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Alas, this gadget-mindedness inclines us to treat grammar, meaning, narrative, hermeneutics as devices for extracting "biblical principles." Eat This Book counters this serious-minded technologism with a great deal of disarming storytelling—so much so that the reader begins to see that, for Peterson, narrative and doesn't have a point; it is the point. Gradually, we find our bearings in his narrative style, listen to his confessional voice, follow him as he circles back to gather up an earlier plotline. As we learn the criteria that his aesthetic discourse presents us with—plot and character, cohesiveness and plausibility, connotation and irony2—we begin to realize that Peterson is mentoring us in the practices that make up the second part of this book: reading as an act of hearing, meditating as a gestalt-like apprehension of the biblical story, prayer as response to the always prior word of God, and contemplation as living out this word.
When it comes to life in and with the Scriptures, insists Peterson, you are not in control. This diminishes the techno-angst so familiar to consumers of communication technology: is there a better, faster, more adaptable device for doing what I want to do? The better my wiring, the greater my worrying.3 Instead of making tools which in turn make us, Peterson calls us to consider how we take up with the medium of divine revelation. It may well be that the medium isn't so much the message as it is, as Neil Postman puts it, the metaphor. Just as a metaphor constructs our attitudes toward people and things, so the way we take up with biblical language shapes our integral awareness of the world that Scripture bears on, the world of the Father's creating, the Son's redeeming, and the Spirit's gathering.
Which brings us to Peterson's metaphoric exploration of The Jesus Way. We tend to forget that "Way" is itself a metaphor—what rhetoricians would call a "buried metaphor." We'd actually prefer (as the disciples did) for Jesus to be more literal with us, to offer us a broader band to divine data. But by describing himself as a kind of medium, Jesus confronts us with different sorts of questions than our catechisms have historically asked—questions not so much of definition as of direction. Not (as Peterson hastens to add) that defining the truth is unimportant, only that all too often in our deliberations "Jesus as truth gets far more attention than Jesus as the way." The result? Too many Christians acting like Flannery O'Connor's Hazel Motes, the founder of the Church of Christ Without Christ. We want the message without the medium; we want immediate connection with the divine. But as Peterson's latest book makes clear, we can't avoid mediation. We'll always be using some sort of means, following some sort of way. So, to get us back on the Jesus Way, Peterson traces the early steps along this path, following Old Testament wayfarers such as Abraham on the road to Moriah, Moses delivering sermons, David praying his way through his own imperfection, Elijah eating well on the banks of the Cherith, Isaiah clapping his hand to his mouth before the dangerous beauty of holiness. These stories clear places for spiritual theology—heeding the creational, practicing the sacrificial, avoiding the managerial, honoring the personal.
I use the term "places" advisedly. It's an old rhetorical term for topics, or topoi—the scattered places in which one might open a conversation. This mode of communicating has signal weaknesses: a disregard for logical rigor, a habit of meandering, a contempt for procedure. But the great virtue of topical thinking and speaking is that it requires close acquaintance with one's hearers. What guides Peterson's placement of his points is not a logically rigorous schema but rather a persistent attention to North American character. Take, for example, the last part of The Jesus Way which examines three bad alternatives to following Jesus: the imperialism of Herod, the privilege and power of Caiaphas, the propagandizing of Josephus. Nasty conditions, all, and no mistake. But disconcertingly, Peterson sees subtler problems emerging in pious responses to these problems. So he turns his attention to the Pharisees, the Essenes, and the Zealots, whose responses to the aforementioned cultural deformations were at once deeply thoughtful and deeply flawed. I, for one, feel as if I've been had by these critiques, both coming and going. But I have to admit that Peterson's triangulation gives sure footholds along the Jesus Way.
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