Talk:Mere Christianity
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I think it would be useful if someone placed a short description of the reasonable alternatives to the "Trilemma." I don't know them myself, so I would be interested in learning, and I'm sure this is an area that many people are curious about.
That probably wouldn't be helpful in an article like this, which is meant to be a presentation of the ideas rather than a criticism of them. But if you're interested, the obvious rejoinder to Lewis' argument is that the picture of Jesus presented in the Gospels may not be an accurate one in every respect (or, perhaps, in any respect!) and that any claims to divinity attributed to him are spurious. Thus it is perfectly consistent to say that Jesus was a great moral teacher, but he was subsequently regarded as divine by his followers (although note that explicit claims that Jesus was divine are hard to find in the New Testament anyway) and this accounts for the picture presented by the Gospels, especially that of John. In fact this is what most biblical scholars believe anyway, and had Lewis researched modern biblical scholarship he would have seen the need to present a defence of his hidden premise that Jesus really did speak the words attributed to him in the Gospel of John.
- On my userpage I extend the trilemma to a quintlemma (adding "nonexistent" and "misunderstood"). It's just a list, no formal criticism, although I believe it covers all possibilities ;) Arch O. La 00:25, 20 February 2006 (UTC)
The trilemma is absurd. Besides assuming that the Bible is true (and therefore being a bit circular), and ignoring the ambiguity of the Bible, it inappropriately assigns the labels. A "lunatic" is more than merely a person who is mentally ill; many of the mentally ill are quite high-functioning (and it is incredibly insulting to the mentally ill to assert that mere mental illness disqulaifies one from the category of "great moral teacher). And not every false statement is a lie (even if it is known to be false by the speaker-- were the parables lies?), and not everyone who states a lie is a "liar".Heqwm 04:20, 9 September 2007 (UTC)
- It also needlessly throws the baby out with the bathwater. People have argued that Jesus is a good moral teacher on the merits of the morality he teaches (as displayed in the bible) so even if his claims to divinity are rejected, the point (I think) of arguing that he was a good moral teacher was to not ignore everything coming from Jesus just because one doesn't accept the claims to divinity. Ƶ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 21:13, 9 September 2007 (UTC)
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[edit] source of title Mere Christianity
As I recall, in The Narnian, there was discussion of an earlier work titled Mere Christianity that was considered by Lewis and seems to have influenced his thinking. A discussion of this and a link to this would be very interesting.
[edit] source of title, "Mere Christianity"
The term was coined by Richard Baxter, a 17th century Puritian writer.
[edit] Review
There's a review on Mere Christianity at the Official Time-Waster's Guide here. It actually contains a great deal of descriptive material, so may be helpful for this article. The Jade Knight 08:03, 8 March 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Joy
Does the discussion of joy belong in a section titled "Arguments for a Moral Law"?Heqwm 04:14, 9 September 2007 (UTC)
- I think so, but it could probably do with some clarification or elaboration. Ƶ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 21:15, 9 September 2007 (UTC)
