The Life and Thought of Blaise Pascal

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All of history’s greatest scientists were playing hide and seek one day. Several of them were extremely good at this. Schrödinger was particularly good at this. He kept hiding in a sealed box with a cat who didn’t seem at all happy about the arrangement.[1]



Heisenberg just climbed on a giant triple beam balance every time…because as long as he was making a precise measurement of his mass it was impossible to detect his location.[2] Now you can understand how Sir Isaac Newton finally got tired of losing to these guys. So finally, while Einstein was counting, he just stood in the center of the room and used a piece of sidewalk chalk to carefully draw a box around himself. When Einstein finished counting he looked up and saw Isaac standing in the middle of the room. He said, “Dude, I found you.” Newton responded, “No you didn’t. You found Pascal. I’m a Newton per square meter.” [3]



So this is how I got interested in Pascal. I was in grad school for engineering, and I had written down the abbreviation for this guy’s name roughly 1000 times (giving me a kilopascal) and heard he had written an insightful and accessible work of theology, so I picked it up.


I had never read a book by a dead guy and was a little skeptical. I wondered if it could possibly have any contemporary merit. Interestingly, I found that Pascal had anticipated this concern:


You see, there are two temporal fallacies when it comes to our quest for insight and wisdom. The first is traditionalism. Traditionalists prefer ancient wisdom to modern insight. Ideas with more history get more weight. Until approximately the time of Pascal, most cultures held to this view. A new idea could only prevail with difficulty because ancient wisdom was generally trusted and novelty was received with skepticism. However, in Pascal’s time (around the fifteen century) things began to change. There was a flourishing of optimism in human ingenuity and science. And there this led to a relatively sudden cultural reversal. Ancient ideas were suddenly viewed with skepticism in favor of novelty. The fallacy of Traditionalism was supplanted by fallacy of Modernism. The Modernists fallacy was to allow modern insight to uncritically trump ancient wisdom. CS Lewis calls this, “chronological snobbery.”

Tonight, and over the course of the next two weeks, we are going to test Pascal’s hypothesis that wisdom is a middle path between these fallacies. We are going to test the hypothesis that while novel ideas and contemporary reflection have a lot to offer us, powerful minds that have been silent for centuries have something special to offer our age, because they can speak free from our paradigms and prejudices of our time.[4]

Tonight we are going to briefly tell Pascal’s story and then look at just two of the principle ideas of his philosophy.

Pascal lived through the middle of the seventeenth century. He was a contemporary with Descartes and just before Newton and Spinoza. This meant he occupied one of the most turbulent eras of intellectual discovery and ferment in western intellectual history. It was ‘the enlightenment’, ‘the scientific revolution’, ‘the age of reason.’ And he was lived in Paris, which was the heart of the action.

Pascal’s story starts with tragedy. His mother died when he was three, leaving Blaise and his two sisters in the care of their eccentric father who was, essentially a Paris tax collector. His father decided to home school and despite the fact that Blaise showed uncanny early potential he was forced to studied classics (Greek and Latin) because his father believed that “mathematics was too intoxicating for a young mind.”[5] Though something came across my facebook last night that made me wonder if he wasn’t on to something.



This kept up until (as Blaise’ older sister reported later) his dad walked in on him deriving Euclid’s principles alone in his room – you get the picture of a dad walking in on his son looking at porn. So his father relented, and he began to study math. When he was 17 he published his first major publication. By 19 he had invented the first calculator (in order to help his father with his job). This should not be underestimated:

I realize how this could be underwhelming to an Iphone/Droid/blackberry generation – I mean it is just a single function device. But listen to what Douglas Groothis said about this: [6]




In his early twenties he turned to physics and performed a series of experiments on hydrostatics (which is why we use his name as the SI unit for pressure). This was the beginning of his tendency to champion unpopular views, as he argued for the possibility of a vacuum, which most of his contemporaries believed could not exist. This debate put Pascal head to head with Descartes himself, but, Pascal was, of course, correct. The vast majority of our physical universe is in fact a vacuum.

Now despite these early achievements, he was sick most of his life, and began to really suffer from his illnesses in his 20s. His doctor told him that he needed to spend less time on stressful things like math and science and more time on social diversions. Now I want you to imagine this. You are a 24 year old dude in the world’s most fun city and the Doctor officially prescribes more partying.



Let’s just say he was extremely contentious in medical compliance. He was introduced to Parisian high society and was very well received. Even though as the son of bureaucrat he was not really in their social class, there were two reasons this was generally overlooked. First, Scientists and Philosophers were the celebrities of 17th century.



Descartes was Tom Cruise and Spinoza was Russell Crowe. A couple years ago it came out that people pay Paris Hilton to show up at parties to make those parties successful. Pascal turned out to be a seventeenth century version of this…except he was also clever, articulate and witty. You do not have to spend very long with his writings before you can imagine that he could be highly entertaining. The second reason he climbed socially was a simple matter of mathematics. Many of his friends were gamblers and some of his early work in probability stemmed from his attempts to solve gambling puzzles.

But he found that a life of diversion was fundamentally unsatisfying. His life was full of anesthetic. Diversions did not make the big questions of the universe or the human condition go away, it just made him forget they were there. Later he wrote:

“Being unable to cure death, wretchedness and ignorance, men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things…That is why men are so fond of hustle and bustle; that is why prison is such a fearful punishment…”

“The last act is bloody, however fine the rest of the play. They throw earth over your head and it is finished forever.”

Peter Kreeft who wrote a fine commentary on Pascal’s writings wrote “The word “boredom” does not exist in any ancient languages. It first appeared in the 17th century.” 187
Pascal came to believe that the reason boredom had become so intolerable, the reason
there were so many ways to occupy their minds with insubstantial things, was because bordom makes mental space for dread of a vacant universe. The realities of a vacant universe and our true condition are too dreadful to allow it to maintain our attention.

“We run heedlessly into the abyss after putting something in front of us to stop us (from) seeing it.”

About the same time Pascal’s father broke his leg. He hired two amateur bone setters to help him heal and rehab and they lived with the family. They were simple men whose lives revolved around their Christian faith, and Pascal found himself drawn to them. This is one of my favorite details of the story, because these were very simple, unassuming men. They were not in the intellectual ballpark of the precocious young Blaise, but he would eventually adopt their worldview. And this is one of my criterions for evaluating a worldview. Does it have generality across the human condition? Is similarly compelling and useful to simple tradesmen and world class intellects?

For the next few years, these two influences, the Jesus of the bonesetters and the high life of the Parisan cultural set each pulled at him. We only know how that resolved in retrospect. He did not let anyone in on the final decision as far as we know. But when he died, his family found this document, dated Nov 11, 1954 (which would make him 31) sewn into the lining of his jacket (as though he had resolved to always have the reminder of this night close to his person).



“The year of grace 1654.
Monday, 23 November, feast of Saint Clement
From about half-past ten in the evening until about half-past midnight.
FIRE.
The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.
Not of the philosophers and intellectuals.
Certitude, certitude, feeling, joy, peace.
The God of Jesus Christ.
My God and your God.
Forgetfulness of the world and everything except God.
One finds oneself only by way of the directions taught in the gospel.
The grandeur of the human soul.
Oh just Father, the world has not known you, but I have known you.
Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy.
I have separated myself from him.
They have abandoned me, the fountain of living water.
My God will you leave me?
May I not be separated from him eternally.
This is eternal life, that they may know you the one true God and J.C . whom you have sent.
Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ.
I have separated myself from him. I have run away from him, renounced him, crucified him.
May I never be separated from him.
One preserves oneself only by way of the lessons taught in the gospel.
Renunciation total and sweet.
And so forth.”

This changed the trajectory of the last decade of Pascal’s life. He began to study theology and take an interest in Paris’ poor. His last big project was to implement the first public transportation system in the Western world. He used his own money to set up a series of omnibuses with prescribed routes and public time tables with the intent of giving Paris’ poorest citizens a way to get around the city. He also started to write his major work of philosophy, collecting fragments in a shoe box. Pascal never finished the book. He died before he turned 40. The autopsy revealed at least 3 terminal disease so advanced they couldn’t tell which one killed him. But his sister fond the shoe box published the fragments as she found them, under the title Pensees (simply the French word for ‘thoughts’). Now for not being an actual book, Pensees is one of the great works of history. It is easily one of my five favorite books. IT is a shockingly raw and subversive dissenting opinion to the rest of the triumphalistic philosophy that came out of that age. In some way, a non-traditional work was appropriate legacy for Pascal. Kreeft says: “To ask such a man to write an ordinary book is like asking lightning to sit for a portrait.”
At his funeral there were eminent scientists, members of Parisian high society, renowned members of the religious community, but the account reports that the much of the church was full of the Paris’ poor that he had assisted following his conversion. And I think that sums up his life pretty well, and I think that scene alone, makes his writings compelling. What kind of world view generates a life like this?



Well with the time I have left I just want to briefly look at two of the organizing ideas of his world view. To understand Pascal’s world view and why it was so radically different than the others of his time, you have to understand how he answers two of the big questions: “Who are we?” and “How do we know stuff?” or his anthropology and his epistemology.

First: Who are we? (Pascal’s Anthropology)

Pascal was fundamentally an empiricist. In the debates about a vacuum, he put the emphasis on experimentation and data over theory and principle. And he felt like, if you are going to achieve a stable view of the meaning and purpose of life, you first have to take some data on what it means to be human. So he undertook a new study later in life. He called it his study of “The Human Subject.” And he concluded that there were two fundamental and paradoxical things that any world view has to reconcile about the human condition:

“The more enlightened we are the more greatness and vileness we discover in man…” (613 – p51)[7]

“What sort of freak then is man? How novel, how monstrous, how chaotic, how paradoxical, how prodigious! Judge of all things, feeble earthworm, repository of truth, sink of doubt and error, glory and refuse of the universe!” (131 - 107)

He argues that if you are going to try to answer the question “Who are we?” your answer has to account for two very different stories. First, you have to account for the capacity gun down 5 perfect strangers (including a 9 year old) outside an Arizona grocery. But you are also going to have to account for an 18 year old that used her college money to start an orphanage in Nepal and by the age of 24 was the sole caretaker of over 40 children, sharing her bed with a fussy infant.[8] You are going to have to account Stalin and Teresa, for our tendency to destroy and our tendency to create, our darkness and our beauty.



Pascal felt like the Christian story made the most sense of this paradoxical data. He argued that we are all metaphysically valuable but morally flawed. We are fundamentally good but existentially broken.

“(Human) greatness and wretchedness are so evident that (a successful world view) must necessarily teach that there is in (us) some great principle of greatness and some great principle of wretchedness. It must also account for such amazing contradictions…It must acknowledge that we are full of darkness…(and) teach us the cure for our helplessness.” (149 – p65)

The great irony is that most contemporary world views invert this. They argue that there is nothing intrinsically valuable about us, we are just carbon and chemicals, the accidental animation of cosmic dust, yet, we are all basically good at heart. We are intrinsically valueless but morally good. [9] Pascal says:

“What amazes me most is to see that everyone is not amazed at (their) own weakness…” (33 – 106)

Someone once asked Ravi Zacharias, a notable South Asian Christian for the primary reason he followed Jesus. This is a particularly fair question for him, as he grew up in India, one of the few places on earth where all of the major religions are well represented. He responded, “I follow Jesus Christ because he diagnosed my condition most precisely.”


Second: How do we know stuff? (Epistemology)

What Pascal demonstrated in the vacuum debates was that he was interested in data than theory. And he felt like, if you are going to achieve a stable view of the meaning and purpose of life, you first have to take some data on what it means to be human. And he concluded that there were two fundamental and paradoxical things that any world view has to reconcile about the human condition:

“Two excesses: to exclude reason, to admit nothing but reason…Reason’s last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it. It is merely feeble if it does not go as far as to realize that.”

And this is why we have to understand Pascal’s anthropology before we can understand his epistemology. His answer to “Who are we?” informs his answer to “How do we know stuff?…and so does yours. If we fit Pascal’s picture of beautiful brokenness, there is a reason to be skeptical about our ability to penetrate reality ourselves.

He found that despite the immense power of his own mental faculties, that reason and the senses are helpful but slippery guides. “I found myself so often making unsound judgments that I began to distrust myself and then others…I realized that our nature is nothing but continual change.” (520 – p93)

Even the greatest minds will have trouble differentiating between their reason and their passions.

“The internal war of reason against the passion has made those who wanted peace split into two sects. Some wanted to renounce passions and become gods, others wanted to renounce reason and become brute beats. But neither side has succeeded, and reason always remains to denounce the baseness and injustice of the passions and to disturb the peace of those who surrender to them. And the passions are always alive in those who want to renounce them.” (410 – p97)[10]

Pascal anticipates the existentialists and the post-moderns (even as modernism itself is just getting started) by arguing that there is no ‘view from nowhere.’ All knowledge is perspective and fundamentally self interested.

“The aversion for the truth exists…in everyone to some degree, because it is inseparable from self love.” (978 -150)

He found dogmatism unsatisfying but was skeptical about skepticism. He needed a world view that allowed him to use his mind but also recognized the limitations of our equipment.[11]
Pascal believed that because we are beautiful and broken, it distorts the way we perceive reality. Like looking into a shattered mirror. We see some aspects of reality exactly right, but the big picture eludes us. And this state is supposed to supposed to lead us to look outside ourselves for the interpretive key that pulls the story together.



“You cannot be a skeptic without stifling your nature. You cannot be a dogmatist without turning your back on reason. Know then, proud man, what a paradox you are yourself. Be humble, impotent reason! Be silent, feeble nature! Hear from your master your true condition, which is unknown to you. Listen to God.” (131 – 109)

Disillusioned with the capacity of his powerful mind to penetrate reality, he looked for help. And he found a tutor who seemed to see it all clearly.[12] He found someone who had a fundamental understanding of how we work and how the world works that fit Pascal’s empirical . He found Jesus.

“Not only do we know God through Jesus Christ but we only know ourselves through Jesus Christ.”(417 -313)


Concluding Thought:

Let me just wrap up with a couple words on how Pascal’s mentorship has enhanced my experience of the University and the reflective life.

Letting Jesus inform your interpretations of your sense data does not have to devolve to dogmatism. But in the end, I have found the same thing Pascal found, the Christian story makes the most sense of the cloud of paradoxical data I have encountered in my studies. However, I am far more curious about science and philosophy, about how the world works and how we work, than I was without Jesus.

“I believe with (our) curiosity changed into wonder (we) will be more disposed to contemplate them in silence than to investigate them with presumption.” (199-122)

Pascal’s Jesus provides a robust approach to the academic life. Study hard, enjoy the accumulation of facts and the evaluation of ideas, develop your powers of reasoning, observation and experimentation. But instead of leading to arrogance, let them lead you to wonder. Consider the possibility that the one who made all this wants to walk with you through your discovery of it. And consider the possibility that if Jesus describes the human condition with such precision, that you might want to look to him for the solution.

____________________________
[1] “Schrödinger’s cat walks into a bar…and doesn’t” My friend Zach
[2] My friend Steve brainstormed a bunch of these:
Schrodinger could hide in two boxes at once and when a box is opened/observed he could "collapse" to the unopened box (maybe leaving a dead cat behind?).
Einstein could change himself into energy and travel at the speed of light (since he would be massless) and then change back to matter.
Plank could hide inside of a really, really, really, tiny distance.
Feynman could be particularly good at finding people by making a diagram of every possible path the other scientist might use to try and hide.
[3] You English majors will just have to take my word for it…these jokes are hilarious.
[4] They are, no doubt, restricted by the prejudices and assumptions of their own age, but these are easy for us to sniff out. What makes looking to past figures for insight particularly valuable is that they do not have to dance to the fiddler of our moment and can provide an ‘outside’ opinion. Rather than musty, their ideas are often fresh because they would never occur to us.
[5] Seriously, you’ve got to love the seventeenth century – where they say stuff like this. Sometimes I hear would-be-hippies bemoan that they were born in the wrong decade…that their natural temporal home would have been the sixties. Well sometimes I sympathize…sometimes I feel like I should have been born in the sixties too…the 1660, when people talked like this.
[6] Douglas Groothuis On Pascal, p 17.
[8] http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504464_162-20027569-504464.html
[9] Kreeft: “Psychopaganism is infinitely inferior to existentialist nihilism because it does not even rise to the dignity of despair.”
[10] “One must know when it is right to doubt, to affirm, to submit. Anyone who does otherwise does not understand the force of reason. Some men run counter to these three principles, either affirming that everything can be proved, because they know nothing of proof, or doubting everything, because they do not know when to submit, or always submitting, because they do not know when judgment is called for.” (170 - 236) 3 kinds of fanaticism
[11] He actually believed that the cloudiness of our cognitive equipment and our inability to see things clearly was a gift from God to point us to our need for an external interpretive key.
[12] “Let man both hate and love himself, he has with him the capacity for knowing truth and being happy, but he possesses no truth which is either abiding or satisfactory.” (119 p61)

Seven Mile: Jesus on the Road to Emmaus

So over spring break I went ‘manpacking’ with several college life guys. The reason I bring it up, besides the chance to mention that Cory packed an electric toothbrush, is that we hiked about 7 miles a day with some modest elevation gain in perfect weather, it took 4 to 5 hours.…which according to the first verse, is very similar to the setting of today’s passage…so I’ve name this talk:


So there are really two major themes I’d like to look at in this passage with a brief prolog and epilog. The first is how Jesus’ sees himself in light of the Hebrew Scriptures and the second is the idea that as we observe how Jesus reveals himself to these two travelers, we can pick up some hints about how Jesus reveals himself to us.

Characters: I want to notice two things about the characters in this story. First of all, they are minor characters. Jesus’ early appearance wasn’t to any of the guys we have become familiar with in the story to date. His fist, extended, post resurrection appearance was to a couple of random dudes we have never heard of.

Second, Richard Bauckham, in his recent, definitive work ‘Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Accounts’ points out something about this passage that has really startled the community of Biblical scholarship. This story is told from the perspective of Cleopas. It is as if he was telling the story. Luke shifts the storytelling position of his narrative to inhabit Cleopas’ perspective. Bauckham suggest this is because Luke included the story just as Cleopas told it. And, as Bronwyn argued last week, the reason he names Cleopas is because he is still alive and you can go ask him. In essence, Luke is citing his work (Cleopas, 33). As with all citations, its purpose is to build your argument on the basis of the evidential claims of others.

So from here, I would like to make two major observations about this text.

1. It Has All Always Been About Jesus

v27And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.

v45 Then he opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures.

Most of you are probably vaguely aware that there are dozens of passages in the Hebrew Scriptures, written between 500 and 2000 years before the life of Jesus, that predict the activities of a coming Messiah and correlate to the events of Jesus’ life with uncanny precision and clarity. Let me start out with just three brief examples:

“The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own brothers. You must listen to him.” Deut 18:15

Jesus says, beginning with Moses, he explains that the Hebrew Scriptures talk about him. Well this is the clearest Moseic passage about the Messiah, written almost 2000 years before Jesus lived. Think about that…as much time elapsed between when Moses said there would be a Messianic figure as has passed between Jesus and us.

Of course, the most famous messianic passage is Isaiah 53

2 He grew up before him like a tender shoot,
and like a root out of dry ground.
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.

3 He was despised and rejected by men,
a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering.
Like one from whom men hide their faces
he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

4 Surely he took up our infirmities
and carried our sorrows,
yet we considered him stricken by God,
smitten by him, and afflicted.

5 But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,
and by his wounds we are healed.

6 We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
each of us has turned to his own way;
and the LORD has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.

I know Bronwyn cited Isaiah 53 at the end of last quarter, but it simply cannot be left out of a discussion of predictive messianic literature. I have a pretty committed Jewish friend who keeps the shebat and studies the Hebrew scriptures in their original language, and is, on the whole, very serious about his heritage and faith. His given name is David, but every one who knows him call him Dvd (since there are no vowels in Hebrew). As a side note, he tells a great story about how, when DVD’s became the video media of choice, he was perplexed about why his name was suddenly plastered on signs everywhere. He is so serious about it that he will often not watch college football on Saturdays, thought he is a HUGE Texas A&M fan, because he simply doesn’t see contact sports as the kind of thing that should typify a ‘day of rest.’ With all of this said, he has gone back and forth on whether or not Jesus is the Messiah (or as he would say it Jeshua is Messia). At the heart of nagging doubts that Jesus was, in fact, the Jewish Messiah, is Isaiah 53.

Finally, here is one of my favorite ones. Someone once asked me, if God really wanted to foretell the coming of the Messiah precisely, why would he bother with vague symbolic language, why doesn’t he just call him by name. This is obviously problematic, because if you predicted the name of the Messiah everyone who wanted to be Messiah would just take on the name, it is much more powerful to predict the place of his birth (which he would have no control over) – which God did…but I think this verse is really interesting:

"Take the silver and gold and make a crown, and set it on the head of the high priest, Joshua son of Jehozadak. Tell him this is what the LORD Almighty says: 'Here is the man whose name is the Branch, and he will branch out from his place and build the temple of the LORD. Zechariah 6: 11-12

So, the branch is a popular messianic symbol[1] and Joshua, or Jeshuah, can be transliterated into Aramaic as Jesus. So it seems to me that this passage does foretell of Jesus by name. And whether you find those convincing or not, there are literally dozens of them and the cumulative case turns out to be pretty strong.

So, when we, as Christians, say that the OT is about Jesus, we are usually talking about isolate scriptures like this, that appear to be clearly foretelling some future liberator. I like to call it the ‘Easter egg’ version of OT Christology. The prophets are my favorite books of the OT. One of the biggest misconceptions about the prophets is that their primary purpose was foretelling. They actually do very little predicting and a whole lot of what we would call ‘preaching.’ The ‘Easter egg' version of Jesus in the OT scans over vast tracts of text to find these kind of special, predictive, passages. Or to illustrate it another way, when it comes to Jesus, we often read the old testament as if it were a game of ‘find the saltine.’

So I think may people read the old testament like this:

CL Guy: “Isaiah 53”
Stanford: (opens the bible – there is a cracker there) “You, my friend, have found the saltine.”

This doesn’t seem to be the way Jesus approaches the relationship between him and the Hebrew Scriptures. Look at verse 27 again “And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.” Let me make two brief observations about this. First of all, it takes JESUS, HIMSELF 4 to 6 hours to explain the gospel. The gospel is not a drive by sort of thing. The gospel is not a pithy idea. It is not a bumper sticker or a greeting card. Jesus cannot be reduced to a sound bite. If you want to know what Jesus is all about, you are probably going to have to hang around for a while.

But the main thing I’d like to bring out from this verse is that Jesus believes that HE is the interpretive key of the Old Testament. Let me repeat that. Jesus says that he is the interpretative key to the old testament.

So during the first day of ‘manpacking’ I found that I was only getting about half of the jokes. The jokes that I wasn’t getting appeared to be film references. Now, I fancy myself film savvy so I was mortified that I was missing so many film references. But it turned out that most of them were references to a single movie that I hadn’t seen. It turns out that to understand the humor of college life guys…you require an interpretive key…which turns out to be the movie ‘Dumb and Dumber.’ Without the film, I understood noting. You can mention the ‘Salmon of Capistrano’ all you want, and if I haven’t seen the movie I won’t get the joke.

Jesus tells the random dudes on the seven mile that you must approach the Hebrew scriptures Christologically…otherwise we will end up reading the NT for gospel and the OT for religion. Even Christians tend to read the OT moralistically…looking for lessons for life…Keller calls this the Aesop’s fables approach to the scriptures…we look for a moral of each story and try to do it. He says ‘if you read the bible like this, in the beginning it will be mildly inspirational…but it will eventually crush you to powder. If the Bible is about you it will inspire you for a while and then it will crush you. But if it is about Jesus it will ignite your heart.” But if you read the whole OT Christologically, all of a sudden the gore and bore of Leviticus, which Andy Croch calls “the graveyard of so many good intentions to read straight through the Bible” becomes a beautiful sign post of God’s sublime plan for our rescue in Jesus.

2. Insights On Encountering Jesus

The second major theme I want to bring out of this passage is that there are counter-intuitive insights about how Jesus is known. Epistemology is the philosophical sub-discipline that deals with how we know things. It has been popular for some time for educated people to assert that some form of rationalism or scientific empiricism is the only robust epistemology …or the only way something can be know is by a rational evaluation of the objective evidence. So it has become fashionable for the New Atheists (authors like Dawkins, Harris and Hitchings) to assert that Atheism is the only legitimate world view because their conclusions are rationally derived while spiritual and religious worldviews are based on social or personal influences.

In his book ‘The Reason for God’ Tim Keller reports on his survey of the sociological literature of belief and points out that, according to the best sociology of belief, all beliefs are socially, personally and rationally conditioned. People of all kinds believe things for a wide variety of intellectual, personal and cultural reasons. There is, obviously, much more to say about this, but it is not my topic. What we are interested in today is this passage…and what it says about how Jesus, in particular, is known. Let me make six observations:

i. Jesus takes the initiative.
15As they talked and discussed these things with each other, Jesus himself came up and walked along with them;
He always does. Not one of us belongs to him because we sought him out on our own initiative. No major Christian theological system asserts anything else. He always starts it.

ii. They didn’t know it was him
16but they were kept from recognizing him.
Jesus’ work in people’s life is subtle. It often isn’t invasive. He doesn’t generally speak to you audibly as you are brushing your teeth. Jesus could be at work in your life right now, while you are sitting in a lecture hall listening to some dude talk about an old book, and you might not even realize it. You might even be despairing or wondering where God ‘has been.’ In some of the more mystical Christian traditions if you are despairing or facing a particularly dark situation, their prescription will be sustained meditation on this very passage.

iii. Jesus is known, primarily, by the Scriptures, in Community
27And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.

Jesus had risen from the dead, and had not even ascended yet, and already he is pointing his followers to the Scriptures as one of the primary resources for knowing him. But it is not just an individual processing of the scriptures. In this passage, Jesus ‘shows up’ and ‘explains the scriptures’ when they were working these things out between them:
14They were talking with each other about everything that had happened. 15As they talked and discussed (and the Greek word here is for strenuous discussion or even debate) these things with each other, Jesus himself came up and walked along with them;
Whether you are a follower of Jesus or just curious about him, the prescription here is to seek him out in the Scriptures, in community. You’ve got to be in some sort of small group that opens up the scriptures and looks at them TOGETHER. And, as a side note, Christianity can ONLY be done in community. If you are going through college on the margins of a Christian community, you are ripping yourself off of what most of us look back at as THE singularly most valuable experience of our lives. I am not going to patronize you by suggesting that these are the best days of your life. I sincerely hope they aren’t. People used to tell me that all the time in college and I used to thing ‘you have got to be kidding me.’ And they were wrong.

But if you take Christian community seriously during your college years, I can almost guarantee you that these will be some of the best friends of your life…because you will attribute significant portions of your spiritual growth directly to them. If you have had trouble connecting, sign up for the retreat…get in a small group for the last 7 weeks of the year…make it happen.

iv. Jesus engages the intellect AND the passions
32They asked each other, "Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?"
Listen, I am a professional and relatively successful scientist. In an ongoing debate in my field, I take the position of empiricist which puts the emphasis and trust in data over models and paradigms. My life is all about data. I am on schedule finish my fourth degree in the fall and already have the fifth one picked out. I simply want to know as much as I can. But I do not believe that our humanity can be reduced to facts. God fashioned us as complex beings with multiple sensory apparatus. When we approach the gospel, we ask the question, ‘is it true’? But that is actually not enough. We also ask does it work? And is it beautiful? Many of us found that an encounter with Jesus left our passions aflame well before we had answered all our questions. And I’m ok with that…because God made us people…not computers…so it would seem to follow that he would reveal himself to our sense of beauty and meaning as well as our sense of truth.

v. At some point we have to invite him in
28As they approached the village to which they were going, Jesus acted as if he were going farther. 29But they urged him strongly, "Stay with us, for it is nearly evening; the day is almost over." So he went in to stay with them.

The two random disciples on the road that day still had not put everything together. They still did not realize who it was who was with them. But they did know that this man seemed to have something of value. They invited him in. One of my favorite philosophers is Søren Kierkegaard. His most famous idea is that certainty follows commitment. If you wait to commit until you are certain, you will wander through life always seeking that one last piece of data. Kierkegaard says that God reveals himself in our risky venture towards him. Some of you are at that place. You aren’t sure it is all for real, but there is something about this Jesus character that is attractive to you. You need to invite him in.

vi. Revelation vs Investigation
30When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them. 31Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him…
At the center of a Christian epistemology (thoughts about how we know things) is the idea that God is not known primarily by investigation. We do not figure him out. We believe knowing Jesus is primary a matter of him revealing himself to us. Incidentally, this is why we pray instead of meditating. We participate, as is relatively clear from the passage - he would not have revealed himself unless they had invited him in – but if you are here today and are wondering if the whole Jesus thing is for real, and what’s more, you are wondering how you would even figure out if it is real, I think this passage teaches: invite him in, in the midst of your doubt, pursue the scriptures in community, join a small group, and expect his revelation to be not only to your capacity for understanding, but also to your longings for beauty and meaning.

NT Wright says that this passage is: “a model for a great deal of what being a Christian is all about. The slow, sad dismay at the failure of human hopes; the turning to someone who might or might not help; the discovery that in scripture there lay keys which might unlock the central mysteries and enable us to find the truth; the sudden realization of Jesus himself, present with us, warming our hearts with his truth, showing himself as bread is broken. This describes the experience of innumerable Christians…”

Closing Thought: The Resurrection Changes Everything

Then finally, this passage is, first and foremost, about the Resurrection, which we celebrated just two days ago. The main point of this passage is that the Resurrection changes EVERYTHING.

Check out these two verses

v19b "He was a prophet, powerful in word and deed before God and all the people.
v52Then they worshiped him

At the beginning of the seven miles, they were despairing.

Verse 17 describes their faces as downcast. Saint Augustine stresses the word ‘had’ in verse 21. ‘We HAD hope.’ Hope is a past tense verb

And they describe Jesus as ‘a prophet’ that they had looked to for political retribution. This is a common view of Jesus’ importance without the resurrection. He WAS and important prophet and if we take him seriously he will guide us to a political Utopia (which will look different if you are a democrat or a republican…but both claim the dead Jesus as their model). It is not surprising that Paul said that if the resurrection didn’t happen we are to be pitied beyond all men…that thing is depressing.

But the resurrection changes everything. Dan and I got together a couple months ago and I asked him what he hoped for me to get out of this passage. He essentially said, ‘I just really love how that passage is a microcosm of the whole story…the very moment that they were sure of their defeat, of death’s victory, was the very moment in which they were walking and chatting with their victorious chamion over death.” The resurrection changes everything. When Jesus shows up among the disciples, and they realize that death did not hold him, that he was indeed raised from the dead, they did not say ‘you are the greatest prophet of all time’…no…they WORSHIPED him. The resurrection changes everything.

Dan said two weeks ago: “The resurrection is a reality that can totally revolutionize your life.” Whether or not you are a Christian. And that is why we are going to spend the last six weeks of the school year unpacking some of the theological and practical implications of the resurrection. The first two weeks will focus on theological applications:

Next week, Dan will talk about the new earth. Anyone close to him knows that this topic has simply captured his imagination. It will be, in some senses, and escatology (last days) talk, but I promise that there will be no charts…just a total reevaluation of what life after death will be like, and what life will be like after that.

The next week I will be back to talk about ‘The New Body.’ And we will look at passages like and including this one, where the resurrected Jesus looks like an ordinary human being, but he is also walking through walls and seemingly teleporting. I will talk about what Jesus’ physical resurrection means for our physical resurrection as well as how we should view our bodies theologically right now…and the implications for work, sleep and sex.

So we’ll talk about ‘The New Earth’ and ‘The New Body’ but then we will spend three weeks on ‘The New Task.’ Jesus doesn’t just show up as a neat trick…he leaves the disciples with marching orders in light of his resurrection in verses 46-48.

46He told them, "This is what is written: The Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, 47and repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. 48You are witnesses of these things.
And so we will break ‘The New Task’ in light of the resurrection into 1) Justice, 2) Evangelism and 3) Beauty and Creativity.

The gospel changes everything. During the seven miles on the road to Emmaus, Jesus turned two kingdom role players from bitter, cynical, followers of a failed prophet, to worshipers of a risen champion over death with a new mission. This is the end of the story of Luke, but the beginning of our story. I hope you will come along with us for the next few weeks.

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[1] Jer 23:5