"Liar,madman or God"; CS Lewis on the divinity of Christ

Great Debates
21

I haven’t seen anyone mention the big one: Christ’s reference to himself as “Yahweh.” (I’ll look for the cite when I have a Bible handy, unless somebody wants to beat me to it. Most Bibles translate this directly into English as “I am.”) This was a tremendous *faux pas[/I} back in Christ’s time…basically a stoneable offense. Not only was the mere utterance of the name bad (the idea was that you’d get God’s attention by speaking his name, which gave us mortals an improper power over God), but that Christ was calling himself God.

Now, there’s a second argument on whether Christ actually said those words, but it’s doubtful the Gospel authors stuck it in there for fun. Anyway, assuming he did say it…well, he’s either right, he’s looney, or he was trying to fool people.

22

No, not for fun. But the evangelists could have added it in there because they knew he said something similar, and they embellished to make their point (which was that Jesus was the Christ, etc.). They obviously believed he was the Son of God, how difficult would it be for them to assume he had said so?

ResIpsa, do you know which book that reference is in (Jesus referring to himself as “I Am”)? I can try to find it online.

23

Joe Cool

Can you provide a quote of him directly saying “I am God”?

How is that a no-brainer? Is everyone who believes something false a lunatic?

David Simmons

So are priests either lord, liar, or lunatic? There is another problem with his argument: he treats insanity as an eithe-or proposition: either someone is completely sane, or he is completely insane. But there’s an even larger problem in Lewis’ argument: it relies people’s actions making sense. If Jesus was God, his actions would make sense (well, more so than if he were merely a man). If he were a liar, his actions would make sense. If he were a lunatic, his actions would make sense. But what if he were none of the above, and his actions simply have no explanation?

24

I don’t find it that doubtful at all that that statement attributed to Jesus was added by writers later as embellishment. There’s plenty of talk about the whole of the Resurrection being a later addition to the Bible story (I’ve read this in several paper sources, I’ll try to find an online cite), so I find it entirely plausible that writers embellished or flat-out added to Jesus’ words.

I read the Bible with the same type of analysis I apply to reading Arthurian mythological texts… documents that were written many years after the facts (if they are facts at all) in question, by writers who were either relying entirely upon distant memory or secondhand accounts, and have been subsequently translated by others, often several times, before they actually reach our eyes. Given the number of filters these documents (meaning both Biblical and Arthurian source material) have had to pass through to reach modern eyes, I find it difficult to believe that they have survived completely intact. Think of a tin-can phone, stretching through history… each connection distorts the message slightly. After so much time, we can only rely on what can be verified from multiple sources, which isn’t much. Language itself becomes a barrier when enough time has passed.

Reading the modern translation of the Bible as a literal historical document is, to me, simply inaccurate. Unless you have a seperate source to verify what it says (which is true for some of it, such as the Flood and the Tower of Babel), then I take most of it with a rather large helping of salt.

Now, even if we ignore all of that and assume that the words are correct as written, I agree with CyberPundit’s opinion on the matter: Lewis’ explanation is too simplistic, and only holds if you agree with his assumptions, which are many. When I read Mere Christianity a couple years ago, I was impressed by the fact that it presented most of what it had to say quite reasonably, contrary to many defenses of Christianity I hav had the misfortune to read. However, the whole thing is, as you can see in the passage quoted by David Simmons, based on a number of pretty obvious assumptions. Lewis considers them to be “obvious universal truths,” as he states earlier in the book, but they were pretty clear assumptions about morality, reality, and faith. If you don’t accept his assumptions (which I did not), then the whole of the book simply falls flat.

As David Simmons summed up:

Lewis proves that he believes what he believes very convincingly and reasonably in Mere Christianity, but for those who do not share his beliefs and assumptions, most of his argument is empty. The OP topic is one example.

25

We shouldn’t forget what Lewis was arguing against:

"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. "

So his “liar, madman or God” arguement was in response to people who were willing to accept that what was reported in the Gospel was what Jesus really said (therefore, they were willing to embrace him as a “great moral teacher”). Once we start arguing about what he really said and what he didn’t, it calls into question not only his claims to divinity, but also his golden rule, his sermon on the mount, etc. And once we start questioning those things as well, then we can no longer call Jesus a “great moral teacher” with any confidence.

It seems to me that Lewis is saying that if you’re willing to go far enough in believing the Gospel’s account to proclaim Jesus a “great moral teacher,” then you have to be willing to deal with what he said about his own divinity also. For those who aren’t willing to go that far, they aren’t addressed by this argument.

26

g8
“since if we have multiple contradictory claims about the supernatural, we would expect many or all of them to be wrong in any event, yes?”
Fine but there is no particular reason to use the trichotomy argument to conclude that Jesus was telling the truth and but that the others were liars/madmen. Lewis’s argument seems to be that Jesus’s behaviour in the rest of the Gospels doesn’t seem like that of a liar/madman but that could easily be said of most great religious leaders. So if we apply the Lewis argument consistently we are forced to say that all religions are completely true which is not possible.

Another reason I brought up the issue was that I suspect that there are Christians who would accept the Lewis argument but would be reluctant to call other religous leaders liars/madmen and I wanted to see how they would apply Lewis’s very rigid trichotomy to other faiths.

spoke
“Though you’ve rendered Jefferson’s view “inadmissible,” that was his take on the subject”
I may not have been clear but that is pretty much what I meant to say in the OP ie. that Lewis’s argument would impy that the Jeffererson view is wrong. I wasn’t saying that I believed Jefferson was wrong.

27

“It seems to me that Lewis is saying that if you’re willing to go far enough in believing the Gospel’s account to proclaim Jesus a “great moral teacher,” then you have to be willing to deal with what he said about his own divinity also”
Well I don’t think it’s an either/or proposition. I think it’s perfectly admissible for a non-believer to look at the Gospels and try to separate out the plausible from the implausible. The “great teacher” bit is certainly plausible whereas the idea that he was literally God is not.
Incidentally one of the reasons I started this thread was that I have seen the Lewis argument invoked by people who are by no means religious nuts. And of course Lewis himself was an Oxbridge (can’t remember which one) don and no fool. So I wanted to know if there was more to it than what I had heard since it seemed to me so transparently feeble. IMO it exemplifies both the seductiveness and impossibility of trying to prove religious doctrine on intellectual grounds instead of invoking tradition/subjective experience which ,by contrast, are valid reasons for adopting religion.

28

There’s a difference in saying that Jesus’ claim to divinity are implausible, and saying that it’s implausible that Jesus even made those claims. The former is self-evident, while the latter would require at least some evidence that those quotes were made up, imho.

29

With no offense intended, don’t we have anything better to do than argue about C.S. Lewis?!! The man was an apologist, not a theologian. He had a conversion experience, a non-rational experience (note I did not say irrational), and then wrote a bunch of fluff trying to make his non-rational experience rational.
The flaws in his logic abound. Read Surprised by Joy, in which he discusses, after his conversion to theism, why he chose Christianity over other religions. It certainly wasn’t a rational process.

The few things that he writes that present a cogent argument have been presented with much more clarity by other theologians. The rest is his personal experience, which, while others may relate to it, is not the basis for a logical debate.

Sua

30

No, not particularly. And I’ve actually read C.S. Lewis, as opposed to other theologians.

31

No, of course there’s no particular reason to single out Jesus as being special and yes, the argument could be applied to any religion. But the point I’m trying to make is that the argument doesn’t say strictly that Jesus is in fact God, it just says that there are a limited number of possibilities and in a separate bit of reasoning Lewis concludes that the only one that is acceptable to him is that Jesus is God.

If we accept this and we assume that Jesus never lied or was mistaken, then anyone who claims something contrary to what Jesus actually said MUST be mistaken. I don’t see how Lewis’ argument shows that every religion is true; rather, I see it as saying that at most one is true.

To provide an analogy: Einstein, Hawking, and Newton all tell us how gravity works. Once any one of them has told us, we’re forced to assume that either that one person was right or he was wrong. By itself, this simple piece of obviousness provides no way of choosing between the possibilites, but once we’ve made a choice (say, to believe Hawking), we can freely conclude that Einstein and Newton are wrong; the argument allows any of the three to be correct but it does not allow ALL of the three to be correct, since that is plainly impossible.

32

." I don’t see how Lewis’ argument shows that every religion is true; rather, I see it as saying that at most one is true."
Well what I meant was that if you applied the same trichotomy to every religious leader whose high ethical tone indicated he was unlikely to be a liar/madman you would be forced to conclude that they were 100% right. Obviously Lewis restricts his argument to Christ but that is precisely my problem.

I agree that it’s impossible that all religions are 100% right but that IMO is another internal contradiction to Lewis’s argument if applied consistently to every religion.
“There’s a difference in saying that Jesus’ claim to divinity are implausible, and saying that it’s implausible that Jesus even made those claims”
That’s a good point. All I would say is that AFAIK Jesus’s claims to being divine are relatively rare whereas examples of him being a “great teacher” seem to be integral to the NT, so IMO it is possible to believe that the latter represent the historical Jesus while the former are embellishments.

33

Oh and in respone to Sua Sponte’s point: the reason I started a thread on Lewis was ,like I said, that I have seen his argument crop up a number of times from relatively sane people.

Though I find his argument weak, I don’t think I have ever seen a significantly better argument attempting to prove Christianity (or any other religion) on purely rational grounds.
If you know of better intellectual arguments for Christianity from well-regarded theologians I would be happy to hear about them.

34

Hmm. I think we’re talking past each other. The way I see it, if I applied the same trichotomy to N religious leaders whose high ethical tone indicated that they are unlikely to be a liar or madman and who represent N different religions which are all mutually contradictory, I would be forced to conclude that all appearances to the contrary, at least N-1 of them must be liars or madmen nevertheless, even though individually it seems like none of them are likely to be such. This is an ugly conclusion and strongly indicative that the trichotomy is as we all agree a false one, but it does not mean that the trichotomy is logically inconsistent. You are never forced to conclude that any religious leader is right; there are always other options. Phrasing these other options as liar or madman is misleading, since when you realize that these really stand for “is wrong and knows it” and “is wrong but doesn’t realize it,” the latter becomes more palatable. (Parenthetically, why can’t someone with high ethical character nevetheless be off his rocker?)

I think what I was trying to say is that there isn’t any logical inconsistency and what you were trying to say is that the above outcome is rather unbelievable. Is that fair? If so, then I agree with you.

35

“I think what I was trying to say is that there isn’t any logical inconsistency and what you were trying to say is that the above outcome is rather unbelievable”
OK. I suppose Lewis would have argued that there are reasons why Christ is not a madman/liar but why Buddha is though of course such an argument is most unconvincing. So there is some kind of escape route.

“Parenthetically, why can’t someone with high ethical character nevetheless be off his rocker?”
Well I should probably have written “high ethical character/sanity” or something like that . Many religious leaders have also been highly perceptive philosphers and writers and in some cases sucessful political leaders which more or less rules out madness.

More generally one could argue that high ethical character implies the abillity to distinguish between right and wrong which rules out at least the worst kinds of madness.

36

The fact that the “Lord, Liar, or Lunatic” trilemma has such limited application is what points out its fatal flaw: namely, why do we so easily dismiss Liar or Lunatic as options? Naturally, Lewis was addressing those who already accept that Jesus was a good man, and not crazy or malicious.

Except that you can’t dismiss those options so quickly. Was Jesus crazy? Well, he spoke to demons, worried about people out to get him, and believed the end of the world was nigh. He told people to hate their families, sell their possessions, and leave their dead fathers unburied. Today, we’d call such behavior “insane.”

Was he a liar? We’re supposed to believe that Jesus’ moral messages show him to be unimpeachably benevolent. But we’ve seen in our own times those who repeat Jesus’ words verbatim, yet prove to be crooks (Jim Bakker, etc.). And the lie doesn’t have to be malevolent: Jesus could have been a reformer who employed the “shocking” claim of being God incarnate to motivate change.

Or he may have sincerely believed he was divine – based on what his parents told him. Perhaps it is they who were delusional. I can’t say for sure, but it is a plausible option. The Trilemma does not represent all the possibilities, nor is one possibility overwhelmingly more likely. Lewis is mistaken when he asserts that “Lord” stands above the others.

37

If I might bring in two obvious examples, if only to flesh out what’s already been said:

  1. Joseph Smith. Liar, Lunatic, or Prophet? Eh, Joe Cool? Or what about Mohammed?

  2. Philip K. Dick. Clearly Dick was a lunatic, but he was also a very smart guy and a deep and interesting thinker. If Dick could believe that his insights into the human condition were being beamed into his left ear by a pink laser beam wielded by Goddess, or that his award-winning novel The Man in the High Castle was merely a factual report related to him by a refugee from a parallel universe, why couldn’t Jesus have been crazy?

For my part, I think Jesus himself never claimed to be God, mostly because that assumption makes a number of things fall into place. Suppose Jesus were really a revolutionary claiming to be the traditional Jewish messiah a la bar Kokhba, instead of claiming to be a Christian-style messiah. Then, when caught, he would be crucified (as befits a revolutionary leader) rather than stoned (as befits someone who claims to be God.) Cognitive dissonance sets in among his followers, and people start talking about how sure, he didn’t conquer the Romans, because he meant a spiritual kingdom. Over time we see a movement away from the spiritual resurrection described by Paul to the physical resurrection claimed by the Gospels, because that’s what Christianity needed at the time in order to catch on with non-Jews. (Not to mention the dropping of requirements for circumcision and the like.)

Anyway, all the changes in Christianity over time, as fossilized in the Gospels, are explained somewhere on www.infidels.org, but I don’t have the exact link. See also Who Wrote the Gospels? by Randal Helms, if you’re interested.

-Ben

38

No, I think the Trilemma does represent all possibilities when appropriately cast in the guise of “telling the truth,” “intentionally telling a falsehood,” and “telling what he mistakenly believed to be the truth.” It’s phrasing these latter two as “liar” and “lunatic” that causes the problem; Lewis no doubt phrased them like that because he expected people would rule these possibilities out, but interpreting this narrowly isn’t a good way to do things because it does present a false trilemma. Nevertheless, you CAN present a closely related true trilemma which suddenly becomes unconvincing when phrased in less loaded language. I of course agree with you that there’s no reason to instantly rule out “liar” and “lunatic” (particularly since, as Cyber Pundit noted, if we apply “Lord” to Jesus, we must apply one or the other of these to Buddha and others), but I don’t see any other possibilities.

39

[hijack]
And not a very good one either. In an essay in Mere Christianity he undertakes to show that God is the force behind moral law. In the piece entitled * We Have Cause To Be Uneasy* there is the following passage: "… one part of you is on His side and really agrees with His disapproval of human greed and trickery and exploitation. You may want Him to make an exception in your own case, to let you off this one time; but you know at bottom that unless the power behind the world really and unalterably detests that sort of behaviour, then He cannot be good. [italics added]

It seems to me that Lewis says that in order for this “power behind the world” to be good, He has to obey a higher law.
[/hijack]

40

In “The Chronicles of Narnia” (yeah, i was 8 once) that always seemed stange to me even then, he seemed to say there was a higher law that even Divine beings must obey. But that argument could be extended to Christianity in general…that the Supreme Lawgiver had to send Christ to die to redeem our sins, and there was no other way to do so.

But regardless of whether I agree with him or not, I like C.S Lewis.