In an exchange with a student in the early 1950s, Dartmouth sociologist Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy remarked:
“Religion is dead, murdered by the theologians.”
A Christian news site just ran a short piece about Jordan Peterson — essentially troubled that Peterson is unclear about his stance on the divinity of Christ. Peterson’s elucidations on the bones, or archetypes, of scripture — scientific observations that genders and the human condition may in fact be an irreducible dialectical state of being, and general Christ-like approach to reality — have left some Christians grateful for the breath of fresh air, and others troubled and strident that Peterson is not doctrinally sound.
The comments section of the article reflects this — a fairly thorough going refutation — that Peterson isn’t onboard with the hypostatic union, is not being led by the Spirit, and so on. Firm but fair criticisms. The underlying message is that he represents an untrustworthy source, or even a false prophet.
Peterson faces this same askance treatment from academia. The madness that has infected the colleges and their humanities departments has “progressed” beyond meaningful contact with the world, has lost predictive power. So much so that they are now running afoul of the harder sciences — see Brett Weinstein and Lindsay Shepherd. Certain research is now taboo, bounded by newspeak. The new “beautiful ideas” are smothering free inquiry, even in the face of meaningful statistical study. Peterson’s de facto appeal to the metaphysical, or primitive, is certainly due for a visit from the Grand Inquisitor even though Progressive ideology is increasingly no longer useful in exploring reality.
On a broad level, it doesn’t matter what he knows or believes about doctrine. We are ruled by the realities of our genders, the dialectical nature of the heterosexual union — these facts are crucial in orienting us as we develop across time. Other aspects — movement of the Spirit, how our souls interact with our minds and and so on — are hard God-created realities that rule us, whether we like it or not, whether we have the details of doctrine meticulously defined or not.
Maybe “common grace” is a better description — that we all know the Truth, but suppress it unnecessarily for a variety of reasons, but are still able to relate to a hardwired image of God within us all.
The hard dialectical realities persist, though — and a true religion encompasses that description. Peterson has had the sense to look back at the development of the the Western mind and detect how that development occurred. He’s taken these themes and self-consciously reapplied them to a straightforward existential approach. A way of life. A way of life that has predictive power and is utterly relatable.
It has to be unnerving for Christians in America to hear what he has to say — he’s largely describing the world as it is — and they know that instinctively, along with millions of others — but he is arriving at his conclusions in a way that is completely obscured by decades of abstracted doctrine and an almost Gnostic approach to Christianity.
The Church in the West has become impotent in its approach to weekday life — confused in how to “engage the culture.” Men are bailing out of the worship services; people are confused. And what has “fallen out” of this equation is a slide into legalism for some, and abstraction or spiritual obscurantism for others. The Church in the West is guilty of becoming lost in doctrinal disputes — splitting denominations over the subtleties of imputation, for example. Other branches are held to together by offering a simple shared spiritual epiphany every Sunday. Others have reduced “the Gospel message” to an abstraction. Darrell Bock’s and Russell Moore’s last articles are examples of this: vague admonitions to a general level of “gospelness,” but nothing that is relatable in a an existential, rubber-meets-the-road, sort of way.
You cannot abstract time and space — the Greeks tried this, and it destroyed them.
The common “not of this world” attitude in American evangelical circles compounds this dangerous detachment, and it is exasperating people who are trying to sort out their lives, kids, and marriages. Young people going through the turbulent transition from “son” or “daughter” to “suitor” or “bride” — and on to “wife,” “husband,” “father,” “mother,” etc. are left gleaning what they can from Hollywood or Madison Avenue pimps — and what they are offering is poison.
So Peterson has pieced together a rough sketch of the world bounded by Christian archetypes and delivered it to a mass audience. He is able to tell us how we are connected and has highlighted our commonality — how we can related to each other in a meaningful way, in everyday life. It’s religious, but not in a way most Christians understand.
As Christians, we should be ashamed of ourselves for our complete inability to compete with Peterson’s clear, grounded message. Peterson is working with fragments that have fallen from our table and is running circles around the Church in the West.
Shame on us.