The trilemma.

Years ago I made the mistake of trying to edit a Wikipedia article. It’s not always safe to do that, y’know. Some Wikipedia editors consider certain pages their territory, and will fight to the death any of your attempts to fix or update them.

The article in question was on C.S. Lewis, and you know how some Evangelicals are about Lewis. Christian apologists especially. He’s one of their patron saints. He’s a former atheist who turned Christian; an academic who taught at both Oxford and Cambridge, and apologists love when academics join their field. In 1941 and 1942, during World War 2, he wrote three radio talks for the British Broadcasting Corporation. The transcripts were initially published as Broadcast Talks, then renamed The Case for Christianity in 1943, then re-renamed Mere Christianity in 1952. It’s an introduction to Christian beliefs for anyone who might be on the fence about Jesus. Plus they’re usually fond of his Narnia books; especially the bit about Aslan not being a tame lion, and apologists often like to imagine they’re not tame lions either.

I’m a fan of Lewis too. I grew up on his Narnia books, and discovered his Space Trilogy and apologetics works in college. But unlike many a Lewis fan, I can’t agree with everything he taught. I take great issue with how the characters in his novels were willing, even thought it righteous, to kill their enemies. In the Narnian wars it’s somewhat justified; these are wars after all. But Elwin Ransom beating Weston to death in his 1943 book Perelandra—I don’t care that Weston was possessed by Satan. You could bind the guy, same as God’s angel is gonna do with Satan during the millennium, Rv 20.1-3 and get the very same result. I’d’ve much preferred Lewis got his ideas from the New Testament than the Crusades.

Anyway, the part I tried to update was the article’s section about the “trilemma.” It’s still there. I tried to move it to another page, and someone has since successfully done so.

Trilemma isn’t Lewis’s word, by the way. It was probably coined by Philip Henry in 1672. Its meaning in Christian apologetics was defined by “Rabbi” John Duncan (1796–1870), professor of Hebrew and oriental languages at New College, Edinburgh, Scotland. His fellow Scottish Free Church pastor William Knight collected many of Duncan’s interviews and sayings into a book, Colloquia Peripatetica/Deep-sea Soundings: Being Notes of Conversations with the Late John Duncan. L.L.D., published 1907. And among his sayings is this one:

Christ either deceived mankind by conscious fraud, or He was Himself deluded and self-deceived, or He was Divine. There is no getting out of this trilemma. It is inexorable. Knight 109

I don’t know whether Lewis read Duncan. He definitely read Catholic novelist and pundit G.K. Chesterton, whose 1912 novel The Napoleon of Notting Hill described one of the book’s characters, Adam Wayne, this way:

“He may be God. He may be the devil. But we think it, for practical purposes, more probable that he is off his head.” Chesterton 171

Or maybe he heard the trilemma concept from another fellow Christian. Either way, it got into Mere Christianity like so:

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 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. Lewis 1.8

Josh McDowell, in his 1979 book Evidence that Demands a Verdict, reduced it to Lunatic, Liar, or Lord. These are our three options; Jesus is one of the three. It’s not a di-lemma, with two options; it’s a tri-lemma, with three. Get it?

The fourth option.

Now here’s the problem with it being only three options: Every time I interact with skeptics—and no doubt every time you’ve interacted with skeptics—none of them already believe one of the three.

They don’t think Jesus is nuts, or self-delusional. They don’t think he’s a dirty liar or a con man. They don’t think he’s Lord and God either. If we present ’em with the trilemma, they’re usually gonna respond to us with confusion—they never believed, nor came to the conclusion of, any of these options.

What do they believe about Jesus then? Oh, that we Christians got him wrong. We’re the lunatics. Or liars. Or dupes of liars and lunatics.

They think the biblical Jesus isn’t real. Instead they believe in Historical Jesus, a version of Jesus which isn’t altered and manipulated by 20 centuries of Christians. They heard about this version of Jesus from their fellow skeptics; they took a Historical Jesus course in school, or took a philosophy course which described Historical Jesus, or they’re currently listening to some podcast where the host keeps saying, “No, the Jesus of the bible is the Christian version of Jesus, but lemme tell you about the real Jesus.” So now they believe in that Jesus.

Who isn’t God, and didn’t make any of the radical divine statements we read of in the gospel of John. When Lewis described Jesus as a man who “said the sort of things Jesus said”—well, these folks don’t believe Jesus ever said such things. The radical divine statements Jesus makes in the gospel of John? Christian fanfiction, invented by people like St. John who were trying to start a new religion, figured the great moral teacher Jesus of Nazareth would make the best figurehead, and put words in his mouth which made him divine. Other ancient Christians like St. Paul invented doctrines about what Jesus is now doing in heaven; ancient and medieval politicians like Constantine made them official dogmas and legally enforced them with deadly consequences; the popes created the official institution of the church, with its hierarchy and rituals; and the “real Jesus” has been buried under all that, with fact and fiction so frappéd together we can’t tell what’s what.

Well… except somehow they figured out what’s what. And they feel pretty clever about it.

Anyway, “lied about” isn’t in John Duncan or C.S. Lewis or Josh McDowell’s trilemma. And absolutely should be, because this is the belief you’ll find in pretty much every pagan. Only the most hardcore conspiracy theorists will claim Jesus never actually existed. Only trolls will claim he was crazy or lying or self-delusional—with very few exceptions. Albert Schweitzer, in his 1906 The Quest of the Historical Jesus, claimed Jesus thought he was Messiah, got himself arrested in the hopes his Father would dramatically rescue him, but the Father didn’t—to Jesus’s shocked surprise. Schweitzer didn’t really think Jesus was crazy; just horribly, tragically, wrong. There’s bits of this idea in Martin Scorsese’s 1988 movie The Last Temptation of Christ, but very few people read Schweitzer anymore, or take him seriously, which is why this belief has faded over time.

Then there’s the Muslim variant, which has their own version of Jesus. Who is Lord, in that he’s one of their acknowledged prophets—though superseded by Muhammad. Who didn’t die; Muslims believed he switched places with Judas Iscariot, and Judas got crucified—and Jesus was raptured, and is alive in heaven until his second coming. They believe our teachings about him are Christian inventions. Again, “lied about.”

Otherwise, pagans generally say Jesus was a wise, kind man, who taught wonderful things, and was unfairly arrested and executed by the envious powers-that-were, who saw him as either an irritation or threat. But he’s not resurrected, he’s not Lord; those are likewise Christian inventions. It allows them to eat their cake yet keep it: They can praise “Jesus”—their interpretations of him, anyway—to the skies, and say nothing bad about him… and they don’t have to follow him any more than they please.

So, Lunatic, Liar, Lied About, or Lord. Instead of a tri-lemma, we have a tetra-lemma.

Or, y’know, just a dilemma.

The reason biblical scholars and theologians rarely refer to the trilemma is because, in simple logical terms, it’s an either-or. There are only two options. Either Jesus is Lord, or he’s not.

There’s not three options—nor four, as I just showed you. There’s two; it’s a binary “is” or “isn’t.” There are simply three reasons people choose “isn’t.” None of these reasons are of equal weight to the statement “Jesus is Lord.” The only thing which does have equal weight, is the statement “Jesus isn’t Lord.”

The biggest problem with the trilemma is it’s an oversimplification. We wrongly assume there are only two reasons people reject Jesus; then learn to debate pagans who think he’s delusional or lying. In reality pagans don’t believe he’s delusional or lying; they believe we’re delusional or lying. You do realize you can’t debate someone who’s delusional or lying, right? If they’re delusional, they’re too addled to accept your arguments. If they’re lying, they’re cheating, and you can’t accept their arguments. You’re never gonna win. And this is why skeptics seldom bother to engage Christians in serious debate: They don’t take us seriously.

This is why I usually tell apologists to skip the debating, and share your testimonies. If you want to convince people Jesus is Lord—and is real, alive, and active—you gotta show them so. They’re not gonna think we’re delusional or lying, when they’re too busy trying to wrap their brains around the God-experiences we just showed them.

Plus a far, far bigger part of this dilemma than skeptics who think Jesus isn’t Lord, are all the Christians who regularly claim he is Lord, but don’t obey him.

Luke 6.46 NLT

“So why do you keep calling me ‘Lord, Lord!’ when you don’t do what I say?”

I firmly believe Jesus is far more upset by our hypocrisy, than he is at pagans who weren’t taught any better, and don’t know any better. That we Christians oughta put more effort into tackling that problem—which only contributes to pagans thinking we’re liars—than arguing with people.