Jordan Peterson As Avatar And Bridge to Faith

Tara Burton's piece on Jordan Peterson (no relation) in Religion News Service appeared just as I've started making my way through his YouTube series on the Bible (start here if you're interested).   

Burton covers some of the reasons why JP is in the news at the moment - the controversy inside Penguin Canada regarding the publication of his new book, his personal issues regarding addiction,  and his popularity with a largely male right wing fan base.

I don't have a huge amount of data points assembled on him yet, though as I get to know more about him, I am less interested in his status in the culture wars than I am in the way he points to the Bible as a profound source of meaning, even while refraining from making any theological truth claims for it.

I'm interested in how a professor of psychology can command the attention of packed theatres to talk about the bible and meaning, in a way that most preachers would give a limb to be able to do.   Clearly there's a bridge between his work and Christianity, a bridge that people seem to be finding on their own, as I don't think JP's expressed goal is to be an evangelist of anything except a commitment to meaning, truth and freedom as he understands it.   As Peterson says in his first Bible video, "how do we live in the world properly" in a meaningful way that minimizes suffering and maximizes our good and the good of others is "the eternal question of human beings".

Others have described Peterson as a modern version of a Stoic moralist.  Does his brand of moralism appeal more to men than to women?  Burton writes that Peterson's "battle of good against evil pits brave truth-tellers such as himself against the insidious forces of the social-justice-industrial-complex, with his very person as both celebrity spokesperson and the commodity. His life is a fantasy of heroism for alienated young men encountering the fundamental brokenness of modern life, just as their feminist progressive counterparts are."

There may well be some truth in this final sentence about Peterson's appeal to younger men, something confirmed to me by friends and fellow clergy.   I have at least one dear friend who credits JP with bringing him to Christian faith, for which I'm profoundly grateful.   Paul Vanderklay, a Christian Reformed pastor with a substantial (for a pastor) YouTube following has done a lot of thinking about the connection between JP and faith, and has dialogued with a lot of younger men on this subject.  He's a good person to subscribe to on YT.

All of this to say that I'm deeply interested in JP within the parameters described above, and not that keen to get dragged into the culture wars.  Is that possible?  Watch this space.

Kenneth A. Briggs on the Vanishing Bible

An article in today's Religion News Service has me wanting to read Kenneth A. Briggs' new book on the diminishing place of the bible in North American Christianity, The Invisible Bestseller: Searching for the Bible in America (Eerdmans). 


In her article for RNS, reporter Emily McFarlane Millar describes what Briggs found as he was writing the book:


Along the way, he met a homiletics professor who encouraged her students to explore the text by exchanging roles with the characters in biblical accounts, and he came across professors at evangelical colleges surprised by how little their incoming students knew about the Bible. He attended a meeting of Bible promoters in Orlando, Fla., worried nobody was reading their tomes; the academic Society of Biblical Literature convention in Chicago; and a traditional Presbyterian church in Pennsylvania. He was deeply moved by his visit to a federal prison in upstate New York, where, he said, the inmates knew the Bible better than he did.


As a preacher in a liberal Protestant denomination, I have found I cannot take for granted that congregations have a working biblical literacy.   Thanks to the three year lectionary, they will probably know the core gospel readings, but most do not seem to know the grand lines of the biblical narrative, what Richard Hooker once called the "main drifts" of scripture.   By "grand lines" I mean covenant theology (old and new), the adoption of the gentiles into the chosen people, the relationship of Jesus to the prophets, or how Revelation concludes God's plan of redemption (as opposed to it being a book of predictions and prophecy).   It's difficult in a fifteen minute sermon to develop any of these ideas, especially if, as I am, one is an occasional preacher.


Bear in mind that I am speaking now of a dwindling group of churchgoing Anglicans who have been doing this, most of them, for a long time.   I am interested in knowing what the bigger picture is, according to Briggs, but I am sure it is not a pretty one.


I am not clever enough to point to all the reasons why the bible is fading from our consciousness.    I can guess at a few of them.  Within the church, I suspect it may be an erosion of belief in preaching among clergy, or a sense that it is not foremost among their priorities.   Most parishioners, I find, have low expectations of the sermon.  My late father once said that the sermon was a time when he could lightly close his eyes.


Among the culture as a whole, I suspect there is a widespread distrust in the bible as an archaic book of bronze age make believe.  Watch any half hour of the political comic Bill Maher on HBO and you will get this loud ad clear.  There is also a skein of post-modernity which distrusts narratives of authority, and easily deconstructs the bible as an arbitrarily compiled compendium of texts by the men who ran the church.  There is also a widespread and (I think, often justified) suspicion of Christian fundamentalists who use the bible in a highly selective way.   Fans of The West Wing will remember President Bartlett taking apart a fundamentalist evangelist by using the contradictions in her proof texts against her.


If you have read my sermons here on this blog, you will, I hope, agree with my assertion that I am a thoughtful preacher who approaches scripture carefully.   I try to be mindful of the strangeness of the bible, of its foreign and difficult nature, and I am often leery of it.  But, I am also enough of a follower of Karl Barth to agree that without this scripture, we only have our own ideas and constructs of God (which Barth dismissively referred to as religion) to fall back on.   Simply put, I can't know God except through the bible.  I would have nothing to say as a preacher without it.  I believe that the bible helps us to be human, and so I conclude these thoughts with some of Briggs' words in the RNS interview.


One thing we miss in this is the potential to enlarge our minds and hearts and spirits. I think the Bible is the springboard to opening all kinds of ideas, thoughts, beliefs about what our life is about. And I think without it, it narrows our perspective and gives us a much more truncated view of what the possibilities are. I don’t think we’re getting as much of the larger picture by avoiding the source that has been that pathway to all kinds of discovery. (It’s been the pathway to) entertaining most profound thoughts about what possibly we might belong to beyond ourselves or our immediate communities.

Ann Hornaday on Noah and On Being a Christian Film Critic

Noah says “Watch This Film!"

I posted something here recently on the Noah movie.   Despite what I said in that post about not going to see the film, I did see it last week, and am currently working on a paper about it for my grad course on secularism.  I’m still not sure what to think of the film, but I was impressed by this review by The Washington Post’s Ann Hornaday.

Here’s the executive summary of her review - not sure I agree 100%, but I think it’s fair.

"Like interpreters through the millennia, Aronofsky has taken Noah’s journey sincerely to heart, processed it through his own singular visual and moral imagination and come up with a narrative that feels deeply personal, broadly mythical and cannily commercial all at the same time. That feels just about right for “Noah,” which ultimately invites viewers to form their own meanings, whether they’re about sacrifice and obedience, stewardship and service or the enduring entertainment value of an epic ad­ven­ture that, thousands of years on, still manages to astonish."

I discovered Hornaday via a recent essay she wrote for WaPo about being a Christian film critic.  It’s a thoughtful essay, particularly about what makes a good (and bad) religious film.

Hopefully I’m not biased by learning that Ms. Hornaday is, like me, an Anglican, and that a work day for her might include doing Oscar interviews and then taking home communion to a shut-in parishioner.

The Bible For A New Generation

Wow, Adam was not only in the buff, he was pretty buff! Who knew?

I'm not convinced that there has been a good television miniseries since Roots, but I am interested in a forthcoming ten-hour series, "The Bible", coming to The History Channel. This review, in today's New York Times, suggests that the producers have thought carefully about their subject, "the grand sweeping embrace, the love story that is the Bible.” I confess I'm also looking forward to seeing the martial arts angel.