On this week’s episode of “The Ben Shapiro Show, Sunday Special,” psychologist and bestselling author Jordan B. Peterson discusses the Bible and how biblical truths can inform our lives with Daily Wire editor emeritus Ben Shapiro.
Peterson joined Shapiro to discuss his forthcoming book, “We Who Wrestle With God: Perceptions of the Divine,” which hits shelves Tuesday. The book is a “riveting” new look at the Bible that “analyzes the Biblical accounts of rebellion, sacrifice, suffering, and triumph that stabilize, inspire, and unite us culturally and psychologically.”
A clinical psychologist, Peterson approaches the Bible both “scientifically and spiritually,” offering new insights into well-known biblical stories like that of Cain and Abel, the Tower of Babel, and Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt.
Peterson argues that the Bible is a story of sacrifice, which he holds up as the proper model for human life. Peterson holds the biblical narrative up in contradistinction to the “self-defeating” story around which people frequently order their lives, one of “hedonistic self-gratification or nihilistic collapse.”
“There’s no difference between work and sacrifice, because work is the sacrifice of the future to story, the sacrifice of the present to the future and the sacrifice of the narrow self to the community,” Peterson told Shapiro.
“If it’s all about me in the most narrow way, then there’s no community, right? There’s only the immediate gratification of my whim…and I have to impose those whims on other people using power, because they’re not going to cooperate voluntarily if it’s all about me.”
Shapiro noted that the “place where you most obviously make your first sacrifice is in marriage, where you sacrifice your interest to the interests of something larger. And then the place where you make your second sacrifice is when you start to have children.”
“It’s not a giant surprise that a society that refuses to see the story of humanity as a story of sacrifice, refuses the sacrifices themselves,” Shapiro said. “That makes a lot of sense that people aren’t getting together, people aren’t actually getting married, people aren’t having babies, because the minute you start to live that sacrifice, it becomes impossible to unsee.”
This is a topic which Peterson and Shapiro have frequently discussed, including earlier this year on Peterson’s podcast.
But the pair also broke considerable new ground on The Sunday Special, as Peterson delved into the ontological nature of the God of Abraham.
“The God in the Old Testament, and the New, for that matter, is ineffable,” Peterson said. “God isn’t real the same way a table is real, right?”
“I think it’s more definitive in the Old Testament account that whatever God is, is beyond categorization. This is why even Moses can only get a glimpse of God. So, God is outside our category structures.”
“Now does that make him real? Well, I would say God is hyperreal,” Peterson asserted. “God is the reality upon which all reality depends. That’s a different kind of category. And it’s not exactly comprehensible.”
Peterson, who has long drawn on biblical stories in his writings and lectures, takes his exegesis to the next level in “We Who Wrestle With God,” as well as in his forthcoming series “The Gospels,” which will be available to stream on DailyWire+ December 1.
You can pre-order “We Who Wrestle With God” from The Daily Wire shop or Amazon.