Lexington, Concord Fought In Vain

Andrew:

The fame of C.S. Lewis’s “trilemma” argument has always been deeply baffling to me. The normal reaction of a thoughtful person (me, Martin Gardner, Richard Dawkins) on first hearing it is: Why couldn’t Jesus just have been mistaken? People mistakenly believe all sorts of wacky things; and the notion that one might be divine was a lot less wacky in 1st-century Palestine than it would be in 21st-century Manhattan. It is after all a tenet of most religions that every one of us is to some degree divine.

Yet this (it seems to me) trivial piece of illogic is mightily famous. Google turned up “about 11,200 results” — admittedly less famous than Pauli’s Exclusion Principle (91,900 results) but nearly twice as famous as the Ragsdale Conjecture (6,090 results). The defenses of it, which form a good portion of that 11,200, are logic-free, so far as I could be bothered to look.

The other thing that baffles me about ol’ C.S. is that he has been so enthusiastically embraced by American Christians. I recall reading that there is a church somewhere in the Republic with a Lewis-themed stained-glass window.  The dotty-Anglican type is perfectly familiar to anyone raised in England, but I’m surprised it travels so well, or least has in Lewis’s case.  If Americans will swallow this, what possible objection can they have to Marmite?

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11 Responses to Lexington, Concord Fought In Vain

  1. Susan says:

    It’s probably the DisneyWorld aspects of Lewis’s theology that account for his appeal here currently. I have no intention of reading The Chronicles of Narnia, nor of watching any movie based on it, but I understand it’s chock-a-block with centaurs, fauns, talking lions, elves, and other such cute entities.

  2. Stephen says:

    I thought vegemite was preferred?

  3. Marc says:

    For what it’s worth, I’ve never been in England, but I’ve learned to like Marmite. I live in Connecticut, but order it online from a place in California. Tried Vegemite too, but it’s not very good in comparison.

    Lewis’s argument, alluded to above, has always struck me as bafflingly illogical, too. There’s an even more obvious possibility, that the claims attributed to Jesus were never made by any actual historical person, but are pure fiction. I’ve found “Mere Christianity” useful, though, in explaining *what* many Christians believe, even if it doesn’t give me any reason to believe in it myself. That may be more useful here in America, where Lewis does seem to be very influential.

    I loved the Narnia books as a kid, while automatically rejecting the Christian message.

  4. Polichinello says:

    People mistakenly believe all sorts of wacky things; and the notion that one might be divine was a lot less wacky in 1st-century Palestine than it would be in 21st-century Manhattan.

    Well, first, Lewis was responding to people who wanted to embrace Jesus as a moral example. So his being mistaken would not really help make Lewis’ opponents’ case that Jesus is a moral example. It just adds another slightly less worse option; i.e., Jesus wasn’t mad, just wrong about the most important feature of his ministry. It was that feature, BTW, Lewis pointed out, that distinguished Jesus from other previous moral teachers. So if Jesus isn’t divine, then what need for him?

    Second, for a first century Jew to consider himself divine is pretty unusual, and would indicate to me, at least, that the guy was severely narcissistic. Fawn Brodie, Joseph Smith’s biographer, argues that Smith may well have believed his own bullsh*t at times, but it took a lot of effort and conscious deception of others to get to that point. Jesus would fit that profile as well.

    As an atheist, I personally like the trilemma. It avoids the mushmouth, everyone-is-right compromises you find in modern religion. It’s a nice clean “take it or leave it” offer.

  5. oft says:

    There’s an even more obvious possibility, that the claims attributed to Jesus were never made by any actual historical person, but are pure fiction.>

    Given there is more historical evidence for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ than any other man in ancient history, you better forget about the existence of: Philo, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, Socretes, and all the rest.

    Even Jesus’ enemies attest his life (the Jews, Greeks and Romans, including Tacitus and Emperor Hadrian).

  6. Marc says:

    “Given there is more historical evidence for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ than any other man in ancient history. . .”

    I’m sorry oft, but this is a very common line of argument among evangelicals, and it simply doesn’t hold water. You have more reading to do. Whether you choose to do it is entirely up to you, but the synoptic gospels, a passing allusion in Tacitus, and two mentions in Josephus, of which one is almost certainly a later forgery, and the other is so brief as to be worthless, do not make your case for you. Nor can you assume that, if the Jesus of the gospels *were* based on a real person, that they are an accurate description of his teachings or deeds.

    Which is really the point here. Lewis’s trilemma depends on the reader accepting the words of Jesus in the Bible as something that someone actually said, and evaluating them based on that.

  7. Polichinello says:

    Lewis’s trilemma depends on the reader accepting the words of Jesus in the Bible as something that someone actually said, and evaluating them based on that.

    Exactly, and that is who Lewis was addressing: writers who argued that Jesus should be seen as a moral teacher. They did it by ignoring his pretensions to divinity–including his forgiving people of their sins. Now, they could argue that the Gospel writers invented these passages, but they haven’t provided an objective means of determining true passages from false passages, and if this was the case, it would also mean Jesus was a lousy judge of character, which also disqualifies him as a serious moral thinker.

  8. Polichinello says:

    If Americans will swallow this, what possible objection can they have to Marmite?

    It’s called a gag reflex, something the English have evolved away from as they developed their newfangled accent.

    Harrumph.

  9. Richard says:

    Lexington and Concord were not fought to preserve America from the influence of British writers.

    Anyway, here’s your C.S. Lewis window:
    http://www.stgeorgeohio.org/stainedglass/lewis.htm

  10. Justin says:

    An even more fruitful line of attack on Lewis’s trilemma is provided by New Testament scholarship. To the extent that a historical Jesus can be derived from our sources, it is fairly clear that he was an apocalyptic prophet preaching about the need for repentance before the coming of the Son of Man. He himself, however, did not claim to be divine. Lewis’s trilemma ignores the possibility (surely correct, to my mind) that Jesus’s followers, particularly Paul, having become convinced of the reality of Jesus’s resurrection, attributed words to him that he never uttered.

  11. John David Galt says:

    I’ve known plenty of people who believe that Jerry Garcia was God. Maybe he was; it’s not an important question for me. Much less some guy who lived 1900 years ago.

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