What Can We Learn from the Jordan Peterson Phenomenon?
00:00:00.000 | Welcome to a new week on the Ask Pastor John podcast.
00:00:06.800 | Today we have a guest with us, but before we talk with him, I want to open with a short
00:00:11.360 | excerpt from Jordan Peterson's appearance with Cathy Newman on Channel 4 News in the
00:00:17.480 | UK.
00:00:19.560 | Here they are, Jordan Peterson and Cathy Newman, talking about gender equality in the workplace.
00:00:24.760 | Have a listen.
00:00:25.760 | Is gender equality a myth?
00:00:28.520 | I don't know what you mean by the question.
00:00:30.360 | Men and women aren't the same and they won't be the same.
00:00:32.820 | That doesn't mean they can't be treated fairly.
00:00:34.860 | Is gender equality desirable?
00:00:37.120 | If it means equality of outcome, then almost certainly it's undesirable.
00:00:40.680 | That's already been demonstrated in Scandinavia.
00:00:43.120 | Because in Scandinavia...
00:00:44.120 | What do you mean by that?
00:00:45.200 | Equality of outcome is undesirable?
00:00:47.080 | Well men and women won't sort themselves into the same categories if you leave them alone
00:00:50.260 | to do it off their own accord.
00:00:51.560 | I've already seen that in Scandinavia.
00:00:53.560 | It's 20 to 1 female nurses to male, something like that.
00:00:57.480 | It might not be quite that extreme.
00:00:58.880 | And approximately the same male engineers to female engineers.
00:01:02.720 | And that's a consequence of the free choice of men and women in the societies that have
00:01:06.960 | gone farther than any other societies to make gender equality the purpose of the law.
00:01:12.220 | Those are ineradicable differences.
00:01:14.400 | You can eradicate them with tremendous social pressure and tyranny.
00:01:18.440 | But if you leave men and women to make their own choices, you will not get equal outcome.
00:01:21.800 | Right, so you're saying that anyone who believes in equality, whether you call them feminist,
00:01:25.560 | call them whatever you want to call them, should basically give up because it ain't
00:01:28.800 | going to happen.
00:01:29.940 | Only if they're aiming at equality of outcome.
00:01:31.560 | So you're saying give people equality of opportunity, that's fine.
00:01:36.380 | Not only fine, it's eminently desirable for everyone, for individuals and for society.
00:01:40.840 | But still women aren't going to make it, that's what you're really saying.
00:01:43.080 | It depends on your measurement techniques.
00:01:44.760 | They're doing just fine in medicine.
00:01:46.580 | In fact there are far more female physicians than there are male physicians.
00:01:50.380 | There are lots of disciplines that are absolutely dominated by women.
00:01:54.880 | Many many disciplines.
00:01:55.880 | And they're doing great.
00:01:57.360 | Lively.
00:01:58.360 | No surprise the video of this debate has been viewed over 10 million times on YouTube.
00:02:04.120 | So who is Jordan Peterson?
00:02:05.680 | Where did he come from?
00:02:06.680 | And what can we learn from the Jordan Peterson phenomenon that's taking the world by storm?
00:02:12.020 | To answer those questions we're releasing a special long form APJ conversation today.
00:02:16.840 | It will likely go about 30 minutes or so with our guest Dr. Alistair J. Roberts.
00:02:22.360 | He is a theologian in Durham, England, a podcaster on the Mere Fidelity podcast and author of
00:02:27.080 | two books.
00:02:28.200 | One with Andrew Wilson, Echoes of Exodus, tracing themes of redemption through scripture.
00:02:33.280 | And another one in process titled Heirs Together, a theology of the sexes.
00:02:38.640 | Lord willing forthcoming in 2019.
00:02:42.040 | I began my chat with Alistair Roberts asking him to explain the surge of interest around
00:02:47.100 | Jordan Peterson and how it began in the first place.
00:02:50.680 | It's a very good question because many people have different forms of exposure to Jordan
00:02:56.320 | Peterson.
00:02:57.320 | I think for many people, their first exposure was in the context of his opposition to Bill
00:03:03.200 | C-16 in Canada a few years ago.
00:03:06.640 | And he saw that as an example of compelled speech where people had to use the preferred
00:03:11.320 | gender pronouns of transgender persons, even in cases where they might not believe that
00:03:16.640 | those were the appropriate pronouns to use.
00:03:19.480 | And so he opposed that quite vehemently.
00:03:22.320 | And for many people, that was the first introduction to him, seeing him as someone who was a figure
00:03:27.360 | within the culture wars, someone who was opposed to the restrictive and oppressive form that
00:03:34.520 | certain progressive movements have taken in recent years, and someone pushing back against
00:03:40.360 | that tendency.
00:03:41.800 | More recently, he's been famous for, first of all, an interview that he gave to Channel
00:03:46.480 | Four in the UK with Kathy Newman, where he spoke about the issue of the gender pay gap,
00:03:54.080 | other issues like that.
00:03:55.680 | And the interview hit a nerve for many people.
00:03:59.320 | He was arguing calmly, and yet the interviewer was constantly pushing back against him in
00:04:05.080 | a very aggressive way, "So you're saying that?" and then mischaracterizing his position quite
00:04:10.320 | severely.
00:04:11.320 | But yet, within that interview, Peterson expressed his concern for the well-being of
00:04:16.480 | young men who have formed a significant body of his followers.
00:04:20.160 | Now, to understand the place that Peterson has for young men, it's also important to
00:04:25.720 | understand that Peterson has not just been a figure within the culture wars.
00:04:30.680 | He's been someone who, behind the scenes, has amassed a considerable following as someone
00:04:36.680 | who's akin to a self-help guru for some, but seems to be going further than that.
00:04:42.680 | He's making some deeper claims about reality itself.
00:04:46.800 | So he's set up a YouTube channel, which many people have followed, and more recently, he's
00:04:51.840 | published a book, Twelve Rules for Life, which has been a wildfire bestseller in all parts
00:04:58.040 | of the world, and it's been translated into a number of different languages already, I
00:05:02.480 | think.
00:05:03.480 | But in that book, he expresses a vision for life and for finding meaning within it, meaning
00:05:09.200 | in the context of chaos and disorder, but also in the context of quests for a sort of
00:05:15.400 | an oppressive order, the totalitarianism that many people are drawn towards.
00:05:20.480 | And his thought comes from a more academic position than many of the people that you
00:05:25.000 | see within the culture wars, or in the context of self-help.
00:05:29.920 | He's a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of Toronto.
00:05:34.360 | Now he's on leave for the time being, going around the world giving speeches and talks
00:05:41.720 | and filling halls and stadia just talking about his philosophy.
00:05:47.840 | And so many people have been attracted to this, particularly young men, and understanding
00:05:52.080 | that is complicated because some of them are coming from the culture war perspective, but
00:05:56.880 | a great many, perhaps the majority, are coming simply in need of meaning in their lives,
00:06:03.200 | a need for order, a need for a sense of purpose, and a need for a sense of reality as something
00:06:09.160 | that is a place in which they can act with weight and with significance.
00:06:14.600 | And he speaks to that, he speaks with great compassion.
00:06:17.520 | He's often had interviews in which he's broken down in tears when he's talked about the plight
00:06:22.660 | of young men who have suffered with a lack of meaning and a lack of purpose.
00:06:27.160 | And he speaks to these young men not in terms of a victim mentality, but telling them that
00:06:33.760 | they need to, his famous phrase, "Clean your room, set your house in order before you criticise
00:06:39.240 | the world."
00:06:40.640 | He's speaking to them in terms of responsibility, in terms of purpose, meaning, in terms of
00:06:47.800 | contribution to a society beyond themselves.
00:06:50.500 | As they set themselves in order, they will become sources of life for people around them.
00:06:55.320 | Now this has provoked considerable controversy in various quarters for a number of different
00:07:02.280 | reasons, some valid, many not so valid.
00:07:04.760 | Yeah, really interesting stuff.
00:07:06.360 | A lot of different people are drawn to him, obviously.
00:07:09.140 | So how much of the Jordan Peterson phenomenon centres on him as a political figure in the
00:07:14.080 | culture wars today, and how much of it centres on him as a self-help guru mentoring these
00:07:20.220 | young men towards responsibility?
00:07:21.640 | Well, it's complicated.
00:07:23.320 | I mean, Peterson didn't start off trying to reach young men, nor did he start off as a
00:07:28.200 | figure in the culture wars.
00:07:29.760 | He was a clinical psychologist and an academic.
00:07:33.480 | And so my first exposure to Peterson was through a talk that he gave on TEDx at the University
00:07:41.460 | of Toronto, where he was speaking about meaning and reality and talking about the way in which
00:07:46.700 | we need to move beyond a nihilist and materialist view of reality, to see reality itself as
00:07:52.920 | meaningful and weighty, and as our place within reality as something that was significant.
00:08:00.600 | And that is where the real source of his position lies.
00:08:04.460 | That's where everything else has arisen from.
00:08:07.160 | And he's had a particular concern with oppressive governments, particularly communism and Nazism,
00:08:13.640 | which he sees as a response to the tragic loss of meaning within following the death
00:08:18.680 | of God.
00:08:19.760 | He's dealing with a Nietzschean reality, and the response of totalitarianism is an attempt
00:08:24.840 | to establish order in a situation of chaos.
00:08:28.360 | And so he's written and thought and spoken an awful lot about Soviet Russia, about Nazi
00:08:35.720 | Germany, and he's got a personal fascination with these things as well.
00:08:39.680 | His house is filled with Soviet propaganda, because he just finds it fascinating and compelling
00:08:47.480 | as a subject matter, seeing exactly what leads people to follow such a belief system.
00:08:52.920 | So whereas the typical clinical psychologist is attempting to enable people to be well-adjusted
00:08:58.920 | members of society, Peterson has always had this deeper concern of getting people to engage
00:09:05.040 | with reality in a meaningful and a powerful way, to recognise that reality itself is glorious,
00:09:11.280 | that reality has meaning, and that when we act, we should act with purpose and significance,
00:09:16.920 | and not just in a world that is bare and materialistic.
00:09:20.100 | But then he's also very concerned about the way in which society itself can become dysfunctional.
00:09:26.940 | So he's trying to form people who would be able to resist a Stalin or a Hitler, people
00:09:32.900 | who have courage and conviction.
00:09:35.700 | And so his concern about telling the truth, I've never seen anyone who writes with such
00:09:40.920 | force and conviction about the importance of telling the truth.
00:09:45.000 | Telling the truth for Peterson is something that has an existential significance, but
00:09:50.160 | also a political significance, because societies where lies, people become accustomed to these
00:09:55.400 | small lies, are societies where people like Hitler or Stalin rise to power.
00:10:02.000 | And so his concern about Bill C-16 wasn't about the gender issues primarily.
00:10:08.040 | It was about a government that was enforcing speech, enforcing people to tell what might
00:10:13.600 | seem to be just little lies in order to make society run more smoothly.
00:10:19.300 | But as Peterson argues, when we start telling those little lies, the entire fabric of society
00:10:25.400 | is placed in jeopardy, because those little lies seldom remain little.
00:10:29.600 | They tend to balloon in size, and they often come at the sacrifice of the soul of society.
00:10:37.200 | So he'll talk about, for instance, Soviet Germany, where you have Eastern Germany and
00:10:43.280 | the secret police, and the way in which their power was rested in large part upon all the
00:10:49.600 | petty animosities between people and their neighbours.
00:10:54.120 | And so our individual issues are bound up with the structural and systemic issues of
00:11:00.640 | society.
00:11:01.640 | So we must begin by setting ourselves right.
00:11:03.680 | Now many people have criticised Peterson for not taking enough account of the structural
00:11:07.900 | and systemic injustices and dysfunctions within society.
00:11:11.960 | I think that's an unfair concern.
00:11:14.320 | Rather, he's saying, these concerns are important, but we must begin with ourselves.
00:11:19.600 | We must set ourselves right first.
00:11:21.640 | Yeah, there is so much to commend in him.
00:11:24.840 | But how should we critically assess him?
00:11:27.520 | What would you say to Christians about how to go about discerning his works and his influence?
00:11:33.240 | Tell them to start off by recognising where he's coming from.
00:11:36.760 | He's not speaking, first of all, he's not speaking as a Christian.
00:11:40.240 | He will occasionally speak of himself as someone who holds to Christian beliefs, or is motivated
00:11:47.160 | by Christian principles, but he is not a Christian, not in any orthodox sense of the term.
00:11:52.680 | He believes in Christianity as a true myth, as a myth that has weight within the world,
00:11:58.600 | but not as something that actually occurred historically in the way that we would believe
00:12:02.800 | that it did.
00:12:04.520 | He's also speaking as someone who is a Jungian, and as a Jungian he's very much concerned
00:12:11.800 | about the collective self-conscious, about things like archetypes.
00:12:17.240 | And so his concept of chaos and order, male and female, all these sorts of things, are
00:12:22.040 | very much bound up not with primarily Christian understandings of these things, but with Jungian
00:12:27.320 | understandings.
00:12:28.320 | Now, those can be very helpful and informative, but we need to be aware, we need to understand
00:12:32.880 | where he's coming from there.
00:12:34.440 | He's a Darwinian who is very, in many ways, he's taking the concept of evolution further
00:12:41.200 | and dealing with it in the very context of human meaning structures, that those are evolved
00:12:47.280 | structures too, not just human physiology, but are very meaning structures.
00:12:52.040 | And so his Jungianism is inflected by Darwinianism.
00:12:56.640 | And so that's another thing to bear into account.
00:12:59.480 | He's a strong individualist, not in the sense of the way that we usually use that term,
00:13:05.480 | but as someone who believes that things must start with the individual, not in terms of
00:13:10.160 | self-actualisation and hedonism and indifference to the common good, but in terms of being
00:13:16.280 | responsible, in terms of seeing the individual as the source and the spring of the integrity
00:13:23.200 | of society.
00:13:24.400 | If individuals are not faithful, then society will crumble.
00:13:28.680 | And so that's another part of his ideology that he's working with.
00:13:32.220 | And then there's the phenomenology, which again is a way of looking at reality, framing
00:13:36.960 | reality in terms of moving beyond a subjective objective distinction.
00:13:41.940 | So when we look at the world in terms of science, we can often end up with a humanity that is
00:13:47.360 | detached from the world.
00:13:49.000 | We stand over against the world, and the world is primarily a realm of material objects that
00:13:54.400 | are shorn of meaning.
00:13:55.800 | Whereas he's trying to connect the human perception with the world as a world that's lived in,
00:14:01.240 | a world that's a realm of habitation, and a realm which is inherently meaningful, where
00:14:08.280 | the realities that we encounter are not just bare objects in motion according to certain
00:14:13.960 | forces, but they are charged with meaning, beauty, glory, life, all these sorts of things.
00:14:21.680 | Now it should be clear there that there are a lot of areas with Peterson's views that
00:14:27.600 | do not square well with Christian understandings.
00:14:30.960 | They will be common points of reference.
00:14:33.280 | So for instance, his Darwinianism and his Jungianism give him a strong account of human
00:14:37.600 | nature that pushes against many of the modern ideas of social constructivism and human nature
00:14:45.880 | as non-existence.
00:14:47.400 | We can make ourselves to be whatever we want ourselves to be.
00:14:51.220 | So he pushes very strongly against that, and it leads to a strong idea of differences between
00:14:55.680 | male and female and these sorts of things.
00:14:57.840 | But it's built on a different foundation from a Christian understanding, so that's important
00:15:03.200 | to bear in mind when we're dealing with him.
00:15:05.960 | Also, he uses scripture a lot.
00:15:08.400 | When you're reading most self-help books or books of philosophy or psychology, you don't
00:15:12.720 | expect to encounter scripture.
00:15:15.280 | Whereas within Peterson's work, it's everywhere.
00:15:18.080 | Much of his book, Twelve Rules for Life, is concerned with exegesis of a kind, but it's
00:15:24.480 | exegesis that's more akin to a sort of modern psychological allegory of scripture than to
00:15:31.240 | close exegetical and careful grammatical historical handling of the text.
00:15:36.860 | Now his understanding of scripture is something that we can learn from.
00:15:41.280 | We see that there are structures of meaning and archetypes and these sorts of things that
00:15:46.920 | are represented in scripture.
00:15:48.680 | So he comes up with a statement like this, this is in Twelve Rules, "The Bible is, for
00:15:53.600 | better or worse, the foundational document of Western civilization, of Western values,
00:15:58.320 | Western morality, and Western conceptions of good and evil.
00:16:01.360 | It's the product of processes that remain fundamentally beyond our comprehension.
00:16:05.640 | The Bible is a library composed of many books, each written and edited by many people.
00:16:10.240 | It's a truly emergent document, a selected, sequenced, and finally coherent story written
00:16:14.920 | by no one and everyone over many thousands of years.
00:16:18.680 | The Bible has been thrown up out of the deep by the collective human imagination, which
00:16:23.640 | is itself a product of unimaginable forces operating over unfathomable spans of time.
00:16:30.280 | Its careful, respectful study can reveal things to us about what we believe and how we do
00:16:35.320 | and should act that can be discovered in almost no other manner."
00:16:39.560 | Now that's a striking statement.
00:16:41.480 | It shows the contradiction of Peterson's thought, or the complex character of Peterson's thought,
00:16:48.520 | for a Christian.
00:16:49.520 | Because on the one hand, he's coming to the scripture with a great respect for this document.
00:16:53.520 | This document, in the form of myth, reveals certain truths about our collective subconscious.
00:16:59.680 | It reveals something true about our nature and about our place within the world and how
00:17:04.120 | we are to find meaning and purpose and significance in the world.
00:17:08.120 | But it's not true in the way that Christians have traditionally understood it.
00:17:13.800 | And so it's not a book that's come from God in the way that we understand it to have come
00:17:18.320 | from God.
00:17:19.320 | Rather, it's thrown up out of the collective human imagination.
00:17:23.080 | Now it's a deep document from which we can learn things, but at the same time, it's not
00:17:27.920 | inspired, it's not infallible, it's not inerrant, it's not the sorts of things that we, as Christians,
00:17:35.640 | would hold as absolutely essential to an orthodox doctrine of scripture.
00:17:39.640 | Yeah, I think that point is so important and it's worth underlining as well.
00:17:43.840 | I mean, as a Jungian archetypalist, he's not seeing one author.
00:17:47.800 | The Bible is a collection of psychological allegories for him.
00:17:52.040 | In other words, scripture emerges for him from a set of universal patterns that exist
00:17:56.920 | inside the collective unconsciousness of humanity.
00:18:00.160 | Oh my, I mean, that is such a great point for us all to remember as Christians.
00:18:06.160 | Whenever we see a New York Times bestseller making good use of the Bible, often that's
00:18:09.720 | where it's coming from.
00:18:10.720 | It's a very different approach to the Bible.
00:18:13.200 | But Alistair, maybe the most important question I want to ask you, and it's the one that
00:18:16.160 | I want you to elaborate most on, and it's what lessons can church leaders and pastors
00:18:21.280 | take from the Jordan Peterson phenomenon and his impact on young men?
00:18:26.200 | Yeah, I think that's one of the areas where Peterson's example is most striking.
00:18:31.220 | He attracts a wide range of people, but especially young men.
00:18:35.600 | And he's resonated with young men in a very powerful way that itself is a phenomenon that
00:18:40.660 | needs to be reflected upon.
00:18:42.920 | I've heard people comment that these young men's mothers have been telling them to clean
00:18:47.320 | their rooms for years, but then Jordan Peterson comes along and tells them to clean their
00:18:51.680 | room and it's deep wisdom from the dawn of time.
00:18:54.640 | And there's something about that that needs explanation.
00:18:58.380 | What is it about him that is so charismatic and magnetic for young men?
00:19:03.440 | And I think even within his own structures of thought, something like the archetype of
00:19:08.280 | the father within his Jungian perspective, I think that explains something of his impact.
00:19:15.560 | He speaks not just as an academic, not just as a general self-help guru, but he speaks
00:19:23.360 | as if a father, and people recognize in him a father figure and they respond to him as
00:19:28.960 | a father figure.
00:19:30.380 | Someone who represents a man who cares about them, who is concerned for their well-being,
00:19:36.280 | and who speaks with authority into their situation.
00:19:39.680 | Now the sorts of responses, both positive and negative, I think to Peterson are in large
00:19:46.120 | measure a response to what he represents, not just what he is saying.
00:19:50.880 | And so the negative responses are to the fact that Peterson represents a father figure.
00:19:56.400 | And for many people that's associated with the patriarchy, it's associated with male
00:20:00.960 | oppression and all these sorts of things, the ways in which men have dominated women
00:20:06.840 | within society.
00:20:07.920 | And so many people react against him.
00:20:09.960 | And the reactions against Peterson are remarkable, the vehemence with which people resist him
00:20:16.240 | and oppose him, and the way in which they write about him as this figure that's only
00:20:21.680 | one shade removed from Hitler himself.
00:20:24.160 | And it's very hard to understand why that is without recognizing that I think he represents
00:20:29.660 | something that's more than just an individual guy speaking certain ideas.
00:20:34.760 | He represents an archetype which people respond to.
00:20:38.880 | The other thing that pastors I think can learn from is Peterson speaks with authority, and
00:20:44.960 | people do need and value authority.
00:20:48.080 | And many pastors can beat around the bush, or they can hedge their statements, or they
00:20:52.840 | can start to approach their statements just in terms of, "This is what I've found personally."
00:20:59.480 | You can try it on for size too.
00:21:01.660 | But Peterson speaks with force and conviction into people's experience as one who cares
00:21:06.440 | about them, and as one who gives them direction as an older man to younger men.
00:21:12.520 | Now I think that's powerful, and yet many pastors fail to speak in such a manner, and
00:21:18.400 | they fail to represent that sort of figure.
00:21:21.800 | And so I would suggest that's a lesson that we can learn, that people aren't resistant
00:21:26.440 | to authority.
00:21:27.680 | When they see a good authority, they will respond to it.
00:21:30.480 | And often we think of authority as something that is a force to keep people in place, to
00:21:36.080 | make sure that they stay in line, that they don't hold false teaching or something like
00:21:40.400 | that.
00:21:41.400 | But authority can be an attractive force.
00:21:44.400 | People want good authority in their lives, because good authority gives you purpose and
00:21:49.400 | direction and significance and value.
00:21:52.120 | It gives you a sense of what to do, where to go.
00:21:55.680 | And if you meet someone who really cares about you, and yet can speak with clarity and wisdom
00:22:02.040 | into your situation and into your life, you will respond to that person in a way that
00:22:08.160 | you won't to many others.
00:22:09.600 | We respond to people who care about us.
00:22:12.320 | And I think that's one thing that Peterson exemplifies, that he really does care about
00:22:16.320 | these young men.
00:22:17.520 | When you see him crying, it's clear that his emotion for these young men is genuine.
00:22:23.160 | But yet it's not just about treating them as victims who need to be coddled, but as
00:22:28.600 | those who need to be given purpose and meaning.
00:22:30.800 | And so he speaks that into their situation.
00:22:33.480 | And so I think pastors have the same capacity, but often they don't show that same compassion
00:22:40.780 | for young men.
00:22:42.160 | And instead they speak in ways that just tear young men down, that blame them for things,
00:22:46.840 | that shame them, that accuse them, and constantly hold them up against a standard which they
00:22:52.240 | can't attain to without help.
00:22:54.560 | And so that's another area where I think pastors can learn from Peterson.
00:22:59.360 | Peterson also is a preacher.
00:23:00.760 | I mean, he's a psychology professor and a lecturer and all these sorts of things.
00:23:05.760 | But for the most part, his mode of discourse is akin to nothing so much as the preacher.
00:23:11.520 | And so preaching is not a dead medium.
00:23:14.200 | If people believe that a long sermon is something that is a relic of a few centuries ago, just
00:23:22.000 | look at the fact that people will go to YouTube and listen for two hours to a Peterson lecture.
00:23:28.320 | There can be something powerful and attractive about that.
00:23:31.760 | And so I think that's another lesson that pastors can learn.
00:23:35.720 | And finally, pastors I think can learn from the fact that Peterson's wisdom in speaking
00:23:40.840 | to people is not primarily about theory, but it's about having spent many, many years working
00:23:47.920 | with people and attending to people, listening to people.
00:23:51.760 | And hearing what they say and learning from observing people.
00:23:55.640 | And that gives you a wisdom and a capacity to speak into people's lives that mere textbooks
00:24:02.520 | won't.
00:24:03.520 | And so one of the great benefits that the pastor has is the benefit of spending time
00:24:09.040 | with people, of being a pastor, a shepherd to people, spending time with families.
00:24:14.700 | Very few people have access to families as families.
00:24:18.280 | They have access to individual people, but pastors can become part of the lives of families.
00:24:22.960 | They can become people who join with people on the pilgrimage of the Christian life over
00:24:29.320 | many, many decades and learn from that experience.
00:24:33.240 | And then they can communicate their knowledge to other people.
00:24:36.880 | And pastors I think are in danger of devaluing the importance of that time spent attending
00:24:42.900 | to people, listening to people and learning from people.
00:24:47.560 | That is something that I think Peterson exhibits that is important.
00:24:52.360 | And all of this I think goes back to something that is a very important and topical issue
00:24:58.680 | within our day and age, which is what is the nature of authority?
00:25:02.320 | Because we've had increasingly these issues within the church that have shown pastors
00:25:07.720 | and leaders who have abused authority, have used authority as a means of power over people,
00:25:13.080 | as a means of taking advantage of people, keeping them in line, preventing them from
00:25:17.780 | actually flourishing, but just making them do what they want them to do.
00:25:22.260 | But Peterson I think exhibits a form of authority that arises by means of attraction, that people
00:25:28.580 | see that and they want to become like this person.
00:25:31.300 | They want to learn from his wisdom.
00:25:33.260 | They want to learn from his example and from his words that he can speak into their situation.
00:25:38.220 | He speaks with an authority not just of some office, but with the authority of experience
00:25:43.460 | and wisdom and an authority that is based upon trust and compassion, that he actually
00:25:50.900 | cares about the people he's speaking to.
00:25:53.780 | And that gives him a practical authority in their lives.
00:25:57.600 | When people who really care about us tell us that we've done something that's really
00:26:01.560 | disappointed them, that stings in a way that nothing else quite can.
00:26:07.040 | When we know we've let down someone that we really care about and whose opinion we value
00:26:11.920 | or someone we admire, that really stings.
00:26:15.040 | And there's a sort of authority there that is based upon trust and love.
00:26:19.840 | And yet many pastors I think are in danger of seeing their authority primarily as residing
00:26:25.000 | in the fact of their office.
00:26:27.600 | Whereas the authority of a pastor who truly loves and is concerned with his congregation,
00:26:33.080 | who cares about them, who prays for them continually, someone who spends time visiting them and
00:26:40.160 | sharing their sorrows and their joys over many years, there is an authority that such
00:26:44.900 | a pastor has that no other person can really have in their life.
00:26:49.240 | And so I believe as pastors face the crisis of trust within the Church today, where people
00:26:55.700 | feel this deep distrust arising from a history of abuse, of spiritual mistreatment, of all
00:27:02.360 | these other sorts of problems, and where there are so many competing voices of authority,
00:27:08.000 | I think there's a lot to learn from this.
00:27:09.800 | The authority can work, but it really does depend upon establishing a bond of trust.
00:27:16.200 | And on that bond of trust and love, you can have the movement of truth.
00:27:20.200 | That's so helpful.
00:27:23.240 | That was Dr. Alistair Roberts from Durham, England, making his guest debut today in this
00:27:27.400 | special Long Form APJ episode.
00:27:30.000 | Alistair is a theologian, a podcaster on the Mere Fidelity podcast, and author of two books,
00:27:34.800 | one with Andrea Wilson, Echoes of Exodus, tracing themes of redemption through Scripture,
00:27:40.120 | and another one in process titled Heirs Together, a theology of the sexes, forthcoming in 2019,
00:27:47.320 | Lord willing.
00:27:48.320 | Well, we're going to return on Wednesday back with John Piper in the studio.
00:27:51.880 | Pastor John recently went undercover to attend a mainline liberal church service here in
00:27:57.400 | the Twin Cities.
00:27:58.400 | I asked him about it, and he will tell us what he learned in six observations.
00:28:03.320 | That should be really interesting.
00:28:04.440 | That's next time on Wednesday when we return.
00:28:06.080 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke.
00:28:07.080 | We'll see you then.
00:28:07.640 | [END]
00:28:10.640 | John Piper, A Theologian, and a Podcaster
00:28:12.640 | [BLANK_AUDIO]