Part 1 can be found here.
Part 2 can be found here.
Part 3 can be found here.
Part 4 can be found here.
The Main Argument
There are only five possible answers to the question: If Jesus is not God, what is he? The possible answers/alternatives to Christ's divinity are:
The Dilemma: Lord or Liar? Aut deus aut homo malus ("Either God or a bad man.")
- Jesus either Lord, liar, lunatic, guru, or myth.
- He could not possibly be a liar, lunatic, guru, or myth.
- Therefore "Jesus is Lord" (the earliest Christian creed) if he did not lie about who he was, or a bad man (if he did).
The Dilemma: Lord or Liar? Aut deus aut homo malus ("Either God or a bad man.")
- Jesus was either God (if he did not lie about who he was) or a bad man (if he did).
- But Jesus was not a bad man. (Very few will challenge the premise that Jesus was not a bad man.)
- Therefore jesus was (is) God.
Someone who claims to be God and is not, is not a good man but a bad man. Merely a "good man" is one thing Jesus could not possible be.* By claiming to be God he eliminated that possibility. For a liar is not a good man, and one who lies about his essential identity is a liar, and a mere man who claims to be God lies about his essential identity.
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*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 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. 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 patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
-C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
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