A Thinking Reed

Category: Theology & Faith

  • Lewis’s trilemma in context

    Since we’ve been debating in the comments to this post just what Lewis was trying to accomplish with his trilemma argument, I thought it might be worth walking through the relevant passages in Mere Christianity step-by-step.

    It’s worth recalling that for all the attention it’s received, the argument only takes up somewhere in the neighborhood of five paragraphs. So we should be able to lay it out relatively succinctly.

    The argument (or most of it, anyway) appears in book II, chapter 3 of MC, which is titled “The Shocking Alternative.” Earlier in the chapter Lewis has been discussing the Christian view that the world is occupied territory–that, in Lewis’s words, “an evil power has made himself for the present the Prince of this World” (p. 52).* Lewis then considers (1) how this state of affairs can be in accordance with God’s will and (2) what, if anything, God had done about it.

    With regard to the first point, Lewis invokes human free will as the explanation for why God’s good creation was able to come under the sway of the devil. Human beings have collectively tried to “set up on their own as if they had created themselves–be their own masters–invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside God, apart from God” (p. 54).

    This can never succeed, Lewis says, because we were made to be in communion with God–“He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on” (p. 54). Because of how we’re made, pursuing happiness apart from God is bound to fail.

    So what, in the Christian view, has God done to remedy this sorry situation? Apart from sending Jesus (which we’ll get to in a minute), Lewis said that God has given us conscience, so we can tell that we’ve gotten off the right track; sent us “good dreams: I mean those queer stories scattered all through the heathen religions about a god who dies and comes to life again and, by his death, has somehow given new life to men”; and selected the people of Israel to teach them, and the rest of the world, what kind of God, God is (see pp. 54-5).

    Only now after all this set up does Lewis turn to Jesus:

    Then comes the real shock. Among these Jews there suddenly turns up a man who goes about talking as if He was God. He claims to forgive sins. He says He has always existed. He says He is coming to judge the world at the end of time. Now let us get this clear. Among Pantheists, like the Indians, anyone might say that he was a part of God, or one with God: there would be nothing very odd about it. But this man, since He was a Jew, could not mean that kind of God. God, in their language, meant the Being outside the world Who had made it and was infinitely different from anything else. And when you have grasped that, you will see that what this man said was, quite simply, the most shocking thing that has ever been uttered by human lips. (p. 55)

    Lewis’s claim here seems pretty straightforward: Jesus appeared among the Jews acting like and effectively claiming to be God in the flesh. Now Lewis does not try to establish this point: he seems to be taking, at least for his purposes here, the gospel accounts of what Jesus said and did at face value. Lewis was certainly aware of modern, skeptical biblical scholarship (though he didn’t have a very high opinion of much of it); but for his purposes here he seems to be ignoring the possibility that the gospels don’t accurately record Jesus’s words.

    In the following paragraph, Lewis considers the implications of Jesus claiming the authority to forgive sins in particular. He argues that no human being can forgive wrongs done to someone other than himself:

    We can all understand how a man forgives offences against himself. . . . But what should we make of a man, himself unrobbed and untrodden on, who announced that he forgave you for treading on other men’s toes and stealing other men’s money? Asinine fatuity is the kindest description we should give of his conduct. Yet this is what Jesus did. He told people that their sins were forgiven, and never waited to consult all the other people whom their sins had undoubtedly injured. He unhesitatingly behaved as if He was the party chiefly concerned, the person chiefly offended in all offences. This makes sense only if He really was the God whose laws are broken and whose love is wounded in every sin. (p. 55)

    This seems to be largely an amplification of the point in the previous paragraph: Jesus, at least as he is portrayed in the gospels, claimed, by both word and deed, to act with the authority of God. As Lewis puts is, “[i]n the mouth of any speaker who is not God, these words would imply what I can only regard as a silliness and conceit unrivalled by any other character in history” (p. 55).

    In the short paragraph that follows Lewis observes that readers of the gospels–even those hostile to the claims of Christianity–don’t come away with the impression that Jesus is a silly and conceited person. “Christ says that He is ‘humble and meek’ and we believe Him” (p. 55-6).

    Only in the final paragraph of the chapter do we get the trilemma argument properly speaking:

    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 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 feed 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. (p. 56)

    Given what has gone before, I think we can set out Lewis’s argument so far like this.

    1. Jesus, through his words and actions, effectively claimed to be God.**

    2. Jesus was either (just) a man, or he was God.

    3. If he was just a man, then he was either insane or evil.

    Therefore, Jesus was either an insane man, an evil man, or God incarnate.

    The argument doesn’t exactly end in this chapter, but continues in the following chapter, “The Perfect Penitent”:

    We are faced, then, with a frightening alternative. This man we are talking about either was (and is) just what He said or else a lunatic, or something worse. 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. God has landed on this enemy-occupied world in human form. (p. 57)

    Lewis doesn’t offer further explanation of why it’s obvious that Jesus was neither evil nor insane, though we can imagine that many of his readers (then and since) would be inclined to agree. So, if they take his earlier conclusion as established, then they would probably readily assent to Jesus’ divinity.

    After going through this, I think part of the disagreement in the previous comment thread may have been due to different understandings of the scope of the trilemma argument. If we restrict it to just the final paragraph in chapter 3, then its intent does seem limited to the relatively narrow point that, whatever else Jesus was, he wasn’t (just) a great moral teacher. But if you read that as part of a broader argument encompassing the entire back half of the chapter and the first paragraph in the following one, then I think Lewis’s goals are more ambitious. That is, he’s trying to convince the reader that Jesus really was who he claimed to be (or who the gospels claimed he was): God incarnate.

    If that’s right, then I stand by my claim that the broader argument has some serious weaknesses–or at least some major undefended premises. But I do think the narrower argument has merit in rebutting a popular image of Jesus as a “great moral teacher.”

    ———————————————————-

    *Page references are from the 1996 Touchstone edition published by Simon & Schuster.

    **This originally said “claimed to be God,” but as Brandon pointed out, Lewis doesn’t say that Jesus explicitly claimed to be God. Thanks to him for the correction.

  • Lewis’s “trilemma” revisited

    Alan Jacobs takes issue with Anthony Kenny’s discussion of C. S. Lewis’s famous “trilemma” argument in Mere Christianity for the divinity of Jesus. Here’s Kenny:

    One line of argument he made popular went like this. Jesus said that he was God. Jesus was neither a deceiver nor deceived. Therefore Jesus was indeed God. Mocking the idea that Christ was simply a great moral teacher, Lewis wrote that a man that said the sort of things Jesus said “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”. Yet even most conservative biblical scholars today think it unlikely that Jesus in his lifetime made any explicit claim to divinity, so that the argument fails to get started.

    Jacobs responds:

    Lewis’s trilemma argument does indeed have a serious weakness, and Kenny gropes towards it: Lewis’s argument depends on the assumption that the Gospels faithfully record Jesus’s words, but if you doubt the reliability of the Gospel accounts, then you can easily believe that Jesus was a “great moral teacher” who had certain words put in his mouth by later disciples. This is the assumption that underlies most skeptical redactions of the Gospels, from the Jefferson Bible to the work of the Jesus Seminar. But the great majority of biblical scholars today, as throughout the history of the Church, do indeed believe that the Gospels faithfully record Jesus’s teachings, which puts the trilemma into play.

    While I agree with Jacobs that many (if far from all) biblical scholars hold that the gospels (or at least the synoptic gospels) faithfully record the spirit (if not the letter) of Jesus’ teachings, Lewis’s argument still faces some serious obstacles. The biggest problem, in my view, is that Lewis and those who follow him tend to read a full-blown doctrine of the Incarnation back into the gospel texts, and sometimes put questionable interpretations on ambiguous passages. Many of the proof-texts sometimes used to show that Jesus claimed to be divine are susceptible of much less exalted readings.

    That said, I do think many contemporary scholars would accept that the historical Jesus claimed a special or unique role for himself in God’s unfolding plan. Many statements of Jesus in the gospels, while falling short of straightforward claims to divinity, do express the sense that one’s response to Jesus is determinative for one’s standing in God’s kingdom. This makes some on the liberal end of the spectrum uncomfortable, in part, I suspect, because it conflicts with the portrait of Jesus as a benevolent sage preaching a message of inclusive tolerance. (See the final chapter of Michael McClymond’s Familiar Stranger for a good discussion of this issue.) So if Jesus viewed himself as the agent of God’s inbreaking reign, even if he didn’t claim to be divine in Nicea-compliant terms, a modified version of Lewis’s trilemma argument could perhaps get off the ground.

  • Slavery, divine judgment, and atonement

    During my vacation I read James Oakes’ The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics. Oakes tells the story of how the radical abolitionist Douglass and the temperamental conservative Lincoln converged on a brand of antislavery politics that eventually resulted in the emancipation of America’s millions of slaves (via a bloody civil war, of course).

    One thing that struck me was Oakes’ description of Douglass’ response to Lincoln’s second inaugural address. Douglass adhered to what Oakes describes as “a messianic Christianity in which a vengeful God commanded the bloody overthrow of the slave system.” In Lincoln’s speech, particularly its references to the war being a form of divine judgment on the nation, Douglass saw a vindication of his view.

    Oakes points out, however, that there were differences between Douglass’ and Lincoln’s views of divine judgment. Douglass saw things in more black and white terms–slaveholders and those who enabled them were sinners, and God would judge them accordingly. Lincoln, meanwhile, saw the sin of slavery as something that both North and South bore responsibility for, and he held that neither side’s cause could be simply identified with the divine will. “The Almighty has His own purposes.”

    (Of course, Lincoln, as a free white man, had the privilege of taking this “broader” view, while Douglass–a former slave–had first-hand knowledge of slavery’s evils. So you could see why Douglass was less inclined to magnanimity.)

    But what really interested me about this was that divine judgment played an important role in both men’s thinking, even though they represented what would be considered the “progressive” position of their time, politically speaking. They were invoking God’s judgment–even wrath–in the service of social justice and equality. This contrasts with a lot of contemporary progressive theology, which seems uncomfortable at best with the notion of divine judgment. Instead, God is often portrayed in terms of unconditional acceptance or “hospitality.”

    But can unconditional acceptance of oppressors–slaveholders, victimizers, or abusers–be at the same time hospitality for their victims? If God loves his creation, wouldn’t he be wrathful at seeing his creatures abused? (It was Elizabeth Johnson’s defense of divine wrath in her feminist theology She Who Is that first made me realize this was not necessarily a “conservative” position.)

    Maybe this is why, despite the many critiques that have been leveled at it, I still find something worth holding on to in traditional “satisfaction” accounts of the atonement. As Paul Tillich has written, we relate to God both as Father and Lord–that is, as a loving Father with whom we can have an “I-thou” relationship, but also as the universal governor of the universe and upholder of the moral order. Tillich thought that the emphasis on God’s fatherhood to the exclusion of his lordship accounted in part for liberal theology’s neglect of what he calls the Pauline doctrine of the atonement.

    Lincoln and Douglass both believed there was a moral order in the universe, upheld by divine governance and that this would ultimately doom slavery. But it’s less clear to me whether Lincoln, with his God of inscrutable judgment, or Douglass, with his God of vengeance, could make room for divine mercy. (At least in Oakes’ account, Christ didn’t seem to play much of a role in either one’s theology.)

    For all the distortions, that’s what the Anselmian doctrine of atonement–and its many offshoots–tries to do: hold together mercy and justice. God wants to save his creatures but does it in a way that preserves the moral integrity of the creation. There is a price to be paid for sin, though the Christian message is that God, in the person of his Son, has paid it himself. I’m not sure the doctrine is entirely successful, but it at least points to a genuine problem.

  • Wesley’s “conversion”

    Methodist and other churches remember today as the anniversary of John Wesley’s “Aldersgate Experience.” Richard Hall at Connexions provides some of the background here. Essentially, Wesley reported having a vivid experience of assurance in his own salvation when hearing a reading from Luther’s Preface to Romans. While this has sometimes been described as Wesley’s “conversion experience,” it seems that later Methodist lore may have invested it with more significance than it warrants. Wesley was undoubtedly a very sincere Christian virtually his entire life, and had been preaching justification by faith for some time prior to this experience.

    As Stephen Tomkins relates it in his very accessible biography, Wesley experienced several turning points in his faith and ministry: when he started the “Holy Club” at Oxford (which became the nucleus of the Methodist movement), when he encountered the pietistic German Moravians during his mission trip to America, at the meeting at Aldersgate Street, and when he began his field preaching, among others. Tomkins traces a life-long dialectic between Wesley’s emphasis on God’s free grace and on the need for personal holiness. As Tomkins puts it, “He had an evangelical horror of trying to satisfy God by good works, but an even greater horror of trying to satisfy God without good works” (p. 196). When he felt that one pole of the dialectic was in danger of being over-emphasized, he often swung back toward the other. For example, the classic evangelical experience represented by Aldersgate and Wesley’s preaching on justification by faith has to be viewed side-by-side with the teaching on “Christian perfection,” arguably his signature doctrine.

  • What does the Catholic Church teach about the salvation of non-Christians?

    I noticed that some people are spinning the pope’s remarks from yesterday as saying that anyone who “does good” is redeemed. But is this accurate? And is it consistent with other Catholic teaching on this?

    In the remarks, as excerpted here, Francis makes two major points, best as I can tell. First, everyone–no matter their religious belief or lack thereof–is under the obligation to do good, and this shared obligation can be the basis of dialogue and peace. Second, everyone is redeemed “with the Blood of Christ,” even non-Christians, including those who don’t believe in God at all.

    Leaving aside the question I raised yesterday of whether this implies a kind of universalism, what the pope doesn’t seem to be saying here is that non-Christians are redeemed by good works. They are redeemed by Christ, but they are also obligated and empowered to do good.

    I thought I had a pretty good grip on Catholic theology on this matter, but when I went back and looked at some of the relevant passages in the catechism, the church’s teaching does seem to be somewhat ambiguous on this point. Here’s the text dealing with the oft-repeated claim of “no salvation outside the church”:

    846 How are we to understand this affirmation, often repeated by the Church Fathers? Re-formulated positively, it means that all salvation comes from Christ the Head through the Church which is his Body:

    Basing itself on Scripture and Tradition, the Council teaches that the Church, a pilgrim now on earth, is necessary for salvation: the one Christ is the mediator and the way of salvation; he is present to us in his body which is the Church. He himself explicitly asserted the necessity of faith and Baptism, and thereby affirmed at the same time the necessity of the Church which men enter through Baptism as through a door. Hence they could not be saved who, knowing that the Catholic Church was founded as necessary by God through Christ, would refuse either to enter it or to remain in it.

    847 This affirmation is not aimed at those who, through no fault of their own, do not know Christ and his Church

    Those who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or his Church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience – those too may achieve eternal salvation.

    848 “Although in ways known to himself God can lead those who, through no fault of their own, are ignorant of the Gospel, to that faith without which it is impossible to please him, the Church still has the obligation and also the sacred right to evangelize all men.” (footnotes omitted)

    The ambiguity, as I see it, comes from maintaining both that (1) “all salvation comes from Christ the Head through the Church which is his Body” and (2) people “who . . . seek God with a sincere heart, and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience . . .  may achieve eternal salvation.” The second statement could be read as saying that people are–or at least can be–saved by their good works–albeit grace-empowered ones.

    Maybe the right way to interpret this passage is to say that the work of Christ is what makes salvation possible, but that it can be appropriated by non-Christians through the seeking of God and attempting to do good, with the help of God’s grace?

    I’m sure there are readers better informed about Catholic theology than I am who could shed more light on this.

  • Is the pope a universalist?

    Probably not, but he said this in a homily today:

    The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! ‘Father, the atheists?’ Even the atheists. Everyone! And this Blood makes us children of God of the first class! We are created children in the likeness of God and the Blood of Christ has redeemed us all!

    As others have pointed out, Francis could simply be referring here to what theologians call “universal (or unlimited) atonement.” That’s the view that Jesus died for everyone, rather than a limited sub-set of people (as taught by some Calvinists and others). By itself, universal atonement doesn’t necessarily imply universal salvation. It could be, as most believers in universal atonement have taught, that Christ’s passion makes salvation universally available, but that we have to do something to appropriate it, as it were.

    Still, though this is a sermon and not a theological treatise, the pope’s language here sounds awfully categorical. And his two predecessors were both fans of Hans Urs Von Balthasar, who argued that we should at least hope that everyone will be saved.

  • Miscellaneous links and such, mostly theological

    This post strikes a good balance in responding to the controversy over a tweet Calvinist preacher John Piper posted immediately after the tornado in Oklahoma.

    I enjoyed this podcast of some philosophers discussing Schleiermacher’s “On Religion.” Although they don’t seem to be very familiar with his more explicitly theological work–particularly The Christian Faith–which provides some important context in discussing his views and overall project.

    The new pope seems to be taking the “preferential option for the poor” pretty seriously (via bls).

    I’m in the middle of this biography of John Wesley. So far my takeaway is that Wesley was in many ways an extremely admirable person, if not necessarily a very likable one. (Of course, the same could be said of many great figures in church history.)

    And here’s a new trailer for the upcoming Superman movie:

  • The chief miracle ever recurring on earth

    ‘I, educated in the conception of God, as a Christian, having filled my life with the spiritual blessings Christianity gave me, brimful of these blessings and living by them, I, like a child, not understanding them, destroy them–that is, I wish to destroy that by which I live. But as soon as an important moment of life comes, like children when they are cold and hungry, I go to Him, and even less than the children whose mother scolds them for their childish mischief do I feel that my childish attempts to kick because I am filled should be reckoned against me.

    ‘Yes, what I know, I know not by my reason but because it has been given to me, revealed to me, and I know it in my heart by faith in the chief thing which the Church proclaims.

    ‘The Church? The Church?’ Levin repeated to himself. He turned over, and leaning on his elbows began looking at the herd of cattle in the distance approaching the river on the other side.

    ‘But can I believe in all that the Church professes?’ he asked himself, testing himself by everything which might destroy his present peace of mind. He purposely thought of those teachings of the Church which always seemed to strange to him, and that tried him. ‘The Creation.–But how do I account for existence? By existence! By nothing!–The devil and sin?–And how do I explain evil? . . . A Saviour? . . .

    ‘But I know nothing, nothing! And can know nothing but what is told me and to everybody.’

    And it now seemed to him that there was not one of the dogmas of the Church which could disturb the principal thing–faith in God, in goodness, as the sole vocation of man.

    Each of the Church’s doctrines might be represented by faith in serving truth rather than serving one’s personal needs. And each of them not only did not infringe that belief but was necessary for the fulfillment of the chief miracle ever recurring on earth: the possibility of every one, millions of most diverse people, sages and idiots, children and old men, peasants, Lvov, Kitty, beggars and kings, indubitably understanding one and the same thing, and forming that life of the spirit which alone is worth living for and which alone we prize.

    –Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, part VIII, chapter 13

  • The year of Moltmann

    Okay, that title’s a bit grandiose, but I’ve decided to start delving into (some of) the works of German theologian Jürgen Moltmann, someone I’ve long thought I should be more familiar with. I recently read his Jesus Christ for Today’s World, which is a popular-level treatment of Christology, but now I want to move on to something more substantial. So I ordered a copy of The Trinity and the Kingdom, which, at least according to the book’s subtitle, sets forth a doctrine of God. I realize the more traditional place to begin would be Theology of Hope or The Crucified God, but I feel (maybe incorrectly) that I’ve absorbed many of the ideas in those works through other sources.

    Moltmann intrigues me in part because he doesn’t seem to fall neatly into any particular camp or category and draws inspiration from a variety of theological sources (Lutheran, Reformed, Wesleyan, liberation, liberal, neo-orthodox, etc.). Any readers have thoughts on Moltmann, pro or con?

  • Methodism, homosexuality, and me

    This NYT article interests me as someone who is about to join the United Methodist Church from an ostensibly more “progressive” denomination, at least with regard to the equality of LGBT persons.

    Thomas Ogletree, a UMC minister, is facing disciplinary action after he presided at his son’s (same-sex) wedding. The UMC has continued to maintain that the “practice” of homosexuality is “incompatible with Christian teaching.” As with most mainline denominations, there have been efforts to change this, but, in the UMC’s case, they have met with limited success.

    This is partly due to the fact that a significant number of the delegates to the church’s general conference–its supreme legislative body, which meets ever four years–come from outside the U.S.–particularly places where conservative views on homosexuality still prevail. At the conference’s most recent meeting, in 2012, even an “agree to disagree” resolution couldn’t pass. Though it’s unclear how much of an effect acts of “civil disobedience” such as those of Rev. Ogletree may have on the direction of the larger denomination, this seems to be a stance that more “progressives” feel compelled to take.

    So as someone who does support full LGBT equality in church and society, why would I consider joining a denomination that seems to be a long way from affirming it?

    The main answer is that my family and I have found a home in the local UMC congregation we’ve been attending for about the last two years, and we want to formalize our commitment to it. We left our previous church for a variety of mostly non-theological reasons and were attracted to this one by its growing number of young families, dynamic pastor, flourishing homeless ministry, and combination of theological substance and progressive social vision, among other reasons. I’ve also come to appreciate some of the distinctive emphases of Wesleyan theology–combining at its best a Protestant emphasis on sheer, unmerited grace with a Catholic emphasis on personal and social holiness that I find quite appealing.

    Our congregation is a “reconciling” church and so aims to welcome LGBT folks at all levels of parish life, even though this contradicts the denomination’s official teaching. This makes them (us) the loyal opposition, a position that could grow increasingly uncomfortable if, as seems likely, the denomination continues to move at its current glacial pace on this matter.