In “Mere Christianity,” Lewis writes of Jesus: “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 a level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell.”This famous passage does not, on a second read, make much sense. After all, could not a great moral teacher have messianic delusions?
Actually, people who are delusional and claim to be God do not tend to advance any great moral teachings, and offhand I can't think of anyone regarded as a great moral teacher -- other than Jesus -- who made such a claim. Jesus' claim was quite extraordinary and most of his moral teachings actually are not.
I had the same thought when I read this a few days ago.
ReplyDeleteI can't think of any "great moral teacher" who was a nutter, but maybe I'm just not thinking hard enough.
I agree that great moral teachers tend not to be nutters. But people at their times very often do regard them as such. That's why many great moral teachers are vilified, mocked, exiled, even executed. As the saying goes, "A prophet is never beloved in his home village." That was certainly true for every Biblical prophet, and was also true of Mohammed, the Buddha, and many others.
ReplyDeleteBut this is one area in which I think Lewis' theology tends to get very sloppy. Frankly, it was sloppy a lot of the time; he convinced a lot of people of his views because he was a very convincing writer, a good arguer, and a very good debater. Lewis is a lot more popular in the USA than he is in England, BTW. Anglican theologians that I've read on Lewis often point out the holes in his logic.
Lewis' viewpoint in this quote is just his opinion, but he wrote a whole book to try to convince others of it. LOL In fact, it IS possible to separate the message from the man. You can do that with any artist, any prophet, any great moral teacher. Lao Tse, for example, we know almost nothing about, but the "Tao Te Ching" is a masterpiece of moral and ethical teaching.
And to be completely honest, Jesus never actually claimed to be God; that is a theological point that developed in the 3rd Centru C.E. What Jesus did say, again and again, was that we are all sons and daughters of God, just as he himself was. And when others called him the son of God, he didn't agree with them, he just didn't deny it.
Of course, that's an opinion put forward by many Biblical scholars that I've read. People will no doubt find ways to disagree with it, if they really want to agree with Lewis. And a lot of this stuff is about wanting to agree with someone who expresses a viewpoint one likes—and Lewis was actually rather good at that. It's just not very good theology.
I think the question as to whether Jesus claimed to be God is debatable,. If he indeed said, "before Abraham and Isaac were I am," the use of "I am" -- Yahweh's self-identifying phrase -- he was committing blasphemy, which, according to the record, many of his auditors thought.
ReplyDeleteI should have added that, when you get to that point, the decisive factor is faith.
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