Eugene H. Peterson
On October 22, 2018, Eugene H. Peterson died in Lakeside, bringing to a close a life spent working across the overlapping territories of theology, pastoral ministry, and literary translation. He had been born on November 6, 1932, in Stanwood, and his career would eventually take in roles as parson, university teacher, theologian, author, and translator — a range that kept him in sustained contact with religious texts in the English language.
His formal education moved through several institutions. After Flathead High School, Peterson attended Seattle Pacific University, then continued his studies at New York Theological Seminary and Johns Hopkins University. That sequence carried him from his early schooling through to graduate-level academic work, and it provided the foundation from which he would later operate in both pastoral and university settings.
He served as a parson and as a university teacher, two occupations that placed him among congregants and students alike. As a theologian and author, he produced a body of work in English, and his role as a translator gave that work a particular character. Rendering ancient texts into contemporary English was not a peripheral activity for Peterson but a central one, running alongside his writing and his ministry throughout his career as a United States citizen.
Peterson died in Lakeside, having lived and worked within the multiple vocations the facts of his life record: theologian, parson, university teacher, author, and translator. The institutions where he received his education — Flathead High School, Seattle Pacific University, New York Theological Seminary, and Johns Hopkins University — mark the stages of a formation that preceded decades of work with scripture and language. He was born in Stanwood in 1932 and died in Lakeside in 2018, and between those two points he produced, in English, a body of authored and translated work that defined his public presence.
Quotes by Eugene H. Peterson
Eugene H. Peterson's insights on:
Every true gospel vocation is a resurrection vocation that arrives after a passage through the belly of the fish. All “word of God” vocations are thus formed. There can be no authentic vocation that is not shaped by passage through some such interior.
Any time that we move from personal names to abstract labels or graphs or statistics, we are less in touch with reality and diminished in our capacity to deal with what is best and at the center of life. Yet we are encouraged on every side to do just that.
That is Jeremiah’s accusation: “You have found a safe place, haven’t you! This nice, clean temple. You spend all week out in the world doing what you want to do, taking advantage of others, exploiting the weak, cursing the person who isn’t pliable to your plans, and then you repair to this place where everything is in order and protected and right.
Give your entire attention to what God is doing right now, and don’t get worked up about what may or may not happen tomorrow. God will help you deal with whatever hard things come up when the time comes. A.
I am interested in cultivating the fundamentally holy nature of all language, including most definitely the casual, spontaneous, unselfconscious conversational language.
The basic conviction of a Christian is that God intends good for us and that he will get his way in us. He does not treat us according to our deserts, but according to his plan. He is not a police officer on patrol, watching over the universe, ready to club us if we get out of hand or put us in jail if we get obstreperous. He is a potter working with the clay of our lives, forming and reforming until, finally, he has shaped a redeemed life, a vessel fit for a kingdom. A LONG OBEDIENCE.
Apart from the before, the now has little meaning. The now is only a thin slice of who I am; isolated from the rich deposits of before, it cannot be understood.
Mercy, GOD, mercy!”: the prayer is not an attempt to get God to do what he is unwilling otherwise to do, but a reaching out to what we know that he does do, an expressed longing to receive what God is doing in and for us in Jesus Christ.
The difficult pastoral art is to encourage people to grow in excellence and to live selflessly, at one and the same time to lose the self and find the self. It is paradoxical, but it is not impossible.