This book brings to life the principle described by Jesus when he said, "I praise You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because You have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children." Jordan Peterson, a man the New York Times describes as "The most influential public intellectual in the Western world right now" clearly falls in the category of the wise and learned. The author, by comparison, is but an intellectual child. Despite this disparity in intellectual stature, however, the author is revealed something that Peterson has been kept from seeing. More precisely the author has discovered the very thing that Peterson set out to find. This book is a demonstration of the veracity of this claim, the discovery itself, and the journey that led to it.
In the introduction to 12 Rules for Life Dr. Norman Doidge correctly asserts that "One of the many virtues of the book you are reading now is that it provides an entry point into Maps of Meaning, which is a highly complex work". Maps of Meaning, Jordan Peterson's magnum opus is indeed highly complex, and, for that reason, it's likely few have either the time – the audiobook, read by Peterson himself, is over 30 hours long - or the capacity to plumb its depths and mine its riches. To understand Maps of Meaning is to understand Jordan Peterson, however, and the author felt driven to understand Jordan Peterson to make sense of what he perceived as a very strange anomaly, a truly scientific mind that honored and valued Scripture. He writes "I spent an inordinate amount of time, over a period of about a year, immersed in Maps of Meaning and through this prolonged exercise I became very familiar with Jordan Peterson's ideas."
Through this exercise, the author recognized that Peterson set a very clear and specific target for himself in Maps of Meaning. That target, in Peterson’s language, boils down to an "explicit declaration of that which Christ represents." Following the principle of The Divinity of Interest described in Maps of Meaning, the author’s interest was drawn to explore the question, "Who is Christ to Jordan Peterson?" This exploration soon required revising the question to, "What is Christ to Jordan Peterson?" as it became obvious that Jordan Peterson’s conception of Christ did not point to a person but to something, well, something quite abstract.
In Maps of Meaning, Christ has many facets, as it were, but these facets are scattered throughout the book. The author has painstakingly gathered those pieces together and organized them for us in order to assemble a unified sketch from the disparate parts. Using this sketch, the author enables the reader to see what Jordan Peterson was aiming at as well as establishing the fact that he fell from hitting his mark. This language of falling short of hitting the mark is one that Peterson uses in Beyond Order, where he discusses the concept of sin. There he observes that the word sin has its roots in the Greek term "harmatia" which "was originally an archery term, and it meant to miss the mark or target."
Jordan Peterson has sinned, has fallen short of hitting the target he clearly delineated in Maps of Meaning. In hitting that target, the author enables the reader to see not just how close Peterson came to hitting his target as well as how infinitely far Peterson fell short of doing so. In this way, the reader is left with a fairly objective measure of the magnitude of Jordan Peterson’s "sin." With the target in plain sight, the reader can see how unlikely it is that Peterson will ever hit it. What’s more, in hitting the target himself, the author bridges that gap, making up for Peterson’s falling short. This book, then, is about atonement for sin, and more particularly atonement for Jordan Peterson’s sin.
Finally, with Jordan Peterson's conception of Christ out in the open, made visible or "revealed" in the sense that it has been made explicit, the reader can apprehend the significance of the discovery and how relevant it is to the current moment. Jordan Peterson's conception of Christ is a truly revolutionary idea. That idea, like the ark that Noah built, may very well prove to be the means by which Western civilization escapes its current impending disintegration.