Friday, January 13, 2012

Mere mythologies and a false trilemma

I have to be honest. I am a bit disappointed in this next section I'm reading of Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis. The writing style is excellent and very easy to read through, but I was hoping for something a bit more profound. In the beginning of the book Lewis was very thought provoking while making a case for the existence of God, but was careful not to jump to saying that it was the Christian God. Now in this second section of the book he is discussing what Christianity believes about Genesis, Jesus, etc. This felt like a jump to me as he really did not explain why we should suddenly start talking about Christianity since he was so careful not to make that assumption in the first part of the book. Of course I knew he was going to get to Christianity at some point, I had just hoped there would be a bridge from the philosopher's God to the Christian God.

Mere mythologies
Lewis also made a strange comment that really raises the eyebrows. When listing the clues God gave us for His existence Lewis mentions that "He [God] sent the human race what I call good dreams: I mean those queer stories scattered all through the heathen religions about a god who dies and comes to life again and, by his death, has somehow given new life to men." It's amazing that he took this as evidence of God's existence. I take it as evidence of stories from other religions being borrowed and used in Christianity. The early christian apologist Justin Martyr makes the same admission that Lewis makes, but he had a different spin on it. He blames demons for spreading myths that were similar to Christianity. "They have been uttered by the influence of the wicked demons, to deceive and lead astray the human race" (Justin Martyr, 1st Apology, Ch. 54). Justin explains that the demons were able to read the prophets and had some ideas about how the messiah would come and so they influenced heathen mythologies to appear similar to Christianity. If you are interested in reading about these mythologies, here is a Wikipedia article about some of them: Jesus Christ in comparative mythologies.

A false trilemma
One other thing I'll mention about Mere Christianity is the argument C. S. Lewis makes that Jesus has to be one of three things: a Liar, a Lunatic, or the Lord. This sounds nice, but it's not a good idea to corner oneself into only these three possibilities. The biggest problem is that it leaves out the possibility that Jesus was made into a Legend. It also makes a huge jump in saying that he automatically has to be God. He could have just been a prophet that God chose to raise from the dead. There are plenty of other possibilities too and let's not forget that we don't even know if everything Jesus "said" in the gospels were his words or not.

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