Back to Basics: The Trilemma

Liar, lunatic, or Lord. If you’ve ever held the belief (or knew someone who has) that Jesus might’ve been a great philosophical teacher, but he wasn’t actually God per se, someone might’ve introduced this argument to you. Popularized by C.S. Lewis, it goes something like this:

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 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. (C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity)

In this argument, you have only three choices when considering Jesus:

1. Either Jesus’s teachings, taken as a whole, were right, thus He’s Lord, or
2. Jesus believed he was right, but was in fact wrong (i.e. he was delusional), thus he’s a lunatic, or
3. Jesus knew he was wrong, yet taught what he taught anyway, thus he’s a liar.

The first basic objection to the trilemma is one based on popular selective understanding of the New Testament: Jesus just talked a lot about loving your neighbor, forgiveness, pacifism, and all that good stuff. If that’s all He talked about, sure: He doesn’t necessarily need to be God incarnate, and was just like a Jewish Ghandi or something.

Jesus Himself bought into the “God Stuff”

The problem is, our only source for Jesus’s work, the Bible, has Him saying Himself that He was, in fact God. A quick Google search will give you more passages you can shake a stick at regarding His claims to divinity. Take, for instance, Jesus in the Gospel According to John:

So the Jews gathered around him and said to him, “How long are you going to keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.” Jesus answered them, “I told you 12 and you do not believe. The works I do in my Father’s name testify to me. But you do not believe, because you are not among my sheep. My sheep hear my voice; I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish. No one can take them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one can take them out of the Father’s hand. The Father and I are one.” (John 10:24-30)

Moreover, Jesus’s ministry, that is His entire project, hinges on Him claiming divine authority. I’ll discuss it in another blog post, but one of the major tenet’s of Jesus’s teachings, the forgiveness and absolution of sins, only works if He’s God (or acting on God’s behalf). You at least have to take that He claimed divinity as part of His argument, and it needs to be addressed in any counter-argument.

A Straw Man

This is where the more sophisticated arguments come in. Both Daniel Howard-Snyder (PDF) and Jim Perry give great overviews of many of the possible objections to the Trilemma. I encourage reading both of their papers, but here’s a basic rundown of the objections:

1. It’s not clear when (or if) Jesus meant anything he said literally, thus his claims to divinity are suspect
2. We don’t know if Jesus really said what people claim he said in the Gospels, so who’s to say he didn’t say something different?
3. If he did mean his claims literally, it could be that they are a noble lie: a way to get unsophisticated people to buy into a moral framework that he believed to be right

To be clear: these are all perfectly valid objections to the validity of Jesus’s teachings as portrayed in the Bible, and need to be addressed when making a rational claim to the authority of the Bible. However, the first two points are a straw man: the original argument wasn’t whether the Bible was accurate, it’s whether or not, given the validity of Jesus’s teachings sans the divinity part make him a respectable moral teacher. That is, can one be justified by saying “I think Jesus was a great moral teacher, but I don’t think he was God”?

When someone makes the claim that Jesus was a great moral teacher, they have exactly one source to base that on: the Gospels. All other works are based on those original papers. If you’re going to assume part of it’s true, you need a separate justification to show that the parts you don’t like are not true of Jesus. Why are some of what he says accurate portrayals of him, and other parts not? It’s arbitrary.

The Noble Lie

The third point, that perhaps Jesus meant the divine portions as a noble lie, to make his moral program more palatable to the masses. As Jim Perry puts it:

Another, separate, possibility is that of the “noble lie.” Jesus may have felt that his teachings on behavior were so important as to validate falsely claiming special authority from (or at an extreme, as) God in order to persuade people to follow them. There is historical precedent for the idea that “the people” need the backing of supernatural authority to behave morally. Jesus could have believed in all sincerity that following his teachings would lead people into the Kingdom of God and/or eternal life, and said what he thought necessary to get people to follow him. In doing so, to the extent that such a lie was against those teachings, he may have thought he was forfeiting his own eternal security. Greater love hath no man… [While this last detail wanders quite far down a specific path of speculation, it makes at least as much sense as McDowell's argument that it would be "unspeakably evil" to lie about promising salvation]. On this view Jesus would have been a liar, but nobly motivated, and no demon.

There’s the arbitrary argument: that, why would this portion of his teachings be a noble lie, but not the less controversial parts? But that’s weak. More pressingly, it doesn’t fit given the narrative: the purpose of a noble lie is to convince people quickly and effectively. But, as Jim Perry explains, most people didn’t take Jesus seriously during His lifetime. The “noble lie”, as it were, didn’t work. So why did Jesus insist on it, and why was it transferred after his death? If Jesus was taking a tack that was merely a way to help him communicate his message effectively, it seems he would’ve given it up after a while.

Instead, in order to justify the noble lie argument, it seems you need to assume Jesus was thinking long term: that even though it didn’t work for three years, it’d totally work in 50 years, and that he somehow was convinced of that in a way that was far short of divine revelation. In short, was Jesus the George W. Bush of his time?

Wrapping Up

To keep the noble lie defense up, you have to start assuming a lot of things, both about Jesus’s motivation, his disciple’s motivation, and the long term (that exceeded everyone’s lifetimes) strategy of those people. It’s a lot to overload into source material that doesn’t explicitly state that’s what happened. In this case, Occam’s razor seems to be apt: one ought not introduces entities without necessity. Is it necessary to assume that Jesus wasn’t divine, or is it only useful to keep alive the possibility that he was a great moral teacher, but not really God?