Thanks to all!

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Permalink Reply by Blake on June 15, 2010 at 8:03pm

Jason, those are beautiful, warm, encouraging and uplifting sentiments. Spoken like a true Christian!

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Permalink Reply by Paavo Laird on June 15, 2010 at 11:28pm

Jason,

Have you ever heard of the Lord, Liar or Lunatic argument? Well, it's actually not even an argument. It's a examination of the possibility that Jesus could be labeled one of the three.

Jesus said He was the Son of God and that He and the Father were one. So, 3 possibilities arise:

1. Jesus said He is the Son of God because knows He is, in which case He really is Lord.

2. Jesus said He is the Son of God but He knew He wasn't, in which case He would have been a liar.

3. Jesus thought He was the Son of God but He wasn't, in which case He would have been a lunatic.

The following addresses these possibilities in detail. Please consider:

I caution in advance that this is a deep read. It's also long, but not too long.

Was He a Liar?

If, when Jesus made His claims, He knew He was not God, then He was lying. But if He was a liar, then He was also a hypocrite, because He told others to be honest, whatever the cost, while He, at the same time, was teaching and living a colossal lie.

More than that…because He deliberately told others to trust Him for their eternal destiny. If He could not back up His claims and knew they were false, then He was unspeakably evil.

Last, He would also be a fool, because it was His claims to deity that led to His crucifixion.
…If Jesus was a liar, a con man, and therefore an evil, foolish man, then how can we explain the fact that He left us with the most profound moral instruction and powerful moral example that anyone ever has left? Could a deceiver –an imposter of monstrous proportions –teach such unselfish ethical truths and live such a morally exemplary life as Jesus did? The very notion is incredulous.

John Stuart Mill, the philosopher, skeptic, and antagonist of Christianity, admitted that Jesus was a first-rate ethicist supremely worthy of our attention and emulation. As Mill expressed it:

About the life and sayings of Jesus there is a stamp of personal originality combined with profundity of insight in the very first rank of men of sublime genius of whom our species can boast. When this pre-eminent genius is combined with the qualities of probably the greatest moral reformer and martyr to that mission who ever existed upon earth, religion cannot be said to have made a bad choice in pitching upon this man as the ideal representative and guide of humanity; nor even now would it be easy, even for an unbeliever, to find a better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the concrete than to endeavour to live so that Christ would approve or our life.

Throughout history Jesus Christ has captured the hearts and minds of millions who have strived to order their lives after His. Even William Lecky, one of Great Britain’s most noted historians and a dedicated opponent of organized Christianity, noted this in his History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne:
It was reserved for Christianity to present to the world an ideal character which through all the changes of eighteen centuries has inspired the hearts of men with an impassioned love; has shown itself capable of action on all ages, nations, temperaments and conditions; has been not only the highest pattern of virtue, but the strongest incentive to its practice…the simple record of [Jesus’] these three short years of active life has done more to regenerate and soften mankind than all the disquisitions of philosophers and all the exhortations of moralists.

When the church historian Philip Schaff considered the evidence for Jesus’ deity, especially in light of what Jesus taught and the kind of life He led, Schaff was struck by the absurdity of the explanations designed to escape the logical implications of this evidence. Stated Schaff:

This testimony, if not true, must be down right blasphemy or madness. The former hypothesis cannot stand a moment before the moral purity and dignity of Jesus, revealed in His every word and work, and acknowledged by universal consent. Self-deception in a matter so momentous, and with an intellect in all respects so clear and so sound, is equally out of the question. How could He be an enthusiast or a madman who never lost the even balance of his mind, who sailed serenely over all the troubles and persecutions, as the sun above the clouds, who always returned the wisest answer to tempting questions, who calmly and deliberately predicted His death on the cross, His resurrection on the third day, the outpouring of the holy Spirit, the founding of His Church, the destruction of Jerusalem –predictions which have been literally fulfilled? A character so original, so complete, so uniformly consistent, so perfect, so human and yet so high above all human greatness, can be neither a fraud nor a fiction. The poet, as has been well said, would in this case be greater than the hero, it would take more than a Jesus to invent a Jesus.

In his work, The Person of Christ, Schaff revisits the theory that Jesus was a deceiver, and mounts a convicting attack against it:

The hypothesis of imposture is so revolting to moral as well as common sense, that its mere statement is its condemnation…No scholar of any decency and self-respect would now dare to profess it openly. How, in the name of logic, common sense, and experience, could an impostor –that is a deceitful, selfish, depraved man –have invented, and consistently maintained from the beginning to end, the purest and noblest character known in history with the most perfect air of truth and reality? How could he have conceived and successfully carried out a plan of unparalleled beneficence, moral magnitude, and sublimity, and sacrificed his own life for it, in the face of the strongest prejudices of his people and ages?

The answer, of course, is that Jesus could not have! Someone who lived as Jesus lived, taught as Jesus taught, and died as Jesus died could not have been a liar. So what are the other alternatives?

Was He a Lunatic?

If it is inconceivable for Jesus to have been a liar, then could He have thought He was God but have been mistaken? After all, it is possible to be both sincere and wrong.

But we must remember that for someone to think he was God, especially in a culture that was fiercely monotheistic, and then to tell others that their eternal destiny depends on believing in him, was no slight flight of fantasy but the thoughts of a lunatic in the fullest sense. Was Jesus Christ such a person?

Christian philosopher Peter Kreeft presents this option, then shows why we must reject it:

A measure of your insanity is the size of the gap between what you think you are and what you really are. If I think I am the greatest philosopher in America, I am only an arrogant fool; if I think I am Napoleon, I am probably over the edge; If I think I am a butterfly, I am fully embarked from the sunny shores of sanity. But if I think I am God, I am even more insane because the gap between anything finite and the infinite God is even greater than the gap between any two finite things, even a man and a butterfly.

Well, then, why [was not Jesus a] liar or lunatic?...Almost no one who has read the Gospels can honestly and seriously consider that option. The savviness, the canniness, the human wisdom, the attractiveness of Jesus emerge from the Gospels with unavoidable force to any but the most hardened and prejudiced reader…Compare Jesus with liars…or lunatics like the dying Nietzche. Jusus has in abundance precisely those three qualities that liars and lunatics most conspicuously lack: (1) his practical wisdom, his ability to read human hearts; (2) his deep and winning love, his passionate compassion, his ability to attract people and make them feel at home and forgiven, his authority, “not as the scribes”; (3) his ability to astonish, his unpredictability, his creativity. Liars and lunatics are all so dull and predictable! No one who knows both the Gospels and human beings can seriously entertain the possibility that Jesus was a liar or a lunatic, a bad man.

Even Napoleon Bonaparte went on record as saying:

I know men; and I tell you that Jesus Christ is not a man. Superficial minds see a resemblance between Christ and the founders of empires, and the gods of other religions. That resemblance does not exist. There is between Christianity and what ever other religions the distance of infinity…Everything in Christ astonishes me. His spirit overawes me, and His will confounds me. Between Him and whoever else in the world, there is no possible term of comparison. He is truly a being by Himself. His ideas and sentiments, and truth which He announces, His manner of convincing, are not explained either by human organization or by the nature of things…The nearer I approach, the more carefully I examine, everything is above me –everything remains grand, of a grandeur which overpowers. His religion is a revelation from an intelligence which certainly is not that of man…One can absolutely find nowhere, but in Him alone, the imitation of the example of His life…I search in vain in history to find the similar to Jesus Christ., or anything which can approach the gospel. Neither history, nor humanity, nor the ages, nor nature, offer me anything with which I am able to compare it or to explain it. Here everything is extraordinary.

William Channing, although a nineteenth-century Unitarian and humanist, rejected the lunatic theory as a completely unsatisfactory explanation of Jesus’ identity:

The charge of an extravagant, self-deluding enthusiasm is the lst to be fastened on Jesus. Where can we find the traces of it in His history? Do we detect them in the calm authority of His precepts? In the mild, practical and beneficent spirit of His religion; in the unlabored simplicity of the language with which He unfolds His high powers and the sublime truths of religion; or in the good sense, the knowledge of human nature, which He always discovers in His estimate and treatment of the different classes of men with whom He acted? Do we discover this enthusiasm in the singular fact, that whilst He claimed power in the future world, and always turned men’s minds to heaven, He never indulged His own imagination, or stimulated that of His disciples, by giving vivid pictures or any minute description of that unseen state? The truth is, that, remarkable as was the character of Jesus, it was distinguished by nothing more than by calmness and self-possession. This trait pervades His other excellences. How calm was His piety! Point me, if you can, to one vehement, passionate expression of His religious feelings. Does the Lord’s Prayer breathe a feverish enthusiasm?...His benevolence, too, though singularly earnest and deep, was composed and serene. He never lost the possession of Himself in His sympathy with others; was never hurried into the impatient and rash enterprises of an enthusiastic philanthropy; but did good with the tranquility and constancy which mark the providence of God.

Philip Schaff, the noted historian, wrote:

“Is such an intellect –clear as the sky, bracing as the mountain air, sharp and penetrating as a sword, thoroughly healthy and vigorous, always ready and always self possessed –liable to a radical and most serious delusion concerning His own character and mission? Preposterous imagination!”

The truth is, Jesus was not only sane, but the counsel He provided gives us the most concise and accurate formula for peace of mind and heart. I like the way psychiatrist J. T. Fisher brings this out:

If you were to take the sum total of all authoritative articles ever written by the most qualified of psychologists and psychiatrists on the subject of mental hygiene –if you were to combine them and refine them and cleave out the excess verbiage –if you were to take the whole of the meat and none of the parsley, and if you were to have these unadulterated bits of pure scientific knowledge concisely expressed by the most capable of living poets, you have an awkward and incomplete summation of the Sermon on the Mount. And it would suffer immeasurably through comparison. For nearly two thousand years the Christian world has been holding in its hands the complete answer to its [humankind’s] restless and fruitless yearnings. Here…rests the blueprint for successful human life with optimism, mental health and contentment.

No lunatic could be the source of such perceptive and effective psychological insight. C.S. Lewis is right. No other explanation but the Christian one will do: “The historical difficulty of giving for the life, sayings and influence of Jesus and explanation that is not harder that the Christian explanation is very great. The discrepancy between the depth and sanity and (let me add) shrewdness of His moral teaching and the rampant megalomania which must lie behind His theological teaching unless He is indeed God, has never been satisfactorily got over. Hence the non-Christian hypotheses succeed one another with the restless fertility of bewilderment.

-The New Evidence That Demands A Verdict -Josh McDowell

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Permalink Reply by Jason A on June 16, 2010 at 6:51am

Love ya too! And i have to say, when others have angered me, you have always been a reason i return. Even when we disagree. which of course with a crazy liberal like me is a lot. :)

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Permalink Reply by Debbie Hasty on June 16, 2010 at 9:49am

Even though I come in and post and reply I truly have never allowed myself to get to close to anyone in the forums I go into, but do have much love for everyone as we do come together in the name of Jesus to not only teach and learn from each other through the Holy Spirit working through us, but to also lift up and edify each other.

Jason I have always enjoyed your post and all the questions you have asked as I am the type of person who loves to be challenged by others to dig even deeper in the word of God to find answers to the questions that are presented and you Jason do challenge me to dig deep and I thank you for that. We do not have to always see eye to eye as for one thing we are all on different levels of learning by how we study and even with that we at times have indifference, but the whole of each of us that binds us together is that love of Christ that has brought each of us together and makes us one in Him.

Jason you are special to me, as well as everyone, as you are growing in the Lord everyday by questioning and searching for truth as we all do. I think if we did not question then we would not grow for it is through the questions we seek the Holy Spirit to give us answers through Gods word. We do not rely on others to teach us, but do rely on the scriptures given by others so through Gods Spirit we can obtain understanding which produces knowledge in His word. Keep searching and let the questions flow as we will never exhaust the word of God and someday we will know all truth when Jesus comes back to take us home.

God bless and much love.

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