There is a peculiar sort of man who spends his entire life walking steadily toward a door he dare not enter. His steps are sincere. His gaze is fixed. His intentions are wholly earnest. But when he reaches the threshold, when the latch is before him and his hand is inches from it, he hesitates. Not because he doubts what lies on the other side, but because he fears that stepping through will undo him.
Dr. Jordan B. Peterson is such a man.
For nearly a decade now, Peterson has made a remarkable public pilgrimage toward Christianity. He circles its doctrines with a seriousness that puts many believers to shame. He speaks of Christ with awe. He praises the Gospels as the bedrock of Western civilization. He affirms, quite openly, that Jesus is the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets, and that, were we to have a camera inside the tomb on Easter morning, we would see Him walk out of it. He makes every confession a believer makes, except…
Ask him whether he believes in God, and the calm professor is replaced by a man suddenly scrambling to interrogate the definition of the word “believe,” as though the English language itself were a trap laid before him. On any other topic, he offers beliefs freely and with authority. On this one alone, he retreats into tortured semantics, circling the word “believe” as if it were an explosive device.
This is not intellectual caution. It is existential fear. Panic, even.
Peterson is not held back by the typical skeptic’s objections; not by science, nor miracles, nor metaphysics. His problem is not that Christianity is too incredible for the intellect, but that it is too costly for the self. He has followed his understanding faithfully to the very brink of faith, the final step overturns everything he thought he understood.
In this, he resembles C.S. Lewis in the years before his conversion. Lewis, too, found himself dragged “kicking and struggling” toward belief, not because he lacked evidence, but because he could see the personal implications with terrifying clarity. One does not become a Christian as one becomes a mathematician: incrementally, through effort. One becomes a Christian by surrender, and surrender is precisely the point at which the self revolts.
Peterson’s dilemma is therefore the oldest dilemma in the Christian story: “Whoever would save his life will lose it.” He is, in a very literal sense, afraid of losing his life; not his biological life, but the psychological edifice he built brick by brick to keep himself from falling into chaos.
That self is no small accomplishment. Peterson’s public persona, the disciplined man who sorted his soul with reason, order, and courage, was not purchased cheaply. He wrestled for it, suffered for it, nearly died for it. And Christianity, quite alarmingly, demands that he place this very self upon the altar. Not because it is bad, but because it cannot reign. Not because God despises his intellect, but because the intellect is not large enough to hold God.
Here we see the “offense” of Christianity that Søren Kierkegaard warned about. The stumbling block is not doctrine; it is pride. Not foolishness of ideas, but the affront to that deepest part of us that insists on being the author of its own story, and that after decades of meticulous penmanship, it is to be tossed into the fireplace. Kierkegaard saw that the greatest obstacle to faith was not irrationality, it was the self’s refusal to be dethroned.
Paul said the same thing in starker terms. “The cross,” he wrote, “is foolishness to those who are perishing.” Not foolish because it lacks sense, but because it assaults the one faculty human beings adore above all others: our own sufficiency. The cross says to the wise man, “Your wisdom cannot save you.” It says to the heroic man, “Your courage cannot justify you.” It says to the self-made man, “The self you have made is the self you must relinquish.” Christianity is not the story of a man climbing a mountain; it is the story of God coming down the mountain because the man could not climb it at all.
No wonder Peterson pulls back.
Peterson’s Jungian leanings worsen his predicament. For Carl Jung, Christ is an archetype: a symbol the psyche integrates into its structure. But Christianity does not permit this maneuver. Christ cannot be “integrated,” because Christ is not a pattern. He is a Person. And a Person may be loved, obeyed, rejected, or ignored, but never absorbed. Christ does not become part of your story; He either replaces your story, or He remains outside it.
This is the point where Peterson reaches for escape. He accepts Christ as the incarnation of the Logos, but quickly asks, “But what does that mean?” It is not the meaning that eludes him. It is the implication. What he is really asking is: How do I reconcile this with the self I have built? How do I admit that the intellect that carried me this far cannot carry me beyond this point?
Here he is trapped in a circularity of his own construction. His intellect has led him to the truth of Christ, but the truth of Christ demands the surrender of the intellect’s throne. And so the intellect doubles back upon itself, as though further thought might undo the need for surrender, and return his feet to firmer, familiar ground.
The psychological mechanics are easy enough to understand. A man who has saved himself through heroic effort does not easily believe in being saved by Another. A man who forged his identity through order and reason does not lightly relinquish that identity in exchange for a new one, especially one so inimical to him. A man who has spent his life interpreting the Scriptures does not easily accept that the Scriptures now interpret him.
There is also, I think, a bit of a group identity crisis at play here. A man who has built his career and identity as a scientist, one who has made his living in the clean, well-lit world of data, evidence, and natural law, does not easily join we silly folks who profess the supernatural. To him, embracing Christianity would mean abandoning a lifetime of intellectual liberation and supremacy, only to be lumped in with we uneducated, intellectually backward simpletons. The mere thought of this triggers his tortured mind to scream “I don’t belong here!”, like a new prisoner arriving at Shawshank, as though conversion were not entering freedom but surrendering it.
The irony of all this, and perhaps why Peterson is stuck in purgatory at the moment, is that Christianity asks that we reject the world, and that’s usually the greatest obstacle. But in Peterson’s case, the world has already rejected him. Academia has banished him. He will never be allowed to re-enter through the world’s gates, so long as he remains true to himself. Yet neither can he enter the Gates of Heaven without accepting that his intellect, which has brought him so far, is now holding him back.
And yet, and yet, and yet… If only he could see that while Christianity requires us to abandon ourselves, it allows us to become the truest expression of ourselves. We do not abandon the intellect in favor of the irrational; we abandon it in favor of wisdom and enlightenment. We do not abandon purpose in favor of servitude; we embrace servitude to achieve our highest purposes.
In the end, he is not struggling with the question of whether Christianity is true. He is struggling with the question of whether he can allow himself to be remade by that truth—whether he can bear the self-death that Christianity demands before it grants rebirth. It is one thing to admire Christ, to analyze Him, even to affirm Him. It is another thing entirely to say, with Paul, “I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.”
Paul once said that he “died daily,” as though the Christian life were not a single surrender but a continual one. And again: “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come.” This, I suspect, is the transformation Peterson fears most of all. He imagines that becoming a new creation means losing the self he painstakingly built, when in fact it means discovering the self he was always meant to be. It is the fear of the caterpillar who cannot imagine the butterfly. The caterpillar knows only crawling, and the cocoon feels like burial. The tearing, the dissolving, the metamorphosis—none of it can seem pleasant from the inside. But on the far side of that death waits flight. No creature in nature is more gloriously different from what it was than the butterfly is from the worm.
Peterson fears that Christianity will diminish him, when in truth it would remake him. He fears that he will be stripped of reason, when in fact he would be crowned with wisdom. He fears that he will lose himself, when in fact he would, for the first time, truly find himself. The old must go; the new must come. And though the chrysalis feels like a tomb, every Christian knows what emerges from it. The fear is real, but so is the liberation. And if Peterson ever takes that final step through the doorway he has paced before for so long, he will discover that the thing he feared losing was never the thing God meant him to keep, and the thing God plans to give him is more glorious than he has yet imagined.
I once saw Dr. Peterson on his “We Who Wrestle With God” tour. He wrestled magnificently. I can only pray that, like Jacob, he will one day cease wrestling and finally embrace the One who has been wrestling with him all along. God won’t give him peace until then. He loves him too much to let him go.
