When
Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do
people say the Son of Man is?”
They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still
others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”
“But
what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?”
Simon
Peter answered, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God."
Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of
Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven”
(Matthew 16:13-16)
Some people suggest that Jesus asked these questions because He was
feeling insecure. To me, it's more of the question a good teacher asks students
to show them that they are ready to move on (e.g., from addition and
subtraction to multiplication.) Other
people claim that Jesus never claimed to be God or the Messiah (for which the
Latin word is "Christ.") I think rewarding Peter for his answer is
making a claim. One doesn't generally tell someone that God gave them an answer
if the answer is wrong.
Today, the same question needs to be asked, even among those who call
themselves "Christian." C. S. Lewis
dealt with this in part:
"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 the 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[sic]
nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to
us. He did not intend to. ... Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a
lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or
unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God. [1]
The two main ways that I've heard people get around this are to 1) to
ignore the question, and 2) to say that the claims purportedly made by Jesus
and His disciples were inserted as much as 400 years later. This doesn't
resolve the conflict because if material was added, we cannot know - we can
only assume - what Jesus actually said or did and what was inserted. We are
left with the same problem. He cannot be considered a great man, or a great teacher
if we cannot trust His words to be His own
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On the Calendar
Birthday of Samuel Houston
[1] Lewis, C.S., Mere
Christianity, London: Collins, 1952, pp.
54–56. (In all editions, this is Bk. II, Ch. 3, "The Shocking
Alternative.")
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