“The aut Deus aut malus homo” – Boyace Van Harlan Jr., PhD
C.S. Lewis popularized his “Trilemma” in a BBC radio talk and in his writings. It is sometimes summarized either as “Lunatic, Liar, or Lord”, or as “Mad, Bad, or God”.
“Christ either deceived mankind by conscious fraud, or He was Himself deluded and self-deceived, or He was Divine. There is no getting out of this trilemma. It is inexorable.” Lewis went on to write: “I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. 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 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 left that open to us. He did not intend to. … Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.”
Jesus was and is God! He is to be honored and worshiped. He is the God that saves! I agree with Lewis! Even the late great president Ronald Reagan used Lewis’s argument in 1978, in a written reply to a liberal Methodist minister who said that he did not believe Jesus was the son of God. .[14] A variant has also been quoted by Bono. The Lewis version has been cited by Charles Colson as the basis of his conversion to Christianity Stephen Davis, a supporter of Lewis and of this argument, argues that it can show belief in the Incarnation as rational. Lewis refers to this argument as “the aut Deus aut malus homo” (“either God or a bad man”), a reference to an earlier version of the argument used by Henry Parry Liddon in his 1866 Bampton Lectures, in which Liddon argued for the divinity of Jesus based on a number of grounds, including the claims he believed Jesus made. Jesus is Lord! If he can’t be Lord of all He will not be Lord at all!