Liar, Lunatic, or Lord?
The Christian apologist C. S. Lewis put this question to his audience: “When Jesus says, ‘I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me’ (John 14:6), is he a liar, a lunatic, or the Lord?” The question is called Lewis’s trilemma.
Lewis couldn’t imagine anyone choosing “liar” or “lunatic” and hence assumed his trilemma was a surefire evangelical trap: when forced to choose, the chooser could only choose “Lord” and would convert to Christianity on the spot. Yet imagine placing a similar trilemma before Mr. Lewis himself:
When Muhammad (PBUH) claimed to have received the Holy Qur’an from Allah through the archangel Gabriel, was he a liar, a lunatic, or the Prophet of God?
When Joseph Smith claimed that God charged him with founding the one true Christian Church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, was he a liar, a lunatic, or the Prophet of God?
When Krishna claimed “all reality is My being, and yet I am greater still” (Bhagavad Gita 9:4), was he a liar, a lunatic, or the Lord?
The trilemma is simply an example of confirmation bias.
A holy rascal response to Lewis’s trilemma: “We are liars when we claim we aren’t God, lunatics when we imagine we are all of God, and Lord when we know God is all of us.”