First off, Lewis was a product of his time—formed by the
limited scholarship of early-20th-century Christendom and shaped by a
Christianity that had already been streamlined by centuries of theological
consolidation. I sincerely question how familiar he was with the diversity of
early Christianities, especially as uncovered in the Nag Hammadi Library. The
trilemma assumes that the gospels offer a single, harmonized picture of Jesus,
but modern scholarship has taught us that the portrait is fractured, layered,
and contested. We’re not looking at one Jesus through one lens; we’re looking
at multiple portrayals through divergent theological agendas, written decades
after the events they claim to describe.
To me, Jesus does not neatly fit into Lewis’s trifecta. Not
a liar, not a lunatic, and not “Lord” in the imperial or orthodox theological
sense. He was an awakener. A voice—perhaps the clearest voice of his
time—calling people not to bow to external authorities but to turn inward, to
awaken to the divine spark within. This was not blasphemy; it was liberation.
And, ironically, it was often the religious elite who saw that awakening as
dangerous. And it was. It still is.
If we place Jesus in his context—not the theological
constructs that emerged three centuries later, but in his actual Jewish
milieu—we see a man embedded in a culture obsessed with ritual purity,
sacrifice, and sin-consciousness. The temple system functioned as the spiritual
center of Jewish life, and guilt was institutionalized. Jesus didn’t come to
affirm that system; he came to disrupt it. His actions in the temple weren’t
random acts of passion—they were prophetic gestures pointing to the futility of
a sacrificial system rooted in fear. His message was clear: God desires mercy,
not sacrifice.
This is why I see Jesus not as a savior in the penal
substitutionary sense but as an antidote to sin obsession. His
"salvation" was not a metaphysical transaction with a wrathful deity;
it was the liberation of the mind and spirit from the chains of fear, guilt,
and alienation. It was an awakening to the truth that the kingdom of God is
within you. That’s not a future promise or a post-mortem destination—it’s a
now-reality obscured by forgetfulness.
And herein lies the glaring omission in much of Lewis’s
theology and indeed much of Western Christianity: the deep Jew-Gentile divide
that runs like a fault line through the New Testament. Jesus' own ministry was
predominantly focused on the Jewish people. He spoke their language—parables,
Torah references, prophetic allusions. Yet something fundamentally shifts after
the cross event. Luke captures this subtly but powerfully. In the Gospel of
Luke, we see a Jesus rooted in Jewish thought and tradition. In Acts, by
contrast, the message becomes increasingly universal, Gentile, Hellenized. The
shift isn’t just theological—it’s civilizational. The tension between Peter and
Paul in Acts, and later between James and the Hellenistic believers, reveals a
deep rupture within the early Jesus movement. It was not a monolithic church.
It was a contested, evolving movement with multiple interpretations of what
Jesus meant and what he came to do.
This brings me to the richness that Lewis’s framework
ignores: the pluralism of early Christian thought. Gnostics, Hermetists,
Platonists—these weren't heretical outliers; they were seekers of the same
Christ-light, approaching it through different philosophical and mystical
traditions. The Valentinian view that we suffer from forgetfulness rather than
guilt resonates deeply with me. The Christ doesn’t die to appease a wrathful
God but to awaken us to our true nature. The crucifixion isn’t about punishment;
it’s about revelation—revealing the extent to which love will go to shatter our
illusions.
When I integrate Hermetic thought into this picture, the
message becomes even more profound. “As above, so below”—the Christ event
reflects a cosmic truth: the descent of spirit into matter, and the return of
that spirit to its origin, now transformed by the experience of individuation.
The Gospel of Thomas echoes this beautifully: “When you know yourselves, then
you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living
Father.” Not servants. Not wretched sinners. Children.
Jesus, in this view, is not Lord in the authoritarian sense
but Lord in the sense of master teacher—one who has realized and manifested the
divine nature fully, and whose life becomes a pattern for us to do the same. He
is the mirror held up to humanity, saying, “This is what you are. You have
forgotten, but I remember.” His miracles are signs, not proofs. His teachings
are riddles meant to destabilize, not catechize. His death is not a necessity
for cosmic bookkeeping but the inevitable result of confronting empire and ego
with transcendent truth.
Modern scholarship has done much to vindicate this view.
Scholars like Elaine Pagels, Bart Ehrman, Karen King, and others have exposed
the political, textual, and ideological developments that shaped what we now
call orthodoxy. The very formation of the canon was not a purely spiritual
process—it was deeply influenced by power, control, and the need for unity
under empire. The Council of Nicaea did not just affirm the divinity of
Jesus—it began a centuries-long process of standardizing belief and marginalizing
alternative voices.
But those voices never fully went away. They survived in the
margins, in mystics, in poets, in the Gnostic scriptures buried in desert
caves, in the Hermetic fragments passed on through whispered traditions. And
today, they are being rediscovered—not as threats to Christianity, but as
reminders of its original breadth and beauty. The Christ I follow is not
confined to a creed. He is cosmic. He is the Logos, the divine word resonating
through all traditions, all people, all creation.
So no, I do not accept that Jesus must be a liar, a lunatic,
or the Lord. That’s a false trilemma. He may have been none of those, or all
three in a symbolic sense. But most of all, he was and is an awakener—one who
came to remind us who we are, where we come from, and what lies dormant within
us.
In that sense, Jesus is not the exception. He is the
example.
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