This paper examines three interconnected theological themes. It begins with Blaise Pascal's Pensées, analyzing his Jansenist anthropology, the famous wager argument, and the distinction between geometric and intuitive intelligence. It then evaluates Friedrich Schleiermacher's "apologetics of immanentism" as a response to Marxist and Freudian critiques of religion, arguing that Schleiermacher's emphasis on subjective religious experience inadvertently concedes ground to rationalist objections. Finally, the paper considers Nicholas Lash's call for reverent theological speech alongside Jonathan Edwards's vivid Calvinist rhetoric, asking whether theologians are obligated to employ dramatic language in service of religious conviction.
The paper demonstrates comparative theological analysis: rather than treating each thinker in isolation, it consistently places them in dialogue or tension. Schleiermacher is read against Marx and Freud simultaneously; Edwards is read through Lash; Pascal's mathematics is turned against his own wager. This triangulating method reveals structural similarities and contradictions that a single-thinker treatment would miss.
The paper is organized into three numbered sections. Section one covers Pascal's Jansenist theology and the wager argument, culminating in the geometric/intuitive distinction from Pensées 512. Section two applies Schleiermacher's apologetics of immanentism to Marxist and Freudian critiques, showing how the subjective defense of religion mirrors its critics' frameworks. Section three sets Lash's concern for reverent theological language against Edwards's dramatic Calvinist preaching, concluding with the author's normative claim that theologians have a duty to use all available rhetorical means.
Pascal's projected apologia for Christian belief, for which the text of the Pensées offers some glimpse, would ultimately have reflected his sincere conversion to the gloomy Jansenist theology that hovers over his works generally. Ultimately rejected by the Roman Catholic Church as heretical, Jansenism emphasized the fallen and corrupt nature of man in an Augustinian way, while at the same time suggesting that only God's grace can permit human action to rise above this fallenness. Pensées 133 notes that the fallenness is compounded by a willful refusal to see the facts: "unable to cure death," man instead seeks "diversion." At Pensées 24, he describes "man's condition" with a suitably Augustinian bleakness as consisting of "inconstancy, boredom, anxiety." The last two can surely be related to human life when viewed alongside the prospect of a future and eternal life. But the "inconstancy" seems to be Pascal's own way of registering even the doctrinal anxieties that placed his own theology at odds with the orthodox Roman Catholic variety current at that time, or else simply the failure of the real world to live up to the geometric and mathematical certainties that Pascal's earliest education and writings had emphasized.
This scientism is ultimately the limitation of Pascal's style of argument, as seen in his famous "wager." Pascal's achievements in mathematics — where he more or less established the idea of probability — argue that if there is any probability that God exists, the rational person will undergo whatever privations are demanded by religion in order to enjoy eternal life. Yet this argument offers no moral force when faced with contemplation of a heretical alternative: if the Muslim heaven offers virgins and servants in addition to rapt contemplation of God, should it not be preferred? In other words, the wager argument itself is not between Christianity and any particular alternative, but between Christianity and those vast empty spaces of the universe, the contemplation of which so chilled Pascal, especially when considered to be devoid of God's presence.
To some degree, this objection to Pascal's logic would be rejected by him as violating the spirit of the wager argument, which is an attempt to provide an argument for Christian belief in which the listener is expected to be persuaded by purely rational means. As belief in Cthulhu is not a truly rational alternative to belief in Jesus Christ, it would not be something to bet on. Likewise, the Pensées deal with a traditional subject for any apologia for Christian belief: whether to regard the Bible as the literal truth. For Pascal, scripture fits into an older system of typology, which he expresses at length in Pensées 643, stating that the typological reading of scripture reveals an "image through all time" that offers "assurance of His power and His will to save." At Pensées 658, that "image through all time" which God has "made them see" is identified with a means "to show that the Old Testament is only figurative." To some degree, Pascal's version of Christianity is already made more acceptable to the rational mind.
At Pensées 512, Pascal distinguishes famously between the geometric intelligence and the esprit de finesse, meaning something like "subtle intelligence." In some sense, Pascal acknowledges that these are not fundamentally different, and that every mathematician would be intuitive, because "they do not reason incorrectly from principles known to them." The geometrical mind performs a clear and obvious job, made difficult only by the rigorousness of its methodology. But the limitations of this approach as a means of engaging larger questions — through the kind of Thomist legalism dominant in Roman Catholic theology generally — are self-evident, and are reflected in Pascal's single most famous aphorism: "the heart has its reasons whereof reason knows nothing." In some sense, the expression of the limitations of a purely rational and mathematical approach is why the wager argument seems a bit thin: the mathematics of the wager, from the standpoint of Pascal's own work in the field, are basically irrelevant, since the prospect of future gain is infinite, which means that there is no need to calculate the actual odds in the way that a real gambler would.
Theologians have frequently had recourse to Schleiermacher's "apologetics of immanentism" as a way of responding to critics of religious belief. By emphasizing the interiority of religious experience, this approach effectively defends religion on the grounds of its interiority, as though to say that, debates about the existence of God notwithstanding, these accounts may at least be considered proof of something genuine. As William James — who would adapt and amplify Schleiermacher's defense in America in The Varieties of Religious Experience — liked to emphasize, religious experiences are very real to the people who have them. But does Schleiermacher's "apologetics of immanentism" actually offer a defense against the most influential critics of religious belief?
It is important to note at the outset that Schleiermacher's fundamental conception reduces religious belief to the status of mystical experience. There is no defense of religion on the grounds of its status as inherited truth or wisdom, nor a defense — in the style of Joseph de Maistre — of the pure institutional authority wielded by churches. The limitations of this approach should be self-evident: it runs the risk of offering nothing but personal motives for religious belief, without providing any defense of doctrine or dogma. It is very seldom that anyone has a religious experience in which angels discourse learnedly on the concept of homoousia or Tertullian's view of the Trinity, graciously clarifying any lingering doctrinal questions one may harbor. In other words, Schleiermacher's approach does away with the intellectual apparatus of traditional theology in order to defend the value and truth of religion at the individual level. Such an exaltation of pure subjectivity is bound to result in a level of utter relativism — effectively "one man, one creed."
In other words, Schleiermacher's defense itself already concedes ground to the rationalist objections to religion offered by the likes of Marx and Freud.
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