Son of God<\/a>, or else a madman or something worse.\u201d<\/p>\nI\u2019m with other people criticising the trilemma for failing to consider other options; the obvious ones are listed at the end of the Wikipedia article as Legend and Guru. \u201cLegend\u201d is, I think, dealt with by the consideration that much of what we see in the New Testament is not actually people reporting what happened, it\u2019s them reporting how they saw Jesus, how they related to Jesus, and by the time they wrote Jesus had become something much greater than just a man. I prefer not to use \u201cGuru\u201d, but \u201cMystic\u201d will do nicely; none of the wording ascribed to Jesus by the Fourth Gospel (which is what Lewis is concentrating on) is at odds with what could be said by a panentheistic God-mystic.<\/p>\n
However, Lewis is also being obstructive in saying, in effect, \u201cYou cannot regard Jesus as a great moral teacher\u201d. I know stacks of people who are quite convinced that Jesus WAS a great moral teacher, but who listen to something like that and say \u201cWell, if you\u2019re saying that, clearly for you he wasn\u2019t, so I\u2019m out of here\u201d. Twenty five years ago, I doubt I\u2019d have stayed around to listen to anything more on exactly that basis. Those who use Lewis\u2019 trilemma are, to be honest, inclined to sideline Jesus\u2019 moral teachings anyhow \u2013 yes, they acknowledge that they\u2019re there, but they\u2019re not THE BIG THING about Jesus. They\u2019re not what GETS YOU SAVED.<\/p>\n
But actually Jesus WAS a great moral teacher, whatever else you think he may have been. That has a wider spread of agreement than anything else about what Jesus was \u2013 not only Christians but also their offshoots Latter Day Saints, Muslims, Baha\u2019is and a whole load of people in entirely separate religions agree this. And Lewis wanted to tell them they couldn\u2019t think that way? What a bozo!<\/p>\n
Moving on, though, I see a set of historical-critical scholars trying to extract a picture of what the real, lifetime Jesus was. There are two big camps of these; those who think Jesus was a social and religious subversive revolutionary spreading a message of resistance to Rome, the breaking down of political and religious power structures, radical redistribution of wealth, non-violent action, reform of the basis of Judaism (away from the Temple-sacrifice based structure to something radically rabbinic, away from focus on details of purity related praxis towards inclusionary praxis), reform of the individual\u2019s own world-view and the institution of radical communitarian values. And as far as I can see, they\u2019re right.<\/p>\n
Then there are those who see Jesus as an apocalyptic preacher prophesying the end of power structures as they then were and the coming of the Kingdom of God, the restoration of Israel and the dawn of a new age of personal enlightenment and communal concern with a restored Israel leading the way. And I think they\u2019re right too…<\/p>\n
But though there is some overlap, each of them wants to say \u201cJesus was THIS\u201d impliedly to the exclusion of the other.<\/p>\n
None of them I have yet read seem to give adequate weight to Jesus as God-mystic, Jesus who knew intimately a new relationship with God on a personal basis, a completely different conception of how he and we stood in relationship to a God who was immanent \u2013 no, that\u2019s not enough stress, a God who was IMMANENT! God around us, beside us, above us, behind us, within us, in our history and in our future, all pervading, (according to Psalm 139:7-10), he who in whom we lived and breathed and had our being (according to Paul via Luke in Acts 17:28). This is, incidentally, where I think the great deficiency of the \u201capocalyptic preacher\u201d school of thought lies; he was not proclaiming something in the future, he was proclaiming an apocalyptic event which had already happened, was happening and would continue to happen.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t want \u201cEither…or\u201d I want \u201cBoth…and\u201d<\/p>\n
And then you get Paul and \u201cJohn\u201d, who were Christ-mystics, and the synoptic evangelists who were talking of another Jesus, a Jesus who was still present with them and in them, who had not died because they were experiencing him day by day (OK, I think they were experiencing God-in-them and mislabelling it, but let\u2019s not be too picky here!).\u00a0 <\/span>Paul\u2019s and John\u2019s experience will have made them concentrate on sin and forgiveness from personal transformation through ecstatic experience, because that\u2019s what they will have experienced themselves (I know, I had such a transformative experience without having any of their theological or symbolic structure to hang it on, and that\u2019s still how I experienced it).<\/p>\nAnd I don\u2019t want \u201cEither…or\u201d I want \u201cBoth…and\u201d<\/p>\n
Jesus WAS a great moral teacher AND a rabbi wanting to reform Judaism and call people to repentance AND a social and political subversive revolutionary AND a teacher of personal transformation through ecstatic experience AND a panentheist God-mystic \u00a0<\/span>AND… well, as a panentheist God-mystic myself I have no problem at all with son of God or God incarnate. AND he was an example of self-sacrifice for others AND his death and post-mortem appearance and presence reconciled his people to God AND he shows us that sacrifice to God is no longer necessary in the ritualistic sense AND following him can lift our burden of guilt, shame and, yes, sin AND by following him we can come to God and be transformed ourselves AND in following him society will be transformed AND all this can happen, is happening, here and now and we do not need to wait until we\u2019re dead.<\/p>\nAND we don\u2019t need to try to harmonise all these into a single coherent narrative, because he overspills the bounds of anything narrow you can construct, and that doesn\u2019t do him justice.<\/p>\n
Lewis said we could not follow the small picture because there was a larger one, completely missing the fact that there was a larger one still.<\/p>\n
So I probably missed some things. I suggest you go and find them \u2013 I\u2019m still looking myself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In my continuing meditations on the awfulness which is Lewis\u2019 trilemma, some more thoughts have come to me. To remind you, C.S. Lewis wrote:- \u201cI\u2019m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don\u2019t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[10,3,12,6,4],"class_list":["post-205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-alpha","tag-christianity","tag-philosophy","tag-spirituality","tag-theology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=205"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":323,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205\/revisions\/323"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}