Maps of Meaning with Jordan Peterson

Part 29, The Gospel Versus Moral Development

The final (long) chapter of Maps of Meaning is entitled "The Hostile Brothers: Archetypes of Response to the Unknown." The first part of the chapter discusses the first brother, "the Adversary." In this section Peterson shares his insights regarding evil and the satanic, with prolonged reflections upon the experience of the concentration camp. We've reviewed some of that material over the last few weeks.

Having considered Satan (the Adversary), Peterson turns to consider Christ as emblematic of the hero archetype. But before discussing Christ, Peterson starts with Moses. 

Truth be told, at this point in Maps of Meaning I'm feeling that Peterson is just rehashing points he's made previously in the book. I don't feel there is much that is new in this section that we haven't covered before. But from a Jungian perspective, his contrast between Moses and Christ is of interest.

Simply, in Peterson's hands Moses stands as a Jungian archetype for law and Christ represents the heroic transcendence of the law in the individual conscience. Peterson states, "Christ's [life and teachings] signified transition of morality from reliance upon tradition to reliance on individual conscience--from rule of law to rule of spirit--from prohibition to exhortation. To love God means to listen to the voice of truth and to act in accordance with its messages; to love thy neighbor, as thy self."

No matter what one might think about this theologically, it's pretty standard moral development theory. Consider Kohlberg's theory of moral development, where moral reasoning goes from following rules and societal codes of conduct (conventional stage) to embrace more abstract and flexible moral principles, and where the individual conscience can stand against social norms when those norms are deemed to be immoral (post-conventional stage). 

The theory of Spiral Dynamics makes a similar point, arguing that morality at a lower level of development tends to follow rules in a fairly rigid fashion which gives way to more abstract reasoning as moral development progresses.

What to say about this?

On the one hand, this is pretty standard fare. It's obviously true that moral reasoning grows more sophisticated with cognitive development. And many have argued that humanity as a whole has experienced moral evolution. See Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of our Nature, Robert Wright's Nonzero, or Karen Armstrong's The Great Transformation.

On the other hand, we're back to points I've made multiple times in this series, about the impoverished Christology on display here. And Peterson should take care to monitor the supersessionist temptations in seeing Christ displace Moses in a line of moral evolution. 

To be clear, I don't mind people pointing to Jesus as an ideal moral exemplar. But problems come when we reduce Jesus to being a moral guru or an enlightened human being. We see Jesus standing at a summit of moral progress with a smooth road leading up to him. We climb, as heroes, toward that summit. We are on a journey of moral and spiritual self-actualization. But in the Christian story, this entire enterprise is radically called into question. We can't climb. We can't self-actualize. We're stuck. And so Christ comes down to us and dies for the ungodly. 

I'll readily admit that it's not fair to expect Jordan Peterson to share these views about the gospel. So I'm not really leveling a criticism toward him. I'm mainly raising a caution flag for Christian fans and readers of Jordan Peterson, alerting them to readings of Christ that trade the radical news of the gospel for a psychological theory of moral self-improvement.