Latest / Reformed Thinking / The Shocking Alternative | C. S. Lewis

Transcript

The Shocking Alternative | C. S. Lewis · Reformed Thinking

0:00
Welcome to Reformed thinking. This is the deep dive, and today
0:02
we are cutting straight through the noise to get to the core
0:05
arguments of one of Christian history's most influential
0:08
thinkers, CS Lewis. We've been supplied with a
0:11
substantial stack of material centered on 2 giant defining
0:14
topics, the existence of evil and the the startling identity
0:19
claims of Jesus Christ. It is indeed an ambitious deep
0:22
dive, and Lewis is a wonderful guide for this.
0:25
He takes issues that most people simply let stand as unresolvable
0:29
paradoxes and attempts to bring rational clarity to them.
0:34
His strength lies in his logical, almost clinical
0:36
approach to Christian belief. Our mission is to extract not
0:40
just his conclusions, but his entire logical progression, step
0:43
by step. That's it.
0:45
We are seeking specific insight into immense theological
0:47
puzzles. If God is perfectly good and
0:49
sovereign, how can evil be permitted to operate?
0:52
What is the genuine cost of granting free will and moving
0:56
from cosmology to Christology? What exactly did Christ claim
0:59
for himself, and why does Lewis argue that we can't simply
1:02
admire him while dismissing those claims?
1:05
That's right, our goal today is to give you, the learner, a
1:08
clear way into Lewis's mind, a map for understanding his
1:11
logical steps as he confronts these alternatives.
1:14
The material reveals a structure that is surprisingly tight and
1:17
and incredibly logical, and we want to ensure we take the time
1:20
to unpack every stage of his argument.
1:22
It's easy to miss things. It is.
1:24
If we move too quickly, we risk missing the subtle but crucial
1:28
distinctions he makes. So let's start exactly where
1:31
Lewis does with the central conflict that defines the
1:34
Christian view of the universe. The premise is that Christians
1:38
believe that an evil authority has somehow seized control and
1:41
made himself the Prince of this world, right?
1:43
This isn't a small philosophical point, It's a high stakes
1:46
logical trap because it forces us to confront the nature of
1:49
divine control and sovereignty. The trap, as Lewis sees it, is
1:53
immediate and severe. If we state that the current
1:56
state of war, this pervasive presence of the dark power, the
1:59
suffering, the rebellion is somehow according to God's will,
2:02
then, well, the implication is that God sanctions or even
2:06
prefers evil. Which makes him seem strained or
2:09
malevolent. Exactly.
2:11
That's the first horn of the dilemma, and it's unacceptable
2:14
to the Orthodox Christian position.
2:16
Conversely, if we argue that this state of affairs, this
2:19
rebellion, this pervasive evil is contrary to his will, then we
2:24
have a huge theological. Problem a massive.
2:26
How can anything happen against the specific desire of a being
2:29
who possesses absolute, total authority?
2:33
If God is truly sovereign, how can He be successfully defied in
2:37
such a dramatic, long lasting way?
2:39
Yeah, the very idea of the Almighty being thwarted seems to
2:43
undermine the concept of almightiness.
2:45
And this is where Lewis shows his skill as a philosophical
2:48
guide. He addresses this apparent
2:50
contradiction by introducing a key distinction, one that allows
2:53
us to resolve the paradox without compromising either
2:56
God's absolute authority or his perfect goodness.
2:59
And he does this with an analogy.
3:00
He does. He uses a practical relational
3:02
analogy, the analogy of a person in authority.
3:04
And the analogy settles on is the mother in the school room,
3:07
which is brilliant because anyone who has ever supervised
3:10
or managed others immediately recognizes the dynamic.
3:13
It allows Lewis to distinguish between two types of will
3:16
operating simultaneously, the long term structural will and
3:21
the immediate specific will. Let's unpack that.
3:24
Think about this mother. Her desire, her specific will,
3:29
is for a tidy school room and obedient children.
3:32
Of course. She prefers order, respect and
3:35
cleanliness, but she has a prior structural will that transcends
3:39
the immediate outcome. She wills her children to
3:42
develop self-control, discipline and moral character.
3:45
To achieve that greater good, she must deliberately decide I
3:49
am going to grant them genuine autonomy and agency.
3:53
I will not constantly police their actions.
3:55
They need to learn to keep it tidy themselves.
3:57
That structural will, the will to grant genuine freedom and
4:00
autonomy for the purpose of developing virtue, that's the
4:02
key. That's the key.
4:03
It's a primary decree, and because of that initial
4:06
fundamental decision, it makes possible profoundly undesirable
4:09
outcome. Precisely the outcome is not
4:12
what she wanted in the moment when she walks in later and
4:15
finds the room in total chaos. Toys everywhere, inks build
4:17
books ruined. That mess is undeniably against
4:20
her specific preference. She hates the mess.
4:23
She actively dislikes the mess. She actively dislikes the
4:26
disobedience. But the crucial point Lewis
4:28
makes is that her prior will, the decision to grant freedom
4:31
for the sake of true character, is what left the children free
4:34
to be untidy. Yes, the untidiness itself is
4:38
against her preference, yet the condition that allowed it was
4:41
freely chosen by her for a better, more meaningful outcome,
4:45
the formation of self governing people.
4:47
And we apply this directly to the universe and to God's
4:50
sovereignty. God's overarching structural
4:53
will is to create a live world populated by creatures with
4:57
genuine freedom and autonomy capable of choosing Him.
5:01
That's the big picture. That decision, that decree to
5:04
permit agency, necessarily leaves creatures free to be
5:07
untidy, free to rebel, free to inflict harm.
5:10
The sin and evil, we observe, is the immediate, specific outcome.
5:14
That is absolutely against his moral preference for goodness
5:17
and obedience. So the evil that exists is
5:20
contrary to God's moral will, but its possibility is
5:23
consistent with his decreed will to create free beings.
5:27
It means God is not malevolent. He hates the mess, but he's not
5:31
thwarted because the existence of the mess is a permitted,
5:34
though undesirable, consequence of his own decree to grant
5:37
freedom. It resolved the logical, not
5:39
Lewis first presented. It shows how a thing can be in
5:42
accord with God's will, in one way, the permission of the
5:45
structural design, the desire for genuine relationship, but
5:49
not another, the specific action of rebellion or sin.
5:53
It allows us to hold on to both His goodness and His absolute
5:56
authority simultaneously. He thought the price of a
5:59
potential war in the universe was worth paying for the sake of
6:02
a live world where true voluntary love was possible.
6:06
And if we pause there and consider the Reformed tradition,
6:09
this notion of a permissive will is deeply significant.
6:12
It guards against two errors, making God the author of evil
6:15
and limiting God's ultimate control.
6:18
Lewis achieves this balance by showing that the creation of
6:20
freedom itself is an expression of God's absolute control, even
6:23
though that freedom is used to rebel against his moral
6:25
preferences. It's a key distinction for
6:28
understanding Lewis's entire theological outlook.
6:31
It is. Lewis doesn't just dismiss the
6:33
paradox. He dissects it using practical
6:35
reasoning. He takes the seemingly vast gulf
6:38
between divine action and human suffering and bridges it with a
6:42
simple, relatable experience of a parent or any governing
6:46
authority struggling to balance control with the necessity of
6:49
autonomy for growth. This clarity on the divine
6:52
dilemma immediately pivots us to the source of evil itself, free
6:56
will. If the possibility of evil is
6:58
the necessary price of freedom, then we must ask why God created
7:03
freedom in the 1st place. Knowing the potential
7:05
catastrophe, Lewis states plainly that God created
7:09
creatures with free will, meaning they could go either
7:11
wrong or right. And he immediately challenges
7:14
anyone who claims to imagine a creature that is simultaneously
7:17
free and incredible of error. Right.
7:20
We often wish for that fictional being, a creature that chooses
7:22
good every single time but still retains the essence of choice,
7:26
Lewis says. That's a logical impossibility.
7:27
Contradiction in terms. You can't have it both ways.
7:30
You can't. If something is truly free to be
7:32
good, it must logically also possess the option to be bad.
7:35
That makes free will less of a gift and more of a terrible,
7:38
necessary responsibility. Lewis argues that free will,
7:42
though it made evil possible, is the only thing that makes
7:45
possible any goodness, love, or joy that is actually worth
7:49
having. Yes, this gets to the essence of
7:51
why God created us in the first place.
7:54
What exactly would the alternative creation look like?
7:57
It would be a world of automata. That's the technical term.
8:00
Lewis uses creatures that work automatically, entirely
8:03
programmed, like a clockwork doll or a computer running a
8:06
script. Just robots.
8:07
Just robots. If we were merely automata, we
8:09
would move and speak only when God pulls the strings fulfilling
8:12
his will mechanically. That world, he suggests, would
8:15
hardly be worth the effort of creation, because there would be
8:18
no relationship, no voluntary return of love.
8:21
And he contrasts that empty possibility with the kind of
8:24
relationship God actually desires.
8:26
The happiness God designs for his higher creatures is
8:29
something altogether more intense, dynamic, and relational
8:33
than mere functional obedience. He describes it in almost
8:36
shocking terms. He calls it the ecstasy of being
8:39
freely, voluntarily united to him and to each other, in love
8:43
and delight. Ecstasy.
8:44
That's a strong word. It is.
8:46
This isn't just moral satisfaction.
8:48
This is joy at a cosmic level. Lewis go so far as to claim that
8:52
this spiritual union is so intense that even the most
8:55
rapturous love or sense of delight we know on Earth is
8:59
comparatively thin, like milk and water.
9:01
Wow. For this kind of freely given
9:03
love, this ecstatic union, genuine freedom and therefore
9:07
genuine risk is the absolute prerequisite.
9:10
That provides the justification for the initial divine risk.
9:13
God knew the consequence of freedom were used wrongly, but
9:16
Louis asserts that God thought the possibility of ecstatic,
9:19
voluntary love was worth the risk.
9:21
And this is the moment where Louis anticipates the common
9:24
human inclination, the listener who looks at global suffering,
9:27
who looks at the war, famine and cruelty, and says Louis is
9:30
wrong. God made a terrible calculation.
9:33
It wasn't worth the risk. And for those who feel compelled
9:35
to make that judgement, Lewis provides his fascinating
9:38
rhetorical check the stream and the source argument.
9:41
It prevents us from taking a false high ground against the
9:43
Creator. He reminds us that any power we
9:46
possess, including the power to reason, the power to judge, the
9:50
power to critique a divine decision, is ultimately derived
9:53
from God. God is the source from which all
9:56
our reasoning power flows. Therefore, arguing against God's
10:01
logic is a fundamentally flawed intellectual exercise.
10:05
It's like arguing that the stream can rise higher than its
10:08
own source. Your ability to think, to judge,
10:11
to declare this suffering is too high a price is a faculty gifted
10:15
to you by the very being you are judging.
10:17
Lewis's point is structural. If the source of all reason, God
10:21
himself, determined that the potential for voluntary ecstatic
10:24
love justified the state of war and suffering inherent and free
10:27
will, then our downstream derivative reason is logically
10:31
obliged to accept that it is worth paying.
10:34
It shifts the entire conversation away from emotional
10:36
complaint, which is understandable, to a necessary
10:39
structural critique of 1's own intellectual authority.
10:42
You cannot rationally stand outside the system and criticize
10:44
one who authored the system itself.
10:46
Having established the necessity and the high stakes of freedom,
10:50
Lewis addresses another very common question aimed at
10:53
explaining the failure of creation.
10:56
Why did God make a creature of such rotten stuff that it went
11:00
wrong so quickly? Right.
11:02
This is the idea that the ingredients for creation were
11:05
somehow flawed from the start. Lewis dismisses this entirely,
11:09
not by defending the materials, but by inverting the principle
11:13
itself. Inverting it how?
11:15
He says the failure is a function of greatness, not
11:18
inherent weakness. What's the inverted principle?
11:20
It is this. The quality of the creature
11:22
determines the magnitude of the fall.
11:24
If a creature is made of better stuff, if it is clever,
11:28
stronger, more self aware and freer, the better it will be if
11:31
it succeeds, but consequently the worse and the more
11:34
destructive it will be if it fails.
11:36
So the potential for good and the potential for evil scale up
11:40
together. They scale up together.
11:41
This explains why the fall of an Archangel, the being Lewis calls
11:44
the Dark Power, was such a cosmic catastrophe that being
11:48
was made of the most magnificent stuff available.
11:50
Right, he gives some examples. He does.
11:52
He paints a spectrum to make this clear.
11:54
Consider a cow. Its moral potential is extremely
11:59
limited. It can't be very good, and it
12:01
can't be very bad. Its consequences are contained.
12:05
A dog has greater potential for loyalty and relationship, and
12:08
thus greater capacity for bad behavior.
12:11
A human child, still more so An ordinary adult man has a
12:15
terrifying scope for good or evil.
12:17
A man of genius still wider. And finally, a superhuman spirit
12:22
like Satan is capable of being the best, the most glorious
12:25
creation, or when twisted, the worst, most devastating force of
12:29
all. So the materials weren't rotten
12:31
at all. They're precious, powerful and
12:33
glorious. That quality is precisely what
12:35
made the subsequent failure so spectacularly destructive and
12:38
far reaching. The fall of a great being
12:40
resulting great ruin. Yeah.
12:41
Which brings us naturally to the specific nature of the original
12:44
sin, the thing that broke creation.
12:46
Lubus offers a traditional logical guess, grounded in human
12:49
experience, for how the dark power went wrong and then taught
12:52
us to go wrong. The sin is centered entirely on
12:54
the concept of self. Once you have genuine freedom,
12:58
you have the possibility of putting self first.
13:01
Lewis defines this as the desire to be the center, effectively
13:04
wanting to be God in your own private sphere.
13:07
That's it. That original structural
13:08
rebellion is pride, right? Pride is the specific refusal to
13:14
admit one's status as a created being.
13:17
It's the rejection of the distinction between creator and
13:20
creature. Yeah, Lewis is quite careful to
13:22
clarify a common mistake here regarding the fall of man, which
13:25
many people, especially in modern discussions, attribute
13:28
primarily to sexual lust or desire.
13:31
He argues that's a misreading of the sequence.
13:33
The Genesis story suggests that corruption in our sexual nature
13:36
followed the fall. It was a result of the deeper
13:38
disease, not the original cause. Exactly.
13:41
The original sin was not about disordered appetite, but
13:44
disordered will, the initial deception.
13:47
Satan's great offer to Eve was the pitch that humans could be
13:51
like gods. It was the idea of setting up
13:54
shop on their own, becoming their own absolute masters and
13:57
inventing a private sort of happiness that was wholly apart
14:00
from God, governed by their own rules.
14:03
That impulse towards self-sufficiency and self
14:05
idolatry. That is the cancer Lewis
14:08
identifies at the core of the human problem.
14:10
And it's the self idolatry that Lewis will now use to interpret
14:14
the entirety of human history. That decision, the self-centered
14:18
impulse to invent happiness outside of God, is the engine
14:21
driving nearly all of human history, according to Lewis.
14:24
He views the long, terrible story of civilization, the
14:29
desperate pursuit of money, ambition, political struggle,
14:32
war, empires and class conflict as simply man's persistent yet
14:37
hopeless attempt to find something other than God that
14:40
will deliver lasting peace and contentment.
14:43
This leads us directly to one of Lewis's most memorable and
14:46
powerful illustrations, the engine analogy.
14:49
It's. A great one.
14:50
It's the key to understanding why this constant expenditure of
14:53
human energy, the building of civilizations, the writing of
14:55
great literature, the pursuit of scientific knowledge is an
14:59
inevitably doomed to failure when divorced from its creator.
15:02
The analogy is simple and mechanical.
15:04
Louis suggests that God invented us as a mechanic invents an
15:07
engine. An engine is designed for a
15:09
specific fuel. A car designed to run on high
15:12
octane gasoline won't function properly on anything else, no
15:15
matter how much you try to coerce it, Louis says.
15:18
God designed the human machine to run on Himself.
15:21
He is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, the food our
15:24
spiritual nature was designed to consume.
15:28
There is literally no other suitable fuel source available
15:31
in the entire universe. This instantly reframes the
15:34
common secular request put to God.
15:37
People often say if God is good, why can't he just make us happy
15:41
in our own way without all this religion and dogma?
15:44
Sure, you hear that? All the time, Lewis argues that
15:46
God cannot grant us happiness and peace apart from Himself,
15:49
because that happiness, that state of sustainable peace,
15:52
literally does not exist. It's an impossible, structurally
15:55
flawed request. It's like demanding that the
15:57
engine run smoothly on orange juice or mud.
15:59
Exactly. You can pour it in, but the
16:01
machine will immediately object and eventually seize up.
16:04
And this analogy gives us the ultimate key to interpreting
16:07
history. We look at the terrific energy
16:09
humanity has spent. We see magnificent civilizations
16:13
built, legal structures created, scientific leaps achieved, and
16:17
excellent institutions devised, but something always, inevitably
16:22
goes wrong. Always.
16:23
There is a fatal flaw in the human machine that consistently
16:27
allows selfish, cruel and corrupt people to rise to the
16:30
top, and everything slides back into misery and ruin.
16:33
It's the constant breakdown. The machine starts, runs a few
16:36
spectacular steps. Look at Rome.
16:37
Look at the great European empires.
16:39
Look at the rise and fall of utopian political movements.
16:42
And then it conks it. Conks.
16:43
It breaks down because the operators, humans, are trying to
16:46
run it on the wrong juice. They are attempting to achieve
16:49
divine satisfaction using human means, power, money, sex, fame,
16:54
ideology. And that, list concludes, is the
16:57
work of Satan redirecting the human fuel source away from God
17:00
and toward creation itself. This leads naturally to the
17:03
question of what God does in response to this catastrophic
17:06
historical breakdown. Right.
17:07
If the machine is conking out in every generation, did God simply
17:10
abandon it? Lewis says no, and he outlines
17:13
God's response in three distinct preparatory steps instituted
17:18
before the real shock of Christ's arrival.
17:20
OK, these were steps of rescue designed to prevent the complete
17:23
spiritual destruction of humanity and pave the way for a
17:26
true fix. So what's the first one?
17:28
The first preparation was the conscience.
17:30
Despite the corruption of the machine, God left us with a
17:33
sense of right and wrong, the moral law.
17:36
This shows us what the machine should be doing.
17:39
Lewis acknowledges that all through history there have been
17:42
people trying to obey it. Philosophers, moralists, good
17:45
citizens, sometimes very hard, but none of them ever quite
17:48
succeeded perfectly. The law was written on the
17:51
heart, but our ability to follow it was impaired by the wrong
17:54
fuel. So it sets the standard, but
17:56
simultaneously proves our incapacity to meet it.
17:59
Exactly. It acts as a permanent internal
18:02
witness to our failed self-sufficiency.
18:05
The second preparation involves what Lewis calls good dreams.
18:08
Good dreams. This is a fascinating
18:10
sociological and mythological point.
18:13
It really is. Lewis speaks of queer stories
18:16
scattered throughout what he calls heathen religions
18:19
worldwide. These stories share a common
18:21
thread, a divine being or a God who dies and comes back to life,
18:26
often giving new life or sustenance through his death or
18:29
sacrifice. So these weren't direct
18:31
revelation, but universal mythological echoes, a kind of
18:34
spiritual intuition. Yeah, that's a good way to put
18:37
it. It suggests a pre-existing
18:39
global recognition of the need for sacrifice, A mediator and
18:43
resurrection. This dispersed knowledge
18:46
prepared the human mind for the actual event, making the arrival
18:49
of Christ's story recognizable on some deep subconscious level,
18:53
even if the details were confused.
18:55
And the third preparation. The third was highly specific
18:57
and disciplinary, the selection and training of the Jewish
19:00
people. This was a direct, intense
19:02
intervention, Lewis says. God spent several centuries
19:05
hammering into their heads to specific non negotiable ideas.
19:08
1st that there was only one God. Right, establishing pure
19:11
monotheism against the pervasive polytheism of the world.
19:14
And 2nd, that this one God was intensely concerned with right
19:18
conduct, justice and mercy, Not merely ritual sacrifice, but a
19:23
moral standard. The Old Testament is essentially
19:27
the account of that very intense hammering process, the cycle of
19:31
obedience, rebellion, judgment, and restoration, all designed to
19:35
set the stage for the final ultimate intervention.
19:38
So this long process ensures that when the final act occurs,
19:42
there's at least one people on earth who understand the
19:44
identity of God who is acting. The transcendent moral sovereign
19:48
of the universe? Yes.
19:49
And that sets the context perfectly for the arrival of the
19:51
man who would shake the entire structure of human thought.
19:54
After centuries of preparation, hammering and prophecies among
19:58
these specially trained Jews, there suddenly turns up a man
20:01
who goes about talking as if he was God.
20:03
Yeah, this is the historical climax, and Lewis makes sure to
20:06
strip away the familiarity that centuries of Christian culture
20:09
has layered over these events. He highlights the magnitude of
20:12
the claim by pointing out three specific areas where this man's
20:16
words are not just extraordinary, but uniquely
20:19
divine. He claims the authority to
20:22
forgive sins. He states he has always existed
20:25
using language that implies eternity, And he claims he will
20:28
return to judge the world at the end of time.
20:31
These aren't the claims of a prophet or a philosopher.
20:34
They are cosmic absolute claims belonging only to the Creator.
20:39
And Lewis is astute in drawing attention to the cultural
20:41
context. The claim is uniquely shocking
20:44
because it is made by a Jew operating within the framework
20:48
of Jewish monotheism. Lewis contrasts this with other
20:51
spiritual traditions. If this man were, say, a
20:54
pantheist, perhaps from certain Eastern traditions, claiming to
20:57
be part of God or recognizing the divine spark within himself,
21:01
that might be unremarkable. Right in that tradition, the
21:03
universe itself is God, and union with the divine is the
21:06
goal of enlightenment. Many spiritual teachers have
21:08
claimed that. But Christ spoke within the
21:11
Jewish language where God Yahweh meant the being outside the
21:15
world. The absolutely transcendent
21:17
Creator who made everything and was infinitely, fundamentally
21:20
different from anything else created.
21:22
The chasm between creator and creature was infinite.
21:25
Therefore, for a man standing in 1st century Judea who ate, slept
21:30
and breathed like other men, to say the things Jesus said to
21:34
assert equality with the transcendent being was, as Lewis
21:38
puts it, quite simply, the most shocking thing that has ever
21:41
been uttered by human lips. It was not just high spiritual
21:45
talk. It was a unique claim of
21:47
identity that breached the ultimate boundary between man
21:50
and God. And the most accessible example
21:52
of this boundary breach, the one that Lewis uses to really drive
21:55
home the logical consequence, is the claim to forgive sins, any
22:00
sins committed against anyone. This specific claim often slips
22:03
past us because we're so used to hearing it in religious
22:05
settings. Lewis forces us to ask what this
22:07
claim means if the speaker is not God, right?
22:10
He argues that in that case, the claim is preposterous, maybe
22:14
even comic. We understand forgiveness of
22:16
offenses against ourselves. If you steal my bicycle, I have
22:19
the right to pardon you. The injury is mine and the
22:21
authority to remit the penalty is mine.
22:23
Of course, but the absurdity arises when we imagine a man, a
22:27
bystander, who is unrobbed and untrodden on, who announced it
22:31
to a thief that he forgives him for stealing other men's money.
22:34
Or for punching other men's faces right.
22:37
Lewis describes his conduct as asinine fatuity, a ridiculous
22:41
brainless conceit, a man inserting himself into an
22:44
offense where he was not the injured party.
22:47
Yet this is exactly what the man Jesus did unhesitatingly.
22:51
All the time. He told people their sins were
22:53
forgiven and never once waited to consult all the other people
22:56
whom their sins had injured, or even consulted the governing
22:58
authority whose laws were broken.
23:00
He behaved as if he was the party chiefly concerned, the
23:03
person chiefly offended in all offenses, regardless of who the
23:06
immediate human victim was. So whether a sin was a casual
23:09
lie, a theft or an act of cruelty.
23:12
He spoke as if the primary violation was always against
23:15
him. The implication is massive.
23:18
This behavior only makes coherent sense if he really was
23:22
the ultimate, transcendent God whose law is broken and whose
23:25
love is wounded in every single sin committed.
23:27
That's the only way it works. In the mouth of anyone else, any
23:30
sage, prophet, or moral teacher, these words would imply A
23:34
silliness and conceit unrivaled. But here is the profound
23:37
paradox. Despite these claims, claims
23:41
that would make any sane person immediately dismiss him as a
23:44
megalomaniac, neither his enemies nor neutral historical
23:48
readers, nor those who love him get the impression of silliness
23:51
or conceit from reading the Gospels.
23:52
No, you don't. Lewis notes that Christ
23:54
describes himself as humble and meek, and we generally accept
23:57
that description. We fail to notice the logical
23:59
crisis this creates, right? If he were only a man, humility
24:03
and meekness would be the absolute last characteristics we
24:06
could attribute to someone who went around announcing that he
24:09
had existed eternally and would judge all mankind.
24:11
The only explanation for the paradox is that the claims are
24:14
true. If they are true, they are
24:16
humble statements of fact. If they are false, they're the
24:19
most arrogant statements ever conceived.
24:21
This is the setup for the famous Lewis Trilemma, designed to
24:25
close the door on the patronizing position of
24:27
neutrality. Lewis targets the really foolish
24:31
thing people often say. I'm ready to accept Jesus as a
24:34
great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God.
24:38
You hear it all the time. Lewis argues forcefully that
24:41
Christ has not left that option open to us.
24:43
He did not build a bridge to that middle ground.
24:45
He burns that break. He does.
24:47
A man who is merely a human teacher, saying the things Jesus
24:50
said, claiming to forgive sins, claiming to be the divine
24:53
ultimate authority, would not be a great moral teacher at all.
24:57
His claims invalidate his moral standing if there are lies.
25:02
If the claims were false, he would necessarily fall into one
25:05
of the other two categories, Lunatic.
25:07
He would either be a lunatic on the level of a clinically insane
25:10
person who seriously believes he is, say, a supernatural being,
25:14
or a piece of breakfast food. His ethical advice would be
25:18
irrelevant, delivered by a delusional mind.
25:21
We would shut him up for his own safety.
25:22
Or something worse. Or, Lewis argues, he would be
25:26
something worse, the devil of hell, a deceptive entity using
25:31
profound moral goodness as a cloak to spread the ultimate
25:35
falsehood, a claim to divinity. He would be the master deceiver,
25:39
demanding worship under false pretenses.
25:41
Lewis is relentless here. He is forcing the listener, the
25:45
observer, to abandon the sanitized view of Jesus.
25:48
They often hold the decision is inescapable.
25:51
You have to choose. You, the listener, must make a
25:54
choice about who this person was based purely on the content of
25:57
his own claims and behavior. And Lewis leaves us with three
26:00
stark alternatives. Either this man was and is the
26:04
son of God, or a madman, or something worse, a demon.
26:07
And we are not allowed the comfortable option of accepting
26:09
the ethics while rejecting the identity that.
26:11
Option is off the. Table.
26:12
He forces us off the fence. We must either shut him up for a
26:15
fool, spit at him and kill him as a demon, or fall at his feet
26:19
and call him Lord and God. That's the full, unvarnished
26:22
logical force of the Luisian trilemma.
26:24
It's the ultimate summation of his approach, using rigorous,
26:28
simple logic to show that the Christian claim is either true
26:31
and magnificent or false and insane.
26:34
It cannot, by the very nature of the claims made, be a gentle
26:38
moral philosophy. We have completed the deep dive
26:40
into Lewis's illogical steps and it is a breathtaking
26:44
progression. We began with the paradox of
26:46
evil, seeing how the doctrine of structural free will, not rotten
26:50
creation, was the absolute necessity for achieving A
26:53
glorious ecstatic relationship. We then move through the
26:57
absolute seriousness of sin as self idolatry, putting self 1st
27:01
and trying to run on the wrong fuel.
27:03
And we culminated in the inescapable, shocking claims of
27:06
Christ. Lewis's structure forces the
27:09
listener to grapple with the actual unsanitized content of
27:12
the New Testament, the claim of a single historical person who
27:15
consistently behaved as the party chiefly offended in every
27:18
transgression committed since the world began.
27:20
It strips away all the easy ways out it.
27:22
Strips away all the easy, comfortable ways out of the
27:24
dilemma. And as we close, we leave you
27:26
with one final provocative thought, building directly on
27:29
Lewis's engine analogy. If Lewis is correct that we are
27:32
machines designed by God, built specifically to run on God
27:36
Himself as the only suitable fuel, what are the specific
27:40
concrete symptoms you notice in your own life when you realize
27:43
you are running on the wrong juice?
27:46
And what then is the next specific step you take toward
27:49
finding and connecting to the true source of fuel that your
27:52
Spirit was designed to consume? Think about that.
27:54
Until next time.