Beyond the Wager

January 22, 2024
In this adulatory revision of 2003’s On Pascal, Groothuis (World Religions in Seven Sentences), a philosophy professor at the Denver Seminary, frames Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) as a polymath of Christian intellectual excellence. Adding four chapters that touch on Pascal’s critique of “culture and politics” and Jesus’s miracles, among other topics, Groothius mines the Pensées—posthumously published fragments of the philosopher’s Christian apologetic—for Pascal’s musings on Jesus’s “character,” humanity’s simultaneous “greatness and wretchedness,” and the links between faith and reason. Groothuis’s approach has its moments, such as an intriguing discussion of how Pascal viewed the natural world from both scientific and spiritual dimensions. Unfortunately, the portrait that emerges is more hagiographic than well-rounded, and frequent, off-putting tangents undermine the analysis; in discussing Pascal’s views on the Quran, for example, Groothuis concludes that “not... everything in the Qur’an is evil, since some of it agrees with the Bible.” Despite some edifying points, this comes up short.