A Frightening Alternative

"And the high priest said to Him, 'I adjure You by the living God, that You tell us whether You are the Christ, the Son of God.'  Jesus said to him, 'You have said it yourself; nevertheless I tell you, hereafter you will see the Son of man sitting at the right hand of power, and coming on the clouds of heaven'" (Matthew 26:63-64).

I am trying to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about [Christ]: '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.

We are faced, then, with a frightening alternative.  This man we are talking about either was (and is) just what He said or else a lunatic, or something worse.

-C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity