C. S. Lewis Meets N. T. Wright

On October 26, 2007 I delivered a paper at a C. S. Lewis conference at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina. The title of that paper was: C. S. Lewis Meets N. T. Wright: The Trilemma Re-Visited. In that paper I considered Lewis's statement in Mere Christianity about the divinity of Christ:

"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 patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."

Lewis's argument for the divinity of Christ has recently been critiqued by N. T. Wright, author, theologian, New Testament scholar and Bishop of Durham, England. In my paper I examine Wright's critique, comparing and contrasting Wright and Lewis. You can read the full paper online at www.willvaus.com/csl_meets_n_t_wright.

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