The Catch-22 of Christ
What Jordan Peterson Gets Wrong and Kierkegaard Gets Right About Faith
Originally published in Alethēia» on September 30, 2021. Heavily modified. Thank you to Michael Eschelbach for comments, discussion, and review.
Capturing the True Catch-22
There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to.1
The term Catch-22 has permeated American and Western language and culture considerably since Joseph Heller first published his novel in 1961. However, the phrase is often applied to situations distinct from the original.
Now, many describe any two situations which are equally undesirable, or result in the same undesired outcome. While this may seem like a Catch-22, a true Catch-22 is more nuanced. Many of us are faced with difficult decisions with undesirable outcomes every day. What makes Yossarian “let out a respectful whistle” after learning of the Catch-22 clause (quoted above) is the circularity within the decision-making process.
Anyone who wants to stop flying is considered rational because it’s rational to not want to fly.
Anyone who is thinking rationally isn’t crazy.
Anyone who is afraid of flying had to keep flying.
Anyone who isn’t afraid of flying was crazy.
Anyone who is crazy had to ask to stop flying.
Anyone who wants to stop flying must be thinking rationally.
Anyone who is thinking rationally isn’t crazy.
Anyone who isn’t crazy has to keep flying.
And so on…
The circularity here is a much smaller subsection of those decisions which either have equally undesirable outcomes or the same undesirable outcome either way. For example, a situation in the book Catch-22 in which readers often misapply the concept of a Catch-22 is this: If I keep flying, I’ll probably be killed. If I stop flying, I’ll be killed for abandonment/disobeying orders. Either way, I’ll be killed. This is not a Catch-22, it’s just a terrible situation to be in.
The Catch-22 is that whether you’re crazy or not, you’re flying.
Christ and the Original Catch-22
Whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will keep it.
(Luke 17:33)
Does Christ not sound exactly like a character from Heller’s novel? One can imagine the following dialogue between Christ and a disciple:
“Whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it…” The disciples scribbled furiously. “…but whoever loses his life will keep it.” The disciples pause.
“Sorry?”
“…but whoever loses his life will keep it.”
“I’m not sure I understand. If I seek to preserve my life…”
“You’ll lose it,” Christ responded.
“But if I lose it…”
“You’ll keep it.”
“Right. Yes sir.”
Strip Christ’s phrase out of its theological context, and it becomes as absurd as anything Joseph Heller (or Harold Pinter) have written. And we can see this same circular logic at play here:
If you want to keep your life, you will lose your life.
If you lose your life, you will keep it.
If you keep your life, you will lose your life.
If you lose your life, you will keep it.
Now, this doesn’t quite sound like the Catch-22 from Heller’s novel yet. There are two outcomes here, they’re just not what you’d expect, whereas in Heller’s Catch-22, there’s only one outcome either way. We’ve got the circular reasoning, but not the inevitable outcome. We’ll get to that.
Kierkegaard’s Knight of Faith (or: Why Jordan Peterson Faithlessly Believes in God)
To make sense of this, we must turn to two thinkers that have become more popular in the last few years: Søren Kierkegaard and Jordan Peterson.
Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist who rose to fame and international intellectual stardom around the time of his 12 Rules for Life publication, becomes quite squirmy when asked about his beliefs in God. It usually goes something like this:
“So, Dr. Peterson, do you believe in God?”
A long pause. Peterson stares intently at something the camera never captures. He begins to talk, but his eyes never leave that unidentifiable spot.
“Well, I would say that I act as if God exists.”
“Right…”
Jordan Peterson is not a Christian. At least he’s never stated so publicly, despite teaching on and quoting from the Bible in many of his lectures and writings. His reasoning for the answer he gives, that he acts as if God exists, is simply an attempt at some sort of ontological humility. Peterson simply believes it would be arrogant to think that there isn’t a God and that we humans really are the best, most powerful force in the world. But this reasoning is not the Christian faith. It’s closer to some sort of monotheistic deism that doesn’t make room for the Son of God in its theology. As a result, “acting as if God exists” is simply another way of saying “God exists, so act well!”—it’s ultimately a faith not in God’s redeeming work, but a faith in the self’s ethical behavior instead of Christ’s righteousness.
So we have Jordan Peterson, who doesn’t believe in God but acts as if God exists. If that’s one side of this circular logic of faith, what’s the other?
Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish 19th-Century “father of existentialism,” wrote extensively on faith in his publication Fear and Trembling (under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio). In this book, he presents Abraham as the “knight of faith,” and compares him to the “knight of infinite resignation.”
Kierkegaard retells the story of God telling Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac. It is here where we see this same Catch-22 logic at play:
“Abraham, take your son Isaac up the mountain and sacrifice him.”
“But didn’t you say that my offspring shall be named through him and his offspring shall rule over this land and so on?”
“Yes.”
“But,” he paused, “you want me to kill him?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, sir.”2
Kierkegaard takes pains to point out the many ways Abraham could have responded—and most likely should have responded, especially by today’s standard. But he ultimately concludes none of those would be the response of a “knight of faith,” and that Abraham’s actual response in the story was the faithful response to God.
And so Abraham takes his child up the mountain, binds him to the altar, and raises his arm, dagger in hand, ready to swing down into his son’s body.
Don’t Commit Murder
God said that. It’s one of the Ten Commandments, the list of stuff we shouldn’t do. (Exodus 20:13)
And while there are some exceptions,3 killing for a sacrifice is not one of them.
Let’s take a look at this:
“Don’t kill people,” God said, “otherwise you have sinned against me. I love people, and you will be punished for killing them.”4
“Okay.”
“Go kill your son.”
“What?”
You can see where there might be some confusion. Kierkegaard explains this all with the “teleological suspension of the ethical.” If this sounds complicated and over your head, don’t worry. All you need to know is this: if God asks you to do something, you do it even if it’s considered unethical because ultimately God created ethics so doing what he says is always ethical. Simple, right?
Except maybe that doesn’t capture the whole picture. Let’s turn back to Jordan Peterson, and perhaps the synthesis of Peterson and Abraham will put this Catch-22 out in the open.
Synthesizing Faith and Faithlessness
Jordan Peterson doesn’t have a Christian faith, but he acts as if God exists.
Abraham is considered the father of faith, but he was willing to kill his son, a sin that violates one of God’s clearest, most basic laws. Something’s going on here.
Perhaps where this leaves us is here: if you act as if God exists, then you don’t believe in God. If you believe in God, sometimes you act as if he doesn’t exist.
But how can this be? Then would faith not just be a “get out of jail free” card with God? Not exactly.
This is where the “teleological” aspect of Kierkegaard’s convoluted phrase comes into play.
If you take Peterson’s approach, you believe God might exist and act accordingly. While perhaps respectable in a worldly sense, this is still a form of unbelief. It keeps God at arm’s length. But faith is often indistinguishable from madness—perhaps even from sin. And a true knight of faith in the Kierkegaardian sense is indistinguishable from a madman, and perhaps even from a sinner.
This lands us right at the heart of two paradoxes, one Kierkegaardian, one Lutheran.
The Kierkegaardian Paradox of Faith
First, Kierkegaard’s treatment of Abraham in Fear & Trembling points us to this strange truth:
If you act as if God exists, you may be clinging to yourself.
If you truly believe in God, you may find yourself letting go of everything, including ethics, including certainty.
Hence why the knight of faith in Kierkegaard’s treatment is Abraham just as he appears in the biblical narrative: not complaining, not bargaining, not ignoring,—perhaps not even understanding,—but realizing that God has commanded this action and that God will keep his promises nevertheless. Without God, Abraham is a madman! He certainly looks like one. Christians have a hard-enough time deciphering what on earth God was doing commanding Abraham to provide his son as a sacrifice (even when one understands how the story is a precursor to God providing his own son as a sacrifice…). Imagine how atheists feel when they approach this “father of faith” who, upon being told directly by “God” to sacrifice his son, simply goes and does it! A madman indeed!
By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac. He received the promises and yet he was offering his one and only son, the one to whom it had been said, “Your offspring will be traced through Isaac.” He considered God to be able even to raise someone from the dead; therefore, he received him back, figuratively speaking.
(Hebrews 11:17)
The Lutheran Paradox of Faith
Second, there is this sense of simul iustus et peccator (simultaneously saint and sinner). This age-old Lutheran idea, deeply rooted in Scripture,5 means that even those that cling most tightly to Christ are still sinners. The Christian does not magically improve their ethical behavior: we still sin and struggle with the flesh.6 We still need forgiveness. And yet we are justified by faith, clothed in Christ’s righteousness, and no longer under condemnation for our sinfulness.
And so, Paul himself admits that he is a sinner, and yet a follower of Christ! How can we tell apart the righteous from the sinful if even the righteous are sinners? How can we separate the wheat from the chaff? Well… that’s exactly the point. We cannot, and it is not our purpose to. And yet, what we find ourselves doing is attempting to distinguish the righteous from the unrighteous anyway. But where would that lead us? Someone like Peterson would be swept into the righteous camp and Abraham would be left out in the cold. Peterson acts as if God exists—Abraham knows God.
These two paradoxes are what separate Abraham from Peterson:
Peterson believes enough to behave. In many ways, he is like the “fake” Archbishop of Canterbury in Johnny English (2003) who has tattooed on his bottom, “Jesus is coming, look busy.”7 Peterson attempts to preserve his life, but misses the gospel.
Abraham believes enough to die, and in doing so, he lives. Isaac, his son, lives. Abraham loses his life, and he keeps it. That’s what faith is.
The Catch-22 of Christ
An important aspect of Christianity that is seemingly lost on a worrying number of American churches is this: Christ sets you free from your sins. He doesn’t work faith into you because you are a good person and Christ’s going to make you a better one. He works faith into you because he loves you while you are still a sinner.
The harder you try to please him and do what he wants, the more you’ll fail. (That’s why you needed saving.) And yet, Christian after Christian still says things like “I feel like God’s telling me to do this or that…” or “I’m working to become more like Jesus.”
And then there’s ol’ Abe, an arm-swing away from murdering his own son with a sacrificial dagger. And this guy’s the father of faith!
There’s something going on here.
Elsewhere, and under different pseudonyms, Kierkegaard gives us a glimpse of what exactly is going on here. Both The Concept of Anxiety and A Sickness Unto Death provide the necessary context for understanding how Abraham can be considered fully faithful when those striving to “be like Christ” fail, they “lost their life” when Abraham gains it.
The sickness in A Sickness Unto Death is despair, and despair is sin. And for Kierkegaard, you are either in despair or you are in faith. To boil it down to the simplest explanation, there are three levels. It goes something like this:
You are in despair, but you do not know it.
You are in despair, and you are conscious of that fact. This worsens your despair, but also brings you closer to escaping it.
You escape despair by faith alone, by grounding yourself in the external being that created you, by recognizing your relationship with God, with Christ.8
In The Concept of Anxiety, he says as much in different words. Rather than despair, it is anxiety that plagues an individual when he becomes “conscious of his freedom.”9 It is a uniquely spiritual awareness. Animals, in contrast, do not experience this consciousness of freedom. It is an “adventure that every human being must go through — to learn to be anxious so that he may not perish either by never having been in anxiety, or by succumbing in anxiety. For whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.”10 Our anxiety reveals our need for God. Even Jesus, Kierkegaard notes elsewhere, “prayed anxiously in the garden at Gethsemane before he faced death.”11
It is our anxiety, existentially, that leads us through our despair and into faith..
Somewhere early in Slavoj Žižek’s book The Courage of Hopelessness, he offers the following scenario: a man is attempting to stop smoking. While he is told by his therapist to try to cut down, he simply enjoys every cigarette as if it is his last, genuinely believing each time that he will not smoke again. In this way, he enjoys smoking even more, but does not ever actually stop. Believing each cigarette is truly his last leads him to enjoy it even more.
Then his therapist changes tactics and tells him that he “should smoke as much as he wants since health is not really a problem.”12 He therefore stops seeing each cigarette as his last, which he shall enjoy as his last, but rather begins to feel guilty “without getting any narcissistic satisfaction from this guilt.”13 He has entered despair, and so “in total despair—not as a great decision—he stops smoking … The way out thus emerges unexpectedly when [he] accepts the total hopelessness of his predicament.”14
Whoever finds his life will lose it. Whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.
Do these words not ring ever more true? The smoker, attempting to “find his life” by making incremental improvements such as quitting smoking, loses his life and remains an “I’m gonna quit” smoker. Only when the illusion of self-effort dies can true change take place. He who is made anxious by the freedom of smoking all he wants with no restraint eventually loses the addiction.
But wait! Remember, the true Catch-22 leaves us not with two undesirable scenarios, but with the same scenario no matter what we choose. Where Christ crafts this Catch-22 is in the universality of his saving grace. You might be anxious regarding your relationship to him, you may feel you have not done enough to “earn” your place with him, be made holy by him or even be saved by him. But it is already finished. The work is already done. Whether you pursue him or not, whether you continue smoking your last cigarette or quit, Christ has died for you. You cannot escape it. It is the ontological, metaphysical reality of the human experience.
Some argue no, you must believe before you are saved. You have to want it. But does this not undercut the gravity and meaning of Christ’s death on the cross? That he saved the un-deserving, the wretched? He had to die for us because we are incapable of keeping God’s law. If we had a shot, he wouldn’t have come.
Some argue this is “cheap grace.” To them, I use the smoker example. The smoker did not quit when he knew what was good for him and was told what he must do to improve. He quit when he was told, “go, do as you please, and I’ll be here when you’re ready. Go, enjoy as many cigarettes as you like.”15
In the context of Christ, this makes sense. Who knows, more than he, how much better for us his love is than anything in this world? Christ is confident nothing will compare to what he has to offer. Whether you want it or not, it’s there for you.
Back to Catch-22: whether you’re crazy and you want to fly, or you’re rational and you don’t want to fly, you have to fly. Whether you’re a sinner or a saint, you’re saved. (And the reality is, you are both.) Whether you try your best to fulfill the law yourself or you chase some other form of fulfillment, Christ has fulfilled the law for you. This is not cheap grace: it may have set us free, but it cost Christ his life. Such is the Catch-22 of Christ, and the Catch-22 of faith.
Unlike the Catch-22 in Heller’s novel, however, this is not cause for despair. It’s cause for joy. It’s cause for relaxation and dispelling anxiety. You need not even be anxious about the limitless possibilities of what you might do next. It is no longer you who lives, but Christ who lives in you. You have been put to rest in Christ. Your life is covered with the canopy of grace. Your debt has been transferred to Christ, and his wealth has been transferred to you.16 Do you realize this? You cannot change these facts. Do you realize this?
Just like the pilots in Catch-22 who could not change whether they fly or not, you cannot change what has already been done for you and what has already been given to you. Do you know this? Rest easy in this knowledge.
Everything is taken care of.
Everything is going to be okay.
… by the works of the law no human being will be justified. But if we ourselves are also found to be “sinners” while seeking to be justified by Christ, is Christ then a promoter of sin? Absolutely not! … For through the law I died to the law, so that I might live for God. I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. … if righteousness comes through the law, then Christ died for nothing.
(Galatians 2: 16-21)
… there is now no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus, because the law of the Spirit of life In Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death. What the law could not do since it was weakened by the flesh, God did. He condemned sin in the flesh by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh as a sin offering, in order that the law’s requirement would be fulfilled in us who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. … the mind-set of the Spirit is life and peace.
(Romans 8:1-4, 6)
Heller, Joseph. Catch-22. Originally published 1961. Vintage, 1994. Paperback, 52.
George Clooney produced a faithful adaptation of the novel as a TV show for Hulu which released in 2019.
This is my fictionalization, not Kierkegaard’s.
Arguably, killing during warfare, intruder in the home, and penance for a crime.
I know the Ten Commandments were given after Abraham was around, but the Law was always there.
See Galatians 2:17, Romans 4:5, 7:15-25, 1 John 1:8-9, and Philippians 3:12.
However, a life in the faith is one filled with good works amongst the filth of the flesh. These good works are performed by Christ through us, despite us, and with us. Through Christ, we can do genuinely good things that we’ve always had potential for, but never have been able to fulfill on our own.
See Michael Eschelbach’s work on free will (or lack thereof) at wordwithoutwalls.com
Carlisle, Clare. Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard, 174.
Kierkegaard, Søren. The Concept of Anxiety. trans. Alastair Hannay.
Carlisle at p. 175.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Courage of Hopelessness. Verso Books, 2017. Kindle, loc 3.
Ibid.
Ibid. Now, is this a likely scenario? Perhaps not. Although I think the premise, at least, appeals to anyone to who tried to give up an addictive behavior. The act of quitting only makes that next cigarette more desirable, more tempting. In removing those limitations, your next cigarette becomes the next in a line of a thousand cigarettes and whatever joy you received from “your last cigarette” is gone.
No, Christ never says to “go smoke as many cigarettes as you like,” but the Parable of the Prodigal Son is a good indication that our loving father in heaven is fully aware of the human condition. We tend to “never know how good we’ve got it.” In that Parable, the younger son has grown up in a household with a loving father and was always well-cared for. Of course, this leads to him asking for his inheritance early and walking away. He lives a life of pleasure-seeking and debauchery, only to end up penniless, hungry, alone, and unfulfilled. The son returns to the father who, much to the older son’s chagrin, fully embraces the younger son and prepares a large feast for him upon his return. Now, did the father of this parable, or our father in heaven, approve of the son’s conduct while he was off wasting away his inheritance on gambling, booze, and women? I think it’s a safe bet that the answer is no. I’m putting my money on “no.” And so what does this teach us about the relationship between our faith and God’s love and mercy towards us?
As I’ve noted elsewhere, Guillermo del Toro’s remake of Nightmare Alley is effectively the parable of the prodigal son but with one change: before the son leaves, he kills his father and therefore has no loving father to return home to after his time of sin and debauchery has left him with nothing. It’s a cruel ending.
Also consider this aspect of Season Two of The Last of Us (no spoilers): the younger characters in the commune have spent the most mature part of their lives in the commune, safe from the threat that exists outside its walls. Add to that the training they receive, and they feel invincible. It only takes one generation to forget how good we’ve got it. And that’s the beauty of this Catch-22 with Christ: whether we “follow the rules” and stay in the commune or whether we leave the commune, we are saved. The characters in that show are not so lucky.
Again, see Eschelbach, wordwithoutwalls.com