You’ll be overjoyed to hear that Jordan B. Peterson has a new book out. He’s been busy promoting the not at all pretentiously titled We Who Wrestle With God. He was interviewed about it recently in British magazine The Spectator. The interview has to be read to be believed. The introduction can be read here but the rest, alas, is behind a paywall. Don’t worry though, I’ll supply you with the highlights. The article is a goldmine of stupefying statements about God and how Jordan is the only one who really understands the Bible’s stories. They need ‘arranging’, you see, and their underlying ‘hypotheses’ understood:
The Bible presents a series of hypotheses. One is that there’s an underlying unity that brings together all structures of value. The second claim is that there’s a relationship between the human psyche and that unity and each of the main biblical stories casts that unity in a different light, accompanied by the insistence that, despite those differences, what is being pointed to is one animating principle. As far as I can tell, that’s correct.
You got that? As ol’ Jordan humbly admits, this ‘revolutionary realisation’ is his and his alone. Of course, none of this sort of thing is original; the idea that characters, events and stories in the Old Testament prefigure realities in the New is as old as the hills. Typology can be imposed on any set of myths. The gospel writers and Paul did it, seeing Jesus prefigured in Jewish scripture and inventing stories about him so that he complied with these earlier types. There’s nothing ‘revolutionary’ about spotting this, but like so many before him, Peterson gets it back to front and falls, quite literally, for the oldest trick in the Book. Continue reading
rejectingjesus, 