Tillich was famous for his synthesis of existentialism with Christian theology. This was a popular move in America during the 1950s and 1960s, decades that were the high-water mark for liberal theology in American culture. Tillich's influence has dramatically declined since, and I have yet to engage with a theologian for whom Tillich is an inspiration. I've mostly heard Tillich disparaged or dismissed.
And yet, I've claimed that Tillich's existentialism is at the leading edge of post-Christian evangelism. Going back to Part 1, much of "the Ache" we see around us concerns existential struggles. The crisis of meaning among young people and the rise in deaths of despair are well-known examples. And once again, this existential approach to evangelism was pioneered by Blaise Pascal in his Pensées.
As Graham Tomlin describes in his biography of Pascal, Pascal was one of the first Christian thinkers to appreciate the existential impact of modern science upon human self-consciousness. The vastness of the cosmos threatens to diminish human pretensions of cosmic significance and importance. Contemplating the universe, Pascal would write, "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me." A confession that would anticipate the existentialist contention that human existence, in the face of a vast, indifferent universe, is "absurd."
And yet, for Pascal, evoking this absurdity was a part of his two-step evangelistic strategy. Evangelism, argued Pascal, can begin by creating a sense of existential vertigo. And some of the most famous passages in Pascal's Pensées are his experiments in describing the existential predicament of humanity without God. For example:
We are floating in a medium of vast extent, always drifting uncertainly, blown to and fro; whenever we think we have a fixed point to which we can cling and make fast, it shifts and leaves us behind; if we follow it, it eludes our grasp, slips away, and flees eternally before us. Nothing stands still for us. This is our natural state and yet the state most contrary to our inclinations. We burn with desire to find a firm footing, an ultimate, lasting base on which to build a tower rising up to infinity, but our whole foundation cracks and the earth opens up into the depth of the abyss.
Pascal evokes the precarity and fragility of our meaning-making efforts. We long for a fixed point and firm footing, a lasting base upon which to build. But the fixed point shifts and eludes our grasp. Nothing stands still for us. And every foundation cracks, opening an abyss at our feet.
As an existential diagnostician, Pascal is pushing here, hard, on the Ache. And he does so for evangelistic purposes. The Pascalian Two-Step: the evocation of existential angst to make an evangelistic appeal.
