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WillowOne's Positions

Lewis's Trilemma

Form

C. S. Lewis's argument (Mere Christianity, 1952, Book II, ch. 3), popularised as "Liar, Lunatic or Lord" by Josh McDowell:

  1. Jesus claimed to be God.
  2. A man who claims to be God is either lying, insane, or telling the truth.
  3. Jesus was not a liar: his moral teaching and his death for his claim rule it out. He was not a lunatic: his wisdom, calm, and insight are not those of a madman.
  4. Therefore he was telling the truth. "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."

My Positions

  1. The missing option is Legend. The explicit claims to divinity ("I and the Father are one", "before Abraham was, I am") are all in John, the last gospel, written sixty or more years after the crucifixion. In Mark, the earliest, Jesus deflects the title: "Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone" (10:18). The claims were put in his mouth as the movement's theology developed, which is what Bart Ehrman's How Jesus Became God (2014) documents. The trilemma is a False Dilemma with the most likely option left off the list.
  2. "Lunatic" is itself a false dichotomy. People hold one grandiose false belief while being otherwise sane, kind, and shrewd. Sabbatai Zevi, Sun Myung Moon, and the long line of apocalyptic prophets are the type, and a first-century Jewish preacher sincerely convinced that he was the Messiah appointed to announce the kingdom is a well-attested human kind, not a madman. Mark 3:21 records that his own family thought him out of his mind, which the apologist has to explain if "lunatic" is unthinkable.
  3. "Lord" would need to mean what Lewis means. In Jesus's context, "Son of God" was a title for kings and righteous men, and "Messiah" meant an anointed human deliverer. A man who claimed to be the Messiah was claiming to be a man with a job, not the second person of the Trinity. The trilemma reads fourth-century doctrine back into first-century words.
  4. The argument assumes the reliability of the gospels. It needs the sayings to be his, so it is a dependant of the Historical Reliability of the New Testament and fails with it (Circular Reasoning).
  5. The same trilemma proves every founder. Muhammad claimed to receive the words of God; Joseph Smith claimed to translate golden plates from an angel. Each was by all accounts sincere and capable. The Christian apologist takes the "liar or lunatic" horn for both without hesitation, which shows he does not find the trilemma compelling either (Argument from Prophetic Character).
  6. I agree with Lewis about the patronising nonsense. I do not say Jesus was a great moral teacher whose divinity I politely decline. I say that a man probably existed, that what he said is hard to recover, and that the claims made for him were made by others (The Historicity of Jesus).

Sources

  • Lewis, C. S., Mere Christianity (1952), Book II, ch. 3
  • McDowell, J., Evidence That Demands a Verdict (1972)
  • Ehrman, B., How Jesus Became God (2014)
  • Beversluis, J., C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion (2nd ed., 2007), ch. 5
  • Hick, J. (ed.), The Myth of God Incarnate (1977)

Also see