C.S. Lewis is famous for claiming that there are only three possible ways to view Jesus,liar,lunatic or lord.Of course,he wrote many years ago and Christian theology has shown a capacity to develop in various directions.Do Christians today still consider this trilemma valid or do they consider other possibilities?If so what would those be?
Lewis did not invent the argument -- it was a familiar formula, which Lewis cast in memorably pithy language.
When I first encountered the "trilemma" (in a short book by an evangelical named Josh McDowell), I recall thinking about it for awhile and then realizing that those may well have been the only three possibilities... IF the scriptural accounts were taken to be accurate. As I recall, McDowell's book did not even acknowledge the possibility that the gospel accounts were distorted or made up, but tried to make the case that the Bible was of divine authority. That was one of my early experiences with dogmatic attitudes about the Bible, and I was baffled as to why people at McDowell's public appearances (he was active as a "campus crusader") didn't ask him how he could just assume that the Biblical accounts of what Jesus said were reliable. Well, maybe they did; but if so, it obviously did not stop him from making the liar-lunatic-lord argument over and over, with no public acknowledgment that the assumption of scriptural inerrancy, on which the argument relies, might be false.
I prayed for deliverance from the hard world of facts and logic to the happy land where fantasies and prejudices reign. But God spake unto me, saying, "No, keep telling the truth," and to that end afflicted me with severe Trenchant Mouth. So I'm sorry for making cutting remarks, but it's the will of God.
Lewis did not invent the argument -- it was a familiar formula, which Lewis cast in memorably pithy language.
When I first encountered the "trilemma" (in a short book by an evangelical named Josh McDowell), I recall thinking about it for awhile and then realizing that those may well have been the only three possibilities... IF the scriptural accounts were taken to be accurate. As I recall, McDowell's book did not even acknowledge the possibility that the gospel accounts were distorted or made up, but tried to make the case that the Bible was of divine authority. That was one of my early experiences with dogmatic attitudes about the Bible, and I was baffled as to why people at McDowell's public appearances (he was active as a "campus crusader") didn't ask him how he could just assume that the Biblical accounts of what Jesus said were reliable. Well, maybe they did; but if so, it obviously did not stop him from making the liar-lunatic-lord argument over and over, with no public acknowledgment that the assumption of scriptural inerrancy, on which the argument relies, might be false.
If the biblical accounts are not accurate then I would put it into the class of...liar
Not at all, 57. The question is Who Was Jesus, not What Is the Bible? If the scriptural accounts are unreliable, then we know nothing about whether Jesus was a liar, a lunatic, the lord... or something else entirely. A dishonest biography does not mean that the subject of the biography is dishonest.
I prayed for deliverance from the hard world of facts and logic to the happy land where fantasies and prejudices reign. But God spake unto me, saying, "No, keep telling the truth," and to that end afflicted me with severe Trenchant Mouth. So I'm sorry for making cutting remarks, but it's the will of God.
Not at all, 57. The question is Who Was Jesus, not What Is the Bible? If the scriptural accounts are unreliable, then we know nothing about whether Jesus was a liar, a lunatic, the lord... or something else entirely. A dishonest biography does not mean that the subject of the biography is dishonest.
I understand. We can also lok at it this way...if the scriptural accounts are unreliable then the scripture that Jesus quoted from is also unreliable. If that be the case then Jesus bought into the falseness believing himself to be what he wasn't....and places him in the catagory of lunitic.
Not at all, 57. The question is Who Was Jesus, not What Is the Bible? If the scriptural accounts are unreliable, then we know nothing about whether Jesus was a liar, a lunatic, the lord... or something else entirely. A dishonest biography does not mean that the subject of the biography is dishonest.
I understand. We can also lok at it this way...if the scriptural accounts are unreliable then the scripture that Jesus quoted from is also unreliable. If that be the case then Jesus bought into the falseness believing himself to be what he wasn't....and places him in the catagory of lunitic.
That is an interesting viewpoint, although it presupposes that Jesus sincerely believed himself to be the messiah foretold in the Hebrew scriptures. I would reject that view because the Hebrew scriptures depiction of the messiah is starkly different from the Christian depiction: to a Jew--such as Jesus--the messiah was to be human, not divine; he was to be the patrilineal blood descendent of the house of David, not the son of God with no human father; he was to be the champion who would liberate the Jews from oppression and usher in an era of peace and justice, not the savior from sin. I sincerely doubt that Jesus pictured himself as champion defeating the Roman forces and freeing the Jews.
In addition, when Jesus quoted the Hebrew scriptures, it was often to bring a new understanding of the underlying principle hidden beneath the written letter of the law; thus he is quoted as saying things like "You have been taught... but I say to you..." From that, I gather that Jesus was no robotic literalist when it came to the scriptures, and that is relevant to this question: If he quoted the Hebrew scriptures, finding truth in their underlying meaning apart from their literal words, then he was neither a liar... nor a lunatic... nor the messiah as he himself would have understood that role.
Note that Jesus might have been a messiah in the Christian sense; the fact that he did not fulfill the criteria by which the Jewish messiah was to be recognized does not rule out the possibility that he was some other kind of messiah, such as the Christian notion of a savior from sin. But that brings us back to the original question: did he actually make the Christian-messianic claims reported in the gospel accounts? If he did not, then those passages of the gospel accounts are false--but falsity in the Greek scriptures does not imply any falsity in the Hebrew scriptures that Jesus quoted, and does not make Jesus a liar for quoting them.
I prayed for deliverance from the hard world of facts and logic to the happy land where fantasies and prejudices reign. But God spake unto me, saying, "No, keep telling the truth," and to that end afflicted me with severe Trenchant Mouth. So I'm sorry for making cutting remarks, but it's the will of God.
