Howard’s questioning of Scripture indicates that his faith lies elsewhere. "Jesus said to him, 'I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me.' "John 14:6. Any human creature who claims to be The Truth is an excellent candidate for the mental asylum. Only the Son of God Himself could utter such words. I love the simplicity of Lewis’ prose and the profundity of his writings.
Moorad
-----Original Message-----
From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu on behalf of Howard J. Van Till
Sent: Sat 12/20/2003 10:15 AM
To: William Hamilton
Cc: asa@calvin.edu
Subject: Re: Biblical Interpretation Reconsidered
Bill gave us the following quotation from C.S. Lewis:
> 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.
With all due respect for C.S. Lewis, I believe he did Christianity a
disservice by posing the above dilemma. The two stark choices he poses are
not the only two that could reasonably be posed. There are others based on
differing assumptions and judgments about the character of the N.T. text.
(When was it written? By whom? For what purposes? Does the text give us
exact quotations of words actually spoken by Jesus? How does Lewis come to
know Jesus' intentions so clearly?)
Howard Van Till
Received on Sat Dec 20 10:45:31 2003
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