The trilemma has continued to be used in Christian apologetics since Lewis, notably by writers like Josh McDowell. For the moment then, and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume she is telling the truth. You know she doesn't tell lies and it is obvious she is not mad. Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is telling the truth. "Why don't they teach logic at these schools? There are only three possibilities. "Logic!" said the Professor half to himself. After listening to them explain the situation and asking them some questions, he responds: Peter and Susan believe Edmund and are worried that Lucy might be mentally ill, so they seek out the Professor whose house they are living in. When Lucy and Edmund return from Narnia (her second visit and his first), Edmund tells Peter and Susan that he was playing along with Lucy and pretending they went to Narnia. In Narnia Ī version of this argument appears in Lewis' book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Elsewhere, he refers to this argument as "the aut Deus aut malus homo" ("either God or a bad man"), a reference to an earlier version of the argument used by Henry Parry Liddon in his 1866 Bampton Lectures, in which Liddon argued for the divinity of Jesus based on a number of grounds, including the claims he believed Jesus made. Lewis implies that these amount to a claim to be God and argues that they logically exclude the possibility that Jesus was merely "a great moral teacher", because he believes no ordinary human making such claims could possibly be rationally or morally reliable. to intend to come back to judge the world at the end of time.to have authority to forgive sins - behaving as if he really was "the person chiefly offended in all offences.".For example, in Mere Christianity, Lewis refers to what he says are Jesus's claims: It is based on a traditional assumption that, in his words and deeds, Jesus was asserting a claim to be God. Lewis, who had spoken extensively on Christianity to Royal Air Force personnel, was aware many ordinary people did not believe Jesus was God, but saw him rather as "a 'great human teacher' who was deified by his supporters" his argument is intended to overcome this. 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. 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. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. 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. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. 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. He used the argument outlined below in a series of BBC radio talks later published as the book Mere Christianity. Lewis was an Oxford medieval literature scholar, popular writer, Christian apologist, and former atheist. Chesterton used something similar to the trilemma in his book, The Everlasting Man (1925), which Lewis cited in 1962 as the second book that most influenced him. Williams, Reuben Archer Torrey (1856–1928) and W. Others who used this approach included N. There is no getting out of this trilemma. Another early use of this approach was by the Scots preacher "Rabbi" John Duncan (1796–1870), around 1859–60: Ĭhrist either deceived mankind by conscious fraud, or He was Himself deluded and self-deceived, or He was Divine. It was used by the American preacher Mark Hopkins in his book Lectures on the Evidences of Christianity (1846), based on lectures delivered in 1844. This argument has been used in various forms throughout church history. This argument is very popular with Christian apologists, but some theologians and biblical scholars do not believe that Jesus claimed to be God. ![]() It takes the form of a trilemma - a choice among three options, each of which is in some way difficult to accept. It is sometimes described as the "Lunatic, Liar, or Lord", or "Mad, Bad, or God" argument. Lewis in a BBC radio talk and in his writings. One version was popularised by University of Oxford literary scholar and writer C. Lewis's trilemma is an apologetic argument traditionally used to argue for the divinity of Jesus by postulating that the only alternatives were that he was evil or mad. Apologetic argument for the divinity of Jesus
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