– from Mere Christianity

“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 a 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.