"God is dead? No. Deus Renatus est." This is the conclusion of Jordan Peterson’s recent book, We Who Wrestle With God: Perceptions of the Divine.

The “new atheists” are increasingly the shrill cockatoos of yesteryear and dwarfed by Peterson’s compelling analyses and metanarrative. Meanwhile, the woke ideologists who attack existing pillars of the West, particularly Christianity, are swirling in a cesspool of absolute contradictions (as detailed in Douglas Murray’s War on the West: How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason).

Peterson is a neo-Biblicist. He sees the narrative value in forsaken biblical stories. His book is completely unique. It’s impactful not just for its content but for what it represents. Peterson recognizes the spiritual realm.

Peterson treats the biblical canon with respect and divines its meaning carefully. He is unique as a psychologist delving into an area typically reserved for theologians.

Undergirding Peterson’s approach is the commonsense notion that there is a spiritual dimension to humans—proven every day by the actions of billions of people. People don’t live as if they are solely products of an evolutionary process.

Further, Peterson recognizes, as Tom Holland has detailed in Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, the fundamental Christian underpinnings of Western civilization. With no moral ballast, there are currently 8 billion truths on the planet.

His book focuses on wrestling with God. The title of the book comes from the poem titled “Carrion Comfort” by Gerald Manley Hopkins (1885) that ends with, “That night, that year of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling my (my God!) my God.”

One fundamental point by Peterson regards the conscience. He explains that it is “not the only manifestation of God; not His only dramatic persona. He appears also, as we shall see, as a calling—inspiration, adventure, enthusiasm, curiosity, even temptation—in another of His primary guises, and as much more” (xxx).

In Peterson’s mind, there is great value to the Christian metanarrative. He explains that “the biblical story, in its totality, is the frame through which the world of facts reveals itself, insofar as the West itself is concerned: it is the description of the hierarchy of value within which even science itself (that is, the science that ultimately pursues the good) is made possible, The Bible is the library of stories on which the more productive, freest, and most stable and peaceful societies the world have even known are predicated—the foundation of the West, plain and simple” (xxxi).

We live in a divine context. “Man is the being who struggles with that spirit with every decision, because a decision is a matter of prioritization; with every glance is a sacrifice of possibility toward some desired end, and with every action as he moves toward some destination and away from all others. At every moment of consciousness, we are fated to wrestle with God” (xxxi).

Further, “the world, as we have seen, is far more than a mere collection of facts. In keeping with that is the observation there is no simple and directly self-evident pathway from what is to what out to be—from the fact to the act” (495).

The biblical narrative offers the potential to master chaos: "At every moment, what we experience, confront, and wrestle with is a domain of vast possibility. We do that in our capacity as veritable images of God, akin to the Logos, the creative spirit whose actions give rise to the cosmos itself, with its goodness of order" (495).

How do we embrace the divine? Peterson suggests that “all these great, profound and unalterably memorable stories are characterizations of God—and, inevitably, of the men and women who live inevitably in some form of relationship with or to that God” (502).

Peterson elaborates further: “In all these stories, all these dramas, all these descriptions of aim—all these characterizations—God is presented as the unity that exists at the foundation or stands at the pinnacle. In the absence of that unity, there is either nothing that brings together and harmonizes, in which case there is a deterioration into anarchy and chaos, or there are the various replacements that immediately swoop in, in their foul way, to usurp and dominate: the spirit of power that characterizes the Luciferian realm and produces the scarlet beast of the degenerate state. Does that make the divine real? This is a matter of definition, in the final analysis—and, therefore, of faith” (503-504).

Finally, he concludes his 500-page book as follows: “It is high time to rescue the highest from its unconscious existence in the lowest; to become fully aware, in the face of the magical transformations that now so rapidly face us, and to reestablish our covenant with the God whose magic words structure our consciousness and our societies, insofar as they are functional and productive. It is time to take up the wrestling in earnest, to awaken, to return to our origin, and to know the place, as conscious adults, for the first time. God is dead? No. Deus Renatus est" (505).

Read our other blog posts on Jordan Peterson:

Jordan Peterson & The Economist: We Who Wrestle With God (Part I)

Jordan Peterson & The Economist: We Who Wrestle With God (Part II)

A Primer for Jordan B. Peterson’s Beyond Order. Why Every Christian Should Read This Book

A Primer for Jordan B. Peterson’s Beyond Order & 12 More Rules for Life

A Primer for Jordan B. Peterson’s Beyond Order & 12 More Rules for Life. Order, Chaos & Being