On C.S.

Came across this article while browsing through the content on CNN.

I've had an on and off like-dislike relationship with C.S Lewis' body of work - and that includes the movies made on his books. Once, in a debate with a person defending Lewis , I called C.S. 'virulent', a charge I retracted later.

If I were asked to pick one passage/quote that I thought encapsulated his thoughts on Christ, I would pick this:

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. 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.

The quote sums up what I like (and dislike) about Lewis. He seems brutally honest when he assesses the claims of the Nazarene. His personal faith in Christ does not stop him from critically examining Christ's reported claims (Though one might fault him for having given just one from a plethora of possible medically feasible options). Having made such a scathing analysis, he still takes the third option in his writings.

I sometimes wish the Godfather Trilogy was made in C.S's time. It would've convinced him that two great options are enough. You put in a poor (nay, pathetic and unnecessary) third where no more is required and you ruin the trilogy in average. On a more serious note, the dilemma, or trilemma as it were, seems unnecessarily psychological. One first needs to determine the veracity of the claims attributed to the Christ or if a historical Jesus actually existed and performed the miracles and quoted the quotes attributed to him. One can extend this requirement to other religious figures and it persists. In the absence of such proof, any claim of divinity/divine inspiration is hasty and speaks more of the person wanting to cling to the claim than the correctness of the claim itself.