Lord, Liar, Lunatic and Legend Argument
And there I was…It was a cool, crisp morning during the opener of elk hunting season in the Wind River mountain range of Wyoming. My buddy and I snuck out of our tents to crest a ridge well before sunlight, to glass for elk using binoculars, and listen for elk calling to each other. We could see our breath against the faint glow of the rising sun in the distance. With nothing to kill but time, he whispered to me, “You know, it doesn’t make sense that the whole world isn’t already Catholic.”
I asked him what he meant, and he replied, “It’s been 2,000 years since the Church was born, and there are still so many people who aren’t Catholic. It’s not that hard. … You get baptized as a kid, get taught the faith, and go to Mass. What’s so difficult?”
We continued this conversation while we hiked and hunted. It kept going strong during our six-hour drive back to Cheyenne.
I didn’t have the same experience of ease and convenience. For me, being Catholic wasn’t easy, and I grew up in the Church!
My conversation with my buddy taught me a valuable lesson. It is very easy to take the faith for granted, especially if we grew up in the Church. This can lead some to assume that those whom we evangelize should have an equally easy time understanding what we believe and why. The other potential pitfall is suggesting to someone that becoming Catholic will solve every problem in their life. We cannot and should not promise that.
Ultimately, the conversation taught me that even after 2,000 years, Jesus Christ remains (and should remain) a controversial figure in human history. It’s not a new dilemma. In Matthew 16:13, Jesus asked His disciples, “Who do men say that [I] am?” People will come up with so many different answers, sometimes out of ignorance, other times out of obstinance. For the Catholic, we must know who Jesus is, but He must never be so tame in our hearts and minds that we lose the sense of the Mystery of the Faith, which can only be received and accepted as a gift of grace.
Holding onto this sense of Mystery will help to keep us more humble and attuned to those we evangelize.
So, “who do people say that Jesus is?” Many people in today’s relativistic society have a tendency to think of Jesus Christ as a mere human being — one of many great moral teachers from the pages of human history. Of course, to the practicing Catholic, nothing could be further from the truth! However, to someone who doesn’t know Christ, it seems reasonable to consider Him on par with other founders of the world’s religions.
But we, as evangelists, must draw people’s attention to how and why this line of thinking is a gross misunderstanding. Here, we can give the “Lord, liar, lunatic, or legend” argument. This argument essentially challenges people to think about which of these four descriptions best fits the Person of Christ, according to the evidence. As it turns out, the evidence supports the truth that “Jesus Christ is Lord!”
How do we begin to make the Lord, Liar, Lunatic, or Legend argument? One way to begin is by telling a person that the Christian religion is not merely about following the pious teachings of a holy person. The Christian religion believes Jesus Christ to be One with and in the Godhead of the Trinity — Three Persons, One God. Then you can point out that if Jesus Christ was not truly God, he could not have been a holy man. After all, He forgave sins and allowed Himself to be worshipped—two of many things that he did and said which suggest that He thought of Himself as divine. A holy person, who is not God, does not claim to be God. Only liars and lunatics would do that.
In response to this, a person might claim that Jesus did not, in fact, claim to be divine, but that his followers falsely said that he did, making the Jesus we see in the gospels a “legend.” In this case, you can bring out strong arguments which suggest that, on the contrary, the gospels are reliable accounts of what Jesus Christ said and did.
Taken as a whole, the “Lord, Liar, Lunatic, or Legend” argument is “One Good Reason” to believe that Jesus is Lord, for non-Christian believers in God, and for others.
For a street evangelist, employing the “Lord, Liar, Lunatic, or Legend” argument might sound like this:
[Example of the Lord, Liar, Lunatic and Legend argument in a conversation]
An important note must be made here. Your objective isn’t to prove the Bible as a literal account of history in all its facets. Your goal is to show that the gospels are generally reliable accounts of history, and that from the beginning of Christianity, our beliefs were already firmly in place, specifically that Christians believed that Jesus Christ is Lord.
In the written portion of this lesson, we’ll get a bit deeper into questions of the historical reliability of the gospels.
Ultimately, the truth of the matter is that Jesus Christ is not a liar, a lunatic, or a legend. The historical witness to him is solidly founded. And He’s not just a talented teacher or a charismatic “nice guy” that millions of people decided not only to follow but also to worship because He was so nice. Jesus Christ can’t be reduced to any of those things any more than the Catholic Church can be reduced to just one of many belief systems.
So, “why does it all matter?” Because for Catholics, the fact that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, died for our sins, and rose again brings to fulfillment a history of promises that God made to humanity. Even though we could never fully grasp God’s boundless depth and richness of simplicity, we should not thereby be deterred. Whatever we can grasp, we should proclaim, and that is that Jesus Christ is, was, and will be forever, our Lord.