Eugene H. Peterson

Eugene Hoiland Peterson (November 6, 1932 – October 22, 2018) was an American Presbyterian minister, scholar, theologian, author, and poet.

Peterson was born on November 6, 1932, in East Stanwood, Washington, and grew up in Kalispell, Montana.

He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy from Seattle Pacific University, his Bachelor of Sacred Theology degree from New York Theological Seminary, and his Master of Arts degree in Semitic languages from Johns Hopkins University.

He also held several honorary doctoral degrees.

In 1958, Peterson married Jan Stubbs.

They had three children.

In 1962, Peterson was a founding pastor of Christ Our King Presbyterian Church (PCUSA) in Bel Air, Maryland, where he served for 29 years before retiring in 1991.

He emphasized the message of Jesus as being communal rather than individual in its nature.

Peterson worked on The Message throughout the 1990s, translating the original Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic texts and paraphrasing them into contemporary American English slang.

He was the James M. Houston Professor of Spiritual Theology at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, from 1992 to 1998.

Peterson is probably best known for The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language.

The stated goal of The Message was to make the original meaning more understandable and accessible to the modern reader.

Peterson said:

"When Paul of Tarsus wrote a letter, the people who received it understood it instantly, When the prophet Isaiah preached a sermon, I can't imagine that people went to the library to figure it out. That was the basic premise under which I worked. I began with the New Testament in the Greek — a rough and jagged language, not so grammatically clean. I just typed out a page the way I thought it would have sounded to the Galatians."

He wrote over 30 books, including the Gold Medallion Book Award–winner The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language (Navpress Publishing Group, 2002), an idiomatic paraphrasing commentary and translation of the Bible into modern American English using a dynamic equivalence translation approach.

The translation was published in 2002 and had sold more than 15 million copies by 2018.

In 2017, a Religion News Service interviewer asked Peterson about same-sex marriage, which had been endorsed by his denomination, the Presbyterian Church (USA).

Peterson spoke positively of gay and lesbian Christians he had come to know in the past twenty years, and he described homosexuality as "not a right thing or wrong thing."

Asked if he would be willing to perform a same-sex wedding ceremony, he replied, "Yes."

The interview caused an immediate uproar in conservative Christian circles.

LifeWay Christian Books announced plans to stop selling Peterson's works.

The following day, however, Peterson published a statement affirming "a biblical view of marriage: one man to one woman" and retracting his affirmative answer to the question about officiating at a same-sex wedding.

"I regret the confusion and bombast that this interview has fostered. It has never been my intention to participate in the kind of lightless heat that such abstract, hypothetical comments and conversations generate."

Peterson died the following year.

In his 2021 authorized biography, A Burning in My Bones, Winn Collier reported that Peterson's retraction statement had actually been written by Peterson's editor and publisher, and released after Peterson reviewed it.

Peterson's son, Eric, doubted that the statement accurately reflected his father's convictions.

Peterson had dementia in his later years.

Peterson had retired from public life in 2017 after publishing his final book, As Kingfishers Catch Fire.

This was around the same time as the same-sex controversy around him surfaced.

Collier, Peterson's biographer, shared the family's poignant memory from the days leading up to Peterson's death: "During [his final] days, it was apparent that he was navigating the thin and sacred space between earth and heaven. We overheard him speaking to people we can only presume were welcoming him into paradise."

The family also commented how "[t]here may have even been a time or two when he accessed his Pentecostal roots and spoke in tongues as well."

Peterson remained "joyful and smiling" in his final days.

He was hospitalized on October 8, 2018, after his health took an abrupt and dramatic turn.

"[It] was caused by infection", said his son Eric Peterson in an email.

Peterson died at his home in Lakeside, Montana, on October 22, 2018, at the age of 85, a week after entering hospice care for complications related to congestive heart failure.

Praying with the Bible series