Today's Scripture Reading (December 13, 2020): Matthew 21
C. S. Lewis made the argument famous, but he
wasn't the first one to present the idea that Jesus was either Lord, a lunatic,
or a liar. C. S. Lewis makes this argument;
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 patronising nonsense about his being
a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to
(C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity)
Scottish Christian pastor, John
Duncan, made a very similar argument in 1859. Duncan formed what he called his "trilemma."
Duncan wrote that "Christ either deceived mankind by conscious fraud, or He
was Himself deluded and self-deceived, or He was Divine. There is no
getting out of this trilemma. It is inexorable."
A little less than a century later,
Watchman Nee considered the concept once again.
First, if he claims
to be God and yet in fact is not, he has to be a madman or a lunatic.
Second,
if he is neither God nor a lunatic, he has to be a liar, deceiving others by
his lie.
Third,
if he is neither of these, he must be God.
You can only choose one of the three
possibilities. If you do not believe that he is God, you have to consider him a
madman. If you cannot take him for either of the two, you have to take him for
a liar.
There is no need for us to prove if Jesus of
Nazareth is God or not. All we have to do is find out if He is a lunatic or a
liar. If He is neither, He must be the Son of God.
But the question is even
older than Duncan, Nee, or Lewis. It was a question that was asked in the first
century as Jesus's earthly ministry was drawing to close. Who is this? And it
is a question that we need to confront as Christmas approaches. Who do you say
that he is? As you look into the manger of Bethlehem, who is it that you see?
For the shepherds and the magi, the answer seemed to be obvious. I hope that it
is obvious for us as well.
Tomorrow's Scripture Reading: Mark 11
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