THINK ABOUT THIS: The Truth About C.S. Lewis’ Famous ‘Lord, Liar or Lunatic’ Trilemma
Among the most well-known popular arguments in favor of the divinity of Jesus Christ was first proposed by the great C.S. Lewis in his book, “Mere Christianity,” when he offered this syllogistic claim:
“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say.
Screenshot from YouTube.
“A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice.
“Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher.”
Lewis, the Oxford literature professor, author of multiple books, including “The Screwtape Letters,” and a former atheist, first offered the argument in a series of BBC radio broadcasts before redeploying the approach in the book.
If you’ve never read “Mere Christianity,” I urge you to do so because it is a classic, and a great read if you are even the most remotely interested in the issue. Lewsis passed away in 1963 and remains to this day one of the most influential literary voices in the world of myth and fable.
In the following video, Erik Manning, the guy behind the Is Jesus Alive blog and YouTube channel, addresses the recent spate of critics and one comedian who claim to demonstrate that Lewis’ Trilemma is wrong:
Historically, it is the number of eyewitnesses, in the absence of documented testimony to the contrary, that rules out the “critical textualist” arguments.
The gospels depict Jesus as a most hated man by the Jewish religious leaders of the time. Yet there is no record of contemporaneous Pharisees, Sadducees, or priests denying that the miracles took place. Paul’s preaching would have been heckled relentlessly if the Jewish leaders had believed the miracles did not actually happen.
So, they used other means to attack the young church. Treachery, for one. Acknowledging they made have made a mistake about Jesus but then throwing James off of a tower. The Sanhedrin’s testimony about Jesus was that He was a heretic and a blasphemer, not that He fraudulently claimed to perform miracles.
Frankly, it’s hard to believe that the young church could have taken off the way it did if there were accounts of people who claimed Jesus’ miracles were fraudulent. The only thing that makes sense is that His miracles were common knowledge and could not be taken head on.
The critical textualists have nothing but opinion on their side. Jesus validated His words with miracles as a sign of Who sent Him.
And if you don’t believe Jesus rose from the dead, textualists, please find another line of work. Something else C.S. Lewis wrote was that it was one thing to listen to an anthropologist sneer about the superstitious natives dancing around a fire, but something else to then watch him get up, don a witch doctor’s mask and spear, and dance with them.
If you’re not one of us, fine, go be one of some else’s religion.
Opinion and multiple speculative assumptions.