07/10/2021 – Saturday Apologetics Series – Divinity of Christ – 2 of 3 – “Arguments for His Divinity”
Good morning! Again, my text, is the “Pocket Handbook of Christian Apologetics” by Peter Kreeft and Ronald K. Tacelli. It is a fair amount of text to be typed verbatim from chapter 8 – page #60 to page #66. But as I have noted, if it motivates you to purchase a copy and to pour over the 141 pages slowly and deliberately with prayer, than so much the better. 1 Peter 3:15 and Romans 12:2, are just two critical verses, a “call to arms” for Christian remnant warriors. I haven’t read through my copy as often as the Bible, but it would be in 2nd place. Let’s get started.
“Arguments for Christ’s Divinity
We now move to stronger arguments: arguments for the actuality, no just the possibility, of Christ’s divinity.
Christ’s trustworthiness. Everyone who reads the Gospels agrees that Jesus was a good and wise man, a great and profound teacher. Most nonreligious people, and even many people of other religions, like Gandhi, see him as history’s greatest moral teacher. He is, in short , eminently trustworthy.
But what a trustworthy teacher teaches can be trusted. If he is trustworthy, then we should trust him , especially about his own identity. If we do not trust him about that , then we cannot say he is trustworthy, that is , wise and good.
The impossibility of the alternative. What is the alternative to the conclusion that Jesus is God? What do unbelievers say to this argument? Jesus claimed to be God, and Jesus is believable, therefore Jesus is God. The conclusion follows from the premises. Which premise can be denied?
Concerning the first one – that Jesus claimed to be God – perhaps the New Testament texts lie. Perhaps traditional Christianity is a myth, a fairy tale, a fantasy. But this raises quesitons even more unaswerable than the question of how a man could be God. Here are five such questions.
- If the Gospels lie, who invented the lie, and for what reason? Was it Jesus’ apostles? What did they get out of the lie? Martyrdom – hardly an attractive temptation. A liar always has some selfish motive.
- Why did thousands suffer torture and death for this lie if they knew it was a lie? What force sent Christians to the lions’ den with hymns on their lips? What lie ever transformed the world like that?
- If it was not a deliberate lie but a hallucination or a myth sincerely mistaken for a literal truth, then who were the naive fools who first believed it? Imagine this: the transcendent God who for millennia had strictly forbidden his chosen people to confuse him with a creature as the pagans did, this Creator=God became a creature, a man – a crucified criminal. Hardly a myth that arises naturally in the Jewish mind!
- And if it was not the Jews but the Gentiles who started the myth, where did the myth come from in the New Testament? Of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament, twenty-five were written by the Jews.
- Whether Jews or Gentiles started the myth, they could not have done so during the lifetime of those who knew the real Jesus, for it would been publicly refused by the eyewitnesses who knew the facts.
Aquinas argues that if the incarnation did not really happen, then an even more unbelievable miracle happened: the conversion of the world by the biggest lie in history and the moral transformation of lives into unselfishness, detachment from worldly pleasures and radically new heights of holiness all by a mere myth.
Lord, liar, or lunatic? The dilemma is as old as the earliest Christian apologists: Aut deus out homo malus, “Either God or a bad man,” That is the classic argument. Spelled out, it looks like this:
- Jesus was either God (if he did not lie about who he was) or a bad man (if he did).
- But Jesus was not a bad man.
- Therefore Jesus was (is) God.
Few would challenge the second premise. But if the first premise is added, the conclusion necesarily follows. Therefore, non-Christians must challenge the first premise. What justifies this premise?
Common sense. Someone who claims to be God and is not, is not a good man but a bad man.
Merely a “good man” is one thing Jesus could not possibly be. By claiming to be God eliminated that possibility. For a liar is not a good man, and one who lies about his essential identity is a liar, and a mere man who claims to be God lies about his essential identity.
It is attractive and comfortable to say that Jesus was neither a bad man nor God, but a good man. To say he was a bad man offends Christians, and to say he was God offends non-Christians. To say neither offends no one. Therefore non-Christians want to say neither.
But that position offends logic.
Either Jesus believed his own claim to be God or he did not. If he did, he was a lunatic. If he did not, he was a liar. Unless, of course, he was (is) God. Why could he not be either a liar or a lunatic? Because of his character: he was wise and he was good. A lunatic is the opposite of wise, and a liar is the opposite of good.
There are lunatics in asylums who sincerely believe they are God. The “divinity complex” is a recognized form of pshychopathology. Its character traits are well known: egotism, narcissism, inflexibility, dullness, predictability, inability to understand and love others as they really are and creatively relate to others. In other words, this is the polar opposite of the personality of Jesus! More than any other man in history, Jesus had the three essential virtues every human being needs and wants: wisdom, love and creativity.
If, on the other hand, Jesus was a liar, then he had to have been the most clever, cunning, Machiavellian, blasphemously wicked, satanic deceiver the world has ever known, successfully seducing billions into giving up their eternal souls into his hands. If orthodox Christianity is a lie, it is by far the biggest and baddest lie ever told, and Jesus is the biggest and baddest liar. But in every way Jesus was morally impeccable. He had all the virtues, both soft and hard, tender and tough. Further, he died for his “lie.” What would motivate a selfish, evil liar to do that?
Suppose it was not Jesus himself but his disciples who invented the “lie”? The same arguments apply to the disciples, or to whoever first invented the “lie.”
- They do not manifest the psychologgical traits of liars.
- There was no motive; they all got out of it the same thing Jesus did: suffering and death. They proved their sincerityby their martyrdom.
- They could no have believed it would be successful because they would have known how every Jew would be shokced and horrified at this blasphemy.
What if it was his disciples who were the lunatics or the sincerely deceived ones? Suppose his divinity was their own idea that they read back into him and wrote back into the texts of the Gospels? The same arguments apply to whoever “invented” Christianity, whether it was Jesus, his apostles, the early church.
- The writers of the Gospels certainly were not lunatics. If they invented their Jesus, they invented the most compelling fictional character in history. No lunatic could have invented a single chapter of the Gospels, much less all of it.
- Nor could lunany have changed so many lives for the better for so many centuries. Consider the enormity of the lunacy of confusing a man with God, then consider the enormity of the change wrought in millions of lives by this “lunacy” (read, e.g. Augustine’s Confessions), and you will see the size of the camel, you have to swallow to avoid swallowing the gnat of faith.
- What accounts for the deception of whoever was first “deceived”? It is as hard to account for the origin of the lunacy as to account for the origin and motivation of the ‘lie.’ “
Blessings to y’all’s day! ; Soli Deo Gloria!
Love,
Your brother in Christ,
Jimmy