C. S. Lewis, who you may know as the author of the Chronicles of Narnia and many Christan books., said:
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. 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. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. ... Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.[14]
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This argument has been used in various forms throughout church history.[7] It was used by the American preacher Mark Hopkins in his book Lectures on the Evidences of Christianity (1846), based on lectures delivered in 1844.[8] Another early use of this approach was by the Scots preacher "Rabbi" John Duncan (1796–1870), around 1859–60:[9]
Other preachers who used this approach included Reuben Archer Torrey (1856–1928)[10] and W. E. Biederwolf (1867–1939).[11] The writer G.K. Chesterton used something similar to the trilemma in his book, The Everlasting Man (1925),[12] which Lewis cited in 1962 as the second book that most influenced him.[13]
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Lewis, who had spoken extensively on Christianity to Royal Air Force personnel, was aware many ordinary people did not believe Jesus was God, but saw him rather as "a 'great human teacher' who was deified by his supporters"; his argument is intended to overcome this.[1] It is based on a traditional assumption that, in his words and deeds, Jesus was asserting a claim to be God. For example, in Mere Christianity, Lewis refers to what he says are Jesus's claims:
- to have authority to forgive sins — behaving as if he really was "the person chiefly offended in all offences."[15]
- to have always existed, and
- to intend to come back to judge the world at the end of time.[16]
Lewis implies that these amount to a claim to be God and argues that they logically exclude the possibility that Jesus was merely "a great moral teacher", because he believes no ordinary human making such claims could possibly be rationally or morally reliable. Elsewhere, he refers to this argument as "the aut Deus aut malus homo" ("either God or a bad man"),[17] a reference to an earlier version of the argument used by Henry Parry Liddon in his 1866 Bampton Lectures, in which Liddon argued for the divinity of Jesus based on a number of grounds, including the claims he believed Jesus made.[18]
Influence
The trilemma has continued to be used in Christian apologetics since Lewis, notably by writers like Josh McDowell. Peter Kreeft describes the trilemma as "the most important argument in Christian apologetics"[19] and it forms a major part of the first talk in the Alpha Course and the book based on it, Questions of Life by Nicky Gumbel. Ronald Reagan also used this argument in 1978, in a written reply to a liberal Methodist minister who said that he did not believe Jesus was the son of God.[20] A variant has also been quoted by Bono.[21] The Lewis version was cited by Charles Colson as the basis of his conversion to Christianity.[22] Stephen Davis, a supporter of Lewis and of this argument,[23] argues that it can show belief in the Incarnation as rational.[24] Bruce M. Metzger argued that "It has often been pointed out that Jesus'[s] claim to be the only Son of God is either true or false. If it is false, he either knew the claim was false or he did not know that it was false. In the former case (2) he was a liar; in the latter case (3) he was a lunatic. No other conclusion beside these three is possible."[25] It has also been put forward by Catholic apologist Robert Barron.
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Here's the entire interview with Bono
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