To Warm, Not Instruct

There is a famous line from the Pensées of Blaise Pascal: "The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know. We feel it in a thousand things." 

As Pascal goes on to elaborate, faith is primarily about love than intellect. God makes His appeal to the heart, rather than toward the mind. Thus, when we fall in love the heart "has its reasons" of which "reason does not know." 

As Pascal goes on to say: "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 also states the relation in the negative: "The knowledge of God is very far from the love of Him." Indeed. As I describe in Hunting Magic Eels, this was my problem for many years, turning God into a Rubik's Cube that I had to solve. 

I bring all this up to underline Pascal's description of Jesus' and Paul's method of persuasion: "We do not prove that we ought to be loved by enumerating in order the causes of love; that would be ridiculous. Jesus Christ and Saint Paul employ the rule of love, not of intellect; for they would warm, not instruct."

For they would warm, not instruct. 

I think this is, in a nutshell, the path for evangelism in an increasingly post-Christian culture. We could describe this as "Augustinian evangelism," an appeal directed toward the restless modern heart. And the goal of this communication isn't rationalistic. The goal is to warm the heart, to make the appeal of God come alive with promise and possibility. A tenuous flicker fanned into a flame. 

There are lots of ways to do this. My last three books—Hunting Magic Eels, The Shape of Joy, and The Book of Love—are each, in their own way, my experiments with Pascal's strategy. 

They are attempts to warm.