Highlight: Reacting to Jordan Peterson on The Bible

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Jordan Peterson, on Joe Rogan. I'm gonna play the clip, we'll play through it. It's about four minutes long, but I want you to hear some of the things that Jordan Peterson says because it's amazing.

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It's like, yeah, that's actually really insightful and good. And you're right, Joe, he comes from a very philosophical perspective.

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He's thinking in terms of, a lot in terms of like categories and worldview and justification and all those things.

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So he has that mindset already. And I was so intrigued that he actually caught a very, very important aspect of like even what

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I read at the beginning of the show, that in Christ are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. If you want knowledge, if you want truth, then

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Christ is the very foundation of it. He's the reference point. And it's interesting because Jordan Peterson, he sees that, he sees that.

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And what's amazing is he's saying it to Joe Rogan. That's what you're gonna love about this, is that here's Jordan Peterson, who's saying it across the table to Joe Rogan.

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So here we go. This is Jordan Peterson's realization about the

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Bible. If you guys want to look it up for yourselves later, here you go. The Joe Rogan experience.

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If categories just dissolve, especially fundamental ones, the culture is dissolving because the culture is a structure of category.

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That's what it is. So in fact, culture is a structure of category that we all share.

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So we see things the same way. Well, that's why we can talk. I mean, not exactly the same way because then we'd have nothing to talk about, but roughly speaking, we have a bedrock of agreement.

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That's the Bible, by the way. Wow. All right, good start, good start.

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One of the things that's interesting about this is just what he's saying there is something that you've actually heard us saying quite a bit.

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Now we'll say it with a little bit more of a biblical explanatory power in terms of saying, you know, things like you're in the image of God, right?

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It's inescapable that you're in the image of God. You know the true God, and the problem is not like a lack of light or evidence about the true

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God. It's that we're all made in the image of the same God, but we suppress the truth because we don't want to know

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God. Because we're sinners, we rebel, we go the other way. We'd rather worship and serve the creature, the creation itself, rather than the true

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God. So the fundamental issue in all of human experience in terms of our broken relationship with God, our estrangement in terms of our creator is that we know the real

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God, but we don't want to know him. We don't want him in our knowledge. Romans 1 says we don't want him in our knowledge, and so what we do is we switch him for something else.

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We go to substandard gods, and we try to distort even the nature of creation itself.

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So like when he talks about categories, well, that's in Romans 1. The category of maleness and femaleness is in Romans chapter 1, and what happens is, and this is right in line with what he's saying here, when he talks about culture breaking down because we're no longer sharing the same categories, that's exactly what

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Romans 1 is essentially saying, is that the men exchange the natural use of the women for other men, and the women do likewise, and then there's the description of the breakdown that Romans 1 says in terms of disobedience to parents, enemies of God, and all of the different sins that show the breakdown of the image of God in Romans 1.

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I think that's, this was so beautiful about this conversation is that's essentially what Jordan Peterson's getting at, but he's doing it in a way by talking about we all share these categories.

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I think what he's really getting at is worldview. Like we all share the same worldview platforms, whether it's human dignity, and that experience and human dignity, whether it's value of life, whether it's, you know,

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I'd say probably, I don't wanna speak for Jordan Peterson, but I assume he's talking about categories of like the big no -nos we all agree on.

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We all agree that these are no -nos. These are immoral. You ought not do this. This is the basic structure of all of our thinking that we share.

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Well, we would say that's the image of God in people, and of course, it comes downstream from the biblical worldview changing the world, the

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Bible changing the world. So we're supposed to all be holding to these same categories. And I think what Jordan Peterson's saying is now that the cultural breakdown is because now we're dismissing all those categories that we all had sort of as a bedrock, and he's saying, and that came from the

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Bible. And he's right. He's 100 % right. Now watch him explain a little more. So I just walked through the

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Museum of the Bible in Washington. That was very cool. It's a very cool museum. So the structure, that's what the

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Bible provides. Yeah, that's what I figured out. I just figured this out this week. So it was a cool thing to walk through because it's chronological.

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They have one floor, which is the history of the Bible. But it's not exactly that. It's really what it is, is the history of the book.

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Now, in many ways, the first book was the Bible. I mean, literally, because at one point, there was only one book, like as far as our

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Western culture is concerned, there was one book. And for a while, literally, there was only one book. And that book was the

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Bible. And then before it was the Bible, it was scrolls and it was writings on papyrus.

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But we were starting to aggregate written text together. And it went through all sorts of technological transformations.

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And then it became books that everybody could buy, the book everybody could buy. And the first one of those was the

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Bible. And what he's referring to here is, and this is true, in history, it was the

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Christians that essentially innovated and created the technology of a book.

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Reformed Christians. Right, so the book. Just go ahead. Yeah, so the book is, of course, an innovation from the

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Christian church. And he's right. Historically, it's not that people didn't tell stories and write stuff down.

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You didn't have scrolls and things handed out and you had your own personal libraries at home in terms of the things you could carry around.

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But we're talking about papyrus and vellum, animal skins and things that are rolled up and passed along like that.

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But when we talk today about like, hey, I'm holding this here and it's just a collection of books and letters and put together nice and neatly in this format.

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Well, that's an innovation of the Christian church. Like the Bible is what inspired the book and books.

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And so this was an innovation of the Christian church, doing it like this. So came all sorts of books that everybody could buy.

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But all those books, in some sense, emerged out of that underlying book. And that book itself, the

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Bible isn't a book, it's a library. It's a collection of books. And so what

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I figured out was, partly because I was talking to my brother -in -law, Jim Keller, who's the world's greatest chip designer and has now designed a chip that's as powerful as the human brain, which is optimized for artificial intelligence learning, by the way.

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And so I talked to him about that. He said, you heard of the internet? I said, yeah, Jim, I've heard of the internet.

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He said, this is way more revolutionary than that. So in any case, we were talking about meaning in text because we were talking about translation and the problem of understanding text.

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And Jim said, the meaning of words is coded in the relationship of the words to one another.

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And the postmodernists make that case, that all meaning is derived from the relationship between words. That's wrong because, well, what about rage?

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That's not words. And what about moving your hand? That's not words. So it's wrong, but part of it's right because the meaning we derive from the verbal domain is encoded in the relationship between words.

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So now then you think, well, let's think about the relationship between words. Well, some words are dependent on other words.

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Some ideas are dependent on other ideas. The more ideas are dependent on a given idea, the more fundamental that idea is.

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That's a definition of fundamental. So now imagine you have an aggregation of texts in a civilization.

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You say, which are the fundamental texts? And the answer is the texts upon which most other texts depend.

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And so you'd put Shakespeare way in there in English because so many texts are dependent on Shakespeare's literary revelations.

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And Milton would be in that category and Dante would be in that category, at least in translation. Fundamental authors, part of the

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Western canon, not because of the arbitrary dictates of power, but because those texts influenced more other texts.

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And then you think about that as a hierarchy, okay, with a Bible at its base, which is certainly the case.

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Now imagine that's the entire corpus of linguistic production, all things considered.

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Now, how do you understand that? Like literally, how do you understand that? The answer is you sample it by reading and listening to stories and listening to people talk.

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You sample that whole domain. You build a low resolution representation of that inside you.

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And then you listen and see through that. And so it isn't that the

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Bible is true. It's that the Bible is the precondition for the manifestation of truth, which makes it way more true than just true.

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Wow. I've never heard it explained that way, but that was incredible. That was a really fascinating way to get at what historically

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Christians have said, in particular, the school of Van Til, Bonson, the thinking behind transcendental apologetics or presuppositional apologetics is really the thinking that is in accordance with a revelational epistemology.

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In other words, how do I know something, anything at all? How do

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I know something, anything at all? How do I know about human dignity? How do I know anything about ethics? How do I know anything about human experience, about the world, about value, beauty, truth, goodness, anything at all?

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Well, we would say - Which is the one thing most people aren't taught. Right. Now. Right, right. It's just what to think, right?

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Like, and here's what you're to believe, rather than getting at, well, how is that possible?

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And how do you know that that's actually true? Because it's amazing. People will always make claims, knowledge claims. I know this is wrong.

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I know this is right. I know this is beautiful. I know this is not. I know this about humans, whatever. And you ask a question, how do you know that?

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How do you know that that's true? And if you push and push and push and push and push, and you don't start with something that's the very precondition necessary for knowledge at all, then you'll find that that person, the secularist, the atheist, the agnostic, whatever, the humanist today will simply say, well,

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I guess I really don't know. Maybe we are just in a simulation. Maybe human beings don't have any real value or dignity.

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Maybe, maybe rape is not really wrong, right? Like, I personally feel like it is, but I don't know that.

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Right, that's, and what - Well, they certainly won't live, I mean, especially with the very, most people in instances of like murder or rape won't be consistent with that.

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Right, yeah. But they'll say it, I guess, if it comes to it. Right, they'll say, because they're in the image of God, they'll say, you know, rape is wrong.

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We ought not to do that, right? And you push them on their worldview and ask them how they know that that's true, and then they're gonna ultimately say, well, it's not really wrong.

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How many times have we heard that on the show, even? But we shouldn't do it, it's not really wrong, but we shouldn't. I don't think you should do it. I don't think you should do it, but I guess -

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It's just a knowledge claim. Right, I guess they don't really know with certainty that it's wrong. Right. But what

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Peterson's getting at, and that was a really fascinating way to get at it, was that the word of God is the very precondition, not just that it's true, it's the precondition for all truth.

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Right. And that's coming from Jordan Peterson. And I like how he talked about the low resolution.

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What he was saying was the lens, that's how we describe it, is the lens which you view life, which is your worldview.

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Exactly. He just said it in a very philosophical way. He said it in a very fascinating way, but what's amazing is at the beginning of the show,

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I quoted from Colossians chapter two, and what Peterson is saying there is something that the apostle

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Paul said about 2 ,000 years ago, that he's the foundation of wisdom and knowledge.

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And in Christ are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. So if you wanna know something, if you wanna know something is true, if you wanna know how to live, it starts with God, starts with Christ.

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The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. And Jesus' claim about himself in John 14, six, popular verse,

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Christians all know this, is I am the way, the truth. He's not just something that is true.

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He's the grounding of truth. He's the very embodiment of truth. And so what Peterson aimed at there was something actually fascinating.

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He said the word precondition. It's the precondition for truth, not just true.

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It's the precondition for truth, period. And so I love how he did that because he's pointing out to Joe Rogan, something very fascinating is that you have all these things that you're holding onto.

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They're not just suspended in midair. Like we exist downstream from something.

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And what is that something? It's the biblical worldview. It's the word of God. It's what many atheists today just take for granted.

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It's like a while back, I did a show with Provoked, with Zach and Desi, and they had an atheist come on.

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And as I'm talking to the atheist, you guys can look this show up. It's somewhere in our feed. As I'm talking to the atheist,

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I was just trying to press him on his worldview. And we brought up the question of whether or not it's okay to kill, to mutilate, kill, and eat another human being, right?

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And I'm challenging him on that. Now, he, of course, lives here in this nation that was so influenced by God's word and God's revelation and the gospel itself.

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And so, of course, he thinks that that's wrong and icky. But as I pressed him, I was like, well, but in other cultures that still presently exist today in the world, there are cultures, there are tribes who think that it is absolutely moral and good to kill and eat another human being.

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And as I pressed him on his worldview, now, you're living in a Christian nation in...

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Sorry, I can't say that anymore. You're living in a nation that's so been influenced by Christianity.

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So, of course, you don't wanna do that. You do think it's immoral, but what about them? Is it actually wrong? And what did he say?

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It was so refreshing to have somebody just say this. He finally came to terms with, oh, yeah, that's true.

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It's just their tribe and it's their society determining what's right. That's how we do this, right? Yeah, I guess it's not really wrong.

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And I guess just so long as you clean your plate, it's not immoral. That's essentially what he said.

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Well, that is what he said, as long as you clean your plate. So, as long as you kill him, dispatch him, and you don't waste anything,

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I guess it's fine. It's just like, you take it for granted as an atheist that you exist downstream from the influence of the word of God in the world and how it's so blessed the world.

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And what Jordan Peterson's pointing out is the cultural breakdown in the West today is because it is a destruction of the categories that came from the foundation of the