No book until Jordan Peterson’s We Who Wrestle With God has helped me make sense of the books of the Old Testament to my satisfaction. The God of the Old Testament has always struck me as arbitrary and gratuitously cruel. Thus, I always have been faced with choosing between performing a conceptual lobotomy on myself or blind acceptance of an inscrutable God whose behavior as described in scripture was troubling and confusing.

Set in a foundation of diamond hard intellectual integrity along with intent to face the hard questions head-on, We Who Wrestle with God persuaded me that my inferences about the nature of the God as presented in the Old Testament are in error. Thanks to  Dr. Peterson’s persuasive interpretations, I can reconcile the God of the Old Testament with the God I wish to submit to without ignoring what the Old Testament says about God.

This is not to say that all doubts have been resolved. They haven’t and never will be. But, they are no longer daunting obstacles to belief and trust.

The bible is a library of stories, comprising history, myth, poetry, and literature. I have no idea whether it is unerringly “true” in that what is described actually happened historically. Some of it surely did. But I strongly doubt the historicity of all of it, although I do believe the writing is divinely inspired. But what to me is unarguable is that the myths, the super-condensed stories, express foundational truths about the nature of reality and the human condition.

We Who Wrestle with God is about what Old Testament stories tell us about who we are, what the world is like, how we should see the world, what we should do, and why. A story, as Dr. Peterson tells us, is a description of the structure through which we see the world. It is the way we reduce its incomprehensible complexity into a set of perceptions that help us accomplish our aim; a story enables us to decide what to prioritize and pay attention to. The bible tells the story on which western civilization is predicated.

Dr. Peterson’s book is a masterpiece of interpretation,  animated by an unbending commitment to understanding what is true. We all should read it. But, it is maddeningly wordy. What I am trying to do below is to present an easily digestible distillation of the core ideas  and observations in each chapter. They deserve our utmost attention and thought.

1. In the Beginning

God saw everything that he had made, and behold it was very good.

• God shapes chaos with benevolent intent.
• God’s aim is to have all things flourish in a constant upward spiral from good to very good.
• Humans are at the pinnacle of creation. Being made in the image of God, each human being is of innate value.
• There is an absolute moral order.
• God delegates responsibility and authority to man, but man wants more, namely, the he wants the power to set the rules himself, to decide for himself what the moral order – the proper order of being – should be.
• Pleasure and/or power, when raised to the highest position in the hierarchy of aims, assure tyranny and chaos.
• The feminine capacity for tolerance and compassion should not be the basis for the moral order because on its own, it leads to dependency, infantilism, and the arrogance that comes with a sense of moral superiority.
• The masculine capacity to order and categorize the world is no better; on its own, it leads to overreach, boastful narcissism, and violation of the implicit moral order established by God.
• Each form of pride leads to the fall into sin, the missing of the mark.

2. Adam, Eve, Pride, Self-consciousness, and the Fall

• What does the prohibition against eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil mean? “That which is necessarily and inevitably axiomatic – that on which everything else depends – is to be touched at great peril.” Why? Because what is foundational offers protection against both chaos and the tyranny of excessive order.
• “do not touch what necessarily must remain sacred.”
• Morality is not a matter of human judgment.
• The serpent in the garden is the pride that wishes to usurp the place of God.
• All too often, compassion today is used to elevate the moral status of the speaker; it is a means of claiming unearned virtue and attention.
• The parallel temptation for man is to claim that he can master and subdue anything, no matter how overreaching.
• The “knowledge” imparted by eating the fruit “refers to the complete mastery that would allow for what is good and evil to be fashioned, altered, and defined by human design.” Man is not the source of value and should never claim to be.
• Whenever catastrophe hits, we can’t help asking whether we could have avoided it had we made the proper sacrifices. Who knows? The best any of us can do is acknowledge that the burden is all on us – “with God as guide.”

3. Cain, Abel, and Sacrifice

• The sacrifice required of you is proportionate to the gifts bestowed on you.
• Unlike Cain, you must give your best, withhold nothing.
• “Life more abundant requires total and complete commitment, no matter what your circumstances.”
• There is an implicit moral order and it is not up to humans to “usurp the right to create that order.”
• “It is … the deepest of moral requirements to hold life and God to be good – no matter what.” Facing certain death and seeing devastation everywhere, we find this very hard to do, but it must be done, nevertheless.
• “It is much better even under conditions of extreme and apparently unjust suffering to reaffirm our commitment to life more abundant and to undergo the changes necessary to bear our terrible cross.”
• The redeeming promise it that God abides with us in our suffering and confrontation with evil.
• Try not to make things worse by giving in to anger, resentment, vengefulness, etc. this was Cain’s path.
• “When terrible things happen …, faith, humility, courage despite all … constitute the best path forward.” Take the path of Job, not Cain.

4. Noah: God as the Call to Prepare

• The cumulative wisdom of mankind is ignored at our peril.
• The story of Noah tells us what happens when we “abandon and betray the spirit that makes for life more abundant because (we) are wallowing undeservedly in wealth and material comfort left for (us) left (by those who have come before us).” Chaos and destruction (the flood) ensues.
• When the murderous, resentment-driven rage of the Cains of the world rules, a flood of destruction follows.
• A man like Noah, “aiming at what is highest and concentrating on the truth, instead of focusing on and promoting his own self-centered interest, lacks self-consciousness because what he is attending to is not about him.”
• Lies can “work” – get you what you want – in the short term but not long run.
• Solzhenitysn: :” … the most important thing in life: to live and to create out of one’s own truth, or one’s own chaos … even if it is only a single word or a single vision. For we are each of us inevitably heroes of our own lives, and if we are not, then we have missed the whole point of our existence.”
• “… the salvation of the world itself depends in some impossible and mysterious fashion on the determination of each sovereign individual, touched by the spirit of divine worth, to dwell within the garden of the truth and to allow the voice and the will of the God he walks with … to guide his attention, actions, and utterance.”
• The most subtle form of self-deception and deceiving others is lying by omission.

5. The Tower of Babel: God versus Tyranny and Pride

• What the Tower of Babel represents: empire and the presumption of empire; arrogance in tandem with technological might; the confusion that prevails when psyche and society have gone astray.
• The Tower story is all about the temptations and dangers of hubris and misguided ambition.
• “The true hero is he who defeats the tyrant of the state.”
• God warns: Don’t replace me with worship of your own pride and power because all hell is bound to break loose if you do.
• “The fundamental enemy of stable, harmonious being and productive becoming is precisely that which tempts us to presume (the right to question or establish the most basic of moral truths), by appealing to the most powerful, prideful desire of all: the wish to replace or become God himself.”
• Cain makes this mistake by setting himself up as the absolute judge of being.

6. Abraham: God as Spirited Call to Adventure

• In establishing a covenant with God, Abram swears in essence to live by the truth, accepting whatever happens in consequence. That is the adventure of life.
• Themes for living well: maximal responsibility and voluntarily accepted sacrifice
• To deny oneself is to forgo immediate gratification. To pick up the cross means to voluntarily face the reality of mortality and malevolence and to struggle uphill nonetheless.
• You must leave the comforts of your tent and journey out into the world.
• Faith is indicated by action.
• Where dragons lurk, there always is treasure to be found.
• “Abundance is dependent on truly courageous moral action; on genuine faith and forthrightness.”
• Satan is always standing at the crossroads.
• God rejects Cain’s second-rate sacrifices. Cain then has a choice: straighten up and fly right – strive to build a relationship with God – or wallow in resentment and bitterness.
• “there is an intrinsic moral order and its violation will result in punishment.”
• The moral of the story of Lot’s wife: “do not look back at what you have left behind once you have learned to look forward in a better direction.”
• Even renewed, you probably will find yourself haunted by the ghosts of your previous self.
• The moral of Abraham’s willingness to offer Isaac as a sacrifice: All things no matter how valuable must be offered up to God.
• It is love of money, not money itself, that is the impediment to climbing Jacob’s ladder.
• Everything in their proper place.
• The eventual reward is proportional to the sacrifice. “there is literally nothing more practical than the proper sacrifices to what is highest.”
• “What is first must come first.”

7. Moses 1: God as Dreadful Spirit of Freedom

• God presents himself as the ultimate ground of reality.
  • How could reality be a plurality without dissolving into warring chaos.
  • Organization by the Subsidiarity principle: the distribution of responsibility down the social hierarchy to every level of community. This is the only alternative to the Scylla of tyranny or the Charybdis of chaos.
  • People lie either for undeserved gain or to evade responsibility.
  • The revelation of truth often makes things worse in the short run.
  • What replaces tyranny is chaos – uncertainty and directionlessness.
  • An interlude in the desert follows an escape from tyranny. Sacrifice first –[giving up destructive habits], a sojourn in the wilderness — is necessary before reaching the promised land.
  • “God presents himself as what should properly lead those who are adrift, right on the brink of the wilderness; who are standing on the line between the order that has rigidified into tyranny and the chaos of the wasteland….”
  • “The spirit we most truly call upon is inevitably the spirit that emerges to guide us.”

8. Moses II: Hedonism and Infantile Temptation

• Social agreement from consensus, not centered around the staff of tradition, can and usually does lead to hedonistic anarchism.
• Moses sometimes succumbs to the temptation to use power when invitation and discussion might suffice.
• Neither idiotic tolerance nor repression work.
• People become what they practice.
• Our perceptions are shaped by our intentions and aims.
• Every ideal is inescapably a judge.
• “If what is highest is not imitated and worshipped, things either fall apart, as everything vies for predominance and confusion reigns, or something that is not meet is elevated to the status of God. Either way, all hell is liable to break loose.”
• “If such warning reflects reality, in that there are indeed the harshest of consequences for the sins of pride, resentment, rebellion, usurpation, and deceit, why should warning against them be regarded as cruel?”
• “Hedonic anarchy requires regulation by the terrible father, the tyrant.
• “The “cruelty” of God is much better understood as the inevitable consequence of sin, voluntarily taken. This is the sin that is the result of Cain’s endlessly destructive adoption of the stance of resentful victimization.”
• “When the marginal claims to be central, it is not the center that collapses into destruction but the unrighteous themselves.”
• “There is no situation that some stupid son of a bitch cannot make yet worse. And that means you – and me.”
• “Voluntary confrontation with what is most frightening and repellent provides the riches that never cease.”
• An alternative interpretation of the God of the Old Testament: not a vengeful, genocidal tyrant, but one who warns over and over that certain outcomes are inevitable, given “His insistence that nothing and no one except Him is to be elevated to the status of the highest place. If everything necessarily and inescapably tumbles into the abyss when certain strictures are violated, is it not an act of mercy, not of malevolence, to indicate precisely that beforehand?”
• “It is the eternal hope of the religious striver that those who formulate a covenant with what is highest and divine will also become precisely those who are wise.”

9. Jonah and the Eternal Abyss

• If evil is real, then so is its opposite.
• Are we not co-creators perhaps of heaven itself. We can certainly create hell alone.
• “Jonah’s story is a warning. Pick up your damn cross and bear it or face the consequences.”
• “Faith is the courage to determine and maintain stalwart and upward aim at the good, even in the midst of hell.”
• “There is no difference between the silence of the good and the victory of the authoritarian and evil.”
• The story of man, woman, and God is not one of power but of voluntary sacrifice that leads us upward, provided we can keep faith.

 

Conclusion

• In consequence of the pride both man and woman fall according to the temptation specific to each sex, which arises from their own unique strength. “in the case of woman, the capacity to care and nurture; in the case of man, the passion to understand and master the things of the world.
• The Tower of Babel is a monument to the pride and self-aggrandizement of the tyrant who wants to take the place of what is transcendentally foreign.
• Aim up as far as you can conceive.
• Nothing whatever, no matter its value, is to be held in reserve. Everything, particularly that which is most loved, is to be sacrificed to what is yet higher – and in consequence that everything so offered will be retained.
• “We are by necessity those who wrestle with God. If we do that while gazing heavenward, we can align ourselves with the reality that is eternal.”
• Time to re-establish our covenant with God.