Overview
To a Christian, Christ is synonymous with Jesus. To Jordan Peterson Christ represents a process and the New Testament a description of that process. A. Believer’s Jordan B. Peterson’s Christ Revealed is a thought-provoking book that explores Peterson’s conception of Christ.
The book examines the most significant characteristics of Christ described in Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, Jordan Peterson’s magnum opus and the wellspring of his better-known books 12 Rules for Life and Beyond Order. These characteristics that make up Peterson’s conception of Christ are scattered throughout Maps of Meaning in a way reminiscent of how Osiris’ body is dismembered and scattered in the underworld. In Jordan B. Peterson's Christ Revealed, the author gathers these pieces together in order to render Peterson’s conception of Christ visible.
Moreover, there is far more to the book. The author skillfully weaves Jordan Peterson’s abstract ideas, which are drawn from various sources, into his own personal story. Using his own life as an example, the author brings to life all of Jordan Peterson’s most fundamental ideas, allowing the reader to apprehend and appreciate the significance of Jordan Peterson’s conception of Christ as well as its relevance to the current hour in the history of Western civilization.
The book is a must-read for anyone interested in exploring the interplay of science, theology, and psychology and the value of the individual, no matter how seemingly insignificant.
Description
This book brings to life the principle described by Jesus when he said, “I praise You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because You have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children.” Jordan Peterson, a man the New York Times describes as “The most influential public intellectual in the Western world right now” clearly falls in the category of the wise and learned. Our other, by comparison, is but an intellectual child. Despite this disparity in intellectual stature, however, our author is allowed to see something that Peterson has been kept from seeing for decades now. More precisely our author has discovered the very thing that Peterson set out to find. This book is a demonstration of the veracity of this claim, the discovery itself, and the journey that led to it.
In the introduction to 12 Rules for Life Dr. Norman Doidge correctly asserts that “One of the many virtues of the book you are reading now is that it provides an entry point into Maps of Meaning, which is a highly complex work”. Maps of Meaning, Jordan Peterson’s magnum opus is indeed highly complex, and, for that reason, it’s likely few have either the time – the audiobook, read by Peterson himself, is over 30 hours long - or the capacity to plumb its depths and mine its riches. To understand Maps of Meaning is to understand Jordan Peterson and our author felt driven to understand Jordan Peterson to make sense of what he perceived as a very strange anomaly, a truly scientific mind that honored and valued Scripture. He writes “I spent an inordinate amount of time, over a period of about a year, immersed in Maps of Meaning and through this prolonged exercise I became very familiar with Jordan Peterson's ideas.”
Through this exercise, the author recognized that Peterson set a very clear and specific target for himself in Maps of Meaning. That target, in Peterson’s language, boils down to an “explicit declaration of that which Christ represents.” Following the principle of The Divinity of Interest described in Maps of Meaning, our author’s interest was drawn to explore the question, “Who is Christ to Jordan Peterson?” This exploration soon required the question be revised to, “What is Christ to Jordan Peterson?” as it became obvious that Jordan Peterson’s conception of Christ did not point to a person but to something, well, something quite abstract.
In Maps of Meaning, Christ has many facets, as it were, but these facets are scattered throughout the book. Our author has painstakingly gathered those pieces together and organized them for us in order to assemble a unified sketch from the disparate parts. Through the use of this sketch, the author enables the reader to see what Jordan Peterson was aiming for as well as establishing the fact that he fell from hitting his mark. This language of falling short of hitting the mark is one that Peterson uses in Beyond Order, where he discusses the concept of sin. There he observes that the word sin has its roots in the Greek term “harmatia” which “was originally an archery term, and it meant to miss the mark or target.”
Jordan Peterson has sinned, has fallen short of hitting the target he clearly delineated in Maps of Meaning. In hitting that target, the author enables the reader to see not just how close Peterson came to hitting his target, but just as importantly, he makes visible the immeasurable distance by which Peterson fell short of doing so. In this way, the reader is left with a fairly objective measure of the magnitude of Jordan Peterson’s “sin.” With the target in plain sight, the reader can determine for himself the likelihood that Peterson would have ever hit it. What’s more, in hitting the target himself, the author bridges that gap, fully making up for Peterson’s falling short. This book, then, is about atonement for sin, and more particularly atonement for Jordan Peterson’s sin.
Finally, with Jordan Peterson’s conception of Christ out in the open, made visible or “revealed” in the sense that it has been made explicit, the reader can apprehend the significance of the discovery and how relevant it is to the current moment. Jordan Peterson’s conception of Christ is a truly revolutionary idea. That idea, like the ark that Noah built, may very well prove to be the means by which Western civilization escapes its current impending disintegration.
