We Who Wrestle with Peterson Reflections on Jordan Peterson’s We Who Wrestle with God

Over the past few years, several students have asked me what I think about Jordan Peterson’s work. My stock response: I like his titles, particularly Maps of Meaning, but I haven’t read enough to form an opinion. Until now.

Peterson’s latest book, We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine1, intersects with so many of my own interests that I simply couldn’t ignore him any longer. He’s dealing with the big questions of life by interpreting biblical narrative, the same topic as my Cambridge doctoral dissertation on Paul Ricoeur.2 Ricoeur coined the term hermeneutics of suspicion in connection with Sigmund Freud’s idea that our conscious thoughts often hide our unconscious drives.3 Peterson, too, reads as a psychoanalyst, and that piqued my interest: does he get beyond the hermeneutics of suspicion and do greater justice to biblical narrative than Freud did?

What finally awakened me from my dogmatic slumbers and prompted me to wrestle with Peterson, however, was a video by Christopher Watkin4, author of Biblical Critical Theory. Watkin happened to read Peterson’s book right after finishing my latest, Mere Christian Hermeneutics, and discovered unexpected connections between the two, including an appeal to the motif of transfiguration as a central component in our respective approaches to reading Scripture. More on that below. I want to begin, however, by commending Peterson’s attention to the way the stories of the Bible continue to be relevant, challenging us and making sense of our lives.

The way we read the stories in Genesis and the rest of the Bible is more important than ever, particularly if the Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han is correct in identifying our present moment as a crisis of narration. People today are drowning in a sea of information. We jump from one website to another, but “bits of information are like specks of dust, not seeds of grain. They lack germinal force.”5 When we are no longer able to provide meaningful narratives of life, “wisdom deteriorates, and its place is taken by problem-solving techniques. Wisdom is narrated truth.”6

The present crisis of narrative is related to what in Mere Christian Hermeneutics I call the conflict of reading cultures. When people are no longer able to give sustained attention to founding narratives or agree about how to make sense of them, they are doomed to wander aimlessly through the wilderness of meaninglessness and hopelessness.

How, then, does Peterson himself do as an interpreter of biblical narrative? He rightly turns to the stories in Genesis with the express aim of discovering wisdom that is not only ancient but directly relevant to the challenges of contemporary life. Peterson’s study also coincides with another book published in 2024: Biblical Narratives and Human Flourishing: Knowledge through Narratives. Its premise: every biblical narrative contributes something distinctive to our understanding of human flourishing. As the editors say: “Every influential culture is grounded in foundational narratives which shape that culture and its understanding of life’s enduring questions.”7

Peterson thus appears to be on to something timely, important, and theological. In a series of provocative books, he has leveraged his day job (clinical psychology) into a form of cultural criticism and himself from therapist to public intellectual. We Who Wrestle with God continues to provide rules for life and maps of meaning, to be sure, but this time through his penetrating analyses of biblical stories, most of which are drawn from Genesis. At the moment of my writing this, his book holds the #1 position in Amazon’s “Old Testament meditation” category and the #4 ranking under the oxymoronic (and Pelagian) category “Christian Self Help.”

Peterson’s book opens with a sixteen-page interpretation of the “singular story” of the prophet Elijah. Like other biblical stories, this one presents a weighty idea “in the dramatic form typical of the Biblical narratives” (xv). Seldom can I say that a book grabbed me before page one, but this one did (his reading of Elijah is located literally before page one, in the introduction, on pages xv–xxxi). If theology is about the relationship of God and humanity, then Peterson’s reading of Elijah’s story is thoroughly theological, with its dual focus on the still, small voice of God on the one hand and its transfiguring effect on Elijah on the other.

Elijah is, for Peterson, a symbolic representation of “the psyche’s capacity for qualitative and revolutionary transmutation” (xvi). Second Kings 2:9–12 depicts Elijah’s transformation or “metamorphosis” as he is taken up by a whirlwind into heaven, the reward for a life well lived, which for Peterson means a life that has attained its aim. As for the still, small voice of God, it is “the voice of conscience itself; the internal guide to what is right and wrong” (xxiv). Peterson declares this idea, the possibility of relating to God by listening to conscience, “a discovery of unparalleled magnitude” (xxiv)—in other words, a big deal!

The still, small voice of God and Elijah’s translation into heaven go together in Peterson’s mind: “1 and 2 Kings lays the revelatory groundwork for a much more psychological and relational definition of the Supreme Deity, detaching God from the pagan theater of the natural world . . . and placing Him . . . inside us all” (xxv). Elijah’s experience, in other words, is an “aha” moment, a small voice for God but a great leap for mankind’s theological understanding, so important that it gives Elijah a ticket to ride a fiery chariot into heaven.

Peterson insists on the point: “The biblical texts and their characterization of God simply cannot be understood in the absence of appreciation for Elijah’s . . . transformative and revolutionary realization” (xxi). God is best conceived, Peterson claims, not as an actor on the stage of world history but as the still, small voice inside us. God, we might say, is the voice of our highest values, and the aim of life is to act, heroically if need be, in ways that embody our values: “This is an act of faith as well as one of sacrifice: faith, because the good could be elsewhere; sacrifice, because in the pursuit of any particular good we determine to forgo all others” (xxvii). The stories of the Bible display the hierarchy of values that provide meaning in our world. If we use our freedom in responsible ways, always in alignment with the voice of God/conscience, then we will not be conformed to this world but transfigured by the stories through which we perceive God, the world, and ourselves.

On to page one, and Genesis 1, where Peterson defines God as “what we encounter when we are moved to the depths” (1). God is a creative spirit who, when it confronts the watery expanse, brings order out of chaos. That’s also what humans, “avatars of God himself” (5), are called to be, which is why Peterson, in an interview, says the first thing to do when you get up in the morning is “make your bed.”8 God and humans alike are creative spirits who bring order out of chaos. To subdue the earth is not to despoil it; on the contrary, it is “to order everything, hierarchically” (10), thus providing a system of value “that makes perception, meaning, and even existence itself possible” (11).

The bulk of Peterson’s book consists of a series of provocative analyses of the stories of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Jonah. They are profoundly human stories, for each one is about us. As Peterson says in an interview with The New York Post: “You’re Adam. You’re Noah. Who else would those stories be about?”9 Take Cain and Abel. According to Peterson, “they embody and represent two archetypal and fundamentally opposed modes of being” (497), two contrasting attitudes towards work. Abel gives it his all; Cain holds something back. These biblical stories orient us to fundamental choices we all have to make in life. They provide maps of meaning, templates for our being in time. All of us, like Adam, have a garden bed to make. All of us, like Abraham, the archetypal individual wanderer, are “to brave the romantic adventure of our lives” (496). All of us, like Moses, should free people from tyranny. Like Joshua and everyone else, you and I have to choose this day whom (i.e., which type of character) we will preserve (cf. Joshua 24:15).

Though most of Peterson’s book focuses on stories drawn from Genesis, it concludes with a reading of Jonah. Jonah is a kind of anti-Elijah figure: “It is the same still, small voice that spoke to Elijah that calls upon Jonah, (466), but unlike Elijah (or Socrates!), Jonah refuses to hearken to the dictates of his conscience—then suffers the consequences for not doing so. When responsibility is abdicated, as when those who should speak truth to power fail to do so, both the ship of one’s soul and the state itself risk shipwreck (cf. Jonah 1:4–16). Peterson’s exposition of the whale—society’s “body” of law, knowledge, and wisdom—is fascinating, as is his caution against a naive literalism: “There is no space within such creatures (à la Monstro in Pinocchio) that could be inhabited, however temporarily, let alone for a three-day period” (481). As a piece of literature, however, Jonah is a rousing call to vocational action—and an implicit warning we do well to heed: “Pick up your damn cross and bear it or face the consequences” (482).

Jonah’s story provides Peterson with a cautionary bookend to the story of Elijah, as well as an occasion to define what he means by faith: “Faith is the courage to determine to maintain stalwart and upward aim at the good, even in the midst of hell [i.e., the proverbial belly of the whale]” (484). Faith, it appears, is the courage to respond to the call of conscience, a response that takes the form of a “sacrificial sequence of transformation that lifts us upward” (492).

Peterson’s interpretation of the story of Jonah is a serious attempt to wrestle with the text; his insights are far from fanciful. One of the theologians in the aforementioned Biblical Narratives and Human Flourishing says that Jonah “is centrally concerned with whether our lives have meaning,” a meaning “threatened only if we neglect God’s own interests.”10 Meaningful words and meaningful lives “are ones that . . . point to something.”11 This raises the question: in Peterson’s opinion, to what do the biblical stories of people’s lives ultimately point? What are we actually wrestling with when we wrestle with God?

Ricoeur once described interpretation as “a struggle with the text.”12 It is an apt description of my own attempt to say what I think about Peterson’s book. Peterson is, without doubt, an insightful reader of the biblical stories. In every case, he has something interesting and coherent to say about why these stories matter and what they mean. I can’t do full justice to his book in this brief reflection. Moreover, Peterson assures us another book is on the way in which he will deal with the story of Jesus (a ten-part series “The Gospels” is already streaming on The Daily Wire). The present essay can, therefore, be no more than an interim report.

Still, and in the spirit of Peterson’s Jonah, I want to use my remaining time to answer the call of my conscience and say my piece. Specifically, I’d like to raise two critical questions, one about Peterson’s hermeneutics; the other about his theology. At stake is what it means to be biblical, as in “biblical Christianity.”

As to hermeneutics, I can’t help but think that Peterson reads with a truncated hermeneutic that leads him to ask of every biblical story, “What is the moral?” It’s almost as if he views the Bible as a Holy Aesop, where the moral of the biblical stories has something to do with encouraging the heroic upward-striving spirit in all of us that is the image of God. Peterson’s reading strikes me as mono- rather than quadraphonic, for he seems to be hearing only one of the four senses of the ancient quadriga: the “tropological” or moral sense.13 Rowan Williams concurs: “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.”14

Peterson’s sensibilities are altogether modern, of course, not medieval. So, though he does appear to interpret the text “spiritually” rather than literally, his frame of reference is neither Platonic nor Freudian, but Jungian, beholden to the psychoanalytic theory of Carl Jung. What the Bible’s stories reveal to us is the hard-won wisdom gleaned from centuries of human experience—in a word, Jung’s “collective unconscious,” the universal wisdom of humanity in general, the sum total of archetypal ways of being in the world.15 The critical question: can Peterson’s Jungian frame of reference catch all that the biblical stories are saying to us? Be that as it may, his hermeneutics strikes me as exemplifying a variation of Walt Kaiser’s “principlizing” model of using Scripture, albeit with a Jungian flair and frame of reference.16

Turning to theology, my main question concerns Peterson’s understanding of God. Peterson rightly says the biblical stories are both characterizations of God and of the relationship men and women have with that God (502), yet this is where his book and Marilynne Robinson’s Reading Genesis, which was also written in 2024 and similarly features virtuosic biblical interpretation, part ways. Whereas Robinson reads the biblical stories as works of literature and as works of theology (she is particularly concerned with theodicy and God’s covenant faithfulness), Peterson’s consistent focus is on the anthropological and psychological significance of the stories.17

Where, and what, is God? I think God, for Peterson, is the source of the values for which upward-striving humans aim their life’s energy. Are the “perceptions of the divine” (the sub-title of his book) that these stories instantiate the same as “divine revelation”? Put more bluntly: in listening to our conscience, are we listening to the voice of God or ourselves, or do the two amount to the same thing? Is the divine real? Peterson’s reply: “It is real insofar as its pursuit makes pain bearable, keeps anxiety at bay, and inspires the hope that springs eternal in the human breast…. It is as real as the further reaches of the human imagination, striving fully upward” (504). I still want to ask: did God bring Israel out of Egypt? Raise Jesus from the dead? If not, then Alistair Roberts’s judgment, though harsh, may nevertheless be correct: “Peterson’s ‘God’ is a prop for his existentialist doctrine.”18

As a clinical psychologist, Peterson is well-versed in what Freud called the Superego, namely, the internalized sense of right and wrong into which we have been socialized by the communities in which we have grown up. How do we know that the still, small voice of conscience is the voice of God rather than the Superego? Peterson could say that the “still, small voice” is that of personal truth and moral courage, which, if we hearken to it, might lead us to rebel against societal convention.

But how might Peterson respond to Ludwig Feuerbach’s more radical critique that all theology is ultimately only anthropology, that God is simply a projection of human ideals onto heaven and into myth?19 After all, aren’t the archetypes Peterson discovers in biblical stories the products of the collective unconscious, and isn’t “collective unconscious” another way of describing the mechanism that projects moving pictures (stories) of God onto the screen of myth and religion? I think Feuerbach would welcome Peterson’s proposal with open arms, perhaps even with a smug “I told you so!” Peterson himself would probably resist this atheistic reading, preferring rather to keep what theistic cards he may be holding close to his chest.

I mentioned at the outset Watkin’s surprise in seeing both Peterson and me appeal to transfiguration in our respective approaches to reading the Bible. For Peterson, transfiguration refers to the process of achieving maturity—the measure of the stature of the fullness, not of Christ but of our own virtuous humanity, personified by Elijah’s obedience to the still, small voice of conscience. Elijah is translated into heaven and later seen with Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration. Elijah is, for Peterson, the paradigm of a human who has arrived at the mountaintop, having achieved his aim, his reason for being: faithfulness to that still, small voice inside.

Watkin describes Peterson’s reading as one-dimensional: every biblical story is ultimately about how to lead a successful life by responding to the inner prompt of conscience to be our best self.20 On my reading, however—and I think I’m not alone in this—the Bible is decidedly not a self-help manual. Is it possible that Peterson, despite his often brilliant literary insights, has made the most egregious interpretive mistake of all, misidentifying the Bible’s genre—what it is and does?21

The Old Testament scholar C. John Collins, in his book on reading Genesis, takes his cue from C. S. Lewis: the first order of interpretive business is to know what kind of text it is, what it was intended to do, and how it is meant to be used.22 Only when we know the genre of a text will we be able to follow the way its words go, what they are being used for. As we have seen, Peterson construes the Bible as imaginative representations of archetypal ways of being human, drawn from the reservoir of humanity’s collective unconscious.

I submit that the Bible is a collection of stories not simply about humanity in general but about what God has done, is doing, and will do with a particular people, people chosen from every race to be a “holy nation” (1 Pet. 2:9). The Bible is the principal means by which the living God addresses the people of God. Peterson is right when he claims the Bible is about us; what he misses is that the Bible is also divine discourse to us. Scripture is second-person divine discourse, and what God says is meant to form the people of God and cultivate godliness. The stories of the Bible describe not simply how we should live but what God is doing to create a new humanity. Peterson misses the textual forest (canonical Scripture) for the trees (individual stories).

I argue in Mere Christian Hermeneutics that readers are not detached observers but answerable subjects.23 We are accountable for corresponding to God’s account of us. Moreover, if the Bible is divine address, what we see is not simply our own faces—our own ideas, our projection of what we value onto the face of God—but, rather, the face of the holy other, the light of the glory of God in the face of Christ (cf. 2 Cor. 4:6). It is by listening to the voice and beholding the face of Christ in the letter of the text that we, answerable readers, are transfigured: “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Cor. 3:18).

In the final analysis, the meaning of the biblical stories—that to which they point—is not the voice of conscience or our own heroic faces. It is rather the voice of God that directs us to look upon the face of Christ, a voice that says, “listen to him!” (Luke 9:35).

1. 1 Jordan B. Peterson, We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine (London: Portfolio Penguin, 2024). Subsequent references to page numbers will be included in the body of the text.
2. 2 Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Biblical Narrative in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur: A Study in Hermeneutics and Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
3. 3 See Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970).
4. 4 Accessed Jan. 3, 2025.
5. 5 Byung-Chul Han, The Crisis of Narration (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2024), 4.
6. 6 Ibid., 10 (emphasis original).
7. 7 Eleonore Stump and Judith Wolfe, “Knowledge through Narrative: Philosophical and Theological Explorations of Biblical Stories,” in Biblical Narratives and Human Flourishing: Knowledge through Narrative eds. Eleonore Stump and Judith Wolfe (Routledge, 2024), 2.
8. 8 https://nypost.com/2024/11/18/us-news/jordan-petersons-new-book-puts-the-bible-in-a-modern-context/ (accessed Jan. 3, 2025).
9. 9 https://nypost.com/2024/11/18/us-news/jordan-petersons-new-book-puts-the-bible-in-a-modern-context/ (accessed Jan. 3, 2025).
10. 10 Aaron Segal, “God, Humanity, and Meaning in the Book of Jonah,” in Biblical Narratives and Human Flourishing, 9.
11. 11 Ibid., 10.
12. 12 Paul Ricoeur, A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination, ed. Mario J. Valdés (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), 494.
13. 13 I am indebted to Brad East’s review for this insight. https://www.christianitytoday.com/2024/11/jordan-peterson-we-who-wrestle-with-god-review/ (accessed Jan. 3, 2025).
14. 14 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/nov/20/we-who-wrestle-with-god-by-jordan-b-peterson-review-a-culture-warrior-out-of-his-depth (accessed Jan. 3, 2025).
15. 15 On the collective unconscious, see further Carl Jung, The Basic Writings of C. G. Jung, ed. Violat Staub de Laszlo (New York: The Modern Library, 1993), 137–51.
16. 16 See Walter C. Kaiser, “A Principlizing Model” in Four Views on Moving Beyond the Bible to Theology, ed. Gary T. Meadors (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009), 19–50).
17. 17 According to Robinson, Genesis introduces the idea of a divine purpose for humanity “to be realized over vast stretches of time. This is an understanding of God and humanity that has no equivalent in other literatures, God both above and within time, His providence reaching across unnumbered generations” (Reading Genesis [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020], 17).
18. 18 https://www.firstthings.com/article/2025/01/jordan-petersons-god (accessed Jan. 3, 2025).
19. 19 See Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, tr. George Eliot (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1989).
20. 20 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iiq0JEGJPA4 (accessed Jan. 3, 2025).
21. 21 For a good study, and definition, of genre, see Andrew Judd, Modern Genre Theory: An Introduction for Biblical Studies (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2024).
22. 22 C. John Collins, Reading Genesis Well: Navigating History, Poetry, Science, and Truth in Genesis 1–11 (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2018), 35
23. 23 Mere Christian Hermeneutics: Transfiguring What it Means to Read the Bible Theologically (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2024), 14–15.