SPEAKER_00

Jordan Peterson rose while surrounded by debaters on the University of Toronto campus.

SPEAKER_05

The presence of Nazis and white supremacists assaulting people at your protest. Do you have any comment on that? Yeah, I don't like Nazis.

SPEAKER_00

Has he now fallen surrounded by debaters on the Jubilee Channel? Have you seen this video? You're interested in Catholicism, aren't you?

SPEAKER_05

Sure. All right. Are you familiar with their doctrines? Somewhat? Okay. You're you're familiar with doctrines of video. How do they regard how do they regard Mary? Why are you asking me that Because you're a Christian? You say that. I haven't claimed that. Oh, what is this? Is this Christians versus atheist? I don't know. You don't know where you are right now. Don't be a smart ass. Well, either you're a Christian or you're not. Oh, either you're a Christian or you're not. Which one is it?

SPEAKER_07

I could be either of them, but I don't have to take a view.

SPEAKER_05

You don't have to tell me. I was under the impression I was invited to talk to a Christian. Am I not talking to a Christian? No, you were invited to I think everyone should look at the title of the YouTube channel. You're probably in the wrong YouTube video. You're really quite something, you are.

SPEAKER_07

Okay, I'm done with him.

SPEAKER_00

But there were other moments like when this debater tried to pin Jordan Peterson down on whether he would lie to the Nazis about hiding some Jews in the basement.

SPEAKER_03

I'll give you an example. If you're like uh in like Nazi Germany and it is the case that there's like Jewish people in your attic and you're trying to protect them, would you lie to like the Nazis if you're not a big deal?

SPEAKER_07

I would have done everything I bloody well could so I wouldn't be in that situation to begin with. It's a hypothetical and it's not a good idea. No, I can't answer a hypothetical like that because it's look.

SPEAKER_03

Don't play games. I'm not playing games.

SPEAKER_07

If you present me with an intractable moral choice that's stripped of context and you back me into a corner, you're playing game.

SPEAKER_00

Tricky, right? And then there was this debater who towards the end of the video made some claims about Old Testament violence, and then they got onto the subject of freedom and whether we are in a causally determined universe. Um Jordan Peterson seems to kind of concede the entire debate uh during this little interchange.

SPEAKER_04

So God already knows in advance everything that's going to happen, which means that by making this world instead of that world, everything is inevitable, which means that God's act of causing this world instead of that world doesn't mean determined. It's causally inevitable if God chooses this world instead of that world. Causally determined. Causally inevitable means determined. No one doesn't. Absolutely, yes, it does.

SPEAKER_07

Well, have it your way.

SPEAKER_00

So Jordan did not do great, but I don't think that's the reason why Christians might want to distance themselves from Jordan Peterson. We distance ourselves from him because he continually has distanced himself from Christianity, which is fine. That is his prerogative. But when he goes on to a debate channel and he is meant to play the part of a Christian, he should be a Christian. You might know that when the video was posted, the title was One Christian vs. Twenty Atheists. Within hours it was changed to Jordan Peterson versus twenty atheists, which puts Jordan Peterson in a category all by himself. And really that's where Jordan Peterson likes to be. Do you remember when Tammy Peterson got received into the Roman Catholic Church and there was a Catholic interviewer who was trying to pin Jordan down and invite him into church? Jordan was, as ever, very resistant.

SPEAKER_04

What is stopping you from embracing the fate of your wife?

SPEAKER_07

You mean all those pesky Catholics? I don't know if anything is stopping me.

SPEAKER_04

What's holding you back?

SPEAKER_07

I I don't think anything's holding me back. Everybody's got their own destiny. And so Is it in yours? Um Is it in mine? I would say it's unlikely.

SPEAKER_04

But why do you say unlikely?

SPEAKER_07

I exist on the borders of things.

SPEAKER_00

Jordan Peterson exists on the borders of things, and he likes to exist on the borders of things, and he will not be pinned down. On Surrounded, many, many debaters tried to pin him down, but none of them achieved it.

SPEAKER_06

In this setting, you understand the way I am using the term God and belief.

SPEAKER_07

Not in the least. I don't understand how you're using it in the least. That's why I'm trying to define it.

SPEAKER_00

Or this debate uh you yourself are a Christian, right?

SPEAKER_07

That's people debate about that, and I generally don't discuss it publicly.

SPEAKER_00

Well, this debate tried it.

SPEAKER_03

You're basing a position of morality and purpose in some like notion of God that isn't the same type of notion of God that typical Christians would prescribe. Your notion of God is what typical Christians? This debate also had a go.

SPEAKER_05

Either you're a Christian or you're not. Which one is it?

SPEAKER_07

I could be either of them, but I don't have to tell you.

SPEAKER_05

You don't have to tell me. I was under the impression I was invited to talk to a Christian. Am I not talking to a Christian?

SPEAKER_00

And the person who Jordan chose to pose to him a question at the end of the whole process, she had about five minutes trying to pin down Jordan Peterson on what he actually believed. And the sorts of things that Jordan Peterson says Christianity is reveals that Jordan Peterson is right not to call himself a Christian because what he says Christianity is ain't Christianity.

SPEAKER_01

What makes someone a Christian and what makes someone not a Christian? What makes like that's what I'm trying to figure out.

SPEAKER_07

That's a good question.

SPEAKER_01

Yes.

SPEAKER_07

Yeah, well, probably the deepest answer to that is willingness to shoulder your cross voluntarily and trudge uphill regardless of circumstances.

SPEAKER_00

What makes someone a Christian trudging uphill? Uh do you know the Greek myth of Sisyphus? Sisyphus, as judgment from the gods, is to push a boulder up a hill continually, and then the boulder falls down, and Sisyphus has to push it up and up and up and up. That's hell. Classically speaking, it is hell to trudge up hill with a weight. And yet Jordan Peterson says, the Christian life is to trudge up hill with a weight on your back. That is not Christianity. Now I'll grant you that there are many peddlers of Christian faith who want to bring you into that kind of slavery and who say that Christianity is trudging up a hill Sisyphus style, but that is a hellish gospel that is not Christianity proper. And when Jordan says he hesitates to call himself a Christian, I think other Christians should agree with him. We hesitate to call you a Christian if that's what you think Christianity is. Now Jordan invited that same debater back to pose to him a question.

SPEAKER_01

And her claim was Jordan Peterson's framework for understanding Christianity is probably not the one that the Bible intended us to use.

SPEAKER_00

Isn't that brilliant? Atheists are holding him to account and saying, Jordan Peterson, you speak on behalf of Christianity. Often we don't think you're getting Christianity right. And when the atheists say, Jordan Peterson, you're not getting Christianity right, and the Christians say, Jordan Peterson, you're not getting Christianity right, you're probably not getting Christianity right. And for five minutes, she presses Jordan Peterson on what his beliefs really are and whether they actually align with the faith that has been handed down to Christians over the centuries. Here's how that interaction went down.

SPEAKER_01

We need to know how we should interpret the things that the Bible says. And the the the things in many ways. Right, right.

SPEAKER_07

But like if we interpret sometimes poetry, sometimes history, sometimes facts.

SPEAKER_01

But for example, the reason why it's important, right? Very important, is because, for example, we can talk about something like God says, I believe it's like 1 Corinthians 15, 17, something about how belief in God specifically as someone who resurrected or as someone who died for our sins is important, right? But we have to look at, if we can interpret that as just like you have to believe that God is a symbol of sacrifice, that is different from believing that there was an actual person named Jesus Christ who died on the cross for our sins. So if you believe one and not the other, that can be the difference between you going to hell and you going to heaven. So if we cannot make like we we cannot say that we know whether or not certain historical facts in the Bible happen, like even as just like events, like because the events matter, because again, God dying for our sins on the cross was an event. If we can't say that we know these things happened, these things did or didn't happen, this then leads us to kind of like the conundrum of how do we know what we are meant to believe, what the Bible intended for us to believe, and this can be very, very important to like our fate. Do you see that?

SPEAKER_07

Yeah. I've got no disagreement with any of that.

SPEAKER_00

1 Corinthians 15 says that these are matters of first importance, that Christ died according to the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised again on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared. Those New Testament gospel events interpreted via the Old Testament scriptures are the matters of first importance in whether somebody is a Christian or not. The atheist debater seems to get this better than Jordan Peterson gets it. So then the question is, do we simply distance ourselves from Jordan Peterson and just have a kind of farewell Jordan Peterson moment? Well, before you conclude that, I want us to pay attention to something nobody is paying attention to as they do these reactions to the Jubilee debate. What nobody is saying is that the four claims that Jordan Peterson brings, the four arguments that he brings, are stellar. These are exactly the critiques we must make of post-Enlightenment Western society. The four claims that Jordan Peterson makes. Atheists reject God but they don't understand what they reject. Morality and purpose can't be found within science. Everybody worships something, including atheists, even though they might not know it. And atheists accept Christian morality but deny the source. These are brilliant critiques of the materialist scientistic worldview. Unfortunately, Jordan Peterson doesn't take any time to really defend those claims and to unpack them. So let me try to extract from his conversations the things that actually support these claims. And I think you'll see that they make a really compelling case against atheism. I don't think they make a case for Christianity, but they make a compelling case against atheism. Number one, atheists reject God, but they don't understand what they reject. This is what Christians are constantly saying. Jonathan Peugeot was always saying it. Bishop Tom Wright was always saying, I'm always saying it. If somebody tells me they don't believe in God, I always ask, which God don't you believe in? And they end up describing some kind of Zeus figure with a thunderbolt ready to hurl. And what do I say? I don't believe in that God either. I am an atheist as regards to the God of the common Western understanding of deity. That eminently rejectable God, I also disbelieve. Atheists reject God, but they don't understand what they reject. Jordan Peterson is 100% correct about that, and it is a brilliant and necessary claim to make against the atheistic worldview. The only problem is that Jordan Peterson does not understand what he affirms. So when Peterson unpacks what he means by the biblical gods, he goes to Moses in the cleft of the rock. Let's have a look.

SPEAKER_07

So despite the fact that Moses is a stellar character and he's had a long and difficult life and can withstand a lot of difficulty and travail, God puts him between two cliffs. So he can just see a crack of what's in front of him. And when God walks by, he allows him to see his back. Okay, so the implication and implication of that story is that the divine is fundamentally unknowable, it's a pinnacle experience, and that people in their finitude have to be shielded from a comprehensive vision of the basis of reality.

SPEAKER_00

Now in Exodus, there's this scene of the hidden God whom Moses cannot see. But also, Moses has been speaking face to face as a man speaks with his friend with this figure called the angel of the Lord in Exodus chapter 33. Exodus itself provides the answer to this hiddenness of the transcendent Lord. There is a face-to-face God in whom we can know the true name and nature of the unseen Lord. John's gospel unpacks this supremely in John chapter 1, verse 18, where John writes, No one has ever seen God, but God the one and only, the Son, who is at the Father's side, he has made him known. The answer to the hiddenness of God is Christ. The answer to the transcendence of the Father is the Son. And that Father-Son dynamic, in the Christian understanding, is eternal. And that's what explains both the transcendence and the imminence of God in our world. The answer to the hiddenness of God is Christ. Unfortunately, Peterson says that the answer is conscience. Here's what he says.

SPEAKER_07

So Elijah, the prophet Elijah, defined God in the Old Testament as the voice of conscience within.

SPEAKER_06

Okay.

SPEAKER_07

That's a definition.

SPEAKER_06

So you're just saying by that definition of God. I guess see, this is kind of goes back to where I'm saying initially.

SPEAKER_07

I'm not defining it. Elijah defines it. Okay.

SPEAKER_06

So as Elijah's as Elijah defines God.

SPEAKER_07

It's defined that way in Jonah, too.

SPEAKER_06

Okay.

SPEAKER_00

Now Elijah does not define God as conscience. There is a story about Elijah in which he has a Moses-like event, in which he cannot see God, but he is hidden in the cleft of a rock. On the very same mountain, and Kings makes a massive deal out of this. Kings is a throwback to Moses. But the still small voice through which the transcendent Lord encounters Elijah is a throwback to Exodus. And we could either go back to Exodus or we could go forward to John's Gospel again, and we can say that the one through whom you can encounter the transcendent Lord is Christ himself. And it and it's not conscience. That is to psychologize all things. And of course, the word conscience doesn't even appear in the Hebrew Bible. But Christ has been the image of the invisible God. Peterson is right to say that atheists reject God, but they don't understand what they reject. Peterson himself doesn't understand what he affirms. It's Christ who makes all the difference. So that's how I would strengthen point number one. But his first claim is good and it must be made. His second claim is also good, and Peterson defends it really well. Morality and purpose can't be found within science. Here he is unpacking that.

SPEAKER_02

We have examples of chimpanzees who actually have a basic understanding of fairness, right? If you give uh chimpanzee two grapes, right, and uh his buddy gets three, right? He actually freaks out, right? But you give both chimps three grapes and they're good. Um we have examples of parrots Except for the greedy chimps. Except for the greedy chimps. They want four graves. They want four graves, you know, those do exist, right? Um, but we have similar examples uh where we do animal tests, right?

SPEAKER_07

And so morality is intrinsic. I think so it precedes science.

SPEAKER_02

I think that actually a better way to define it would be that social animals, which we are, right? Require some level of morality or what?

SPEAKER_07

I'm not disagreeing. Sure. Why do they require that?

SPEAKER_02

Because it's the only way that social groups can actually survive, right?

SPEAKER_07

That's my point with regards to science. Thank you very much. Is that precisely the point that you just made that science has to exist within a moral framework that isn't in itself scientific.

SPEAKER_02

How is that not scientific?

SPEAKER_07

Well, because it's not derived from the scientific process as you just indicated.

SPEAKER_02

It's the fact that we are social animals, we need that to exist as a group.

SPEAKER_07

I agree, but you pointed to the morality of Neanderthals, to the morality of chimpanzees. They didn't derive that from science.

SPEAKER_02

They don't need to. That's not how that works. That's my point. Science explains it.

SPEAKER_07

No, science doesn't explain morality.

SPEAKER_02

It doesn't explain how social animals would need to be.

SPEAKER_07

Well, that that's a complicated question.

SPEAKER_02

But we see it though.

SPEAKER_07

Yeah, but explaining the evolution of morality and explaining morality itself aren't the same thing.

SPEAKER_00

You see, science is nested within a value structure. And that value structure is not derivable from the scientific process itself. And it doesn't matter if you point out that science observes morality in the wild. That doesn't matter. The fact that science observes morality in the wild and that that wild morality has existed long before the scientific method goes to show that morality is prior to science. Isn't that obvious? Peterson is absolutely brilliant on this point. I think morality and purpose can't be found within science. Science itself depends on something that is prior, and those values are not derivable from within science. That is a wonderful point, a point that we have been hearing from Peterson for the last decade or more. It is utterly necessary, and yes, Jordan Peterson exists on the borders of things, and he has made a great contribution into defeating scientism. Let us never forget that about Jordan Peterson. I'm very grateful that Jordan Peterson has done that with his second claim. Morality and purpose can't be found within science. His third claim, everybody worships something, including atheists. Now, this is what gets him into trouble with Danny. Remember Danny at the beginning? Do Catholics attend to Mary? Then don't they worship Mary? And he is trying to pin down Jordan Peterson, whose wife is a Roman Catholic and whose best friend is Eastern Orthodox, and who is employed on the Daily Wire that has a lot of kind of evangelical money around it. And everybody is smirking in surrounded because they know that he's in a difficult spot. Do Catholics attend to Mary?

SPEAKER_07

Yes.

SPEAKER_05

Okay. So do they fit that description of worship?

SPEAKER_07

Yes.

SPEAKER_05

So you would say Catholics and other people that revere Mary, like the Eastern Orthodox tradition, worship Mary.

SPEAKER_07

Well, they might not put her in the highest.

SPEAKER_05

But you would put it that way.

SPEAKER_07

No.

SPEAKER_05

You just said it. Now you're taking it back.

SPEAKER_07

There's still a hierarchy.

SPEAKER_05

Okay, there's a hierarchy, but in within the show. All right. You can worship these.

SPEAKER_07

Mary is quite a ways up the hierarchy, but not at the top.

SPEAKER_05

Let's do let's go over your definition of worship again. What's your definition of worship? Attend to? Attend to. Prioritize? Do Catholics. Do Catholics attend to? Um do they prioritize Mary over all other human beings?

SPEAKER_07

No, I didn't say over all, did I? I didn't add that to my own. I said there was a hierarchy as well. You attend to it. So you can attend to something trivially, or you can attend to it deeply.

SPEAKER_00

And now you're adding stuff to the definition. Is Mary rightly to be worshipped? And Jordan Peterson is squirming over that question. But actually, I think he does okay. He doesn't put Mary in the top spot of the hierarchy of value. But the big problem is his definition of worship, which is about attention and sacrifice. And he keeps going back to this idea of sacrifice. If he stayed with attention, I think he would have been on safer ground. Because for the Christian, worship is not really a sacrifice that we make towards God. God in Christ has made the great sacrifice for us. We receive God in Christ and rightly attend to him in worship. Worship is not so much our contribution to God, it is the glad response to receiving Christ's sacrifice. But Peterson is saying stuff that so many other philosophers have said, like Simone Vey, for instance, she says prayer consists of attention. It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable towards God. And for Simone Vey, as for so many others, there is no human option of not having a God. Something supreme to which our heart turns in a moment of supplication and adoration and attention. Peterson says it, Simone Vey says it, John Calvin says it, you know, the mind is an endless forge of idols. We either worship the true and living God, or we must come up with other highest forms of attention and supplication or worship. We are made to worship. Peterson is right about that, but he's always wanted to turn that into our sacrificial offering towards God rather than receiving the sacrificial offer of Christ. The fourth thing, the fourth claim that Peterson makes is that atheists accept Christian morality but deny the source. And actually the debaters who engage Peterson on that particular point only prove the thesis. They say, Well, I read Old Testament violence, and it doesn't sound like put away your sword, for those who live by the sword will die by the sword. It doesn't sound like turn the other cheek. But who taught us to put away the sword? Who taught us turn the other cheek? Who taught us the principles of just war? That's what Jordan Peterson tries to engage this guy on.

SPEAKER_04

Do you think that there's ever such a thing as a righteous war? I'm skeptical. I'm not sure. It would probably be situational.

SPEAKER_00

Well, right, right. The just war tradition of Augustine sounds very different to the just war tradition of the pre-Christian Aristotle and others. We are applying Christianized morality to the Hebrew Bible. That happens on the issue of Old Testament violence. It also happens on the issue of freedom. The insistence that the human person is the stopping point for moral agency in this world is a profoundly Christian idea that overturned the idea of fate in the pre-Christian world. Post-Christian philosophers might want to see causal determinism at play, but it's a profoundly Christian thing to do, to want to elevate freedom. And the idea of the free individual is one more example of atheists accepting Christian morality but denying the source. Jordan Peterson raised exactly the right four questions. They are four critiques that are devastating of a post-Christian enlightenment scientism. Nevertheless, he can't actually ground those four critiques while ever he exists on the margins of things, while ever he distances himself from Christians, and perhaps Christians just need to distance themselves from Jordan Peterson and let him come home in his own time. This is not exactly a farewell Jordan Peterson moment, but it is a recognition that he has always wanted to be distant from us, and perhaps it's best that he remains at the margins of things, offering the critiques that he offers, which can be helpful to the church. But let no one hitch their wagon to a man who does not want wagons hitched to him. What did you make of the surrounded video? Did you think Jordan Peterson had some good moments? Do you think that format is actually helpful in generating any kind of light? Or is it only heat? Let me know in the comments. And if you want to explore the Christian story, why don't you go to 321course.com and start an account? We'd love you to see life according to Jesus. It just takes eight sessions. And we'll show you the threeness of God, the two-ness of the world, the oneness of you. What do the numbers mean? Go to 321course.com and find out. That'll do us for this video. Why don't you give the video a subscribe and tap that bell so we can see you on the next video? God bless.