comes in, and it says, and it came to pass to the morrow that Moses had to judge the people, and the people stood by Moses from morning unto evening. And Jethro's like, this is not good. You need to assign people to their task have judges and

And he's right now we look at us like of course, that's how society is organized, but this was novel This was the first time People are answering this and where this is where he gets it. Right is he says This is right before they get the law So if he's establishing this nation, trying to move into the promised land, they have to have this kind of subsidiarity built into it. And honestly, I hadn't thought about that placement

in the story, he's right about it. So I don't think Moses is right in this saying, here's how you should form a civilization in Western culture, but the principles of Western culture derived from this text and get the credit for it these are some of the kind of points that I think he brings out that are just brilliant. Actually I don't think it's an accident that you get some of the structure of what civil society was to look like in Old Testament Israel before you get the content of it.

That's exactly the point. I don't think that's coincidence. Now, if I could say, and we're jumping around here with all of our questions, I want to give an example of where I think he missed it. So I think he got it right with Exodus, but given his kind of psychological and archetypical approach, there's sometimes he would say a lot in the book, he'd say, and this is the moral of the story. And I think, I'm not sure I buy it.

So here's an example that on the story of David. So he pulls up the story, David, in the midst of the section of the Tower of Babel, which shows just kind of these rabbit trails he goes goes down but he brings it back in and he says this, the moral of the story, this is right after David defeats Goliath. He says the true hero is he who defeats the giant tyrant of the state. That's the moral of the state. That's the moral of the story. Now I had two thoughts. One, I thought, you know what? He's making the same moralistic mistake that a lot of preachers make looking for some moralistic principle not found in the text. So we see Christians doing the same thing. I mean I remember

talk I gave one of my earliest talks was on David and Goliath. Of course, I'm like, what are the giants in your life that God wants to defeat? I look back, I cringe at like my terrible ex Jesus when I started preaching. But if you go one page earlier in his book, he's citing 1 Samuel 41 through 44. And it says, verse 44, and the Philistines said unto David Am I a dog that thou's comes to me with staves and the Philippines Philippines I don't know why I said that I love the Philippines We can edit that one out or not and the Philistine

cursed David by his gods In other words the purpose of that story is not to defeat the tyrants of the state. The purpose is that the one true God of Israel is the true God. And in that culture, you demonstrate that through military defeat.

So he's made David the hero, and in one sense he is, but it's really about God using David to show his supremacy. It's not about defeating the tyrants of the state and I think he makes this mistake a few times. Well, there's another purpose for that narrative too because one chapter earlier in 1st Samuel 17 is when David is anointed as king. And then the first, basically the first event that takes place earlier in 1 Samuel 17 is when David is anointed as king. And then the first, basically the first event that takes place after he's anointed as king is his battle with Goliath. And again, that's that placement,

I mean it happened historically that way too, but that placement is not a coincidence because it's, that's God's way of saying to David, I will be with you and I am validating my choice of you as king by giving you this extraordinary ability to lead your people and to defeat their enemies. So yeah, I think taking the application of that the way Peterson did I think is stretching the intent of that text and I think, is stretching the intent of that text. And I think it shows that sometimes the biblical text is just a jumping-off place.

I think that's right. And I think as long as we recognize some of the hermeneutical limitations of that, I'm basically okay with somebody making what I think are, you know, some pretty profound observations that may not, that may be true, but not derived specifically from that text. I think that's well said. Let me give another example that draws this out just so people see it. He says, now he's talking about Abram, he says, God in the story of Abram is the spirit that calls to the privileged and sheltered to leave the comforts of their home and to undertake the adventure of their life. I'm sorry,

but that is not the purpose of the story of Abraham. Now Abraham did go on an adventure. This applied to him, but it's the classic example of taking something that's Descriptive in the Bible making it prescriptive for the rest of us That's not the point in drawing out this adventurous spirit about Abraham as much as I loved it And you talk about the temptation in Sodom the conflict the time that he lies about his wife There's all this drama built in. It's an amazing story. But really what this is about is God starting his chosen nation, Israel, to be a blessing to the world

and ultimately bring his Messiah through Israel. If you miss that as the heart of the story, you miss the heart of the story, you miss the heart of the story itself. And I think to underscore your point, sometimes the biblical characters are unique and not intended to be universalized. Exactly. Right? And not everybody's being called to do what God called Jonah to do, you know, which is go, you know, basically go to the doorsteps of the most implacable enemy

of the country and speak a word of judgment. God's not calling everybody to do that. Abraham was a unique character. Moses was a unique character. Now, some of this, they have things that we can emulate and things to avoid. But let's just don't forget that there are... There's a lot to some of these characters that is not intended to be universalized. And I think you would concede that, obviously,

when you look at some of the faults that are there. In fact, he does a really good job of drawing out the faults of Moses, the faults of Abraham, the faults of Jonah. And he says, and there's a great line here, I don't remember exactly, but he goes, the best villains are those that are somewhat sympathetic, and the best heroes are those that are not perfect.

Now, when I look at these... That's every biblical hero. That's every biblical hero. Being significantly flawed. I would look at that apologetically and say, yeah, that's, not only does this ring true archetypically with great stories, but that tells me that these characters are not invented.

That's a sign of the failures of these heroes that they're really human. And they're describing reality. I just take that a little step further than he does. Let's do a couple more things that I think are really important to what he's trying to accomplish here. He talks a lot about belief.

Mm. And I looked and looked and thought and tried to figure out exactly what he meant by that. And I came up somewhat empty on that. Did you do any better? I don't know if I did any better. what he meant by that and I came up somewhat empty on that. Did you do any better? I don't know if I did any better. I wrestled with this because he says, he writes this,

he says, what does it mean to believe? I think he says that three, four, five times throughout the book. We certainly act individually and collectively as if something is true. Like he really has this idea that if you say you believe something and you don't, you don't actually really believe it.

Which is completely biblical. Which is fair. I think that the philosopher in me is just looking for clarity. And I don't know if it's because he's not a philosopher or if he's intentionally talking around certain things to make you think and stir you up and provoke you a little bit.

I don't know the answer to that, but I think biblically, if you believe something, it means you hold that something is true. That's what it means to believe. Now, how do we know somebody really believes something? We know it by the fruit of whether they live it out or not. So if I say, I value my family, I believe that's true. And I'm a workaholic, Peterson would say, you don't really believe it because you're not living it out.

My concern is that this could shift into a kind of works kind of justification and miss that the element of belief and faith is holding that something is true, and I don't justify myself before God at all based on how I live, but that fruit should reveal if the belief is really there. So I wish there was a little bit more clarity on this. Yeah, I think both those aspects are important, because, you know, as Paul put it, if Jesus was still in the grave, we're still in our sins. 100%. That's right. And so there are certain

things that you have to acknowledge as cognitively and intellectually true. In the best philosophical sense of that, that it accords with reality. But... in the New Testament, to believe is much more than that. To believe, and I think he's captured some of that from the New Testament, to believe is to bet your life on it. And to live your life accordingly. And if you don't,

then I think we can raise a fair question about... maybe not what you believe, but how important is what you believe to you? At least the depth of that belief. The depth of it. Yeah. You know, I think I mentioned before here that I've often asked, you know, when I'm with families at the end of life,

you know, I'll often ask them, do you really believe the stuff that you say you do about resurrection and eternity? Because the way you're holding on to earthly life for your loved one makes me think that you believe something else. I think that's sort of, that's the spirit of what he's getting at here. And I think there's something to be

affirmed about that. If you believe to be true the things that the gospel claims, how can you not take those seriously? I think that's right. And I think that latter part is what he's getting at while being agnostic about the former I think that's fair. Yeah, I think you're right And sometimes evangelicals as we overemphasize will just believe something and we don't want to emphasize works at all He's saying wait a minute if you believe it you're gonna bet your life on it You're gonna live out the journey the drama and I think that's what's attractive to people in many ways and I think it brings a good balance to you know the way you described it so well said you ready for one final question okay would you

recommend this book so every recommend that I recommendation that I give is gonna be based upon the book itself now I do I want to make one more point if I can before because I really there's a few things that he he does in this book is I don't always agree with his conclusions but he asks some really interesting questions. So in the chapter for example yeah good so the chapter on Exodus, he says, why is it out of tyranny and slavery and into the desert instead of out of tyranny and into the promised land? Why did they need the season of the desert?

And he's raising the question that they inculcated certain ideas and patterns that had to be shed away from them before they could enter into the promised land and There's this sense of like you think about before the ultimate promised land of heaven We have to shed out things that are sinful to be prepared to be there and so he goes on and on talking about how some of the the Israelites brought with them a certain effect from slavery, where they believed what their oppressors said about them. Hence, they needed the 40 years to have that rid from them.

I thought, what a fascinating, fascinating question for him to raise. Gives another example of one. I love this, I tweeted this out. He says, so this is where you said is he reading earlier on like the supernatural element of the scripture? I think there's times where it bubbles up a little bit. So he says, why is there such great insistence on the fact that reality itself is dead and blind in some final sense? When the organisms that inhabit it Live in see is this not more like a consequence of our ignorance with regard to the final nature of the material rather than a limitation placed on the nature of being

That material like these are great questions and this line, I'll end with this and then answer your actual question. He says, perhaps our reductive materialism is a reflection of something worse than mere ignorance. Maybe we insist on the deadness and intrinsic meaninglessness of the world to rationalize our own unwillingness to accept the immense burden of opportunity and obligation

that a true understanding of our place in a truly meaningful world would necessitate. That's brilliant. And then this last line is powerful. He goes, perhaps, so he's asking these questions and he's suggesting things. He says, perhaps it is not religion that is the opiate of the masses. Perhaps it is instead that a rationalist material atheism is the camouflage of the irresponsible. Let's drop the mic, man. I mean, so I love that he's asking these questions,

even though you and I might answer them differently and take issue with it. So I recommend it. It depends. Every book depends on what you want it for. So I'll be totally honest, I was invited to speak on a cruise for a week. That's where I was gone, a teaching cruise. This was like the perfect book for me,

not a mindless, like just read some, I don't know, romance or some other story, not that I read romances, but whatever story somebody might read. But it was like the perfect space to read something Rest with it talk to my wife about it. I Thoroughly enjoyed it because he made me look at issues differently, but it's long and there's a lot of points I'm like, what is he saying? I maybe it's me. Maybe I don't understand So it's a big commitment to read a book like this.

It's really, really long. So if you want to think and you want to be challenged, I guess the bottom line for me is anytime somebody goes to the texts that I love and helps me look at them a little bit differently, I value it. I read it twice and I loved it for those reasons. If that intrigues you, read it. If not, you'll be wrestling your way all the way through this book.

Yeah, which is what I did. And yeah, I would recommend it if you're looking to take a deep dive into a lot of subjects that you might not have thought about before. And if you're willing to, you know, just sort of put on hold some of the questions you'd really like to ask him. Like, do you really believe all this stuff is true? Do you really believe that, you know, God created Adam and Eve in the way the scripture describes it, for example? You know, I think the value of it is not

going to be found in wrestling with those questions, because he doesn't really, he doesn't, at least as far as I could tell, does not take a strong stand at all on any of those. But if you can be content to bracket those out and just read it for the value. And if you can, you know, if you don't have to channel your human hermeneutics professor, and you can sort of put that aside and just say, he's using the text as a jumping off place. That's right.

Then I think there's a lot of value in this. And I think there's a lot of value in this and I think there's there's there's so much here That is that is worth wrestling with and digesting That but it's a tough read it is for both I mean, you know, we're accustomed to reading it at this level of depth. This was a hard slog for me And it felt like he could have done a 120 page or 180 book even further. Simplifying this. Maybe he will like a popular level and maybe he'll feel like something is lost.

But I mean one last nugget like he talks a lot about in the book about sacrifice. From the very beginning Cain and Abel, sacrifice. He says take a marriage. It only works if you each are willing to sacrifice. And I thought of last night going to the grocery store, neither my wife nor I wanted to go, and it was like, someone's got to sacrifice. And he just draws out these principles from psychology that connect to theology that I thought were great.

But, uh... And I think the larger point is if you are called by God or conscience or the spirit of being or however you think it, that will invariably involve sacrifice. That's exactly right. And he draws that out well. Last thing I would say and then we'll wrap this up is I would love to talk with Jordan Peterson. Oh, I would too.

I mean, I don't know that he's gonna watch this. If he does, I hope he feels like we respect him and appreciate him and just wanna push and probe these ideas a little bit more. I would thoroughly enjoy it. So if you watch this, enjoyed it, share it, tag him, tag his team, say, hey, here's somebody who won't have a conversation with you. You want a Christian ethicist or apologist

to talk this through, I would do it in a heartbeat. I so appreciate his voice. We'd be honored to be able to have that conversation. Send it to his team and we'll see what happens. Hey, I hope you all have enjoyed this conversation about Jordan Peterson's new book, We Who Wrestle With God. Hope you found it stimulating and helpful

and we'll look forward to seeing you next time.