Peterson, Transcendence, and Immanence

[Human beings] invented ritual. We started acting out our own experiences. Then we started to tell stories. We coded our observations of our own drama in these stories. In this manner, the information that was first only embedded in our behavior became represented in our stories. But we didn’t and still don’t understand what it all means. The Biblical narrative of Paradise and the Fall is one such story, fabricated by our collective imagination, working over the centuries.[31]

— Jordan Peterson, qtd. in Ashford, “Jordan Peterson and the Chaos of Our Secular Age.” Myth and Meaning in Jordan Peterson: A Christian Perspective. pp. 19–20.

Compare with N. T. Wright:

[The evangelists’] intention was to tell stories about events which really took place, and to invest those stories with the significance which, within their total worldview, they irreducibly possessed.

… we have now uncovered a solid reason for the evangelists’ wanting to give their readers actual information about an actual historical person. This goes beyond the argument advanced by Stanton, Moule and others: Christians who had not known Jesus personally would be bound to want to know about him, what exactly happened, and so forth.[93] This is undoubtedly true, but it appears somewhat ad hoc as an explanation, and does not fully meet the theological proposals of those who doubt the evangelists’ (or the tradition’s) intention to speak of Jesus rather than to speak in non-historical myths. If they were telling the story of Jesus as the climax of Israel’s story, there is every reason, over and above biographical curiosity, why they would have intended that their stories should have a clear historical referent.

— The New Testament and the People of God. pp. 398–399.

As best I can tell, the transcendence Peterson offers is not just an imaginary one, it’s also a shallower one, taken on its own grounds, than that which Christianity offers.[*] Christianity tells us not simply that our mundane actions objectively participate in the sacred (cf. Charles Taylor on the secular/sacred realm), but that events which Peterson believes, it would appear, are too transcendent to be history are in fact exactly that.

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[*] The qualification given here is due to my limited familiarity with Peterson.