It depends on a value judgement about being “mad”. Lewis assumes that someone who was mentally ill or delusional couldn’t be a good moral teacher. Therefore if his claims about himself were both wrong (not a son of God) and sincerely held (not a con trick) then he must have been delusional; consequently in Lewis’s view couldn’t be a good moral teacher.
I think this is wrong because I don’t think it is true that you can not be a good moral teacher if you are mentally ill, nor do I think sometimes being wrong or deluded makes it impossible for you to have wisdom or insight at other times. To me James Naylor is an example of this. His writing continues to be inspiring to many, but he is also part of the reason Quakers became interested in ministry to the mentally ill and also introduced processes of discernment of what individuals believe to be their spiritual calling.
Thing is, I don't think the trilemma refers to Jesus's moral teaching. It refers specifically to his claim to be the Son of God, which is a slightly different thing.
I was responding to this quote in the wiki article really::
"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 or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. ... Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God."[12]
I ‘ll stick my neck out; I’m fine with the trilemma. But that’s because I think there’s an unspoken bit we need to say out loud now, and that is “given the culture he was living and working in.” Any Jew of his time and background WOULD be either a lunatic or wicked to make such claims if they weren’t true—and it’s obvious from the Gospels that he is neither. Which forces me back on the third option.
Though to be sure, the trilemma isn’t the whole of why I accept his claim to be God. It’s more like “now that I’ve been forced to consider the possibility, i can see all sorts of ways this explanation (that Jesus is God) makes sense of a bunch of other phenomena.”
I ‘ll stick my neck out; I’m fine with the trilemma. But that’s because I think there’s an unspoken bit we need to say out loud now, and that is “given the culture he was living and working in.” Any Jew of his time and background WOULD be either a lunatic or wicked to make such claims if they weren’t true—and it’s obvious from the Gospels that he is neither. Which forces me back on the third option.
Though to be sure, the trilemma isn’t the whole of why I accept his claim to be God. It’s more like “now that I’ve been forced to consider the possibility, i can see all sorts of ways this explanation (that Jesus is God) makes sense of a bunch of other phenomena.”
I ‘ll stick my neck out; I’m fine with the trilemma. But that’s because I think there’s an unspoken bit we need to say out loud now, and that is “given the culture he was living and working in.” Any Jew of his time and background WOULD be either a lunatic or wicked to make such claims if they weren’t true—and it’s obvious from the Gospels that he is neither. Which forces me back on the third option.
Though to be sure, the trilemma isn’t the whole of why I accept his claim to be God. It’s more like “now that I’ve been forced to consider the possibility, i can see all sorts of ways this explanation (that Jesus is God) makes sense of a bunch of other phenomena.”
This. I don’t really see how it could be more. Or less.
I was impressed by the 'trilemma' when I was first presented with it as a susceptible student open to being evangelised by earnest young evangelicals.
Not that I regret that as I came to Christ that way.
I no longer find it particularly useful, but, like @Lamb Chopped can see a place for it alongside other claims / evidence / arguments.
My problem with it is that it doesn't really cover all the bases as Lewis seems to claim. There could be other possible explanations. The disciples could have made the whole thing up. Notions of Christ's divinity could have come from a synthesis of Hellenistic and Egyptian influences on Hebraic thought. Yadda yadda yadda. Etc etc etc.
I do accept the Church's teaching that Christ is God Incarnate. I can't 'prove' that and I'm not sure that 'sound-bite' apologetics of this populist kind are that helpful beyond a certain point.
It's a bit like Josh McDowell's 'Evidence That Demands A Verdict' and other evangelical apologetics. As soon as I see a title like that I want to renounce my faith and join the Humanist Society.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not disparaging Lewis as a popular apologist. He did a good job with 'Mere Christianity' and so on.
But he was very much of his time.
@Doublethink raises a good point I'd not considered before. I was aware of Naylor and his somewhat eccentric 'performance art' style of witness. But yes, and interesting to hear how that led the Friends to involve themselves in issues around mental health. Good on them.
I completely concur with @Lamb Chopped's comment that there is 'a whole bunch of other phenomena' that compels attention. There is something intrinsically compelling about the Gospels, I think.
'The one short tale we feel to be true,' as I think Dorothy L Sayers put it.
My faith doesn't stand or fall by the 'trilemma', and part of me thinks that if we are going to look for 'proof positive' in a scientific kind of way we are going to end up with a somewhat wooden and stilted apologetic.
That's not to say that reason doesn't come into it or we shouldn't rely on formulae such as the Anglican 'trilateral' or the Wesleyan 'quadrilateral' etc.
Agree re CS Lewis - he was doing lot of his writing and broadcasting either in or after an appalling war, having been in the trenches himself. IIRC a lot of the wartime stuff was actually written with the aim of reaching men (mostly) on active service, along with a domestic population also focused on total war.
It all needs to be seen in that context - to say nothing of the fact that he could almost certainly have assumed more scripture knowledge and basic Christian literacy on the part of the man in the street than would be the case now.
So he was doing something that there’s still IMO a need for, but in a different context and starting from a different place. I love his writing, but I don’t see the trilemma as that important to it, it’s just one golf club in the bag. I still find it useful and compelling to a point, but I’m not a Christian because CS Lewis has convinced me to be one.
On the other hand, along with Betjeman, Waugh and Graham Greene, I’m pretty sure he’s *kept* me one over the years.
Agree re CS Lewis - he was doing lot of his writing and broadcasting either in or after an appalling war, having been in the trenches himself. IIRC a lot of the wartime stuff was actually written with the aim of reaching men (mostly) on active service, along with a domestic population also focused on total war.
It all needs to be seen in that context - to say nothing of the fact that he could almost certainly have assumed more scripture knowledge and basic Christian literacy on the part of the man in the street than would be the case now.
So he was doing something that there’s still IMO a need for, but in a different context and starting from a different place. I love his writing, but I don’t see the trilemma as that important to it, it’s just one golf club in the bag. I still find it useful and compelling to a point, but I’m not a Christian because CS Lewis has convinced me to be one.
On the other hand, along with Betjeman, Waugh and Graham Greene, I’m pretty sure he’s *kept* me one over the years.
I should look into all three of those others. Lewis was absolutely 100% critical in my becoming a Christian, no question of that. I wasn’t raised in any religion and though I am of Jewish ancestry (mother’s side) I wasn’t raised in that either… Came to it on my own through various books and things basically. I read “the end of the affair” as part of a college class once but I haven’t really read anything else by Greene or the others.
Absolutely agreed regarding the general knowledge of the average man on the street now vs. then. I think it’s sad.
I blow hot and cold with Lewis. His literary criticism is certainly dated but still has its good points. His poetry is execrable but much of his prose still stacks up.
He certainly has a broad appeal across the whole Christian spectrum. The Orthodox often quote him approvingly. I often wish they'd do the same with other 'Western' writers. Lewis strikes a chord there, for some reason.
He's an important figure, no question about that, but not without flaws. Like all of us.
I think it's false because that Jesus was either deluded, self-consciously deluded, or God is a false problem and one that could apply to any religious prophet. The same could be said about the Buddha, Muhammed, or any Yogi. It's just a weird fake problem.
I also think that Jesus' teachings only make sense within the context of the OT; I completely disagree with the idea that his moral teachings are abstractly pure and correct. We treat them that way because our moral edifices are built upon Christian moral ethics, but there are plenty of other ethics.
I know many people who claim "to be Jesus" are actually mentally ill, but I don't see that it is necessary for an individual to believe some fairly wild things about themselves, whilst sane, that aren't actually true.
If you have a bunch of people around you that keep telling you certain things about yourself and a lot of other followers.. I don't think it is too hard to see someone being sincere but wrong about that.
I blow hot and cold with Lewis. His literary criticism is certainly dated but still has its good points. His poetry is execrable but much of his prose still stacks up.
He certainly has a broad appeal across the whole Christian spectrum. The Orthodox often quote him approvingly. I often wish they'd do the same with other 'Western' writers. Lewis strikes a chord there, for some reason.
He's an important figure, no question about that, but not without flaws. Like all of us.
Oh I find his lit crit and poetry both very good, but your mileage may vary. (I was an anomaly in grad school in the 1990s regarding my views of modern literary criticism, so …)
I blow hot and cold with Lewis. His literary criticism is certainly dated but still has its good points. His poetry is execrable but much of his prose still stacks up.
He certainly has a broad appeal across the whole Christian spectrum. The Orthodox often quote him approvingly. I often wish they'd do the same with other 'Western' writers. Lewis strikes a chord there, for some reason.
He's an important figure, no question about that, but not without flaws. Like all of us.
Oh I find his lit crit and poetry both very good, but your mileage may vary. (I was an anomaly in grad school in the 1990s regarding my views of modern literary criticism, so …)
I work for an Anglican seminary and am an Episcopalian and I take perverse delight in saying how much I dislike Lewis. We treat him like he's a saint when he's, in fact, a not great writer and poor thinker. (Although I agree that some of his literary criticism is actually pretty interesting).
In the Jewish culture at that point in time, mistaking yourself for God was one of those unthinkable things that went to the very bedrock of the culture. Remember, this is not India, they had no concept of people being avatars of the divine or any such thing. This is the land of "Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is One", and the emphasis in the culture is all on the unbridgeable gulf between us and God (in terms of nature, I mean). That gulf is reinforced daily by the prayers, by the rituals of daily life--the whole holiness code--by Scripture, by things like avoiding images and avoiding speaking the Name, just everything. You can hardly turn around without hitting a reminder that God is God and you are not. And I personally think God designed it that way. He as much as says so when he's laying down the law in Deuteronomy 6. Of all the cultures on earth, this one is the least likely to give birth to a sane person who nonetheless says he is God.
Seriously, you could get away far more easily believing yourself a donkey, or a fried egg, or an elephant. This particular delusion could not exist in the head of a first century Jew in Judea / Galilee in the first century without some pretty severe psychopathology undergirding it.
@Gamma Gamaliel I agree that Lewis's trilemma by no means covers all the possibilities. What if Jesus never claimed to be divine, but was defied by his followers after his death? It would have had to be very early after. There can be little doubt that he was crucified as King of the Jews. The Romans wouldn't have cared a jot about Jewish blasphemy allegations. But again, did he make this claim or was it made for him?
As King of the Jews was synonymous with Messiah, he was treated with exceptional brutality. Yet even if he claimed to be the Messiah, that was never a divine title in his culture. His followers were desperate to find some meaning to the traumatic and tragic end to his mission. I think that was sufficient for claims of his divinity to start circulating.
There simply wasn't time, given the earliness of the biblical texts and the non-biblical ones, for that matter. Irenaeus etc. And remember, that since the earliest church was something like 99.999% Jewish by birth and culture, they fall under the same basic inability to attribute deity to a human being as Jesus himself.
Seriously, you could get away far more easily believing yourself a donkey, or a fried egg, or an elephant. This particular delusion could not exist in the head of a first century Jew in Judea / Galilee in the first century without some pretty severe psychopathology undergirding it.
I'm not entirely sure about that. First century Judea was not some culturally isolated monolith culture. They were, in fact, at a the frontier of several other cultures and under Roman occupation. Let's remember that part of Augustus Cæsar's official titles, and the basis of his claim to leadership of the Roman state, was "divi filius", son of a god. (The deified Julius Cæsar.) On some level this had to sink in a little. So while I can believe that very few first century Jews considered this a valid claim, there's always some kind of cultural cross-pollination going on.
In order to be able to attempt to answer the question, we need to believe that everything recorded in the gospels is accurate. I don't believe that it is. Never the less I still put my faith in Jesus.
Seriously, you could get away far more easily believing yourself a donkey, or a fried egg, or an elephant. This particular delusion could not exist in the head of a first century Jew in Judea / Galilee in the first century without some pretty severe psychopathology undergirding it.
I'm not entirely sure about that. First century Judea was not some culturally isolated monolith culture. They were, in fact, at a the frontier of several other cultures and under Roman occupation. Let's remember that part of Augustus Cæsar's official titles, and the basis of his claim to leadership of the Roman state, was "divi filius", son of a god. (The deified Julius Cæsar.) On some level this had to sink in a little. So while I can believe that very few first century Jews considered this a valid claim, there's always some kind of cultural cross-pollination going on.
This is definitely the case, especially considering that the Gospels rely on the idea of a 'euangelion' (in the Greek) to make their claim. This was a well established literary form that the early Christians subverted to their own ends.
These are people who defined themselves AGAINST the surrounding cultures. Witness the hell that they gave those who were the least bit hellenized. I don't think your "rising and dying god" cross pollination idea will work. That's a pretty fundamental cultural idea to suggest changing. (There's a reason almost got stoned/thrown off a cliff/what have you several times before his eventual crucifixion, and it had nothing to do with cultural flexibility.)
There were numerous dying and rising God myths in the Greco Roman world of the Eastern Mediterranean. The idea got absorbed into Christianity.
As I understand it the myths cited are either only tenuously similar to Christianity or else our evidence for them postdates Christianity and the evidence is that any influence actually ran the other way. Or both.
Early attempts by nineteenth or twentieth century scholars to reconstruct Mithraism in particular projected their understanding of Christianity onto Mithraism - their interpretation looks like Christianity because Christianity is the filter they used to view it.
But then, according to the story, he was executed. So where's the contradiction?
Man comes to believe culturally unacceptable things about himself, ends up dead.
The problem is you still have to explain how someone in that culture of all cultures came to believe such a radically unacceptable idea BEFORE they killed him, all the while showing no signs either of moral corruption or severe mental illness. For a minimum of three years. You do grant the least two observations?
This is definitely the case, especially considering that the Gospels rely on the idea of a 'euangelion' (in the Greek) to make their claim. This was a well established literary form that the early Christians subverted to their own ends.
That is not my understanding. The differences between the gospels and other classical biographical writings have been in my view overstated; but I can't think of anything that reads as a non-Christian gospel.
But then, according to the story, he was executed. So where's the contradiction?
Man comes to believe culturally unacceptable things about himself, ends up dead.
The problem is you still have to explain how someone in that culture of all cultures came to believe such a radically unacceptable idea BEFORE they killed him, all the while showing no signs either of moral corruption or severe mental illness. For a minimum of three years. You do grant the least two observations?
Mm. Human nature suggests that humans are constantly coming up with culturally unacceptable ideas.
I don't know anything about ancient Jews but I can't think of many societies in the written historical records that haven't had a constant churn of wild ideas that go against cultural norms. In most highly religious societies these are usually put down.
As others have offered previously, there are the Quakers in 17th century England. Became outcasts, imprisoned, shamed etc. Also Catholics and Protestants at different times to the extent of being publicly executed.
These wild and unpopular ideas survived for generations despite official condemnation.
His literary criticism is certainly dated but still has its good points.
Well it's dated in that modern literary criticism is largely hermetic and aimed at other academics, and tends not to answer the kinds of aesthetic questions Lewis was addressing.
There were numerous dying and rising God myths in the Greco Roman world of the Eastern Mediterranean. The idea got absorbed into Christianity.
As I understand it the myths cited are either only tenuously similar to Christianity or else our evidence for them postdates Christianity and the evidence is that any influence actually ran the other way. Or both.
Early attempts by nineteenth or twentieth century scholars to reconstruct Mithraism in particular projected their understanding of Christianity onto Mithraism - their interpretation looks like Christianity because Christianity is the filter they used to view it.
I'm not sure that can be true, can it? Are you saying that ancient religious ideas of death/rebirth which for example follow seasons don't predate Christianity?
Roman god Janus, Egyptian god Isis. Surely those are older than Christianity?
Of course anything, even the “Jesus was a space alien”, remains a possibility. I don’t expect to argue anyone into faith. I’m simply trying to demonstrate that the trilemma is not as weak a formulation as some have stated.
Sorry I wasn't trying to insult your intelligence, you seemed to be asking me to accept what you were saying as reasonable. I was attempting to offer why it doesn't seem to me to be.
These are people who defined themselves AGAINST the surrounding cultures. Witness the hell that they gave those who were the least bit hellenized. I don't think your "rising and dying god" cross pollination idea will work. That's a pretty fundamental cultural idea to suggest changing. (There's a reason almost got stoned/thrown off a cliff/what have you several times before his eventual crucifixion, and it had nothing to do with cultural flexibility.)
The Herodians were fairly Hellenized. So were the Sadducees for that matter. (They were religiously conservative but culturally liberal.) Neither seems to have been given hell, at least not over that.
One of the big problems I’ve observed about Christians making absolutist definitive statements about Judaism is that they tend to regard Judaism as some kind of unchanging fossil religion whose adherents all monolithically believe exactly the same thing regardless of when or where they lived. Usually a variation on modern rabbinic Judaism. This may be because Christian scriptures so often portray “the Jews” as a monolith.
At any rate, the first century CE was a time of great foment and change in Jewish thought. It was messianically inflected in a way it hadn’t been under the Hasmoneans and very anti-Roman/anti-imperialist. The arrogance to claim that no Jew could have ever independently come up with a specific anti-imperialist idea (like that the son of God is nothing like Augustus Cæsar) seems like an example of projecting modern prejudices onto the past.
I know @Lamb Chopped knows better than this, so I’m a little surprised.
Heh. If there's one thing the Jews (no, I know they aren't a monolith!) took away from the exile, it was an extreme allergy to non-monotheism. I'd say that was THE defining element of that culture, if I had to pick one item. Being messianically inflected does not mean allowing random Messiah claimants to also claim deity; that's a whole different can of worms, and will get you crucified. Witness Jesus and his "I AM" statements.
If there's one thing the Jews (no, I know they aren't a monolith!) took away from the exile, it was an extreme allergy to non-monotheism. I'd say that was THE defining element of that culture, if I had to pick one item.
You’d think so, but the Hasmonean revolt was kicked off when the Hasmoneans assassinated a Jew who offered sacrifices to Zeus. On the one hand the assassination shows a devotion to monotheism, but on the other hand the fact that a Jew was offering sacrifices to the Greek gods shows that at least some Jews were flexible on this point.
I blow hot and cold with Lewis. His literary criticism is certainly dated but still has its good points. His poetry is execrable but much of his prose still stacks up.
He certainly has a broad appeal across the whole Christian spectrum. The Orthodox often quote him approvingly. I often wish they'd do the same with other 'Western' writers. Lewis strikes a chord there, for some reason.
He's an important figure, no question about that, but not without flaws. Like all of us.
Oh I find his lit crit and poetry both very good, but your mileage may vary. (I was an anomaly in grad school in the 1990s regarding my views of modern literary criticism, so …)
I work for an Anglican seminary and am an Episcopalian and I take perverse delight in saying how much I dislike Lewis. We treat him like he's a saint when he's, in fact, a not great writer and poor thinker. (Although I agree that some of his literary criticism is actually pretty interesting).
Yes, we will profoundly disagree about the quality of Lewis’ writing and thinking, as you may imagine.
Speaking of Lewis, regarding the pagan myths of a dying and rising god…
“Now as myth transcends thought, incarnation transcends myth. The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the dying god, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens—at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle.”
“God is more than a god, not less; Christ is more than Balder, not less. We must not be ashamed of the mythical radiance resting on our theology. We must not be nervous about ‘parallels’ and ‘pagan Christs’: they ought to be there—it would be a stumbling block if they weren’t. We must not, in false spirituality, withhold our imaginative welcome. If God chooses to be mythopoeic—and is not the sky itself a myth—shall we refuse to be mythopathic? For this is the marriage of heaven and earth: perfect myth and perfect fact: claiming not only our love and our obedience, but also our wonder and delight, addressed to the savage, the child, and the poet in each one of us no less than to the moralist, the scholar, and the philosopher.”
Agree re CS Lewis - he was doing lot of his writing and broadcasting either in or after an appalling war, having been in the trenches himself. IIRC a lot of the wartime stuff was actually written with the aim of reaching men (mostly) on active service, along with a domestic population also focused on total war.
It all needs to be seen in that context - to say nothing of the fact that he could almost certainly have assumed more scripture knowledge and basic Christian literacy on the part of the man in the street than would be the case now.
So he was doing something that there’s still IMO a need for, but in a different context and starting from a different place. I love his writing, but I don’t see the trilemma as that important to it, it’s just one golf club in the bag. I still find it useful and compelling to a point, but I’m not a Christian because CS Lewis has convinced me to be one.
On the other hand, along with Betjeman, Waugh and Graham Greene, I’m pretty sure he’s *kept* me one over the years.
I should look into all three of those others. Lewis was absolutely 100% critical in my becoming a Christian, no question of that. I wasn’t raised in any religion and though I am of Jewish ancestry (mother’s side) I wasn’t raised in that either… Came to it on my own through various books and things basically. I read “the end of the affair” as part of a college class once but I haven’t really read anything else by Greene or the others.
Absolutely agreed regarding the general knowledge of the average man on the street now vs. then. I think it’s sad.
I’d start with Bevis Hillier’s single volume biog of Betjeman, and Selina Hastings’ biog of Evelyn Waugh, so that you get a good view of who they were/where they came from, then move onto the letters, especially those between them (Waugh Roman Catholic convert reactionary, Betjeman Anglican and assailed by doubt).
Agree re CS Lewis - he was doing lot of his writing and broadcasting either in or after an appalling war, having been in the trenches himself. IIRC a lot of the wartime stuff was actually written with the aim of reaching men (mostly) on active service, along with a domestic population also focused on total war.
It all needs to be seen in that context - to say nothing of the fact that he could almost certainly have assumed more scripture knowledge and basic Christian literacy on the part of the man in the street than would be the case now.
So he was doing something that there’s still IMO a need for, but in a different context and starting from a different place. I love his writing, but I don’t see the trilemma as that important to it, it’s just one golf club in the bag. I still find it useful and compelling to a point, but I’m not a Christian because CS Lewis has convinced me to be one.
On the other hand, along with Betjeman, Waugh and Graham Greene, I’m pretty sure he’s *kept* me one over the years.
I should look into all three of those others. Lewis was absolutely 100% critical in my becoming a Christian, no question of that. I wasn’t raised in any religion and though I am of Jewish ancestry (mother’s side) I wasn’t raised in that either… Came to it on my own through various books and things basically. I read “the end of the affair” as part of a college class once but I haven’t really read anything else by Greene or the others.
Absolutely agreed regarding the general knowledge of the average man on the street now vs. then. I think it’s sad.
I’d start with Bevis Hillier’s single volume biog of Betjeman, and Selina Hastings’ biog of Evelyn Waugh, so that you get a good view of who they were/where they came from, then move onto the letters, especially those between them (Waugh Roman Catholic convert reactionary, Betjeman Anglican and assailed by doubt).
Or for Waugh you could do worse than dive straight into his Sword of Honour novel trilogy - available in one volume. Quite apart from being possibly (IMO) the best fictional treatment of WW2, it’s also pretty much, through its hero Guy Crouchback, a statement of Waugh’s worldview and the sort of RC he wished he was.
He’s been dead since 1966 and he’s nearly won me for Rome multiple times. But I remain the other side of the river.
As I understand it the myths cited are either only tenuously similar to Christianity or else our evidence for them postdates Christianity and the evidence is that any influence actually ran the other way.
I'm not sure that can be true, can it? Are you saying that ancient religious ideas of death/rebirth which for example follow seasons don't predate Christianity?
Roman god Janus, Egyptian god Isis. Surely those are older than Christianity?
By Isis, I presume you mean the story of how Osiris was killed by his brother, chopped into pieces, reassembled by Isis and reanimated, minus his penis which had been eaten by a fish, and became king of the Underworld?
As I say the similarity to Christianity is tenuous.
As for Janus, I've just scanned the Wikipedia page and I cannot find any mention of a dying and rising God at all.
The claim isn't merely that there are stories of gods or heroes that died and came back to life, or who entered the underworld and returned. It's a claim that the myths are similar enough to Christianity that it's reasonable to think they influenced Christianity.
The question of the divinity of Jesus is quite complex because the Christology grows considerably within the New Testament itself. In Romans 1.1-4, Paul says that Jesus is declared Son of God by his rising from the dead. Son of God in this context doesn't necessarily mean equality with God. In Acts 2.22, Peter describes Jesus as "a man attested to you by God with deeds of power." In verse 33 he says, of him, "Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit." I don't see any of this as indicative of a community who believed Jesus to be the eternal God. They believed in the resurrection, certainly, and saw Jesus as having some sort of divine status conferred on him by the Father, but the second person of the Trinity is a big leap from there.
John's "I am" statements are certainly of a much higher Christology, but that gospel in its present form didn't appear until the end of the century when a much higher Christology had grown up around the memory of Jesus. I would never suggest that John doesn't contain some older, even eye witness account, of the events of Holy Week, but the long theological discourses that are entirely absent from the synoptic gospels come across as meditations on the theology of the gospel rather than memories of what was said.
I apologise if this is a tangent from Lewis's trilemma, it's just part of why I struggle so much with Christ's divinity and the concept of the Trinity.
As noted, what substantive evidence we have for the content of the Isis mysteries, as opposed to the ancient Egyptian myths of Isis, is late second century AD.
Our reconstruction of the mysteries is speculative. Finding that they influenced Christianity is rather as if the geneticists in Jurassic Park, having used frog DNA to fill up the gaps in dinosaur DNA, had then analysed the dinosaur genome they'd reconstructed and said, look, frogs have a lot of dinosaur DNA; they must be descended from dinosaurs.
I don't think you're going to find a better example than Isis; I believe it's one of the usual examples cited along with Mithras, Adonis, and Attis.
Comments
I think this is wrong because I don’t think it is true that you can not be a good moral teacher if you are mentally ill, nor do I think sometimes being wrong or deluded makes it impossible for you to have wisdom or insight at other times. To me James Naylor is an example of this. His writing continues to be inspiring to many, but he is also part of the reason Quakers became interested in ministry to the mentally ill and also introduced processes of discernment of what individuals believe to be their spiritual calling.
Though to be sure, the trilemma isn’t the whole of why I accept his claim to be God. It’s more like “now that I’ve been forced to consider the possibility, i can see all sorts of ways this explanation (that Jesus is God) makes sense of a bunch of other phenomena.”
Amen.
This. I don’t really see how it could be more. Or less.
Not that I regret that as I came to Christ that way.
I no longer find it particularly useful, but, like @Lamb Chopped can see a place for it alongside other claims / evidence / arguments.
My problem with it is that it doesn't really cover all the bases as Lewis seems to claim. There could be other possible explanations. The disciples could have made the whole thing up. Notions of Christ's divinity could have come from a synthesis of Hellenistic and Egyptian influences on Hebraic thought. Yadda yadda yadda. Etc etc etc.
I do accept the Church's teaching that Christ is God Incarnate. I can't 'prove' that and I'm not sure that 'sound-bite' apologetics of this populist kind are that helpful beyond a certain point.
It's a bit like Josh McDowell's 'Evidence That Demands A Verdict' and other evangelical apologetics. As soon as I see a title like that I want to renounce my faith and join the Humanist Society.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not disparaging Lewis as a popular apologist. He did a good job with 'Mere Christianity' and so on.
But he was very much of his time.
@Doublethink raises a good point I'd not considered before. I was aware of Naylor and his somewhat eccentric 'performance art' style of witness. But yes, and interesting to hear how that led the Friends to involve themselves in issues around mental health. Good on them.
I completely concur with @Lamb Chopped's comment that there is 'a whole bunch of other phenomena' that compels attention. There is something intrinsically compelling about the Gospels, I think.
'The one short tale we feel to be true,' as I think Dorothy L Sayers put it.
My faith doesn't stand or fall by the 'trilemma', and part of me thinks that if we are going to look for 'proof positive' in a scientific kind of way we are going to end up with a somewhat wooden and stilted apologetic.
That's not to say that reason doesn't come into it or we shouldn't rely on formulae such as the Anglican 'trilateral' or the Wesleyan 'quadrilateral' etc.
But these things will only take us so far.
Among other things, even if our reason is completely convinced, we still have to make the action of the will.
James 2:19 says
It all needs to be seen in that context - to say nothing of the fact that he could almost certainly have assumed more scripture knowledge and basic Christian literacy on the part of the man in the street than would be the case now.
So he was doing something that there’s still IMO a need for, but in a different context and starting from a different place. I love his writing, but I don’t see the trilemma as that important to it, it’s just one golf club in the bag. I still find it useful and compelling to a point, but I’m not a Christian because CS Lewis has convinced me to be one.
On the other hand, along with Betjeman, Waugh and Graham Greene, I’m pretty sure he’s *kept* me one over the years.
I should look into all three of those others. Lewis was absolutely 100% critical in my becoming a Christian, no question of that. I wasn’t raised in any religion and though I am of Jewish ancestry (mother’s side) I wasn’t raised in that either… Came to it on my own through various books and things basically. I read “the end of the affair” as part of a college class once but I haven’t really read anything else by Greene or the others.
Absolutely agreed regarding the general knowledge of the average man on the street now vs. then. I think it’s sad.
The context @betjemaniac provides is important.
He certainly has a broad appeal across the whole Christian spectrum. The Orthodox often quote him approvingly. I often wish they'd do the same with other 'Western' writers. Lewis strikes a chord there, for some reason.
He's an important figure, no question about that, but not without flaws. Like all of us.
I also think that Jesus' teachings only make sense within the context of the OT; I completely disagree with the idea that his moral teachings are abstractly pure and correct. We treat them that way because our moral edifices are built upon Christian moral ethics, but there are plenty of other ethics.
If you have a bunch of people around you that keep telling you certain things about yourself and a lot of other followers.. I don't think it is too hard to see someone being sincere but wrong about that.
Oh I find his lit crit and poetry both very good, but your mileage may vary. (I was an anomaly in grad school in the 1990s regarding my views of modern literary criticism, so …)
I work for an Anglican seminary and am an Episcopalian and I take perverse delight in saying how much I dislike Lewis. We treat him like he's a saint when he's, in fact, a not great writer and poor thinker. (Although I agree that some of his literary criticism is actually pretty interesting).
In the Jewish culture at that point in time, mistaking yourself for God was one of those unthinkable things that went to the very bedrock of the culture. Remember, this is not India, they had no concept of people being avatars of the divine or any such thing. This is the land of "Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is One", and the emphasis in the culture is all on the unbridgeable gulf between us and God (in terms of nature, I mean). That gulf is reinforced daily by the prayers, by the rituals of daily life--the whole holiness code--by Scripture, by things like avoiding images and avoiding speaking the Name, just everything. You can hardly turn around without hitting a reminder that God is God and you are not. And I personally think God designed it that way. He as much as says so when he's laying down the law in Deuteronomy 6. Of all the cultures on earth, this one is the least likely to give birth to a sane person who nonetheless says he is God.
Seriously, you could get away far more easily believing yourself a donkey, or a fried egg, or an elephant. This particular delusion could not exist in the head of a first century Jew in Judea / Galilee in the first century without some pretty severe psychopathology undergirding it.
As King of the Jews was synonymous with Messiah, he was treated with exceptional brutality. Yet even if he claimed to be the Messiah, that was never a divine title in his culture. His followers were desperate to find some meaning to the traumatic and tragic end to his mission. I think that was sufficient for claims of his divinity to start circulating.
I'm not entirely sure about that. First century Judea was not some culturally isolated monolith culture. They were, in fact, at a the frontier of several other cultures and under Roman occupation. Let's remember that part of Augustus Cæsar's official titles, and the basis of his claim to leadership of the Roman state, was "divi filius", son of a god. (The deified Julius Cæsar.) On some level this had to sink in a little. So while I can believe that very few first century Jews considered this a valid claim, there's always some kind of cultural cross-pollination going on.
This is definitely the case, especially considering that the Gospels rely on the idea of a 'euangelion' (in the Greek) to make their claim. This was a well established literary form that the early Christians subverted to their own ends.
Man comes to believe culturally unacceptable things about himself, ends up dead.
Early attempts by nineteenth or twentieth century scholars to reconstruct Mithraism in particular projected their understanding of Christianity onto Mithraism - their interpretation looks like Christianity because Christianity is the filter they used to view it.
The problem is you still have to explain how someone in that culture of all cultures came to believe such a radically unacceptable idea BEFORE they killed him, all the while showing no signs either of moral corruption or severe mental illness. For a minimum of three years. You do grant the least two observations?
That thought occurred to me, too.
Mm. Human nature suggests that humans are constantly coming up with culturally unacceptable ideas.
I don't know anything about ancient Jews but I can't think of many societies in the written historical records that haven't had a constant churn of wild ideas that go against cultural norms. In most highly religious societies these are usually put down.
As others have offered previously, there are the Quakers in 17th century England. Became outcasts, imprisoned, shamed etc. Also Catholics and Protestants at different times to the extent of being publicly executed.
These wild and unpopular ideas survived for generations despite official condemnation.
I'm not sure that can be true, can it? Are you saying that ancient religious ideas of death/rebirth which for example follow seasons don't predate Christianity?
Roman god Janus, Egyptian god Isis. Surely those are older than Christianity?
Of course anything, even the “Jesus was a space alien”, remains a possibility. I don’t expect to argue anyone into faith. I’m simply trying to demonstrate that the trilemma is not as weak a formulation as some have stated.
The Herodians were fairly Hellenized. So were the Sadducees for that matter. (They were religiously conservative but culturally liberal.) Neither seems to have been given hell, at least not over that.
One of the big problems I’ve observed about Christians making absolutist definitive statements about Judaism is that they tend to regard Judaism as some kind of unchanging fossil religion whose adherents all monolithically believe exactly the same thing regardless of when or where they lived. Usually a variation on modern rabbinic Judaism. This may be because Christian scriptures so often portray “the Jews” as a monolith.
At any rate, the first century CE was a time of great foment and change in Jewish thought. It was messianically inflected in a way it hadn’t been under the Hasmoneans and very anti-Roman/anti-imperialist. The arrogance to claim that no Jew could have ever independently come up with a specific anti-imperialist idea (like that the son of God is nothing like Augustus Cæsar) seems like an example of projecting modern prejudices onto the past.
I know @Lamb Chopped knows better than this, so I’m a little surprised.
You’d think so, but the Hasmonean revolt was kicked off when the Hasmoneans assassinated a Jew who offered sacrifices to Zeus. On the one hand the assassination shows a devotion to monotheism, but on the other hand the fact that a Jew was offering sacrifices to the Greek gods shows that at least some Jews were flexible on this point.
Yes, we will profoundly disagree about the quality of Lewis’ writing and thinking, as you may imagine.
I’d start with Bevis Hillier’s single volume biog of Betjeman, and Selina Hastings’ biog of Evelyn Waugh, so that you get a good view of who they were/where they came from, then move onto the letters, especially those between them (Waugh Roman Catholic convert reactionary, Betjeman Anglican and assailed by doubt).
Cool! Thank you!
He’s been dead since 1966 and he’s nearly won me for Rome multiple times. But I remain the other side of the river.
As I say the similarity to Christianity is tenuous.
As for Janus, I've just scanned the Wikipedia page and I cannot find any mention of a dying and rising God at all.
The claim isn't merely that there are stories of gods or heroes that died and came back to life, or who entered the underworld and returned. It's a claim that the myths are similar enough to Christianity that it's reasonable to think they influenced Christianity.
John's "I am" statements are certainly of a much higher Christology, but that gospel in its present form didn't appear until the end of the century when a much higher Christology had grown up around the memory of Jesus. I would never suggest that John doesn't contain some older, even eye witness account, of the events of Holy Week, but the long theological discourses that are entirely absent from the synoptic gospels come across as meditations on the theology of the gospel rather than memories of what was said.
I apologise if this is a tangent from Lewis's trilemma, it's just part of why I struggle so much with Christ's divinity and the concept of the Trinity.
Isis had a cult which was said to offer initiates rebirth and is said by some to have influenced Christianity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mysteries_of_Isis
Janus was the Roman god of deaths and beginnings, worshipped at harvest.
Perhaps they are not good examples to have suggested.
Our reconstruction of the mysteries is speculative. Finding that they influenced Christianity is rather as if the geneticists in Jurassic Park, having used frog DNA to fill up the gaps in dinosaur DNA, had then analysed the dinosaur genome they'd reconstructed and said, look, frogs have a lot of dinosaur DNA; they must be descended from dinosaurs.
I don't think you're going to find a better example than Isis; I believe it's one of the usual examples cited along with Mithras, Adonis, and Attis.