I think the value of Jordan Peterson’s theological outlook is that it let’s you appreciate the Bible from a perspective outside Christianity. His position is essentially is that it is right and good and useful to live as if the Bible were true. That it is metaphorically true, or true in some transcendent sense, some hyper-real sense particular to humans. But that doesn’t mean that it’s literally or particularly true. God isn’t a literal intelligence. He’s more like an emergent or systemic intelligence that the universe possesses or is possessed by. God isn’t a literal intelligence that literally actually loves or cares about you and hears your prayers. Or at least it isn’t obvious and compelling on provable factual or logical grounds.
Faith may be a good, perhaps even necessary, attitude to take toward the universe, that the spirit behind the world and existence itself is good, that existence itself is good, and that it is well to live and believe as if life had purpose and we were precious and loved and of eternal value. But that doesn’t mean that that is literally actually the case. It would be nice, but the case for that is less compelling than the philosophical or psychological truth of Biblical perspectives.
Good enough. And maybe that’s all you can really expect in this life. To be able to choose a loyalty, to choose what narrative to live within, to live as if in this way or that way. To make a wager on a certain vision of the universe and goodness and value and ourselves. Maybe life is meant to be lived in this kind of tension. Maybe that’s what faith and freedom require. The ability to choose what vision to wager our lives on. And we might be reassured by demonstrations that there are some benefits to living as if a certain story were true, that there is an element of symbolic verisimilitude to how certain stories map onto human experience. Is that enough to give us the courage to face life? Is it enough to give us the courage to go further? To change our lives, to transform them, to give them up, to lose them with meaning? Maybe.
But this still leaves a lot of puzzles in the world. Why is it so, that it is good to live this way and believe this way, if it isn’t literally true? Why the gulf between the two? On a purely causational level, especially when it comes to the Gospel, which lies within the realm of history, not merely myth or evolved storytelling, what actually happened? How did the story get invented? How did fishermen change the world? How did they live and die for such peculiar beliefs if they knew they were false? Why didn’t anyone ever crack under torture, facing death, or even just in a careless moment? How is it that they didn’t even seem clear on what was happening and what it meant themselves? How could such deluded or deceitful men as Jesus and the disciples must have been have such an effect on the world?
As the myth of Jesus spread, the story did begin to evolve and grow in more typical mythological directions. But everyone involved seems to have been concerned to try to keep things to some idea of the actual history, and to keep one another honest, even though they had scattered to the far corners of the earth and could, presumably, begin to adapt the story to whatever suited them. And what on earth was up with Paul, and what happened to him? He seems to have been perfectly aware that if he was literally wrong about Jesus, then the symbolic story wasn’t worth the personal cost he was paying. He seems just as clever and self-aware as any modern. In fact he says that he would consider his position pitiable and pathetic if he was suffering for a lie. What are we supposed to make of this? Who were these people?
And who was Jesus? How could a nobody from nowhere with nothing unique to say (according to his critics) and so many imitators and competitors, who lived and taught for only a short while and left no writings and only one big well-recorded speech behind (that was received with more confusion than fervor), who was rejected and executed by his own people, who enjoyed no social or political or economic status or support, have so uniquely changed the world?
Mr Nobody's Patented Blog 