Archive for February 2007
Critical Thinking
I finished reading Mere Christianity for the 3rd time. It’s a very good book but I think that it’ll be the last time I read it. Lewis was a brilliant thinker and writer and he does an amazing job of bringing the Christian perspective to people who aren’t Christians. I don’t know if I’m just becoming more cynical but I started picking up on things that I no longer agree with. Here is the classic example:
“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.”
This idea has been used ad nauseam for as long as I’ve been a Christian. He leaves no room for half-heartedness in this quote; the reader is either for Jesus or drastically against Him, and yet his previous pages contradict what he is doing here. Earlier in the book he says, “Besides being complicated, reality, in my experience, is usually odd.” After fighting for an un-simplistic view of life and religion, Lewis ditches it in, what seems to be, the hopes of putting us in a corner by only giving three options to the question of who Jesus was. I think this argument is flawed because if (for arguments sake) Jesus was truly under a delusion and yet was still (by everyone’s account) a great moral teacher, would His delusion make his moral teachings any less moral? Of course not! Nothing of Jesus behavior took away from his own morality, therefore it could be argued that Jesus was a great moral teacher, but also delusional.
Of course, I believe that Jesus is God. I bring this argument up for one reason, this idea has been used for over 60 years! When are we going to stop relying on the occasional great apologist to supply answers and really start defending the faith ourselves?
The time has come for Christians to start thinking critically about our faith, not to destroy it but to defend it.
