Why is CS Lewis’s trilemma not convincing to non-Christians?
“I am trying 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.
We are faced, then, with a frightening alternative. This man we are talking about either was (and is) just what He said or else a lunatic, or something worse.. I have to accept the view that He was and is God.” ~ CS Lewis
This is a prevalent argument Christian apologists often use to argue that you can’t call Jesus just another spiritual teacher/prophet/guru. If he claimed what he claimed, then he is God. The problem is many other nuanced options are available to counter the trilemma.
Even if someone claims to be divine/God, that doesn’t make him equal to God. There is no problem with admitting that someone can be sincerely mistaken. That makes them neither lunatics nor intentional liars, just fallible.
Let’s go through some reasons why the argument is not convincing to someone not already Christian.
1. A non-Christian can easily accept the option that Jesus was a fraud or madman.
A non-Christian, if presented with this argument, can easily pick the option that the whole Jesus movement was a big fraud. A Christian apologist might come up with different arguments as to why that can’t be the case, but that’s a totally different discussion. This might sound blasphemous or offensive, but I don’t mean it like that. Jesus could be just some madman. I don’t want to psychoanalyze a person from the first century AD, but I can see why, for some non-Christians, this can be a valid possibility. Also, lunatic is a very loaded word. By lunatic, do we mean someone fit to be in a mental asylum or just some sane person mistakenly making a narcissistic claim? That’s another valid option.
2. Jesus could be mistaken.
This is the option the argument majorly targets. Jesus being some Guy who mistakenly thought himself to be Divine is perfectly fine. Probably, the argument is that someone like this can’t be considered a good moral teacher. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Someone can be mistaken and still make some great points on other aspects of life.
For example, Isaac Newton, famous for his works on physics, optics, and mathematics, also pursued alchemy, a discipline long viewed as discredited in the modern scientific world.
While Jesus could be mistaken, I don’t see why we can’t agree with some of his teachings. As I said earlier, the argument misses many nuanced options.
3. In many non-Christian traditions, Jesus could be divine, which would not be a big deal.
If Jesus claimed to be God, He must be God, which is exclusively a Christian understanding of divinity. One can still see Jesus as an enlightened being and a great moral teacher. In the video I am sharing, this Indian guru claims he knows better than God, yet he has a worldwide following, and many people see him as a great spiritual teacher.
Now, what would you call him? He is either a liar, lunatic, or lord?
Look into the case of Sathya Sai Baba, Swaminarayan, or many of the dozens of individuals who claimed to be divine or God. This also ties up with my previous point. We can look at the teachings of these individuals and still say they made some great points. Does that have any effect on the claim that they were divine?
Maybe the argument is that Jesus was a Jew, and we need to look into this from a monotheistic Jewish perspective and not a pagan perspective. Probably, one of the reasons the Jesus movement made a significant impact was because it was radical. Moreover, why should we expect all Jews at the time of Jesus to have uniform beliefs? That’s now how society works. Even early Christianity didn’t have uniform beliefs. Look into Gnosticism and many other diverting Christian traditions from the 1st and 2nd centuries. It’s also true today. We have a variety of Christian traditions, and some of them are so different from orthodox Christianity that we can call them an entirely new religion.
It just so happened that the proto-orthodox Christian tradition survived out of many other traditions. Christianity could be a weird religious syncretism between Jewish and Roman/Greek traditions.
4. Jesus didn’t claim that.
Another valid option is that Jesus probably didn’t claim those radical things, or if the statements actually go back to Jesus, then we have probably lost the actual context. Many of the things that are tied to Jesus could be later legendary developments. Some scholars point out that if we line up our sources, the earliest source where Jesus actually called himself to be anything like God is the gospel of John. The gospel of John is the last canonical gospel chronologically, probably written after more than 50 years of the death of Jesus. That’s very suspicious. Why would earlier sources miss out on such a huge detail?
What if Jesus considered himself the Messiah or son of God, who was meant to be the king in the reformed Israel? Son of God could mean an angel, a divine being, or maybe an enlightened person with a special relationship with God. Starting a new religion was probably never the goal of the Jesus movement. After all, according to Jesus’s teachings, the end days were supposed to come soon.
I think this insistence on equating Jesus with God led to the formation of the theology of the Christian trinity, which in itself is a very convoluted idea.
5. Maybe it’s the combination of all the above.
There is another option it is the combination of all of the above. Some of the details are probably lost in history. Something we have misunderstood along the line. Maybe some of the claims by Jesus were radical, while others were legendary developments. Perhaps the disciples or Jesus intentionally lie about a few things. Maybe it’s a weird theological syncretism. Maybe the Jesus mythicists are right all along.
Conclusion
The trilemma can’t be used as an argument for Jesus’s godhood if that’s what some apologists are trying to do. It will be an utter failure if the trilemma is used in such a way. And I don’t think it successfully refutes the argument that we can simply call Jesus a moral teacher who was mistaken. We can still call him a moral teacher and reject his divinity. Then how is this argument useful? I think it can be useful for Christians as a retention strategy because the trilemma only makes sense once you have accepted the Christian theology, but at that point, the trilemma is redundant.
