We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine

Peterson closes the book with the story of a reluctant profit, Jonah, presenting this last story as emblematic of human strengths and weaknesses. Jonah is a good man but resentful of enemies and bitter that God should show favor to them. His sense of moral superiority compels him to ignore the voice of his conscience, and his subsequent downfall illustrates The Dangers of Pride. Jonah’s journey toward moral maturity is like those of other characters in the Bible, oscillating between moral insight and backsliding, but God stays with him as with the Ninevites. In rejecting God’s call to preach to the Ninevites, Jonah violates the principle of subsidiarity, placing his own judgment above that of God. The Ninevites have persecuted his people, and from his human perspective, his refusal to help them appears just. From Peterson’s perspective, Jonah errs by trusting his own seemingly reasonable moral judgment—a product of his present state of moral development—rather than aiming for a higher morality. The central value of the book, articulated dozens of times across its 500-plus pages, is “upward striving.” By ignoring the voice of God, or conscience, Jonah refuses to strive upward and instead remains stuck where he is. The belly of the whale symbolizes this prison of self-satisfaction, and only through prayerful contrition—the opposite of pride—can he escape it.

Peterson has shared that he is planning a book on the Christian New Testament, and this concluding episode serves a secondary function in pointing toward that planned future book, as some Christian scholars and theologians have interpreted the story of Jonah’s “death” and “resurrection” as foreshadowing the later death and resurrection of Jesus. Like Jesus, Jonah is sent on a mission to convert a lost people. The continuity between these stories, composed hundreds of years apart and under very different social circumstances, underscores the importance of Storytelling as the Foundation of Individual and Collective Consciousness. For Peterson, the stories contain shared themes and even parallel plots because they express universal and timeless human truths. In this, he draws from one of his most important intellectual predecessors—the early 20th-century Swiss psychoanalyst C. G. Jung, who argued for the existence of a “collective unconscious” composed of universal archetypes and primordial stories embedded in the structure of the brain and shared by all humans.

Peterson concludes by briefly summarizing each of the stories he has included in the book, reiterating the common themes among them. Chief among these is the theme most clearly articulated in the story of Jonah: the “upward-striving sacrificial transformation that reconciles the human and the divine” (496). Jonah’s story illustrates the need to make a sacrifice in the present for the sake of the long-term future, as Jonah agrees to be thrown into the sea as expiation for his sin. This sacrifice creates the conditions under which he can be reconciled with God. Peterson presents this story as the culmination of a pattern among all the stories in the book—each pointing toward the need for sacrifice and reconciliation. In the book’s final lines, he offers a rebuttal to German philosopher Friedrich Nietzche’s famous pronouncement in The Gay Science that “God is dead,” responding with the Latin phrase Deus renatus est, or “God is reborn.”