C. S. Lewis, sixty years after his death, is having something of a moment. His children fantasy series, The Chronicles of Narnia, has been claimed by Netflix for adaption, and he recently appeared as the other central character of this year’s Freud’s Last Session. In both instances, Lewis’s Christian faith is evident, but even in Freud’s last session where it is at the fore, his particular brand of apologetics is not what’s penetrating the mainstream. Here I want to consider one of his central arguments for the Christian faith: the “Bad, Mad, or God” argument, or Lewis’ trilemma. Here’s Lewis’ statement of the trilemma.
I am trying to prevent anyone from 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 patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to….
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.1
The question of this piece is this: while we’re reviving C. S. Lewis’ work, should we be reviving this “Bad, Mad, or God” argument? Well, no. It’s a howler. So much so, that I want to consider it not on its merits but on what it is trying to do. This will require a bit of a jaunt through history and rhetoric.
Never accuse an apologist of novelty. Lewis himself is drawing this argument from, in the first place, G. K. Chesterton, and ultimately from a long apologetic tradition.2 The point is that, at least in the New Testament, the character of Jesus Christ does some wild shit: curses fig trees, instructs his followers to abandon their families, promises salvation and the forgiveness of sins, claims, albeit privately, to selective audiences, to literally be the Son of God. If he is not divine, this is, well, megalomaniacal nonsense.
I want to consider, here, as a miniature of what is to come, the variation of this theme in First Corinthians (15:13–18). Quoting the King James Version (as this substack is KJV-onlyism-pilled)
But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen: And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have testified of God that he raised up Christ: whom he raised not up, if so be that the dead rise not. For if the dead rise not, then is not Christ raised: And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins. Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished.
Who is this rhetoric for? Cleary the Christian, given “your faith,” but the Christian who may still have some doubts. As an argument for Christianity, for the divinity of Christ, it is perfectly useless. What it does accomplish is make clear the stakes of Christ’s divinity for the Christian: Christ promised salvation; if he can’t make good on that promise, well, boy howdy that would suck. (Maybe sing those hymns a little louder, eh?)
The earliest precursors of Lewis’ trilemma, then, are inside baseball, by and for Christians. When one gets to his immediate sources in the 19th century, we switch to a more apologetic mode, one addressing, or at least purporting to address, the nonbeliever. Henry Liddon, possibly one of Lewis’ sources here, describes the choice here as being between believing in an “historical” Christ — morally excellent but decidedly human — and a “dogmatic” Christ — the Son of God Himself.3 Here in fact Liddon is more explicit than Lewis about the issue and relevance of the historicity of the Gospels: if the Christ of the Gospels is more or less a fictional character, then pondering his divinity is an act of literary criticism rather than theology.
Who is Liddon addressing? Here we must call out the ambiguity of the “addressing” here. Take, say, Plato’s Euthyphro. Here, as in so many of the dialogues, we find Socrates arguing with a Euthyphro who believes he knows what justice is and what it demands and that, in particular, it demands prosecuting his father for murder. In the following arguments over the nature of justice, Euthyphro comes across as so confused and incompetent that we, the reader, must part ways from him out of embarrassment. That is, we must distinguish the interlocutor of an argument, the person or persons it purports to address, from its intended audience.
Frequently in apologetics, though the phenomenon goes quite a bit further than that, the audience and the interlocutor are on opposite sides of the aisle. Anselm’s presentation of his ontological argument for the existence of God, for instance, begins by addressing the atheist as “the fool.” We may reasonably suppose that the audience here is not the fool but instead the good Christian, who, being alive and so not yet able to enjoy the fool’s roasting in the fires of hell, gets to enjoy the lesser spectacle of the fool being roasted in quite a different sense.
To extend this aside a moment longer, this is not to say that such apologetics is not true apologetics, that is something aiming at the defense and expansion of a faith. A piece of rhetoric can be effective, in the sense of moving its reader’s minds in the author’s intended direction, without being in the least rationally persuasive. The desire not to be a fool is more motivating, generally, than logical consistency.
Granting, then, that Liddon, in sermonistic mode, has the flock’s ear while talking to the fool, which fools is he talking to? Both Liddon and Lewis are frustratingly vague here. We may accept that Liddon, in the 1860s, is writing in the heyday of liberal theology, and with deists and agnostics afoot we might expect attempts to shear Christianity of its supernatural commitments. We may point to, for instance Jefferson’s 1820s The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth which extracts Jesus’ teachings in the New Testament, shorn of any reference to miracles. Still, Liddon’s parties for the “historical” and “dogmatic” Christ come to us very vaguely sketched, with an undrawn no-man’s-land between them.
If this question of opponent is difficult to answer for Liddon in 1866, it is more so for Lewis in 1943. Certainly by then our atheists are much more outgoing. But we can perhaps grant that someone might have held that Christ is a great moral teacher while denying his divinity. Indeed, we may point out that George Bernard Shaw gets at least some of the way there. Most charitably, we can grant that Lewis is speaking to his younger self, who believed “that Christianity itself was very sensible, apart from its Christianity.”4 Perhaps we should say more than addressing individuals as such, Lewis’s opponent is a character type: the genial, Christian atheist, one who does not go in for any of that supernatural bunkum but still wants to have his vicar over for tea without incident.
To press this line a bit further, let us start with another observation by Shaw.
The first common mistake to get rid of is that mankind consists of a great mass of religious people and a few eccentric atheists. It consists of a huge mass of worldly people, and a small percentage of persons deeply interested in religion and concerned about their own souls and other peoples’; and this section consists mostly of those who are passionately affirming the established religion and those who are passionately attacking it, the genuine philosophers being very few.
The worldly many are religious or irreligious only in a conventional sense. In a western European country of the 20th and 21st century, the cultural stakes of religious identification have cooled. Those professing or not professing a religion are expected to get along without incident. “Christ is a great moral teacher,” is a nice, polite thing the irreligious can say to endear themselves to the religious. “We were reading Matthew in our Bible studies group,” the vicar might say, to which the atheist can respond, “Love thy neighbor. Great stuff!”
While Corinthians was trying to turn up the heat on the question of Christianity for the Christian, Lewis’ trilemma turns up the heat on Christianity between Christians and non-Christians. If Lewis is correct, the non-Christian cannot just mouth some pablum about the swellness of Christ but must take a hard stance: lunatic or liar. For the audience, then, for those already inclined towards Christianity, the argument functions to make atheism more personally unappealing. You wouldn’t want an awkward conversation with your vicar.
Here we have a very genteel instance of the general problem of religion in a pluralistic society. Religious differences, when thought through, when taken seriously, cannot simply be smoothed over. The stakes are of unearthly proportion: not merely life-and-death but heaven-and-hell. Christian absolutists, say, who would like to turn the country into a theocracy, are simply being consistent as to the implications of their beliefs: better a tyranny bound for heaven than a democracy bound for hell.
My unease with Lewis’ little argument, then, is an unease with the stakes being turned up on religion. It is by the grace of the worldliness of mankind, their disinterest in their own souls, that modern civilization is at all possible. To that end, I quote a greater moral teacher than Christ.
“It’s not my business,” Scrooge returned. “It’s enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people’s.”5
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: MacMillan, 1952, revised ed), 55f.
Brazier, P. H., “God … or a Bad, or Mad, Man” (The Heythrop Journal, 55, 2001), 3f.
Henry Liddon, “Our Lord’s Divinity as Witnessed by His Consciousness,” The Divinity of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, 1866, 151.
C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1955), 216.
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, Andrew Lang, ed. (London: Chapman and Hall, Ltd. 1897), 16. I stole the quote from Gerald Gaus’s “On the Difficult Virtue of Minding One’s Own Business.”