C.S. Lewis:
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 a 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.I read Mere Christianity about years ago, and this most famous paragraph in the book has since remained in my memory. But hearing a friend mention it recently, I remembered something that had occurred to me some time ago. It is a point so obvious that I am amazed that a man of Lewis's intelligence never noticed it:
Take the above paragraph, substitute the words Catholic Church for Jesus and change a few of the nouns accordingly - and the argument still holds. That is to say, the truth claims of Catholic ecclesiology are just as scandalous as those of Christology. To say I'm ready to accept the Catholic Church as a great source of moral and theological wisdom, beauty and holiness, but I don't accept her claim to be the one Holy and Apostolic Church, alone possessing the fullness of truth and the means of salvation is to speak patronising nonsense.
For if the Catholic Church is merely a great source of moral and theological wisdom, beauty and holiness - one of many, of course - then She would not make such a claim and anathemize those who reject it. The Catholic Church, like Christ her head, can be considered to be true, crazy or evil. There is no other option. And Lewis, who of all people should have known better, chose to hold a nonsensical and patronizing great moral teacher view of the Catholic Church throughout his life.
Reflecting on this, I find myself increasingly less offended by anti-Catholicism. Because faced with the truth claims of the Catholic Church, there are only two completely sane responses: conversion and anti-Catholicism. The latter is obviously the wrong response, but it reveals a healthier philosophy than the qualified admiration of certain of our "separated brethren".