The person most responsible for reintroducing God and the Bible into mainstream secular culture today is not a pastor, a Scripture scholar, or a bishop, but a psychology professor with no church membership.
Jordan Peterson’s lectures and writings on psychology, philosophy, and religion have been a cultural phenomenon, attracting tens of thousands to arenas and millions to his social media sites, and prompting many to leave behind secularism and reconsider Christianity.
Yet Peterson’s own thought is marked by a tensive suspension between archetype and reality—between the ideal of Christ and the God who acts in history. When asked if he himself is a believer, Peterson responds, “I try to live as if God exists.” More recently, in the wake of great personal suffering, Peterson’s wrestling with the figure of Christ and, in his own wording, the profoundly “sane” quality of Catholicism, has reached a kind of crescendo in both his life and work.
Jordan Peterson, God, and Christianity: The Search for a Meaningful Life is the first systematic analysis, from a Christian perspective, of both Peterson’s biblical series on YouTube and his bestselling book 12 Rules for Life, with an epilogue examining its sequel, Beyond Order.
Christopher Kaczor and Matthew R. Petrusek draw readers into the depths of Peterson’s thought on Scripture, suffering, and meaning, exploring both the points of contact with Christianity and the ways in which faith fulfills Peterson’s project. Taking the “mere Christianity” of C.S. Lewis as its point of departure, Jordan Peterson, God, and Christianity is an indispensable analysis, not only for Christians hoping to better understand the significance of the Peterson phenomenon, but also for Peterson fans who are, perhaps for the first time in their lives, thinking seriously about what it might mean to believe.