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Leslie Weatherhead: 162 quotes2 likes

“Some laymen feel that, out of loyalty, they ought to cling to ancient ways of expressing the Christian faith and that to doubt is to sin. But doubt is not the enemy of faith. It is the growing edge of faith...”

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.227 [ellipsis added]

“The essential in Christianity, past, present and future, is loving Christ and one another, and if the Quaker finds God in the silence and the Salvation Army in the band, the Roman Catholic in the Mass and the Baptist in immersion; if the High Anglican likes incense and ceremonial, and the Methodist puts his emphasis on personal experience, the fellowship of the authentic class meeting and Charles Wesley’s hymns, why talk of disunity?”

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.29

“Of course, the human soul will always have the power to reject God, for choice is essential to its nature, but I cannot believe that anyone will finally do this.”

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.287

“The life of Jesus was a translation into humanity, of the life of God, as far as man is capable of discerning the latter. In the same way, the church is not something born on earth which grew to divine proportions and significance, but a translation into terms of space and time of the divine community eternally existent in heaven.”

Leslie Weatherhead

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The Christian Agnostic (1965)

“... Christ does not bow before the Father in supplication that God will have mercy on his own children, but rather that Christ endlessly is at work with and within man, by all the ways open to love—without coercion, or bribing, or favoritism—to effect a unity, an at-one-ment between man and God.”

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.124, [ellipsis added]

“... I believe that the annihilation of even one soul spells a defeat of God’s purposes, a denial of Christ’s teaching and a closure of heaven against those who love the lost soul.”

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.253 [ellipsis added]

“Each thinker has the right to do what Paul did, to set forth truth as he sees it, in the thought-forms of his own day and generation, as long as he does not willfully distort truth merely to fit his own ideas.”

Leslie Weatherhead

Preface, p. 21, sentence 7.
The Christian Agnostic (1965)

“Reason will take us so far on firm ground. But then there must be the leap in the same direction, if the truth of those facts in religion which are only reached by faith are to be enjoyed... It is taking the road of evidence as far as it will go and then, with the energy provided by meditating on the character of God as Christ revealed him, making a leap of faith, only to land finally in a conviction as strong as proof can supply.”

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.79 [ellipsis added]

“When we chant or say the General Confession we pray that hereafter we may live "a godly, righteous and sober life.” But I wonder sometimes if we are too sober. The impression made by the apostles was that they were drunk; intoxicated with God.”

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.154

“Why do men hug words to their hearts after the living truth has long since fled from them?”

Leslie Weatherhead

Preface, p. 18, sentence 5.
The Christian Agnostic (1965)

“When people said to me, ‘I should like to be a member of the City Temple, what must I believe?’ I used to say, ‘Only those things which appear to you to be true.”

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.30

“Divinity is not proved by having one parent instead of two. It could be argued that such a person is removed from us and could not have been truly man. As to sinlessness, we men are a wicked lot, but all the evil in our children does not come from us. Mothers can pass on evil as well as fathers, and sinlessness cannot be physically determined.”

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.99

“Let us never imagine that faith can ever be furthered by suppressing doubt, let alone by suppressing evidence. All truth is one, and religion must be as eager as science to know the truth as far as man can perceive it. If something we have treasured as truth is really contradicted by unanswerable evidence, then in the name of the God of truth we must part with it however venerable it may be. Let us never suppose that we can take over faith from our parents without examination, or believe anything merely because another says it is true. But let us not be content with a static agnosticism which never rouses itself to make inquiry. Let us examine the evidence and then in complete loyalty to its trend make a leap both of intellect and will, and, committing ourselves, acting as if all were established, try out in life the faith that carries us on wings after the hard road of fact and reason stops.”

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.231

“We must resolutely refuse to judge Jesus by the Bible. We must judge the Bible by Jesus; by the total effect of a consistent personality made upon us from all sources, including our own experience.”

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.66-67

“I am not prepared to hand over to any other person, though wise and learned, or to any institution however ancient or sure of its position, my inalienable right to search for ever-growing and ever-expanding truth. I believe the craving for security in belief is one which arises from within ourselves, and can only be met adequately from resources which are within ourselves. It seems to me that it is far more important for a soul in evolution to believe a few things because it has struggled, thought and suffered to discover and possess them, than it is for it to have a comfortable and orderly faith which it has adopted from any source outside itself.”

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.58 (Dr. Raynor Johnson: A Religious Outlook for Modern Man. 1962. Hodder and Stoughton. ppp. 122-23)

“Men glibly turn to an infallible Bible, or an infallible church, or an infallible Pope, or an infallible conscience, or an infallible Christ, and say that that authority is sufficient for them and enables them to accept truth. I believe all that kind of talk is false. It is false psychology or a failure of insight, and it is the fruit of mental laziness; a refusal to think things through. The most important convictions in religion cannot really be reached on the word of another. We can assent to propositions out of laziness of thought, or a desire to please, or an inability to argue, but one of the reasons why, in a crisis, men often feel let down by their religion is that they glibly assented to this or that, and falsely called their assent ‘belief.”

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.50

“It is from this viewpoint that he writes in this unconventional book. He makes a strong case for his contention that loyalty to Christ and to his spirit can go hand in hand with the rejection of unlikely theological dogma and creed.”

Leslie Weatherhead

The Christian Agnostic (1965)

“Christianity must have a marvelous inherent power or the churches would have killed it long ago.”

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.163

“Any man, to the extent to which he is good, reveals the nature of God.”

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.38

“The eyes would soon grow dim if they had no correspondence with light. The lungs would soon perish without any correspondence with air. The mind that has no relation with truth is said to be in a state of unbalance, and the spirit too must have some traffic with God, its relevant Environment, if it is to maintain its fullest health.”

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.220