Europe was sweet! And refutations of common misconceptions.

Hey guys, I'm back from Europe! It was a great trip! I went with my older brother to Dublin, Ireland where we met our younger sister. She showed us around and we got to do a lot of cool stuff. Then Ben and I went to Paris, France and saw the sights. We stayed in a hostel and tried to eat on the cheap. We climbed the Eiffel Tower and saw Notre Dame. We did it all!

So the trip was really nice. Then I got back to America and started doing what I usually do. Here's the setup: in 1941 C.S. Lewis famously stated a trilemma concerning the moral status of Jesus Christ, which goes "Jesus of Nazareth claimed to be God, so he is either telling the truth, lying, or delusional." The point is to rule out a common modern interpretation of Christ's mission, which is that of a moral human teacher. If we can eliminate that possibility, Lewis says, then we are left with the fact that Jesus is Lord, because no one will admit that Jesus was crazy or a liar.

Now I for one believe that Jesus of Nazareth is Lord and Christ. But I don't believe this argument, nor do I believe that the argument helps Christians build their own character of faith or assist others in doing so. It is a false trilemma, false because it inappropriately presents exactly three options. Must Jesus ONLY be Lord, liar, or lunatic? No. The problematic assumption is that the Scriptural account, on which the argument rests, must be akin to a modern biography. It must be a coherent whole and every descriptive sentence must be as equally pedagogically valuable as the one before it and after it, the assumption says.

But a modern secularist, who wants to uphold her notion that the Nazarene was exclusively human and yet an inestimably valuable moral teacher, has recourse in attacking that Biblical cohesion. Couldn't the Bible be right sometimes, and wrong sometimes? She may point to the Higher Criticism and claim that passages about Jesus' divinity are actually manufactures of a later time, or are to be understood metaphorically, or vaguely spiritually. This refutation is not without ammunition from the Higher Criticism and other good scholarship. And it thoroughly destroys the Lewis Trilemma.

As an aside, I personally believe that the Bible is true. But I believe that it is pedagogically true, in that what its contents were written by people inspired by the Holy Spirit to teach important truths, not to literally recount history. Did Creation happen in six days? Probably not, I think. Did the Flood cover the entire world? Probably not. Did Moses turn sticks into snakes? Most likely he did not. These stories serve a larger purpose in inspiring the fear and love of God in us, and the love of our neighbors, ever and ever greater. Of course, I don't dismiss miracles outright. Whether Jesus actually turned water to wine is less important, and more ambiguous, than whether he was raised from the dead. I believe that he was. "And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith" (1 Corinthians 15:14). But I believe it because Christ's resurrection is not simply a teaching tool, like the Hebrew children in the furnace, but a necessary claim for the efficacy of our faith.

Similarly, the Lordship of Christ is necessary to our faith, and therefore I have no problem with Lewis' goal of attempting to demonstrate that Lordship. What I have a problem with is his method of demonstration. We can't bully nonbelievers into believing by leading them down a dialectic trap. We can only demonstrate Christ's Lordship through our imperfect relay of the New Testament narrative and the imperfect example of our own love.