Blaise Pascal (1623 – 1662)
We distinguish between two kinds as assurance, (or doubt). One is of one's own personal standing before God, the danger of hypocrisy, the occurrence of unwarranted doubt, the thought that Christ would not be the Saviour of a sinner such as me. There is need therefore to make one's calling and election sure. The other concerns the objective standing of the Christian faith, with doubt as to the reliability of the Gospel message. Or doubt about the reality of the whole. Each can be assailed by scepticism. In the case of the second kind of doubt, the following can
occur:
A Christian person, stepping back, and finding himself in a sceptical mood which he has not
sought or indulged, may ask (or find himself asking):
Can it really be true that there is deliverance from evil by means
of God taking the form of man and being hung on a cross, that this can provide
deliverance for countless multitudes of people from the their sin, and they
are granted a new nature and in time a resurrected body through which they will
enjoy unalloyed holy bliss without end?
Such scepticism
does not take the form of doubts about elements of the faith such as, How can
there one a person who is both God and man? Can this body be raised again from
the dead, incorruptible? It is not as if there is some doubt about an essential
doctrine of the Christian faith, with all other doctrines remaining the
same. To such a person it may be obvious
that the human sickness is deep and dreadful. The law of God may seem to be perfect.
And so on. It is not this or that element that falls under suspicion, but the whole edifice that suddenly
appears fantastic. So the fact that archaeologists can show that the walls of
Jericho once behaved in a peculiar fashion, probably some millennia ago, does
not help either. The problem is that the whole fabric or texture of the faith, standing
back from it and considering it as a unity, seems utterly incredible,
paper-thin. Like a fairy tale. Changing this or that part of the tale will not
help much, and may cause further difficulties, because the faith in total, in
all its familiarity, seems to be a tightly woven web, insubstantial, floating in air rather
like a Chinese balloon – white or pale blue - made of tissue paper.
Incidentally,
nether The Narnia Chronicles nor The Lord of the Rings nor any other Christianity-shaped fairy tale are not likely to be of any help in bringing such moods out of the tail spin of scepticism
and permitting a recovery of faith. If in such an attack the Gospel seems to be
like an idle tale, then no number of other idle tales, however well they are
presented, will help.
Nor (I think) is
such scepticism a matter of the sheer improbability of the Christian story. Not
at any rate, the improbability of there being divine redemption from sin. After
all, assigning probabilities to a story is a matter of the probability of background
beliefs, in the light of which one can and assign probabilities to the story.
So how does one begin to assess the probability of the extraordinary
singularity that is the Christian story? Yet some of the scepticism may be fed
by something close to improbability, the ‘incongruity’ (let’s call it) of death
on a cross being a part of this story of redeeming grace, what Paul refers to
as the ‘foolishness’ of the thing preached.
If this occurs,
what is a person to do? What can be do?
Pascal’s Wager
At such a point it
may be that Pascal’s remarks on faith and reason on the Pensées will be of help. He famously wrote
‘Either God is, or He is not’. But which side shall we take? Reason
can decide nothing here; there is an infinite chaos between us. A game is on,
at the other side of this infinite distance, and the coin will fall, heads or
tails. Which will you gamble on; According to reason you cannot gamble on
either; according to reason you cannot defend either choice……
Yes, but you must bet. There is no option, you have embarked on the
business. Which will you choose, then? Let us see. Since you must choose, let
us see which will profit you less. You have two things to lose: truth and good,
and two things to stake: your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness.
And your nature has two things to avoid: error and misery. Since you must necessarily
choose, it is no more unreasonable to make one choice than the other. That is
one point cleared up. But your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and loss in
calling heads, that God exists. Let us estimate the two chances; If you win,
you win everything; if you lose, you lose nothing. Do not hesitate then; gamble
on His existence.*
The standard riposte
to this invitation to choose is that the situation is more complex that this: Either God and then bliss, or nothing and then nothing. There are, as Paul
says, gods many and lords many, and so umpteen alternatives to the ‘God (the
God of Christian theism, let us suppose) exists and then bliss’ alternative
immediately suggest themselves.
But the existence
of a multitude of possibilities each of which could be wagered is not likely to
dilute the appeal of a Pascal-type wager to the Christian in the grip of
scepticism. For what overcomes him is not some version of Christianity. The very features which make for the
offence of the Cross are what make it attractive to him, and winsome. What
afflicts him is a sudden, unannounced doubt about the reality of the whole. A
sceptical attack. The features which make the gospel both an offence and
attractive are the very same features that feed that attack, and make the
Gospel suddenly seem incredible. What Tertullian called the ‘impossible’ is but
a hairsbreadth from the literally unbelievable. A less offensive gospel, with
the sharp edges shaved down and the corners rounded, would be of no help.
So for all the
vulnerability of Pascal’s Wager to certain logical objections, it may still
provide help for the sceptical Christian who is faced with a stark choice akin
to (but not identical with) the choice made famous in the Wager. How? For the
Christian afflicted by this kind of doubt, the alternatives are stark, ether
the wonderful account of God’s grace through Jesus Christ, or nothing.
So such scepticism
may be staved off, or starved, by a ‘leap of faith’. Or better, by the resolve
to hold on by one’s fingernails until the attack passes. Then, in retrospect,
such a leap may be seen to have been enabled by God’s grace, a ‘hope against
hope’ of Abramic proportions. Intellectualism may suffice day to day, but in extremis, fideism - the will - may come to the
rescue.
* These passages
are from Pascal The Pensées trans J.
M. Cohen, (Penguin, 1961) from pages 156-7
