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Blaise Pascal: Jesus Christ
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There is no doubt that Pascal's greatest work remains the Pensées, which were posthumously published in 1670. This is a major exercise in Christian apologetics, even though it is mainly composed of notes and fragments jotted down in preparation for a systematic treatise which he did not live to complete. Since only a part of this material had been put into order by Pascal, there is much debate among editors concerning the intended design of his apologia. It is clear... that human nature is investigated in the Pensées at the psychological, social, metaphysical, and theological levels. In moral-psychological terms, Pascal finds in human beings a series of dramatic contradictions which, he argues, only the Christian doctrine of original sin can properly explain. At the social-political level, he points to the fragile nature of many social relationships and the unsatisfactoriness of the legal and political concepts of his day.
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To properly understand Pascal's apologetics, it's important to recognize his motive. Pascal wasn't interested in defending Christianity as a system of belief; his interest was evangelistic. He wanted to persuade people to believe in Jesus. When apologetics has evangelism as its primary goal, it has to take into account the condition of the people being addressed. For Pascal the human condition was the starting point and point of contact for apologetics.
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Pascal recognized that man could not arrive at all knowledge by his own wisdom. He wrote that ‘Faith tells us what the senses cannot, but it is not contradictory to their findings.’11 He ... recognized that God was more than just the Creator—He was a loving, personal God as well—‘the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, the God of the Christians is a God of love and consolation.’12
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