A Tragic Fall

In the early morning of September 6 way back in 1934 Frank Lenwood suffered a tragic and fatal fall.  He had always been fond of mountaineering and was mountaineering in the French Alps when he slipped and fell to his death in the climbing accident on the Aiguille d’Argentieres.  He was one month short of his sixtieth birthday. 

But that was not the worst of it.  One day a dozen years before that in August 1922 while he was cycling along a Welsh lane on holiday, he confided to this wife Gertie that his academic studies had reached the point where he said that “he suddenly realized that he could no longer recognize the Lordship of Jesus Christ”.  As he explained in his book Jesus—Lord or Leader? “The accumulation of small discoveries and unrelated facts of criticism which I had accepted one by one, had organized themselves into a conclusion entirely new to me ... I found that for all his uniqueness I believed Jesus to be divine only in the sense in which it is possible to use the word of any other good and great man”. 

That was a much greater and more tragic fall.  And it was all the more tragic because at the time he was the Foreign Secretary of the London Missionary Society and thereafter its Honourary Director.  He took a couple of years before he handed in his resignation, and even then he still acknowledged that rejecting the traditional belief in the divinity of Christ did not mean that the missionary endeavors to which he had devoted his life were mistaken.  Shortly after his change of heart (i.e. his apostasy) he wrote to his wife, “I am abundantly clear that the thing that lies behind ordinary Christian preaching is a terrific and lifegiving reality. The message of Xtianity mayn’t be what we thought it was in the past, but there’s no doubt that it’s the power of God unto salvation. I believe in Foreign Missions more than ever, though it may be impossible for me to keep on serving them in this form.”

The world has forgotten Mr. Lenwood and now only a few scholarly types have ever heard of him.  I mention him here because many people in the West share his view that “Jesus is ‘divine’ only in the sense in which it is possible to use the word of any other good and great man”.  How then should we respond to Mr. Lenwood and his modern descendants?

A full response is, of course, beyond the reach of simple blog post.  But even in a blog post one can still make a defence of the Church’s two-millenia conviction that Jesus of Nazareth, while being 100% human and a Jew who worshipped the God of Israel, was still also 100% divine.  The defence may be summed up in two words:  “John’s Gospel”.

There are a number of passages in John’s Gospel which strongly suggest that Jesus claimed to be divine.  He said, “I and the Father are one” (10:30).  He said, “Before Abraham was born, I am” (8:58), thereby claiming to be the “I am” who revealed Himself to Moses at the burning bush (see Exodus 3:14).  Even apart from John’s Gospel we still find utterances of Jesus which in the mouth of a Jew constitute claims to equality with God—i.e. claims to divinity, for all Jews knew that no one was equal with God.  What claims?—things like claiming the authority to forgive sins (Mark 2:5-12), things like claiming that He would one day judge every soul that ever lived on the basis of what they thought of Him and did to Him (Matthew 8:22-23, 25:31f).

One might well reply to this—and doubtless Mr. Lenwood did reply—that there were ways of interpreting Christ’s words other than the way the Church traditionally interpreted them.  That is true, especially if one rejects the Church’s Tradition and assumes that one’s own interpretation is correct while the consensus interpretation of thousands of Christians across the miles and across the centuries is wrong.  True, I suppose, but beside the point.

For the point is this:  however we might interpret the texts John reports in his Gospel, John himself believed Jesus to be divine.  The interpretation of the texts may be disputable in the sense that some men have disputed it.  But it should be beyond reasonable dispute that John believed in Jesus’ divinity.

We see this from the emphatic beginning of John’s Gospel and its dramatic conclusion.  John begins by saying, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.  All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being” (1:1-3).  His Gospel story reaches a climax with the confession of Thomas after the resurrection when Thomas falls down in adoration before the risen Christ and says to Him, “My Lord and my God!” (20:28). 

It could hardly be more emphatic:  “…and the Word was God”.  Thomas cried to Christ, “My Lord and my God!”  Hindus might ascribe divinity to many things and the pagan Greeks and Romans could suggest that men could become gods after death—but not the Jews.  For the Jews knew that the distance between divinity and humanity, between the Creator and His creatures, was infinite and fixed.  John, a Jew, was not ascribing demi-godhood to Jesus or saying that He was semi-divine.  For Jews the category of “semi-divinity” did not and could not exist.  John was therefore ascribing full divinity to the man Jesus Christ.

The interpretation of the texts we find in John’s Gospel or the other Gospels must therefore be read as consistent with this. And (let’s be clear) John was in a position to know the truth about Christ for he, along with the rest of the Twelve, were with Him day and night for months on end, listening to Him, watching Him, and had been taken into His confidence. 

One could, I suppose, reduce the argument to a matter of probability:  if you can’t trust one of the Twelve to know whether Jesus was claiming divinity, who can you trust?  Frank Lenwood?  John Spong? Richard Dawkins?  Yourself?

A quote from C. S. Lewis is apropos: “The idea that any man spoke the same language, shared the same habitual imagery and unconscious assumptions, and yet be transparent to those who have none of these advantages, is in my opinion preposterous.  There is an a priori improbability in it which almost no argument and no evidence could counterbalance” (from his Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism).  If the Twelve who shared all these advantages believed that Jesus was claiming to be divine, they may be trusted in their reportage.

I therefore regard it as a certainty that Jesus of Nazareth claimed to be God and not (as Lenwood opined) merely “a good and great man”. 

Those who are very bold might suggest that Jesus was lying when He made His claims or that He was crazy or both.  That is just where the miracles come in and bring their testimony.  In the words of one of the crowd who saw Jesus open the eyes of a man blind from birth, “How can a man who is a sinner do such signs?” (John 9:16). 

And then there is the miracle of all miracles, Christ’s resurrection from the dead.  Even if one concluded that Christ’s miracles were done by Satanic power so that He cast out demons by the prince of the demons (see Mark 3:22) not even Satan could raise a man from the dead.  God alone has the power of life and death.  The empty tomb and the apostles’ repeated testimony that they saw Christ and ate and drank with Him after His resurrection is as much proof that God raised Him from the dead as one could wish in a court of law.  And this resurrection validates His claims.

Mr. Frank Lenwood suffered a terrible fall, not in the French Alps but in a Welsh laneway for it was there that he fell away from Christ to the eternal detriment of his soul.  Orthodox Christians will always exercise a certain restraint when it comes to pronouncing with certainty of the eternal fate of any man since we leave all judgment with the Judge.  But it must be said, “Frank, it doesn’t look good.” 

Let us learn from his fall and remain upright.  As St. Paul once wrote to his Corinthian converts, “Let anyone who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall” (1 Corinthians 10:12).