Generally speaking, there are two main methods of interpreting the Bible today. One is to see it as a book of mostly myths that convey truth about God and humanity. Putting it very crudely, I find this approach generally lacks respect for the text (I have very little time for people who don't respect their subject matter, because they operate from a position of pride and are therefore blind to its merits) and tends, in practice, to ignore stuff that isn't 'nice' (as defined by the fashions of the day). This approach is selective, taking whatever the author thinks to be truth and separating it from backwardness and barbarism; it is arbitrary and thus fragmentary.
The second approach is literalistic, and though this often professes respect for the text, it largely ignores meanings that go beyond an account of what happened. This is also fragmentary; there is no way to make the stories hang together. Things just happened that way and that's the way it is!
Peterson has great respect for the Bible, because he sees it as the distilled wisdom of centuries of human experience in a harsh and very difficult world. (That last point is something evangelicalism doesn't understand, no matter how many songs about going through water they produce. The other day I saw a standard Protestant objection to Lent, that it's too glum and it's gospel time now, so everything should be yay! My response to that is that clearly the world isn't operating on that principle, and happy-clappy gospel news makes zero sense of suffering. It's just therapy to get me through the week. The gospel makes no promises about taking away suffering, in fact, it promises that Christians will suffer. A season of Lent would at least indicate that the church is aware of the suffering present in this life. This is why I hate CCM music so much. I can't bring myself to sing some of it; it depresses me. I would be an atheist by now if my faith depended on music, because it is sentimental to the point of being several galaxies away from reality. This indicates to me that perhaps their theology doesn't pay much attention to how this world is put together.) Peterson does not take the Bible as necessarily literal, and even when it is, that's not the main point, because he sees its primary purpose as illustrating the ethical world. Why does that message resonate today?
To understand why, we need to look at one of the largest problem today, that of a lack of things that let us orient ourselves. T.S. Eliot describes Western civilisation as a wasteland, littered with fragments of bygone eras (the poem famously shows this by being written in a fragmented form). Yet, he says, we now wander through this land looking for something to drink:
If there were water
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water
By the by, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs wonderfully illustrates the lines above, culminating in a hair-raising final scene, where there is no longer any uncertainty about what is.
This is my experience of my culture. It is as if someone has taken a hammer and delivered a shattering blow to the statue of my culture, splintering it from top to bottom, leaving nothing whole, no tradition to grasp, no truth to hold, no place to set your feet. This is also my experience of Christian theology: pieces of doctrine, fragments of tradition, individual preferences, a gospel dissociated from the context of the Bible, disinterest in the particulars of the Bible's text, a therapeutic "Jesus loves you" pat on the head, no thread tying it all together.
[To digress slightly, we can ask what are they leaving out? Why can't they make everything hang together? To tie everything together, you need some framework that gets at the fundamentals of reality. The Bible is intended to at least do that.
There are two primary dimensions to our experience of this world: space and time. Each of these has two directions: past and present, inside and outside (we experience space as either internal or external to ourselves). This describes how we interact with the world and (potentially) has nothing to do with physics.
The past is associated with what has happened. This is the literal sense of the text. This is either truth or lies. The transcendental Truth is associated with this dimension.
The inside is associated with how we are to understand what has happened, what it means. This is the allegorical sense of the text. We either see clearly, or we do not. The transcendental Beauty is associated with this dimension.
The outside is associated with how we act in the world. This is the moral sense. This is either chaos or order. The transcendental Goodness is associated with this dimension.
The future is associated with what end we are to aspire to - we do not act randomly, but head towards a goal. This is the tropological sense of the text. This is either heaven or hell. The three transcendentals are united and harmonised here.
Thus, this structure tells us what is, what it means, what we are to do given that knowledge and to what end we are to do it.
The liberal wing of Christianity generally emphasises only the allegorical sense of the text as relevant for our life, leaving the historical textual analysis to one side as an interesting curiosity. The fundamentalist wing of Christianity generally emphasises only the literal sense. Neither gets very close to the moral or tropological sense. Thus, they lack coherence when explaining how we are to interact with the universe. For instance, on the subject of traditional marriage, literalists can only say that's the way things are supposed to be, because that's the way God made it; while liberals object because traditional marriage is a historical artefact, and we must move beyond it. Neither is a substantial justification for their positions. This section depends heavily on an article by P. Leithart: https://theopolisinstitute.com/article/rehabilitating-the-quadriga/ end digression]
Peterson manages to connect all the stories because he does not say they are because they are, or that his interpretations are valid because they separate niceness from non-niceness. Neither approach is conducive to connecting things and suggests a theology fundamentally and radically underequipped to deal with the fragmented society in which we live.
Rather, he frames humanity as having acquired, over millions of years, ways to navigate through chaos and achieve order. Since we experience the fragmentation of western life as chaos, this message about how to achieve order is like water in a wilderness.
Comments
Post a Comment