The Pascalian Two-Step: Part 1, Evangelism in a Post-Christian Culture

In my recent series on Karl Barth and Friedrich Schleiermacher, I talked about theological approaches that start with either the Wholly Otherness of God or human experience. I made the argument in that series that these approaches need each other. One example I used to make that point is how, if theology ignores human experience, evangelism becomes positivistic, the imposition of alien metaphysical claims upon people who are forced to swallow them.

What I argued for was a more Augustinian approach to evangelism. As Augustine famously prayed, our hearts are restless until they rest in God. Knowing this, we can begin a conversation about God with the restlessness we find within human experience. In Hunting Magic Eels I call this "the Ache." This is a strategy I use in The Shape of Joy, using our mental health crisis to raise questions about transcendence.

But Augustine isn't the only one we can cite in describing this evangelistic approach. Perhaps the greatest proponent and exemplar of this type of evangelism is Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) and his Pensées.

Before his untimely death at the age of 39, Pascal was working on an apology for the Christian faith. He did not finish the work, but the collection of his notes regarding the planned work was published after his death. Though incomplete, within this collection of his thoughts—pensées means "thoughts"—Pascal sketches out his apologetic and evangelistic strategy:

First part: Wretchedness of man without God

Second part: Happiness of man with God

Notice how the first move is an appeal to the Ache rather than to logic, reason, or proof. This is interesting, as Pascal himself had a very rational, analytical mind. Pascal was a historically significant scientist and mathematician, even an early pioneer in the history of computers. And yet, throughout the Pensées Pascal argues that logical proofs of God's existence are ineffective in reaching skeptics and unbelievers. As Pascal would put it,

The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know. We feel it in a thousand things. It is the heart which experiences God, and not the reason. This, then, is faith: God felt by the heart, not by the reason.

Pascal was convinced that rational argument and logical proofs will leave the human heart cold. Thus, the evangelistic appeal had to be addressed to the restlessness of the heart. And you do that by surveying the Ache, the "wretchedness of man without God." And from there, we turn to our happiness with God.

This Pascalian two-step approach is the structure of The Shape of Joy, which starts with our mental health struggles and moves, using the research of positive psychology, to discuss faith, spirituality, and transcendence. And for my money, if you want to evangelize an increasingly post-Christian culture the Pascalian Two-Step is the best approach out there.