McLaren vs Pascal vs Neuhaus, Part 2

This blog focuses on Pascal and how he compares to McLaren in Part 1.

Like McLaren, Pascal exhibits considerable distrust in human reason as a supremely reliable guide for interpreting reality. Pascal has a strong view of sin, believing it thoroughly taints everything, including our reasoning faculties. Pascal wanted to rein in human reason by seeing it within a proper context of sin. So Pascal, like McLaren, warns against both the rationalist and the dogmatist. He notes, “We have an incapacity for proving anything which no amount of dogmatism can overcome. We have an idea of truth which no amount of skepticism can overcome.” (406) In some ways, McLaren and Pascal seem to be fighting against some of the same things. However, while McLaren’s mistrust of rationalism seems to be based more on what he believes is a cultural shift away from modernist thinking, Pascal’s mistrust lies more within a Biblical framework of the corrosive effects of sin upon humanity’s entire condition. In addition, unlike McLaren, Pascal puts forth a philosophy of conversing with emerging generations that seems far more rooted in the history of God’s people and his church. Pascal’s method of cultural engagement is to start with shared experiences that bridge the gap with people. Then, the questions we ask should come from that shared human experience. But as we think about these things, we should reflect and consider what the worthwhile questions are, versus other questions that are less helpful.

So how did Pascal determine what was worth thinking about? His main criteria are the contradictions in human behavior. Humans are both great and wretched at the same time. Pascal notes, “In a word man knows he is wretched. Thus he is wretched because he is so, but he is truly great because he knows it.” (122, see also 114) Pascal then unpacks this greatness and wretchedness and applies the Biblical story to these aspects. He notes, “Man’s greatness and wretchedness are so evident that the true religion must necessarily teach us that there is in man some great principle of greatness and some great principle of wretchedness. It must also account for such amazing contradictions.” (149) Early on, Pascal is not yet arguing for Christianity through this paradox. Rather, he is simply communicating with culture through the shared experiences of life and death, good and evil, happiness and sadness (148), truth and falsehood, creation and destruction, success and failure. He notes, “We desire truth and find in ourselves nothing but uncertainty. We seek happiness and find only wretchedness and death. We are incapable of not desiring truth and happiness and incapable of either certainty or happiness. We have been left with this desire as much as a punishment as to make us feel how far we have fallen.” (401) Christians and non-Christians alike (of every stripe) can relate to this paradox because they ARE this paradox. This is not uniquely Christian; it’s simply a reflection on the nature of human experience. Pascal graphically notes, “What sort of freak then is man! How novel, how monstrous, how chaotic, how paradoxical, how prodigious! Judge of all things, feeble earthworm, repository of truth, sink of doubt and error, glory and refuse of the universe!” (131) Pascal’s observations place him in the cultural conversation of the past few centuries. Nietzche highlighted both the will to life and the tendency to decline. Freud wondered why we are so bored. We should ask where we see human greatness and wretchedness in both society and especially ourselves. We love our wives deeply, yet we also give them very little attention sometimes. We’re willing to give our lives for our children, but we’re unwilling to take 5 minutes to enter their world on their terms because it’s inconvenient for us to do so. We love our neighbor, but usually not as ourselves. This doesn’t mean we don’t really love our wives, children and neighbors; it just means that we are walking paradoxes. Whatever the truth is about human beings, it is going to need to make sense out of both the greatness and wretchedness of man.

Pascal argues that the biblical doctrines of Creation and Fall help us make sense of the paradoxes that we find in ourselves and the world (Creation referring to greatness; Fall referring to wretchedness; the two doctrines together help explain the sense of loss and malaise we often feel). The greatness and wretchedness of JC as the great, yet dispossessed king who saved people and yet suffered a ruinous death highlight this great paradox. Pascal notes, “All these examples of wretchedness prove his greatness. It is the wretchedness of a great lord, the wretchedness of a dispossessed king.” (116) The sense of loss that we have is similar to being born into a great dynasty and yet having the royal household we were born into exiled, and feeling like we had been cheated of what we were meant for. Our discontent has this nature. Man was made for true happiness, but since we’ve lost this true good, we try to satisfy it in everything except God and are left with only traces of happiness rather than the real thing. Pascal notes, “Who indeed would think himself unhappy not to be king except one who had been dispossessed.” (117) We have pushed God out, but the image of God is still in us and drives us to idols in order to find happiness. Pascal says, “God alone is man’s true good, and since man abandoned him it is a strange fact that nothing in nature has been found to take his place…” (148)

Pascal’s understanding of the paradox of man and the wisdom of the Biblical response is everywhere in our culture. For example, in sports, there are wonderful moments of triumph standing side by side with ugly incidents of failure and fallout. Howard Stern’s moral zeal to expose hypocrisy and deal with stuff at the root, while reveling in depravity at the same time, also unwittingly highlights the human paradox and makes the Bible make perfect sense. We can find both Creation and Fall in Howard Stern and everyone else. In its simplicity, the Bible explains the culture and helps the culture understand itself if only the culture would be willing to see itself within the Scriptural mirror as Pascal says, “There is no denying it; one must admit that there is something astonishing about Christianity. ‘It is because you were born in it,’ they will say. Far from it; I stiffen myself against it for that very reason, for fear of being corrupted by prejudice. But, though I was born in it, I cannot help finding it astonishing.” (817). Pascal has given us a reliable way to incorporate 1 Cor. 9 into our lives and our engagement with culture, because it inevitably leads to the Cross. The paradox is resolved in Jesus Christ, and we understand ourselves fully in Him and regain the true happiness we have lost, along with understanding God as well as we can by seeing Jesus Christ on the Cross. Jesus Christ is THE revelation of both God AND man.

In the end, Pascal is to be preferred over McLaren for a number of reasons. McLaren has chosen to align himself too closely to a cultural movement that will come and go like all such movements do. In urging the church to join the fast-break pace of cultural movements and keep up with them, he is in great danger of reducing the Gospel to entirely situational material, rather than something normative that continues to abide regardless of where the cultural winds blow. In saying, “Will you continue to live loyally in the fading world…of modernity…or will you venture ahead…to practice your faith and devotion to Christ in the new emerging culture of postmodernity,” McLaren is reducing the Christian faith to legitimate and illegitimate situational expressions that change with each new situation. In contrast, by focusing on the great questions of humanity and existence as his starting point, Pascal’s approach to dialogue more easily transcends the limits of situational cultural shifts that come and go, and in doing so, actually gets to the heart of the problem much better than McLaren does. More so than McLaren, Pascal is addressing the great issues of life that are universally applicable to all peoples and cultures at all times. Thus, in arguing for the viability of the Christian doctrines of Creation, Fall, and redemption, Pascal is allowing the Christian story to speak normatively to virtually all cultural situations. This is in contrast to McLaren, who is essentially arguing for a situational Christianity that may or may not be based upon or lead to normative truth. We are still reading and pondering Pascal over 300 years after his death. He is still relevant because he continues to speak to each emerging generation. In contrast, I can hardly imagine a scenario where anyone will be reading McLaren 300 years from now. In bringing the Gospel to emerging generations, we must be sensitive to situational realities. But we must do this always with the understanding that the very reason why the Gospel can speak to different cultural situations and shifts is because in the end, it transcends them with an eternal metanarrative that is not so tied to any particular cultural shift that it becomes irrelevant when the next shift happens. We can appreciate McLaren’s appeal to speak constructively to emerging generations, although the emerging generation McLaren is interested in is really only a preferred slice of the emerging generation. But this does not mean that the Gospel of each new emerging generation overwrites, supersedes, and replaces all previous expressions of the Gospel to previous generations. By building the Christian story in the context of the history of God’s people and the importance of God’s church, Pascal’s approach more readily enables us to see each new expression of Christianity as adding on to an already rich story that relies on the wisdom of what has come before to help guide what comes next.