The Lobster King, and the hierarchy of value among narratives

Harry Potter can be read in a variety of different ways. Many impressionable youngsters will see the four houses and treat them like Myers-Briggs’ 16 personalities and determine their personality type from that data. Another interpreter will see the literary background and heritage of the series, and see the obvious class divisions between the houses, and read Harry Potter as a narrative about social classes in British boarding schools.

For the most part, it’s ok to use whichever hermeneutic framework you like. There isn’t a clear hierarchy among the narratives one can draw from the source material. The problem is that the same isn’t true for the Bible.

Jesus gives the Christian the supreme hermeneutic. In fact, not only does Jesus give us the lens through which the Bible should be read, he is the lens through which we must read, if we are to understand. Exegesis is the process of taking a passage and extracting the meaning from it, and John 1:18 says that Jesus exegetes his Father. That is, Jesus is the perfect explanation and revelation of the Father. Jesus is the lens through which we properly understand God, and he tells us how to properly understand the Scriptures.

But, you may ask, can’t a person still learn useful life lessons even if they read it differently?

By all means, but there is an important and eternally meaningful chasm between those two things. Consider a road sign on a mountain-pass that says ‘Hairpin turn – 15km/h’. Imagine that the driver of a Land Cruiser is coasting along at 45, and when she sees the sign she says to herself, ‘indeed, there is this idea in our culture that when approaching a new life direction, it is important to not rush into things, but to take it step by step, because arrogant confidence is foolish’.

None need deny that she has taken a useful life lesson on board, and it is also true that the teaching of the sign does metaphorically contain her conclusion, however all of that is little comfort to her as she proceeds to take the corner at 35 and soar off the mountain side to her immediate peril.

Her problem was not that her reading was untrue, but rather that it was not the intended primary meaning of the sign. She did not submit to the sign’s authority when it instructed her how she should live her life, and she died as the consequence.

This is exactly what happens when someone reads the Bible and draws moralistic applications, e.g. ‘to live a good life you have to be generous and forgiving’. They are drawing conclusions that are mostly true, but will not save you on the day of God’s wrath.

Inseparable from Dr Peterson’s hermeneutic error is his insistence that Moses must answer to Darwin, not the other way. Peterson brings along evolutionary assumptions about humanity and sociological theories about an evolutionary basis for morality. Whatever reading he draws from Scripture will always be framed by those assumptions. Peterson will be like our aforementioned driver, unable to understand and properly apply the road sign due to the way in which she read it. He will not understand Adam and Eve if he continues to think that the human species is a historical accident, the result of unguided chance in an arbitrary universe, ugly bags of mostly water.

As a result of assuming the naturalistic evolution of man, he cannot understand the Bible’s doctrine of creation, sin, the fall, or even the nature of Scripture.

We shall not go into sufficient detail on this next point, but it is worth noting that a non-Christian worldview like his has no way to account for the orderly nature of the universe, nor for our ability to know truth, nor for our ability to justify moral judgements, although he borrows all of those things from the Christian worldview.

To his credit, one thing that Peterson does seem to understand is what has been called the ‘two books’ that God has given us: the book of Scripture mostly handles questions of ‘why’, whereas the book of natural science mostly handles the question of ‘how’. That is, one does not open a biology textbook for reassurance when their parents die, and neither does one open the Bible to learn which mushrooms are poisonous and which aren’t. Scripture and science are not opposed to one another, they have no need for clash nor for reconciliation. In fact, the Christian ought never be afraid of science, because Jesus said ‘I am the way, the truth and the life’. All truth belongs to God, all facts belong to our worldview. It is true, however, that many a scientist has looked at a good set of data, and due to their false assumptions, has come up with a false conclusion. After all, “science doesn’t speak, scientists do” – Frank Turek.

There is one other major flaw in Peterson’s version of Biblical analysis. Having already misinterpreted Jesus as not being necessarily God incarnate, but instead merely focussing on him as, let’s say, ‘the ultimate and divine pattern of being’, he treats Christ as something like a grand lifestyle tutorial: ‘Christ has shown you how to live the best and most meaningful life, now go! Respond to the call of adventure, take up responsibility, press on upwards to the heavenly city!’

Therein lies the flaw: He assumes that it is possible to do that, or even to try. He lies very close to making the Pelagian error, which is to assume that man is not so affected by sin that he is unable to turn in faith to serve and please God. The real reason he makes this error, in our estimation, lies in the aforementioned fact that he does not have a Biblical doctrine of sin. How is a man supposed to properly recognise the all-encompassing noetic effects of sin and the bondage of the will when his worldview precludes the reality of that sin in the first place?

Non-Christian, you are dead in the trespasses and sins in which you walk (Eph 2:1-2), and self-help is not possible when a person is dead. You need God to bring you to life in Christ, so that you can turn to him in faith and be saved. Dr Peterson brings a self-help gospel, which is no gospel at all. For all the good he has done in helping young people see the importance of Biblical wisdom, it will avail you nothing after the car careens off the cliff and you stand before your creator.

Recognise that you are a sinner, and that the God who created the world also entered it to save a people who hated him, but whom he loved. Turn to him and ask for his forgiveness, and you will find him to be a perfect saviour.