Eugene Peterson Still Speaks, Even Though He Is Dead
By faith, the writer of Hebrews tells us that the lives of believers continue to speak, to bear witness to the truth they lived by, even after they have died.
Eugene Peterson, best known as translator of THE MESSAGE, was born November 6, 1932 and he died October 22, 2018, days short of his 86th birthday.
A recent podcast interview [1] led me to read the authorized biography of Eugene Peterson, A Burning in My Bones, ©2021, which chronicles Eugene’s life from birth to death.
- Biography––tells the story of a well-known individual and is written by someone else; usually a chronological account
- autobiography––a well-known person tells his own story, beginning and ending with details he/she wants to share
- memoir––a personal account of memories with limited scope and intent
Winn Collier, a pastor who knew Eugene for years, avoids the hagiography (an excessively flattering biography), typical of so many accounts of people’s lives––after they cannot dispute whatever gets written. Given full access to personal journals, Winn did as Eugene and his wife Jan asked him to do. Tell the truth, even if it hurts.
Winn discovered in Eugene’s journals a record of soul transparency that helped him piece together a biography of a man whose life aim was to live as a saint, which to him meant reflecting God as the living source beyond his own limitations, animating his personality, controlling ambitions, and guiding his path. He aspired for “congruence.” Congruence means “agreement or harmony.” Eugene Peterson wanted to be what he appeared to be, to live what he said he believed.
The Message from Beyond Our Time for Our Times
“They become what they behold.”
William Blake
Early in the process of Eugene’s translation of the Bible from the original language, he determined to write for “Joe, the mover,” the man who loaded the moving van with his family’s belongings. Writing for this one individual, hoping to help him understand the Bible, led to untold millions who have read with clearer understanding the Bible’s timeless message.
Eugene believed that all people are a work-in-progress. “No reductions to stereotype.”
As a pastor, Eugene spent his life involved in the travails of ordinary people and distrusted what the celebrity culture did to pastors. Eugene eschewed celebrity for himself and remained unimpressed with the way the world shapes people’s souls around the appearance of success.
Friends started telling Eugene about an article in Rolling Stone where Bono referred to “. . . this guy Eugene Peterson [whose book] has been a great strength to me. He’s a poet and a scholar and he’s brought the text back to the tone in which the books were written.”
When the U2 band’s chaplain contacted Eugene, trying to arrange a meeting with Bono, Eugene turned down the request. “Who’s Bono?”
Eugene explained, “I was finishing up the Old Testament at the time, and I really couldn’t do it.”
“You may be the only person alive who would turn down the opportunity [to meet Bono] just to make a deadline. I mean, come on. It’s Bono, for crying out loud.”
Eugene paused for a moment. “Dean, it was Isaiah.”
Eugene knew Isaiah; he didn’t know Bono. Over the years, Bono and Eugene spent time together. Eugene’s calendar marked “Lunch w/Bono,” and the rest of the page left blank tracked relationship details he kept private.
The Bible encompasses all truth, wherever truth is found.
In the podcast I listened to, it struck me when author Winn Corbin told host Michael John Cusick that later in life, Eugene read more fiction than theology.
This comment resonates. First, as Augustine said, “All truth is God’s truth.” John Calvin stated: “All truth is from God; and consequently, if wicked men have said anything that is true and just, we ought not to reject it; for it has come from God.”
While Eugene rarely gave advice because he resisted quick answers to problems, during his tenure as a professor at Regent seminary, he met with a young woman experiencing a personal “dark season.”
“God seemed to have suddenly disappeared and Julie couldn’t find her way. Before, she had always maneuvered difficult situations by reading her Bible more. As questions mounted, she simply added more chapters, more study. But her reliable tactic failed her now . . . Surely the professor who had translated so much of the Bible could invigorate her Bible reading. But instead, after hearing her struggles, Eugene gently leaned over and took her Bible out of her hands and then placed it on a shelf. He looked over his stacks of books, as if he were working through rows in his garden. Eugene pulled down ten novels, including Dostoevsky, Kingsolver, and Eliot. ‘Come back and talk to me after you have read these,’ he said. Julie left, books in her arms and holding a new thread of hope.”
The years spent teaching at seminary, Eugene prayed for students, believing that what students needed most was to pray and be prayed for. In the Soulcraft class he taught, “He approached things sideways, teaching novels (Middlemarch, The Power and the Glory, The Book of Dun Cow, The Brothers Karamozov) right alongside Scripture. Students started paying attention.”
By faith, Eugene paralleled the realities of life to Scripture without imposing a religious template on people’s unique stories.
Authenticity and humility characterized his relationship to people and to God.
God, who gets invited
to dinner at your place?
How do we get on your guest list?
2 “Walk straight,
act right,
tell the truth.
3-4 “Don’t hurt your friend,
don’t blame your neighbor;
despise the despicable.
5 “Keep your word even when it costs you,
make an honest living,
never take a bribe.
“You’ll never get
blacklisted
if you live like this.”
Psalm 15, the message
A Long, Unhurried Path to Leave a Legacy
Just as there are a lot of ways to be, there are a lot of ways to die. The last days of Eugene Peterson’s life describe “that precarious threshold of our two ways of being . . . that thin place” and a “stepping out into a broader place.” [2]
Another thin place noted, what the author described as “frailness in his soul,” and his wife also writing in her journal, “. . . not crippling doubts . . . not a crisis kind of thing, but a nibbling at the the edges” reveals humanity and humility.
Nibbling at the edges of a person’s faith occurs because the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty.
Life everywhere in this world has harsh and unkind realities.
So I think to myself, how can living in this contemporary world of technology and speed and competing belief systems and philosophies not raise doubts?
Jesus prayed for his own in the world not to be taken out of the world but to be protected from the evil one, who is loose but limited. [3]
Death awaits every mortal.
Last week, my husband and I came upon a car accident that stopped traffic in both directions for over an hour. Watching the emergency vehicles arrive, we were close enough to see what appeared to be an accident with fatalities.
The timing between a sudden accident that resulted in death and finishing the chapter titled “A Weathered but Holy Shape” about Eugene Peterson’s death reminded me of the car accident that took my dad’s life 11 days after he turned 30. More recently, our friend was killed in a car accident after Christmas. Both died instantly.
Those accidents could not have been foreseen any more than my husband and I could have anticipated the roadblock we had encountered.
By contrast, Eugene’s prolonged departure tried his and his family’s patience and faith. As if waiting for a delayed flight, his circumstances made me think of another dear friend and his wife as caregiver. Their lives showed the long obedience of faithfulness that love calls forth.
An open secret, Eugene’s long life and how he faced his own mortality reflects humility, gratitude, and prayer. Unhurried, following a fall, he slipped away after 15 months of intensifying dementia.
Eugene’s entire life pointed the way to the departure gate and what lies beyond.
[1] Restoring the Soul Podcast, Episode 176
[2] A Burning in My Bones, 300–301.
[3] John 17