ProTheism: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and the Trilemma

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and the Trilemma

36 comments | Saturday, May 27, 2006

I was watching The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe with my kids last night. There is a scene early on where Lucy returns from her first time into Narnia ecstatic. She tells her brothers and sister about the magical place. However, they don’t believe her. Lucy becomes upset and storms off running into the professor. Later, the professor challenges their assumption that Lucy is fictitiously making up the story. Susan asks, “Are you saying that we should believe her?” He answers, “Why not?” Susan tells him, “Well, logically it’s impossible!” “Logic!” said the Professor, “Why don’t they teach logic at these schools? There are only three possibilities. Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is telling the truth. You know she doesn’t tell lies and it’s obvious she is not mad. For the moment then, and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume that she is telling the truth.”

Do you see the trilemma? I will let you decide. This has always been a fascinating subject for me. I remember hearing about it, but finally reading it in Mere Christianity—Lewis states the following:

“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 and 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.”

The Lord-Liar-Lunatic trilemma has been attacked viciously by skeptics. But what most people don’t know is that he discussed and expanded on this issue in God in the Dock. The Mere Christianity version is not quite as developed and in addressing the “legend” aspect (though it is an excellent primer). This is not overly surprising likely because much of it is from a radio show. More readily available though (after much digging), is a section of chapter 19 of the book called “What Are We to Make of Jesus Christ?” Though there are still some problems to be worked out (as in it’s not air tight), here is a more complete version of it:

What are we to make of Jesus Christ? This is a question which has, in a sense, a frantically comic side. For the real question is not what are we to make of Christ, but what is He to make of us? The picture of a fly sitting deciding what it is going to make of an elephant has comic elements about it. But perhaps the questioner meant what are we to make of Him in the sense of 'How are we to solve the historical problem set us by the recorded sayings and acts of this Man?' This problem is to reconcile two things. On the one hand you have got the almost generally admitted depth and sanity of His moral teaching, which is not very seriously questioned, even by those who are opposed to Christianity. In fact, I find when I am arguing with very anti-God people that they rather make a point of saying, 'I am entirely in favour of the moral teaching of Christianity'——and there seems to be a general agreement that in the teaching of this Man and of his immediate followers, moral truth is exhibited at its purest and best. It is not sloppy idealism, it is full of wisdom and shrewdness. The whole thing is realistic, fresh to the highest degree, the product of a sane mind. That is one phenomenon.

The other phenomenon is quite the appalling nature of this Man's theological remarks. You all know what I mean, and I want rather to stress the point that the appalling claim which this Man seems to be making is not merely made at one moment of His career. There is, of course, the one moment which led to His execution. The moment at which the High Priest said to Him, 'Who are you?' 'I am the Anointed, the Son of the uncreated God, and you shall see Me appearing at the end of all history as the judge of the Universe.' But that claim, in fact, does not rest on this one dramatic moment. When you look into His conversation you will find this sort of claim running through the whole thing. For instance, He went about saying to people, 'I forgive your sins.' Now it is quite natural for a man to forgive something you do to him. Thus if somebody cheats me out of ££5 it is quite possible and reasonable for me to say, 'Well, I forgive him, we will say no more about it.' What on earth would you say if somebody had done you out of ££5 and I said, 'That is all right, I forgive him'? Then there is curious thing which seems to slip out almost by accident. On one occasion this Man is sitting looking down on Jerusalem from the hill above it and suddenly in comes an extraordinary remark——'I keep on sending you prophets and wise men.' Nobody comments on it. And yet, quite suddenly, almost incidentally, He is claiming to be the power that all through the centuries is sending wise men and leaders into the world. Here is another curious remark: in almost every religion there are unpleasant observances like fasting. This Man suddenly remarks one day, 'No one need fast while I am here.' Who is this Man who remarks that His mere presence suspends all normal rules? Who is the person who can suddenly tell the School they can have a half-holiday? Sometimes the statements put forward the assumption that He, the Speaker, is completely without sin or fault. This is always the attitude. 'You, to whom I am talking, are all sinners.' and He never remotely suggests that this same reproach can be brought against Him. He says again, 'I am begotten of the One God, before braham was, I am,' and remember what the words 'I am' were in Hebrew. They were the name of God, which must not be spoken by any human being, the name which it was death to utter.

Well, that is the other side. On the one side clear, definite moral teaching. On the other, claims which, if not true, are those of a megalomaniac, compared with whom Hitler was the most sane and humble of men. There is no half-way house and there is no parallel in other religions. If you had gone to Buddha and asked him 'Are you the son of Bramah?' he would have said, 'My son you are still in the vale of illusion.' If you had gone to Socrates and asked, 'Are you Zeus?' he would have laughed at you. If you would have gone to Mohammed and asked, 'Are you Allah?' he would first have rent his clothes and then cut your head off. If you had asked Confucius, 'Are you Heaven?', I think he would have probably replied, 'Remarks which are not in accordance with nature are in bad taste.' The idea of a great moral teacher saying what Christ said is out of the question. In my opinion, the only person who can say that sort of thing is either God or a complete lunatic suffering from that form of delusion which undermines the whole mind of man. If you think you are a poached egg, when you are looking for a piece of toast to suit you, you may be sane, but if you think you are God, there is no chance for you. We may note in passing that He was never regarded as a mere moral teacher. He did not produce that effect on any of the people who actually met Him. He produced mainly three effects——Hatred ——Terror——Adoration. There was no trace of people expressing mild approval.

What are we to do about reconciling the two contradictory phenomena? One attempt consists in saying that the Man did not really say these things, but that His followers exaggerated the story, and so the legend grew up that He had said them. This is difficult because His followers were all Jews; that is, they belonged to that Nation which of all others was most convinced that there was only one God——that there could not possibly be another. It is very odd that this horrible invention about a religious leader should grow up among the one people in the whole earth least likely to make such a mistake. On the contrary we get the impression that none of His immediate followers or even the New Testament writers embraced the doctrine at all easily.

Another point is that on that view you would have to regard the accounts of the Man as being legends. Now, as a literary historian, I am perfectly convinced that whatever else the Gospels are they are not legends. I have read a great deal of legend and am quite clear that they are not the same sort of thing. They are not artistic enough to be legends. From an imaginative point of view they are clumsy, they don't work up to things properly. Most of the life of Jesus is totally unknown to us, as is the life of anyone else who lived at that time, and no people building up a legend would allow that to be so. Apart from bits of the Platonic dialogues, there are no conversations that I know of in ancient literature like the Fourth Gospel. There is nothing, even in modern literature, until about a hundred years ago when the realistic novel came into existence. In the story of the woman taken in adultery we are told Christ bent down and scribbled in the dust with His finger. Nothing comes of this. No one has ever based any doctrine on it. And the art of inventing little irrelevant details to make an imaginary scene more convincing is a purely modern art. Surely the only explanation of this passage is that the thing really happened? The author put it simply because he had seen it.

Then we come to the strangest story of all, the story of the Resurrection. It is very necessary to get the story clear. I heard a man say, 'The importance of the Resurrection is that it gives evidence of survival, evidence that the human personality survives death.' On that view what happened to Christ would be what had always happened to all men, the difference being that in Christ's case we were privileged to see it happening. This is certainly not what the earliest Christian writers thought. Something perfectly new in the history of the Universe had happened. Christ had defeated death. The door which had always been locked had for the very first time been forced open. This is something quite distinct from mere ghost-survival. I don't mean that they disbelieved in ghost-survival. On the contrary, they believed in it so firmly that, on more than one occasion, Christ had to assure them that he was not a ghost. That point is that while believing in survival they yet regarded the Resurrection as something totally different and new. The Resurrection narratives are not a picture of survival after death; they record how a totally new mode of being has arisen in the Universe. Something new had appeared in the Universe: as new as the first coming of organic life. This Man, after death, does not get divided into 'ghost' and 'corpse'. A new mode of being has arisen. That is the story. What are we going to make of it?

The question is, I suppose, whether any hypothesis covers the facts so well as the Christian hypothesis. That hypothesis is that God has come down into the created universe, down to manhood——and come up again, pulling it up with Him. The alternative hypothesis is not legend, nor exaggeration, nor the apparitions of a ghost. It is either lunacy or lies. Unless one can take the second alternative (and I can't) one turns to the Christian theory.

'What are we to make of Christ?' There is no question of what we can make of Him, it is entirely a question of what He intends to make of us. You must accept or reject the story.

The things He says are very different from what any other teacher has said. Others say, 'This is the truth about the Universe. This is the way you ought to go,' but He says, 'I am the way the Truth, and the Way, and the Life.' He says, 'No man can reach absolute reality, except through Me. Try to retain your own life and you will be inevitably ruined. Give yourself away and you will be saved.' He says, 'If you are ashamed of Me, if, when you hear this call, you turn the other way, I also will look the other way when I come again as God without disguise. If anything whatever is keeping you from God and from Me, whatever it is, throw it away. If it is your eye, pull it out. If it is your hand, cut it off. If you put yourself first you will be last. Come to Me everyone who is carrying a heavy load, I will set that right. Your sins, all of them, are wiped out, I can do that. I am Re-birth, I am Life. Eat Me, drink Me, I am your Food. And finally, do not be afraid, I have overcome the whole Universe.' That is the issue.

I thoroughly enjoy Lewis writings; yet, I would treat them as basic instructions for starting to open the mind. The most problematic issue I see with the trilemma is that it is possible to come up with different options. So, the horns don’t seem to stick you if there are alternatives. The most common objection I see is that Jesus didn’t state any of those things regarding His divinity in the Bible and that early Christians added those things to the text and put them on his lips.

I don’t plan to make a case against the “legend” in this post; but as a primer, I would preliminarily field the objections with the following points: i) it’s odd that early church writings do not dispute regarding additions or changes to the text. ii) Secondly, no matter how many verses are striped from the text (take the Jesus seminar for example), you will not find a Jesus without supernatural or divine attributes. Essentially, Jesus’ divine nature is at the core of all His teachings. Hence, the entire thing would have to be fabrication (I can hear this tune already!) iii) Another widely accepted historical fact is the radical change in the disciples after Jesus’ death. They were willing to die and many did. This would seem highly unlikely for someone who had direct knowledge of a fabricate of “Jesus, the God Man”. It also seems irrational to suppose that they would make Jesus God after being humiliatingly beaten and crucified as a criminal. iv) Lastly, as I already demonstrated in my last post, Jesus’ high Christology was already established in the first century.

The trilemma is helpful to key in on the specific issues of the New Testament. I do think it can and has been development more by able Christian scholars; yet, I wouldn’t write it or C.S. Lewis off as easily as many skeptics and Christians do today.

In The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe, the professor offered three options: Lucy was either telling lies, or she is mad, or she is telling the truth. I don’t think the “legend” was an option entertained at the time. However, as it turns out, Lucy was telling the truth and in Jesus’ case—He was also telling the truth; which, makes Him Lord. The question of Jesus being either Lord, Liar, Lunatic or Legend is the most important question anyone could ever ask.

Labels: Apologetics, Christianity, Skepticism

posted by SteveiT1D

at 8:09 PM Permalink

36 Comments:

Jim Jordan said...

Hi Bf
Didn't ya know, Jesus just had good connections. You'll never have to wait for a smoking table at the Pearly Gates Diner if you say you know Jesus.
I have a brother that believes in this "Jesus just had connections" garbage. It seems odd that a person could become more relevant to you if only you believe He's a lying sack of shiloh. Even if you believed that he was made divine by Paul or the apostles then nothing He said would have made any real sense.

Jesus knew this would happen, and that's why any interpretation of Him NOT being divine makes His teaching useless. The gospel is worthless if you take away the central truth of the son of God.

It's an all-or-nothing battle with Jesus. Anyone who truly seeks Him will find Him. Anyone who tries to mold Him into something else will lose Him. Call it divine wisdom.
Good research, great post.
Take care, Jim

5/31/2006 3:54 PM

nsfl said...

So, BF, perhaps the difference to focus on here is that we have Lucy's first-hand testimony, but the who-knows-how-many-filtered-through-testimony of Jesus. The oldest extant scraps of parchment date to the 2nd CE, and the oldest copies of the oldest gospel [Mark] leave out the resurrection story, while the anonymous writer of John takes pains to reinforce how fleshly the resurrection was [anti-Gnosticism]...yeah, the legend couldn't grow in the re-telling, could it?

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The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and the Trilemma

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