{"id":29554,"date":"2022-11-16T10:53:31","date_gmt":"2022-11-16T18:53:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/?p=29554"},"modified":"2022-11-16T10:53:31","modified_gmt":"2022-11-16T18:53:31","slug":"there-is-more-behind-our-beliefs-than-the-bible-says-so","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/there-is-more-behind-our-beliefs-than-the-bible-says-so\/","title":{"rendered":"There is More Behind Our Beliefs Than “The Bible Says So…”"},"content":{"rendered":"

The concept of reading many of the Biblical passages with a literal interpretation is quite a novel concept. Take, for example, Genesis 1-11 being a literal retelling of how the earth was formed, the first humans, the great flood, and the Tower of Babble would have been anathema to the Hebrew writers, let alone most Christian Biblical interpreters throughout most of church history.<\/span><\/p>\n

But if these stories were not intended to be literal stories, what were the intentions of the ancient writers? Symbolism and symbolic language is the literary style of the\u00a0<\/span>Prologue of Genesis<\/span><\/em>. The writers were taking stories passed on from generation to generation, attempting to make meaning of the world and what they believed to be true about God. Could God have created the world in the construct of seven days? Sure. But could the Creation narrative be a symbolic interpretation of how God intimately created, period? Yes.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Reframing particular parts of the Bible as symbolic does not cause the entire tower of Biblical authority to crumble. Instead, it gives us better insight into how the ancients saw significance in their lives, the world, and the Divine. The alternative to the order created by ancient beliefs and stories is chaos. \u201cThe known, our current story, protects us from the unknown, from chaos–which is to say, provides our experience with determinate and predictable structure. Chaos has a nature all of its own,\u201d argued Jordan Peterson in his philosophy and cognitive psychology work,\u00a0<\/span>Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief<\/span><\/em>.<\/span>\u00a0[1]<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Peterson\u2019s book attempts to survey why the ancients formulated their stories, beliefs, and religion to bring order into chaos. He believes that by studying the ancient\u2019s myths, modern society can better understand how belief systems are established and how their brains process what they were experiencing in the developing world. In many regards, the framing of this book follows the author\u2019s journey through the deconstruction of his Christian beliefs, what he was learning through his studies, and what he was experiencing in the chaos of the world.<\/span><\/p>\n

But belief systems are not individual experiences for the most part. Peterson dives deep into the psychology of tribalism, arguing that together we can defeat the unfamiliar and unknown. \u201cA society \u2018works\u2019 to the degree that it provides its members with the capacity to predict and control the events in their experiential field to the degree that it provides a barrier, protection from the unknown or unexpected,\u201d argued Peterson.<\/span>\u00a0[2]<\/span><\/a>\u00a0Religions provide the cultural map for beliefs, behavior, the human desire for belonging, and the examples of those who have lived the \u201cheroes journey.\u201d Of course, this stretches back to our time in Joseph Campbell\u2019s\u00a0<\/span>The Heroes\u2019 Journey<\/span><\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

But what happens if our collective beliefs are wrong or off-center? What happens if the views passed along to us came from a white, Euro-American, patriarchal, privileged worldview? What might we be getting wrong that we believe we are right about?<\/span><\/p>\n

What makes Peterson\u2019s reading fascinating is his ability to bring cognitive science into why we formulate beliefs and what happens when we are confronted with alternative beliefs and realities. \u201cThe brain is actually composed, in large part, of two subsystems, adapted for action in that place. The right hemisphere, broadly speaking, responds to novelty with caution, and rapid, global hypothesis formation. The left hemisphere, by contrast, tends to remain in charge when things that is, explicitly categorized things-are unfolding according to plan.\u201d<\/span>[3]<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

This book connects deeply with my doctoral project, focusing on how social and cognitive science can be seen through a theological lens to improve the relational dynamics within a congregation. In short, I have an entire chapter of my doctoral book dedicated to our cognitive and emotional response to the unknown and unfamiliar. Peterson\u2019s research directly connects to the ideas presented in Schultz\u2019s\u00a0<\/span>On Being Wrong<\/span><\/em>,<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/strong>Kahneman\u2019s \u201cSystems 1\u201d and \u201cSystems 2\u201d thinking, and Chivers and Chivers’s invitation to rethink how we read and interpret facts.<\/span><\/p>\n

Peterson\u2019s philosophical and cognitive research challenges how we examine why we believe what we believe, how those beliefs were formed, and how they implicitly and explicitly affect how we understand life, the Divine, society, and our neighbor. Recognizing that we all bring a unique bias lens to our religious beliefs can shed light on why we are averse to alternative interpretations, beliefs, and views, along with what is happening inside our psychological and emotional centers as we deal with the very real human impulse to respond to the unknown with flight, fight, or freeze.<\/span><\/p>\n

[1]<\/span><\/a>\u00a0Jordan B. Peterson,\u00a0<\/span>Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief<\/span><\/em>, (New York: Routledge, 1999), 18.<\/span><\/p>\n

[2] Ibid, 226.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

[3] Ibid, 32.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The concept of reading many of the Biblical passages with a literal interpretation is quite a novel concept. Take, for example, Genesis 1-11 being a literal retelling of how the earth was formed, the first humans, the great flood, and the Tower of Babble would have been anathema to the Hebrew writers, let alone most […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":139,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1779,1778],"class_list":["post-29554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-maps-of-meaning","tag-peterson","cohort-lgp11"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29554","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/139"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29554"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29554\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29555,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29554\/revisions\/29555"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}