C.S. Lewis - The Good Teacher

C.S. Lewis, a popular British theologian, continues, "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 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, The MacMillan Company, 1960, pp. 40-41.)

"And a certain ruler asked him, saying, Good Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life? And Jesus said to him, Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone" (Luke 18.18-19) to indicate He is not just some Good Teacher for He is God. In essence He said, "Do you know who I AM?" Undoubtedly the man did not catch the implications (see Mark 10.17-31, Matth. 19.16-30 and the rest of Luke 18.18-30).