The Christian tradition began with an event of rupture, where the crucifixion/resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth was encountered as a traumatic disturbance of all existing structures of meaning-making and social belonging that turned the world as we know it inside out and upside down.
In this respect (as I unpack below), there is within the radicality of the way of life enacted by Jesus at the earliest beginnings of Christianity an insurrectionary impulse to deconstruct established value-hierarchies that is fundamentally at odds with Jordan Petersonâs principal message about the unavoidable necessity of hierarchies in human societies. As Christians who follow the work of Jordan Peterson, how are we to respond to this fundamental contradiction between the radical egalitarianism of the figure of Jesus we witness in the gospels and Petersonâs evolutionary justification of hierarchical systems of domination in human civilization?
This critical subversion of natural hierarchies in the public career of Jesus of Nazareth is one of most widely accepted conclusions of historical Jesus scholarship over the last few centuries. For instance, we see this anti-hierarchical disruption of the established order in the most memorable teachings of Jesus, who proclaimed his central message of the kingdom of God in counter-intuitive parables that disoriented and surprised his audience by subverting the value-hierarchies of their social, political and religious world with shocking reversals of meaning that exposed the inherent violence and systemic injustice of the existing order of things.
With the paradoxical madness of a very un-kingly kingdom in which the last are first, the outsiders are in, the nothings and nobodies are singled out for their exceptionality over the privileged and powerful, and the one that is lost is more valuable than the ninety-nine that are saved, the mind-bending parables of Jesus consistently shattered the social and political hierarchies of his audiences commonly accepted world, while also robbing his listeners of their defences by stripping them of those guarantees of meaning that were psychologically necessary for living, as he invoked a deep existential challenge that put his followers into question at the very core of their being.
And another one of the most uncontested historical conclusions about the figure of Jesus in the gospels is his practice of open table fellowship with sinners and outsiders, a politically disruptive form of life that treated the hierarchical value-systems of his world as utterly irrelevant to life in the kingdom of God. In a world where the banquet table functioned as a miniature map of societyâs hierarchical discriminations, i.e. women served men at the table, slaves never shared a meal with their masters, the morally upright wouldnât be seen dead eating with sinners, etc Jesusâ irreverent practice of âopen commensalityâ â that is, of free healing and common eating with the poor and the oppressed on the fringes of society, symbolized his profoundly leftist message of radical egalitarianism, an altogether new kind of human community in which there is neither Greek nor Jew, freeman nor slave, male nor female.
And when Jesusâ radical egalitarianism is considered alongside of his socialist or communist practice of distributive justice, or free healing brought directly to the peasant homes and free sharing of whatever they had in return, the radicality of Jesus divinely inspired challenge to civilizationâs eternal inclination to invoke boundaries, establish hierarchies, and maintain discriminations is undoubtedly one of the most important features of Jesus entire program.
The problem is that there really doesnât seem to be any middle ground here. The two positions are mutually exclusive, we simply donât find the figure of Jesus in the gospel narratives doing anything that legitimizes or attempts to naturalize social and political hierarchies - at least not without engaging in convoluted intellectual gymnastics that succeed only in diluting and domesticating the radicality of Jesus kingdom program.
And so when it comes to the bottom-up radical egalitarianism of Jesusâ central message on the kingdom of God and the system of top-down power and domination of Petersonâs central message on the necessity of natural hierarchies, we canât bridge the gap between the two without distorting and misrepresenting either one or both sides of the equation. And so, who do we follow as Christians: Jordan Peterson or Jesus Christ?