"Seek, and you will find. Knock, and it will be opened for you."

I’ve been reading Diogenes Allen’s Quest: The Search for Meaning Through Christ and have found that he develops some ideas that resonate with what I’ve long thought. Allen is addressing the condition of the “seeker” and trying to show how attending to the story of Jesus can draw them into the life of God. What I think is invaluable about Allen’s work is that he is cognizant of post-modernism and the way it challenges the Enlightenment understanding of truth and rationailty, but he doesn’t jump into the arms of the po-mo relativists or try and make Christianity a hermetically sealed languge game. Nor does he reduce the claims of Christianity to moral or spiritual platitudes in order to secure universal assent.

Allen’s argument is that by attending to the story and teachings of Jesus, and by earnestly seeking God through prayer and other practices, we will come to a greater experience and knowledge of God’s reality. He doesn’t claim to prove the doctrines of Christianity, but he does see a positive role for reason and philosophy in removing common intellectual objections to Christianity’s claims. This serves to clear a space where we can go on to “taste and see that the Lord is good.”

He describes the journeys of Tolstoy and Simone Weil and how their experience led them to a process of seeking through prayer and reasoning. There is no separation of theology and the spiritual life here, but they’re intertwined in an ongoing ascent. (For more on that see this article.)

He even goes on to compare the persistent search for God to the methods employed by science:

Persistence in prayer has a direct parallel in experimental science. Russell Stannard, who directed a research team that confirmed the existence of the fourth kind of quark, called “charm,” used his experience in small-particle physics to answer a young woman’s question about how to find God. Although he had estimated the odds of confirming the existence of charm by the experiments his team had prepared as about one out of five, they had not put less effort into their preparations than they would have done if the odds had been higher. One hundred percent effort, so to speak, had to be made, even though the odds of success were less than twenty percent. He and his colleagues invested two years of their scientific lives to plan, prepare, and conduct experiments that might well fail. If it took concentrated effort for two years to confirm the possible existence of a sub-atomic particle, Stannard thought it reasonable to advise the young woman to set aside five minutes each day for two years for prayer. Not just prayer but persistent prayer is needed in our search for God. (Quest, p. 102-3)

Now obviously the search for God differs in important ways from the search for a sub-atomic particle. Since God is always the subject, never an inert object, the initiative always belongs to God to reveal himself to us. And our relationship to God involves us in a personal existential way that testing a scientific hypothesis usually doesn’t. Nevertheless, there is precedent in the Christian tradition for saying that we should put ourselves in a position of receptivity so that we can hear God.

This whole line of thought reminds me a lot of Pascal. Pascal was a critic of the Enlightenment when being a critic of the Enlightenment wasn’t cool. Though a brilliant and accomplished mathematician and scientist, Pascal believed that Cartesian rationalism was destructive of faith because it substituted the “god of the philosophers” for the living “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” He used reason to demolish the pretensions of reason, showing how its claims were more limited than the best and brightest of the day supposed.

Reason’s impotence to decide ultimate questions of religion made Pascal’s famous “wager” necessary. But I think we misunderstand Pascal if we think of the wager as simply willing oneself to have faith. For one thing, as a Jansenist-symp Pascal had an extremely high view of God’s grace and sovereignty, so he would’ve seen faith as a supernatural gift, not something we can will ourselves to have. Nor was Pascal psychologically naive enough to think that we could just will ourselves to have a particular belief.

I think the wager is best understood as the initial willingness to put oneself in the position to receive faith. This is underscored by his admonition following the wager argument:

[A]t least learn your inability to believe, since reason brings you to this, and yet you cannot believe. Endeavor, then, to convince yourself, not by increase of proofs of God, but by the abatement of your passions. You would like to attain faith and do not know the way; you would like to cure yourself of unbelief and ask the remedy for it. Learn of those who have been bound like you, and who now stake all their possessions. These are people who know the way which you would follow, and who are cured of an ill of which you would be cured. Follow the way by which they began; by acting as if they believed, taking the holy water, having masses said, etc. Even this will naturally make you believe, and deaden your acuteness. “But this is what I am afraid of.” And why? What have you to lose?

Pascal doesn’t promise us that wagering on God will give us faith or quiet all doubts and questions, but he urges us to take the first step on the path. He tells us to put ourselves in the company of those who believe, by “acting” as if we believe, participating in religious services and so on. When we do that we increase the chances of being open to God’s grace and presence. You might say that things like Bible reading, prayer, worship, acts of charity, etc. are ways of exposing ourselves to God’s spiritual radiation. Pascal and Allen want us to try acting on the assumption that there is something to be exposed to.