Michael Gove Interviews Jordan Peterson on the Importance of Bible Stories
Why Should Anyone Read the Bible?
Michael Gove: In your book, We Who Wrestle With God, you work intimately with Bible stories to bring out their meaning, relevance, and importance. Why should anyone read the Bible?
Jordan Peterson: The simple answer is because you have to have your story straight or you go off course badly. One of the strange intellectual events in the past sixty years is that the presumptions of the Enlightenment have been demonstrated to be false. The empiricists, or really the data-oriented people, believed for a long time that we could arrange the world around us merely as a consequence of the facts. The problem with that presumption is that there are an infinite number of facts. If they just lie there, unorganized, value-free and in no hierarchy, they can’t serve as a guide. You have to organize them and prioritize them in your attention and your actions. A description of the way facts are prioritized — that is a story. This is a revolutionary realization because it means “the story” is inescapable. The postmodernists concluded, erroneously and precipitously, that the story that orients us is one of power. That’s wrong because power is an unstable basis for psychological integration and for social unity. Biblical stories make the insistence that the fundamental story is one of unity and also one of voluntary sacrifice. That is a very different story than that of power or its twin, a kind of demented hedonism, which also leads to psychological and social disintegration.
The Unique Power of Biblical Stories
Michael Gove: Some would argue that if you engage with Milton or Dostoyevsky or Victor Hugo, or with George Eliot or Jane Austen, that these authors tell compelling stories about unity and about how a moral life should be led. What is it that is unique about the Bible that means it contains within it stories that are more compelling and more powerful than even the richest voices in the Western canon?
Jordan Peterson: One very straightforward answer is the primacy of position. The deeper an idea is in a given culture, the more other ideas are predicated on it. All the people you described were intimately familiar with the biblical writings, and their worldview was shaped in the finest details by them. If you read all the great texts in the Western canon except the Bible you’d pretty much be able to fill in all the gaps. First of all, 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 the third claim is that the unity can be characterized. The Bible is a sequence of characterizations of 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.
Importance of Old Testament Stories
Michael Gove: In We Who Wrestle with God, you look particularly closely at the Old Testament. Generally in modern discourse when people respectfully refer to the Bible from outside the Christian church, they tend to look to the Gospel and to St. Paul for contemporary moral lessons. Why do you think it’s important to look closely at the Old Testament from the perspective of someone who is outside the church?
Jordan Peterson: The Old Testament stories lay the foundation for the deep understanding of the message that’s encapsulated in the New Testament. Christ himself said that he was the embodiment of the law and the prophets. It’s a remarkable thing for anyone to say. On the face of it, it’s utterly preposterous. But that preposterousness is belied by its simultaneous brilliance. It means there’s a spirit that operates in the Old Testament cultures that gives rise to the law, and that law and spirit is a reflection of this underlying unity which is embodied in the ultimate self-sacrifice of Christ. You can’t understand any of that unless you know the Old Testament stories.
Reflection on Personal Beliefs
Michael Gove: Would you call yourself a Christian? And if not, why not?
Jordan Peterson: I would say in the deepest sense, yes. But I’m not a typical Christian because I’m striving for understanding above all. I suppose people might pillory me as agnostic, but that’s not true because I don’t believe that the proper relationship between this underlying unity and myself would be established as a consequence of intellectual conquest. I’m a new kind of Christian. How about that?
Current Political Landscape
Michael Gove: What are your reflections on the political trends in the New World — in the US and in Canada — and what about the situation that we find ourselves in in the Old World?
Jordan Peterson: I pray there’s still some residual leadership lurking in the dark heart of the decimated Democrats and that one of them will step forward as a genuine leader to help them shed their obsession with the radical utopian left. The Democrats I’ve met have no imagination for evil. They’ve allowed themselves to be devoured by the scuttling monsters of the diverse left. I’m pretty happy with the transformation in leadership in the United States, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t go sideways if it wasn’t opposed by a credible opposition. The UK had better get its act together. I’m hoping it does because the world would be much less without the UK and without Europe.
This interview sheds light on the deep meaning and significance of Bible stories, the importance of understanding the Old Testament, and Jordan Peterson’s unique perspective on religious beliefs and political landscapes across the world.