On Sunday, May 25, Dr. Jordan Peterson faced off against twenty self-proclaimed atheists on the Jubilee YouTube channel as part of its “Surrounded” series. For those who are not familiar with the series, the format involves an individual seated at a table, with one additional chair opposite him, and surrounded by twenty people who all hold opposing views to the person at the table.
The one-hour and one-half video in which Peterson appeared was initially billed as “1 Christian vs 20 Atheists,” but was, four hours after posting, changed to “Jordan Peterson vs 20 Atheists.”
At 49:15 into the debate, a young man named Danny sat down across the table from Dr. Peterson. Danny, a self-proclaimed atheist, pressed Peterson to say whether or not he was a Christian, stating, point-blank, that “Either you are a Christian or you’re not.”
Fair enough.
Peterson, who had been evading questions about his faith throughout the debate, answered with, “I could be either, but I don’t have to tell you, it’s private.”
Young Danny then protested the assertion that Peterson’s faith was private, sarcastically quipping that he (Danny) thought he was coming to debate a Christian, and perhaps Peterson was “in the wrong video.”
Peterson responded to Danny’s sarcasm with a dismissive, “You are really quite something, you know,” to which Danny responded, “And you are really quite nothing,” meaning neither professed Christian nor atheist.
Be it calculated or not, Danny’s insistence that Peterson make his faith clear hit the proverbial, existential nail on the head.
Beyond the emotional fireworks that clips like these supply the Internet, should we care if Dr. Peterson will or will not declare a faith in Christ?
Yes, we should care, notably for what such a confession would mean for Peterson and his relationship with us.
In February of 2024, I went to hear Dr.Peterson speak and reflected on my experience in an article for The Stream. In that piece, I pondered the importance of Peterson’s faith, writing that:
“Does it matter if Peterson is Christian? To quote Peterson, “Well, that depends” on what direction he ultimately takes his work on Judeo-Christian “stories” and what he says we should draw from them. If, like Joseph Campbell, who built a career on telling us what Christian stories did and did not mean but then quipped that the Judeo-Christian belief in bodily resurrection was “a clown act, really,” Peterson someday asserts that Jesus was nothing more than a historical figure upon whom we collectively placed our need to believe in a hero, then, well, that’s a problem. If, however, Peterson comes to a place where, like C.S. Lewis, he finds that “I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ,” that would signal a very different chapter in Peterson’s public story.”
Peterson’s approach to discussing his faith has remained unchanged, and he has stuck to statements about how he “relates to the conception of Christ” and that “It seems right” to him (Peterson) that Christ embodied what he (Christ) claimed to be, namely, “the King of Kings.”
This is interesting, but hardly a confession of faith.
Why, then, does it matter if Dr. Peterson publicly says whether he is or is not a Christian? Well, in a word, credibility.
For the past several years, Peterson has built a career on the analysis and exposition of sacred texts, the mainstay of his work. For example, in cooperation with the Daily Wire, Peterson filmed a seventeen-part video series on the book of Exodus, and recently (2024) a ten-part series on the Gospels. In each series, Peterson is joined around a table by a panel of experts, who, with Peterson acting as a guide, examine (credibly, we are to assume) “textual narratives” that “hold transformative patterns,” which, according to Peterson et al., “could guide our civilization through its current crisis of meaning.”
Great, and this approach is present in Peterson’s latest book, We Who Wrestle with God, in which Peterson focuses on the books of Genesis, Exodus, and Jonah to explore how we, in good faith, might strive to live in a proper (and therefore, beneficial) relationship to the divine.
Again, good, but incomplete.
I have a tremendous respect for Dr. Peterson as a thinker, especially in his analysis of the canonical texts of Western Civilization. I have often been impressed by his ability to pick out the central messages of texts from the Epic of Gilgamesh to Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
I am baffled, therefore, by his failure to acknowledge that a central tenet, if not the central tenet of sacred scripture (especially the four Gospels), is a full-throated, and mostly public, profession that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ, the God-Man.
This profession of faith is the beginning and end (and yes, I do mean also the “Alpha and Omega” of Revelation) of the point, the main message, of the Gospel texts. It is, more than any other “lesson” taught by Jesus, central to our relationship with God, or as Peterson might say, the divine. It is the most insistent and controversial message of the four Gospels, the lynchpin of not only our relationship to God the creator, but also our salvation, our reunification with God, the ultimate aim of existence. According to these texts (the Gospels), our main aim, reunification with God, cannot take place without pointing to Jesus and saying, “He is the Christ.”
Think of it this way: The reason Jesus was put to death was His insistence that He was the Christ, the embodiment of Man and God. Jesus’ death, His sacrifice, was the key to our salvation, our reunification with God. Thus, if no one had acknowledged Jesus as the Christ, He would not have been put to death. If He had not been put to death, He would not have fulfilled His role as the Christ, the opening of the path (or “door,” “gate,” or whatever you like) of reunification, that is, our salvation. If this sounds circular, that is exactly the point.
Why or how Peterson has missed that every reader of the Gospels is called on to openly declare whether or not he believes that Jesus was the Christ is a central “narrative” and “transformative pattern” of the Gospels is puzzling. The texts themselves are certainly not shy or elusive about this point.
Starting in private moments, such as at Caesarea Philippi, where Jesus presses the Apostles to say, specifically, who He is, the “who do you say that I am?” moment of Matt 16, Mark 8, and Luke 9, to the row Jesus invoked amongst the multitudes when He tells them that His flesh is the bread sent from heaven (the Real Presence of John 6) that must be consumed for salvation, it is clear that confessing a belief in Jesus as the Christ is the central narrative.
This text, the gospel of John 6, which is worth quoting at length, drives home the central narrative of openly acknowledging Jesus as the Christ:
“Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him. Just as the living Father sent me and I have life because of the Father, so also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Unlike your ancestors who ate and still died, whoever eats this bread will live forever.” These things he said while teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum.
Then many of his disciples who were listening said, “This saying is hard; who can accept it?” Since Jesus knew that his disciples were murmuring about this, he said to them, “Does this shock you? What if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before? It is the spirit that gives life, while the flesh is of no avail. The words I have spoken to you are spirit and life. But there are some of you who do not believe.” Jesus knew from the beginning the ones who would not believe and the one who would betray him. And he said, “For this reason I have told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted him by my Father.”
As a result of this, many [of] his disciples returned to their former way of life and no longer accompanied him. Jesus then said to the Twelve, “Do you also want to leave?”
Simon Peter answered him, “Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and are convinced that you are the Holy One of God (John 6:56-69).”
One can almost feel pity for the Apostles. Caught out in public while their master unpacks some very “hard sayings,” there was nowhere to run or hide. Unlike in the dark garden of Gethsemane or the confusion during the way of the cross and crucifixion, they could not quietly slip away. Questioned by Jesus about their next move, they are forced, in front of a less-than-sympathetic crowd, to answer what had hitherto been the private question of “who do you say that I am?”
If they answered in the negative, they would have been dismissed as dupes and fools. If they answered in the positive, as Peter did, then they would have known, because they had been given many warnings by the secular authorities, that their goose would be, more likely sooner than later, cooked. Watching the clip from the Jubilee YouTube channel, I felt a similar pity for Dr. Peterson as he tried to walk the line between “Trust me, I can tell you about these Gospels,” but “I can’t say who this Jesus is.”
One of these things, as the rhyme goes, is not like the other and just doesn’t belong. Dr. Peterson is, we should expect, wise enough to realize this.