Liar, Lunatic, or Lord? The C.S. Lewis Trilemma

In modern culture, it is popular to view Jesus of Nazareth as a great prophet, a wise sage, or an enlightened moral teacher, on par with Gandhi or Socrates. This allows people to respect Jesus without submitting to His authority.

The problem with this view is that Jesus did not leave this option open to us. He made radical, absolute claims about Himself. He claimed to forgive sins (something only God can do), He claimed to exist before Abraham, and He allowed Himself to be worshipped.

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"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... or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice."

Since Jesus claimed to be God, there are only three logical possibilities regarding His claims.

First, if His claims were false and He knew they were false, He was a Liar—and a particularly evil one, since He allowed his followers to be tortured and executed for a lie.

Second, if His claims were false but He genuinely believed them, He was a Lunatic, on the level of a man who claims to be a poached egg.

Third, if His claims were true, then He is the Lord.

The Trilemma is powerful because it exposes the intellectual laziness of the 'good teacher' compromise. A good moral teacher does not lie about being God, nor is a lunatic capable of teaching the most profound, world-changing moral philosophy in human history.

Lewis forces the reader into a corner: You can spit at Him as a demon, or fall at His feet and call Him Lord, but do not come with patronizing nonsense about Him being a great human teacher.