... Michael Novak, in Hate at the Movies, did not think to attribute C.S. Lewis.
Novak says that "if Jesus is only a man, he is no great moral teacher. He is on the contrary a fraud, a pretender, a horrible spendthrift with his own life and the lives of his apostles—all twelve of whom met a martyrdom like his, some of them crucified, all of them most brutally killed without the utterance of a single recantation. If He was not the Son of God, one with the Father and the Holy Spirit, he was either a mountebank or a lunatic, and deserves our contempt, not our praise. His every moral teaching would be vitiated by its radical emptiness and fraudulence."
Which bears more than a passing resemblance to something Lewis wrote, that "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 a man who says he is a poached egg - or he would be the devil of hell. You must take your choice. Either this was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool 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."
It's the similarity of phrase I was commenting upon. And I would like to see some quotes earlier than Lewis to that effect if they are easily available.
ReplyDeleteMichael Novak might not have remembered it was C.S Lewis' words that put that thought in his head at some point in the past.
ReplyDeleteWhile I think the DaVinci Code is a load of old cobblers and suspect the movie isn't very good, I don't see the point in being offended that someone secular believes Jesus was just a man. I'm not offended when religious people believe he was the son of God. I don't agree, but I'm not offended by it.
The thing is we know very little about Jesus Christ - our views on what he did or did not say is pure conjecture, or at the very least, it is what other people said he said, updated and reinterpreted by who knows how many monks over the centuries. With C.S. Lewis, we can look up that quote and confirm that that was exactly what he wrote. Jesus himself wrote nothing, not a line, of his own.
The DaVinci Code is speculation masquerading as fact, but claiming Jesus was the son of God, rather than a man, is in my opinion as preposterous.
Well, as I pointed out, I was simply struck by the similarity of Novak's and Lewis's turns of phrase. I wasn't touting the argument. But I think it's worth noting that a classical scholar (not a Christian, as I recall), writing in the TLS a couple of years ago, noted that Jesus is actually the figure from the ancient world about whom there is more contemporary writing than any other. He also noted that if the standards of the Jesus seminar were applied to, say, Augustus, there would be serious reason to doubt Augustus's existence also. The core of Lewis's argument - if indeed it was his, that having been called into doubt - is a series of conditional propositions: If Jesus claimed to be the Son of God, he was either telling the truth or he was not. If he was not, then he was either a liar or a madman. If he was either a liar or a madman, then he was not a great moral teacher.
ReplyDeleteWhether the primary documents of the faith are truthful or not is an altogether different question. The fact remains that the figure presented in those documents claims to be the Son of God. So the conditional propositions are perfectly applicable to that figure. Hence, Lewis's argument remains sound with regard to that figure.
While I myself do not take offense when people deny this claim of divinity, I can see how some people might take offense. I think they are wrong to take offense. It would be more appropriate for them to feel sad.
I don't doubt that Jesus Christ existed. The problem is that we do not know for sure whether "that figure" did or did not claim to be the son of God, or if other people touting his divinity put those words in his mouth.
ReplyDeleteOf course, even if he did personally claim to be the son of God, it does not mean that he was, only that he believed he was.
Assuming he did claim it, we would need to ask what he meant by it since he himself wrote nothing to explain it - was he saying that only he was the son of God, or that all of us in a way are the sons and daughters of God since we're all God's children, supposedly, which was a common theme in pre-Christian Hellenistic cults.