Liar, Lunatic or Lord

Last week's discussion on the divinity of Jesus centered on the description of Jesus in the Bible. That of course assumes the validity of the Bible. In fact, some statements of faiths (e.g. TCBC's Statement of Faith) begin with an assertion on the infalliability of the Bible. We will eventually come back to the trustworthiness of the Bible in our course, but what if you're a skeptic?

Apologetics has the same root word as "apology". From Webster's, "1 a: a formal justification : defense;: excuse". (Saying sorry is only the secondary meaning!) So an "apology" for our faith is a rational explanation and apologetics is the study of the defense of our faith.

The fictional Sherlock Holmes explained his deductive logic as, "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." So C.S. Lewis applied this logic to Jesus and popularized it as "Liar, lunatic or Lord". Jesus is one one of these three possibilities:

• Jesus claimed to be the son of God
• Jesus was a wise moral teacher
• No wise moral teacher is a liar, who makes a claim that they do not believe to be true.
• Anyone who falsely believes they are the son of God is suffering from a delusion such as megalomania; aka they are a lunatic. No wise moral teacher suffers from a delusion

There are a number of counter arguments and they focus on other possibilities not listed. The Bible is wrong and Jesus didn't actually claim to be God. Hence the record of His enemies takes on great importance: they accused Jesus of blasphemy by claiming to be the Son of God. Jesus could've been fooled by others into genuinely believing He was God. If supernatural agents fooled Jesus, then we're into a whole other discussion of the role and nature of these agents. If human conspirators, then we are into conspiracy theories which will be discussed as part of the resurrection below. A lengthier writeup is available on the Campus Crusade website which includes another option "legend".

The most dramatic demonstration of Jesus' divinity was the resurrection. We looked at a fun video dramatization of a debate on possible explanations of the resurrection. Again, applying Sherlock Holmes' deductive logic, the possibilities are: the wrong tomb, Jesus never died, His body was stolen or there really was a resurrection. Josh McDowell, a famous Christian apologist, has a website with a longer writeup. The stolen body theory is in essence a conspiracy theory and the reasons for rejecting it apply to rejecting a conspiracy surrounding the claims of Jesus' divinity or a conspiracy to fool a human Jesus into thinking He was God.

We had small group discussions to practice these arguments and logic as they are the essence of the Christological argument for the existence of God and of far more practical importance than the previously discussed theoretical arguments.