“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 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 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.” -C.S. Lewis
In looking at this paragraph, we must first of all realize what Lewis was not saying: He was not using this argument to convince anyone that Jesus is God. He is simply saying it is hard to have a good opinion about a man who claims to be God Almighty unless he really WAS God Almighty. Either we have to take him deadly serious, or we need to ignore all he said. Lewis isn’t saying which one we should choose, simply that we have to make the choice. So Campus Crusade’s use of this passage as a proof for Jesus’ divinity doesn’t really work.
The only weakness of Lewis’ argument is what if Jesus didn’t claim to be God. Certainly a couple of Jesus’ first century disciples claimed this for him. John (or John’s student) says right off the bat that Jesus is God (John 1:1). Paul says that Jesus created all things, is before all things and sustains all things (Col. 1:16-17).
But did Jesus himself claim to be God? He said, “The Father and I are one” (John 10:30), but we can see later in John that Jesus’ idea of “oneness” also includes all of Jesus’ disciples (John 17:11), so it can’t be the sharing of the Father’s essence that is often described in Christian theology. Thomas proclaimed Jesus his God, and Jesus didn’t stop him, but that’s a little less than the “man who claims he is a poached egg.”
Jesus did claim to be the Son of God (John 11:4), but we can see that the Son of God really just meant the Messiah, or Christ, or king of Jerusalem (John 1:49; 11:27). Jesus did proclaim himself the King of Jerusalem, clearly, as he rode into Jerusalem on a fowl, which fulfilled the prophecy of Jerusalem’s king (Matthew 21:1-9). It is interesting that when Peter made his bold, but private, proclamation that Jesus is the Messiah, that while Jesus approved of this, he also told his disciples not to tell anyone (Matthew 16:16-20). During Jesus’ ministry, it wasn’t clearly stated that he was the Christ, which would explain the confusion of all who listened to him as to his identity, and in John it says he only pointed to the miracles to explain who he was (John 10:24-25). Only to the Sanhedrin, which was a court, but it was only semi-public, did he finally make a clear statement that he was the Christ (Matthew 26:63-64) and that is only clear if you know and have understood Daniel’s prophecy (Daniel 7:13). Jesus’ statements about himself were an enigma wrapped in a controversy.
But even then, his statements were about him being king, certainly not clearly about being God. That was left to His disciples. I am not denying it’s truth, I am speaking about Lewis’ argument. His argument is that Jesus clearly called himself God, which means it is either true or he was insane. (It’s frankly not likely that Jesus was a liar, since it would be a very ineffective lie in first century Judaism, as well as pretty much any other monotheistic culture). But if Jesus was only hinting at his divinity, not stating it clearly, then that makes him neither here nor there. Jesus was smart enough—sane enough—not to come down clearly on his divinity, let alone his messiahship. If he is sane enough to dance around these subjects, surely he is sane enough to be a good moral teacher.
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