Thoughts on chapter 2, Method, of Christianity For Modern Pagans by Peter Kreeft, a commentary on Pascal’s Pensees.
Kreeft quotes Kierkegaard: “Therefore, create silence.”
The purpose of the silence is to make a space for the truth to be heard and experienced. We are so busy, so innundated with material goods, entertainment, educational experiences, and just plain noise, that we lack the silence that is needed to contemplate the basic, important questions of life. A couple of weeks before I went on a blogging sabbatical for Lent, Cindy at Dominion Family made a decision, along with her husband Tim, to stop blogging. If I read her final post correctly, it was a desire to create just the kind of silence that Kreeft and Kierkegaard are writing about that led her to give up blogging altogether.
In the end, it was not the evil things on the Internet, not even the arguments and negativity, but rather the good things that bogged me down. So many, many good things. Pictures of decorated houses, libraries, recipes, book suggestions (this alone has been enough to almost drown me), crafts, knitting, aprons, sewing, frugality, weather, poetry, audio files, friends, homeschooling suggestions, music and the ideas, the wonderful, wonderful ideas. . . . And in the midst of my small world comes the Internet, almost like a god, vast, unmeasured. Always like a siren wooing me with good things, great things, better things.”
Read Cindy’s entire post.
I’m not feeling called to give up blogging, but I do respect Cindy’s decision to do so. And I challenge you and myself to make space for silence, which is another way to say to make space for God to speak.
In this chapter Kreeft and Pascal are writing about methods of evangelism, about how to bring men to a confrontation with the Living God, by whom they are naturally appalled and of whom they are afraid. The first step is the afore-mentioned silence. And the next is what Kierkegaard calls “indirect communication” and what Pascal terms “talking like an ordinary person.” Kreeft mentions Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos, subtitled The Last Self-Help Book as an example of this subtle way of bringing people into an encounter with first of all, themselves, who they really are. (Eldest Daughter is quite fond of Walker Percy, but I have yet to taste his writings; another author to be added to the list.)
Another part of method for the Christian apologist is to see things from the point of view of the atheist or agnostic, to enter into a pagan world view in order to counter that worldview effectively. Pascal says, “We are usually convinced more easily by reasons we have found ourselves than by those which have occurred to others.” Kreeft amplifies by advocating, “indirect comunication, spying, looking at things from your opponent’s point of view and drawing out the consequences of his premises.”
This indirect communication is part of what I am trying to accomplish here at Semicolon. To read books from all sorts of viewpoints, to write about them, think about them, draw out the consequences of the ideas and premises presented therein: this work is worthy, even if the writer herself is sometimes flawed and inadequate to the task.
Finally in this chapter Pascal has a thought, a pensee, about saints and sinners, and Kreeft interprets Pascal: “The world thinks men are good and saints are better. Pascal knows men are sinners and saints are miracles.”
I thought immediately of Mother Teresa and the hullaballoo a few months ago about some writing she had done that revealed her doubts and her spiritually dark times. Of course, she had doubts. Of course, she was a sinner, fallible, sustained by the grace of God. Only a modern secularist would be surprised that a “saint” would weather times of spiritual confusion and doubt, or that a “good man” would commit acts of which he is ashamed. Others delight in demonstrating that C.S. Lewis, the great Christian apologist whom Eldest Daughter calls the Only Protestant Saint, was not a perfect man, intimating that he was sexually immoral or relationally confused.
What does this uncovering of sin and confusion and lostness in even the greatest of saints mean except that we all need a Saviour?
Keith Buhler at Mere-O on Fasting and Silence
Brown Bear Daughter and I watched the 1938 Katherine Hepburn/Cary Grant movie Bringing Up Baby the other night, and I realized about halfway through the movie that one of my other favorite movies, What’s Up Doc?, made in 1972 with Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal, was just a take-off on Bringing Up Baby, practically a remake. Absent-minded professor meets lunatic girl who brings his ordered life crashing down around him—and coincidentally ends his engagement to the wrong, boring girl. Screwball comedy. Innocent mayhem. Lots of laughs in both movies.
I like Katharine and Cary better than Barbra and Ryan, but for some reason I think What’s Up Doc? is the funnier movie. Madeleine Kahn, as Ryan O’Neal’s boringly hilarious fiance, adds a new layer of comedy to the second movie and almost steals the show. Hepburn would never have let herself get upstaged by anyone. Don’t you wish The Great Kate were still around to make more memorable movies? I’d love to see What’s Up Doc?, revised and updated, but starring magically young again Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant.
