Rowan Williams on Jordan Peterson’s new book:
“Peterson remains ambiguous about what many would consider a fairly crucial issue: when we talk about God, do we mean that there actually is a source of agency and of love independent of the universe we can map and measure? Faith is “identity with a certain spirit of conceptualization, apprehension, and forward movement”, he writes in relation to Noah; it amounts to “a willingness to act when called on by the deepest inclinations of his soul”. Echoes here not only of Jung, who figures as a key source of inspiration, but of the radical 20th-century Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, who proposed redefining God as whatever is the focus of our “ultimate concern”. Some passages imply that God is identical to the highest human aspirations – which is not quite what traditional language about the “image of God” in humanity means. Peterson seems to haver as to whether we are actually encountering a real “Other” in the religious journey.”
Peterson’s readings are curiously like a medieval exegesis of the text, with every story really being about the same thing: an austere call to individual heroic integrity. This is a style of interpretation with a respectable pedigree. Early Jewish and Christian commentators treated the lives of Abraham and Moses as symbols for the growth of the spirit, paradigms for how a person is transformed by the contemplation of eternal truth. But, as with these venerable examples, there is a risk of losing the specificity of the narratives, of ironing out aspects that don’t fit the template. Every story gets pushed towards a set of Petersonian morals – single-minded individual rectitude, tough love, clear demarcations between the different kinds of moral excellence that men and women are called to embody, and so on.
More than one person has approached me since my talk to ask if I was advocating ‘doing nothing’ in the face of all the bad things happening in the world. Christ’s clear instruction – ‘do not resist evil’ – is one of his hardest teachings, though there are many more we are equally horrified by: asking those who strike us to do it again; giving thieves more than they demand; loving those who hate us; doing good to those who abuse us. All of these are so counter-intuitive that they have the effect of throwing spiritual cold water into our faces.
But it gets worse. The most terrible teaching of all, at least for those of us who can’t shake off our activist brains, is the one that goes like this:
If anyone wants to come after Me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it. What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul?”
