12 Rules for Life – A Christian Perspective
by David Robertson, theweeflea:
A Review of Jordan Peterson’s latest book.
(I have been asked so much about my article Is Jordan Peterson the New Messiah? on and the book that I decided to forego The Great Deception – Part 1 for this week and write a full review of 12 Rules for Life, complete with quotes so that you can judge for yourselves – Peterson is not a preacher but there are enough quotes here to keep a preacher happy for many sermons! of course reading the book is better. The following is my review from a Christian perspective. I have to say it is a long time since I have been so excited about a book!)..
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos is already a bestseller and deservedly so. No. 1 on Australian Amazon, no. 3 in the UK, no.1 in the US…..I found it challenging, stimulating and frustrating. It is a wonderful mix of psychology, theology, history, narrative and social philosophy from someone who is clearly influenced by Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Freud, Jung and, above all, the Bible.
I want to briefly review each of the chapters – but first to make some general comments. The book is well written and the highest complement of all is simply that it is one of the few books I found to be unputdownable! I also stopped highlighting passages because there were so many. The chapters are a bit uneven, and at times from my perspective, quite frustrating. It was as though we entered into a conversation and then just as it got interesting – we stopped! Peterson’s great forte is his ability to analyse the problem. His weakness is his solutions, which largely only go part of the way. I was left saying ‘Yes, but’ a lot! However if there is a more stimulating thinker and writer in the secular world, I have yet to meet them! (In the Christian world I would suggest that Os Guinness and Tim Keller are on the same wavelength and have the same abilities as Peterson). Nevertheless as Dr Norman Doidge says in the introduction about Peterson: “People have kept listening because what he is saying meets a deep and unarticulated need.”
Each of the rules is a chapter – so lets have a brief look at each of them.
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