David W. Peters

“When you’re ranting at the heavens about what they did to you, the post-traumatic Jesus doesn’t step in and ask you to tone it down a little bit. He joins you in raw anger and grief.” (PTJ, 94)

In the middle of Post-Traumatic Jesus, in the middle of seeing the Gospels through a post-traumatic lens, David Peters takes us to an Old Testament often thought/taught by some to be a separate story altogether, one whose angry God is thought to be in opposition to the loving compassionate Jesus of the New Testament. Peters provides a much needed reminder that the loving God can be found in the OT just as the angry God can be found in the NT (I mean, if one were filled with love what would there be worth being angry about?)
The chapter, as with the rest of Peters’ writing, addresses a too common experience of those who’ve suffered from trauma, one of isolation, of even not being worthy because our response seems to not be the response we should have. Until we look at scripture and at our spiritual family through a post traumatic lens and find we have much more in common than we thought.
Without the post-traumatic lens the verses we read can come off as symbolic, abstraction, sanitized of the suffering that those living under Roman occupation, and many occupation since, experienced. And that abstraction runs the risk of desensitizing us to the suffering around us.
David Peters’ book is a tremendous gift – words that need to be considered, picked up again and re-read, and wrestled with. Just as we wrestle with how to respond to our own experiences or those of our neighbors.
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Father David Peters illustrates that the problem of returning from war has been with mankind as long as wars have been fought. His book brings to light a current epidemic of moral injury but also connects todays warriors in search of healing to warriors from the past who have been through the same struggle in trying to fully reintegrate back into a peaceful society.

In experiencing the stories from backgrounds as diverse as Paul Tillich, St. Martin of Toures, King David, St. Ignatius to Florence Nightingale, Peters finds a connecting thread that addresses moral injury as something distinct from PTSD. As a moral injury its solution often resists the reach of another government program, or a pill, or a simple aphorism by a well-meaning civilian. And by connecting today’s issue to the problem faced by returning warriors centuries ago he provides insights that are not necessarily new but forgotten, such as the idea of ritual purification and pilgrimage.

The presence of answers that addressed the trauma of war in years past presents a truth that is both frustrating (in our tendency to throw off the past) and cause for hope. And Peters’ research also provides insight both for individuals, in letting go of our pre-traumatic image of god, and for churches who have a unique opportunity to fill a gap in the treatment of moral injury that other programs perhaps have not addressed.

The book is a powerful tool for individuals who’ve experience trauma but will also prove useful for family members and civilians whose only experience may come from the canned images that are pervasive in popular media. It’s structure in grounding this problem in both its historical and biblical foundations before proposing effective ritual and the importance of community shows that answers are not simple. And the philosophers and religious leaders referenced also show that this book is not the end of learning all there is to know about issues faced by our warriors, but a great starting point.
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