What Do I Do With What I Know?

 At this stage of my life, I am desperately trying to find ways to get rid of all the things I've spent my life collecting, so ordering a hard back book is last on my list of priorities. Nevertheless, last week, I found myself intrigued by a book reviewed by Bishop Barron's website, Word on Fire.  The more I read, the more I felt that this was a book I needed to read.

The book arrived yesterday, and I started reading it at 4:00 am today.  Rarely have I read a book that leads me into deep contemplation after four pages, but Jordan Peterson, God, and Christianity: The Search for a Meaningful Life by Christopher Kaczor and Matthew Petrusek has done exactly that.  Now, the question arises, "What do I do with what I know?"  or put another way, "How shall I pour out upon the world all the riches I have been given?"  It is agonizing to have received so much wisdom and joy and have to contain it without saying to someone else, "See, Look at all this overflowing bounty!  Don't you want to enjoy it too?"  Now I kind of know how Adam felt in such a rich and beautiful garden and having no one with whom to say, "Isn't it gorgeous?"  "Isn't that a queer looking animal?"  "Isn't that a funny, or touching, or gentle creature?"  Or, "What has Yahweh said to you lately?"

From the opening paragraph of this book, I discovered that it has been my misfortune to never have heard of Jordan Peterson:

The most influential biblical interpreter in the world today is not a pastor, a Scripture scholar, or a bishop.  He's a Canadian clinical psychologist with no formal training in biblical studies and no church membership.  Jordan Peterson's immensely popular YouTube series, The Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories (which has more than eight million views of the first video alone), offers a complex and wide-ranging psychological analysis of the book of Genesis -- the stories of creation, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and the flood, the call of Abraham, and more. This series has captured the imagination of committed atheists who rave online about the wisdom Peterson has shown them in the Bible. Countless people, believers and religiously unaffiliated "nones" alike, report that their lives have been changed for the better by this work of explicating some of the oldest stories in human history.

Evidently, Peterson approaches his overall analysis of Scripture under the headings of evolutionary, psychoanalytic, literary, moral, practical, rational, and phenomenological. According to Christopher Kaczor's commentary on Peterson, "science tells us what is the case, and the text of Genesis is telling us what ought to be the case.  Genesis encapsulates in narrative form what a successful human being embodies in action....Science is theoretical; the stories of faith are practical" (p. 5).

Peterson believes that Scripture is an unimaginably ancient and profound source of wisdom refined through the ages from the collective human imagination...Any story retold for thousands of years captures something enduring about the human condition.  The biblical text is cross-referenced with itself such that one verse can be used to understand another verse. (See page 7).

Jordan Peterson makes use of any and all available human knowledge to illuminate the text of Scripture.  Benedict XVI took a similar approach when he said, "...whatever we learn about the created order can shed light on Scripture, and whatever we find in Scripture can shed light on the created order....To live a faith that comes from the "Logos," from creative reason, is to be also open to all that is truly rational." 

So far, I've read one chapter of this book and I'm ready to wave it in the face of everyone I know. But maybe the best place to begin is to open Jordan's YouTube series and become more familiar with his approach to what the Bible can tell us about ourselves.