“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 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 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 patronising nonsense about his being
a great human teacher. He has not
left that open to us. He did not
intend to. ... 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.”
–C.
S. Lewis
That
is one of the more famous quotes from C.S. Lewis. It is still routinely used by Christians to talk about
Jesus’ divinity. Either Jesus is
who he says he is in the gospels, the living God, or he is mentally ill, a
lying, deluded lunatic unworthy of our attention, let alone our worship. There is no middle ground. To many of those of us who follow
Jesus, this seems pretty airtight.
But
we do not live in C.S. Lewis’ society, where it seemed to everyone “obvious
that He was neither lunatic nor a fiend.”
In the Britain of the 1940’s, the idea that Jesus was psychotic was
probably considered pretty impolite, gauche, and out of the question.
Unfortunately,
that is not out of the question for everyone today. Too many these days would have no problem saying that Jesus
was insane and all his followers, no matter how intelligent, were and are
deluded. In fact, if measured by
people’s actual behavior, this is actually the dominant view in the Western world, though most remain
well-mannered enough not to actually say this in so many words. We won’t admit that Jesus was crazy,
but even most of those who call themselves “Christians” know it would be crazy to actually follow him. We have figured out how to mouth the doctrine about how “he
is God,” while at the same time conveniently treating him like an eccentric, naïve,
idealistic do-gooder whose teachings and actions were commendable but are certainly
not to be imitated.
Some
have taken a different approach. They try to “save Jesus” from this dichotomy
by deciding that Jesus “didn’t really say” what the New Testament says he
said. This mainly applies to
Jesus’ claims to be God, but also to his miracles and even to his resurrection. Once they have extracted from the
gospels this purported “historical Jesus” who really didn’t claim to be God, they
allow people to avoid Lewis’ harsh choice (he’s either God or he’s nuts) and
simply receive Jesus as a great moral teacher.
I
think they think that the claim that Jesus is God resulted in superior,
exclusive, and violent approaches to other religions, and that this is not a
good thing in our more pluralistic world.
I think they think that this claim is somehow an imperialistic and unnecessary
embellishment of an essentially simple story. Perhaps. But that is not the intention.
Unmolested
by such arbitrarily selective and self-serving interpretations, however, there
is no question that the Jesus depicted in the gospels does indeed claim to be, in some sense, God. He clearly and repeatedly says of himself,
and allows others to say of him, that he is God’s Son, the Messiah, the Son of
Man, one with the Father, “I Am,” and so forth. Sorting that all out is one of the main theological tasks of
his subsequent followers. But the
texts say what they say and we have no legitimate basis for editing out the
parts that make us uncomfortable.
To do that is an expression of self-righteous hubris and arrogance. Not only that, it is to apply violence to the text itself. Approaching Jesus with this kind of
patronizing attitude separates one from the circle of those who trust and obey
him.
The
Theological Declaration of Barmen, the courageous statement by a small minority
in the German church against Nazism in 1934, contains the words: “Jesus Christ,
as he is attested in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God, which we have to
hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death.” Any theology that doesn’t begin here, capitulates to the principalities and powers, the empires
(manifested in that time by no less than Hitler) that dominate human existence.
By
giving up the claim that Jesus is God, some are unwittingly and necessarily asserting
the opposite claim, that the Empire
is the ultimate authority from whom all blessings flow. One of the original confessions made by
Jesus’ followers was that “Jesus is Lord!” If we render that confession inert by asserting that
Jesus himself made no such claim, we are left with the ideology it was meant to
oppose, that only Caesar is Lord. Every quest for a “historical Jesus”
different from the Jesus Christ presented in the New Testament is therefore
inherently imperialistic. It is to
give no counter-claim in answer to the raw assertion of the Empire that
might-makes-right.
But
this basic Christian affirmation that Jesus is God is an important and
indispensible claim not because it
asserts domination or superiority over other religions, but because it unites us to them through him.
The
God of the Bible, the sovereign Lord and Creator of the universe, is not a local,
tribal deity tethered to a particular piece of real estate, expressed in only
one culture. This God does not
belong to a particular tribe or nation.
God is not in “competition” with other deities and religions. There are no other deities. If God is God of all creation and
humanity then all religions are, in
some sense and to some degree, authentic responses to the one God in different
times and places. The same God
reigns in India, China, America, Europe, and Africa, as was worshipped by
Israel. (See Amos 9:5-7.) To argue otherwise would imply
that God is not Lord everywhere for everyone.
This
turns C. S. Lewis’ famous argument on its head. Either the claims, accomplishments, and promise of other
faiths have some truth in them as well, or we have to decide that an awful lot
of people, including some of the wisest, most spiritually adept, and best
people who ever lived, are deluded fools in the grip of superstition. To do so would be to limit God to being
merely the private deity of Europeans, who depends on us to carry him around
and impose him by force on these other cultures.
Lewis
assumed it would be repugnant to say Jesus was a lying fool. As wise and good a man as he was, I
believe he would think it equally repugnant to infer that the followers of
every other religion were necessarily lying fools. It is precisely Jesus’ claim to be God that makes it
necessary for us to be open to others’ experiences of the one God, in and
through him. For if Jesus is God,
it means he does not belong to us.
Rather, we and all people, and the whole creation, belong to him.
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