“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: Iâ€™m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I donâ€™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 â€” on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg â€” 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.”
C.S. Lewis,
faith god jesus