Pascal, Schleiermacher, and Theological Apologetics Compared
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.
- Pascal's Jansenism and the Pensées: Pascal's Jansenist theology and human fallenness
- The Wager Argument and the Limits of Geometric Reason: Pascal's wager and geometric vs. intuitive reasoning
- Schleiermacher's Apologetics and Its Critics: Schleiermacher's immanentist defense of religious experience
- Freud, Marx, and the Subjective Defense of Religion: Freudian and Marxist critiques mirror Schleiermacher's framework
- Lash, Edwards, and the Rhetoric of God: Theological rhetoric debated through Lash and Edwards
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper moves with confident intellectual range across Pascal, Schleiermacher, Freud, Marx, Edwards, and Lash without losing its argumentative thread, demonstrating genuine familiarity with primary sources.
- Sharp analogical reasoning — particularly the Shaw anecdote illustrating Schleiermacher's and Marx's shared concession — enlivens otherwise abstract theological argument.
- The paper consistently tests ideas against their own internal logic, such as noting that Pascal's wager math renders odds calculation irrelevant when the prospect of gain is infinite.
Key academic technique demonstrated
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.
Structure breakdown
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 Jansenism and the Pensées
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.
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