“The problem is I probably believe that but I’m amazed at my own belief, and I don’t understand it”
Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, Canadian clinical psychologist and author of 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos and newly-released Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life, discussed the difference between Jesus and fictional accounts of “dying and resurrecting mythological gods” in a recent interview.
Peterson became famous for his stance against Canada’s compelled speech legislation, Bill C-16. “The bill adds ‘gender identity or expression’ to the list of prohibited grounds of discrimination in the Canadian Human Rights Act and the list of characteristics of identifiable groups protected from hate propaganda in the Criminal Code,” according to Canadian law. Dr. Peterson served as a witness opposing Bill C-16 at the Canadian Senate.
Although the psychologist has described himself as “a deeply religious person,” he’s never explicitly professed belief in the Christian Gospel accounts.
Until now, apparently.
During his conversation with Jonathan Pageau, an Orthodox Christian, Dr. Peterson rejected the claim that there is no significant difference between Christianity and other religions.
“The difference—and C.S. Lewis pointed this out as well—between those mythological gods and Christ was that there’s a historical representation of his existence as well, […] there’s still a historical story,” Peterson said, emphasizing that the figure of Christ was in fact “an actual person who actually lived” and who really did what the biblical narrative describes (i.e., the Christian [Jungian] “myth”).
“[S]o what you have in the figure of Christ is an actual person who actually lived plus a myth, and, in some sense, Christ is the union of those two things,” he explained.
Then Peterson began to cry as he professed his belief in the historicity of Jesus Christ and the biblical narrative:
“The problem is I probably believe that but I’m amazed at my own belief, and I don’t understand it.”
“Because I’ve seen, sometimes, the objective world and the narrative world touch—you know, that’s JUNGIAN synchronicity. And I’ve seen that many times in my own life and so, in some sense, I believe it’s undeniable.”
In Jesus “the narrative and the objective world touch,” cried Peterson.
“And the ultimate example of that, in principle, is supposed to be Christ, and that seems to me to be oddly plausible.”
“But I still don’t know what to make of it, partly because it’s too terrifying a reality to fully believe.”
“I don’t even know what would happen to you if you fully believed it.”
Watch Peterson’s emotional testimony:
Watch Peterson’s full conversation with Pageau here.
