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'Good Teacher' just isn't an option!
CS Lewis, an Oxford Don who came to faith from an atheist / agnostic background wrote a series of talks for radio broadcast that were gathered together in the book Mere Christianity. The clarity and logic of this work mean that it remains relevant to this day. Lewis is quoted for saying that we have only 3 choices about Jesus – liar, lunatic or Lord. Here is the passage in which he rules out the idea that Jesus is merely a ‘good teacher’:
A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things that Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on the 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 patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not let that open to us. He did not intend to.”
Mere Christianity p52
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Jesus would never have been crucified for being a good teacher. Even though he sometimes made enigmatic statements about his identity, there was enough about him for Rome to fear him as a king and the Jewish authorities to be troubled by his claim that he was God’s Son.
His words and his life were lived to provoke reaction. You are either ‘for him’ or ‘against him’.
Use the email address below to give feedback / ask questions to the author, whose views these pages reflect
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Six Big Questions Rev John Hibberd sixbigquestions@throughfaithmissions.org
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