Leslie Weatherhead: Trending quotes

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Leslie Weatherhead: 162 quotes2 likes

“Behavior that was innocent and amoral on the animal level of man’s development became immoral as man moved upward on his evolutionary path, and, assisted by prophets, seers and saints, higher and higher moral peaks were discerned. When we come to Jesus, the moral demand made upon man by his new insights was impossible to reach were it not that he offered power to become and claimed himself to be the Way as well as the Goal.”

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.243-244

“It is so very important to remember that, while all healing is of God, we must find the answer to the question, "Which is the most relevant way of cooperating with God in the case of this particular patient? It may be surgery, or medicine, or psychiatry, or prayer. Prayer is not relevant in many cases, save as an aid to the patient’s mental condition, and God is not going to make of prayer an easy magic, just because we have not used our human resources of money and men in wiser ways.””

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.224

“... there is only one authority... that is the authority which truth itself possesses when it is perceived to be true by the individual concerned... the alternative procedure, the delegation to external authority, must itself follow an individual’s subjective decision.”

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.49, [ellipsis added]

“I reject unchecked subjectivism as the authority in religion. No one can suppose that the final authority in religion is what the individual happens to think is true, unless his decision is preceded by long meditation, the weighing of all the available evidence and prayer for guidance.”

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.58

“I believe passionately that Christianity is a way of life, not a theological system with which one must be in intellectual agreement. I feel that Christ would admit into discipleship anyone who sincerely desired to follow him, and allow that disciple to make his creed out of his experience; to listen, to consider, to pray, to follow, and ultimately to believe only those convictions about which the experience of fellowship made him sure.”

Leslie Weatherhead

Preface, p. 16, sentences 2,3.
The Christian Agnostic (1965)

“I hold that the self-authentication of truth, or, in other words, seeing, is the authority, and the only authority there is in the field of religion.”

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.52

“I believe that all men, whatever their religion or lack of it, pass on into another phase of being, to another class in God’s school.”

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.266

“No words used in the Gospels can legitimately be twisted to mean unending punishment, and indeed, such an expression is self-contradictory. The main motive of punishment surely is to reform the sufferer; in school, to make a better scholar; in the State, to make a better citizen. If the punishment goes on forever when does the sufferer benefit by the punishment or use the lesson he has learned so painfully? If Hell were endless it would be valueless.”

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.286

“... I have excluded the idea of the Fall of Man... man has made a long climb from the status of the animal until the time when he could recognize right from wrong. That recognition, at first, was based on behavior that paid, that avoided the retribution of the tribe and the gods, and that enabled the primitive society to function. Yet, however lowly in origin—and I am referring to a period centuries before right seemed to be worth following simply because it was right, or because man’s dignity and status were sustained by doing right; centuries before right was conceived as pleasing to God because he was holy and righteous—that earliest recognition of a difference between right and wrong was an immense advance, even though wrong was chosen.”

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.236-237 [ellipsis added]

“My plea is not for an impossible subjectivism. But the so-called infallible church or book has no power unless I feel that what it says is true. And who can decide that but myself?”

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.57)

“In my opinion, the strongest evidence of his sinlessness is that, if one had sinned, unless one were vicious, one would never let others think one sinless.”

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.100

“The universe must be law-abiding, and if Christ suspended law it would be a criticism of his Father as one whose laws were inadequate for certain possible situations which might arise. "We say," said St. Augustine profoundly, "that all portents (miracles) are contrary to nature, but they are not so. For how is that contrary to nature which happens by the will of God, since the will of so mighty a Creator is certainly the nature of each created thing?"”

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.106 (Augustine: The City of God. 21:8)

“We experience moments in which we accept ourselves, because we feel that we have been accepted by that which is greater than we. If only more such moments were given us! For it is such moments that make us love our life, that make us accept ourselves, not in our goodness and self-complacency, but in our certainty of the eternal meaning of our life.”

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.77-78, (Paul Tillich: The Shaking of the Foundations. 1963. Pelican Books. p. 164

“Paul was a great theologian as well as a great saint and a heroic missionary, but we are not bound to imprison our minds in his theories. Newton was a great scientist, but it is no disparagement of Newton to realize that even schoolboys today know more than he did about atoms. Thought moves on in every field of inquiry.”

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.117

“If Christ can—and he does—hold in utter loyalty the hearts of St. Francis and John Knox, of Calvin and St. Theresa, of General Booth and Pope John, of Billy Graham and Albert Schweitzer, who hold irreconcilably different beliefs about him, how can belief and uniformity of belief be vitally important? Further, where in the Gospels are we ever told that Christ demanded belief in some theological proposition before he would admit a seeker into discipleship?”

Leslie Weatherhead

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

“Every denomination within organized Christianity contains a valuable truth, but none contains all truth. Each mirrors at its best something of Christ but all are only caricatures of him.”

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.28

“For myself, I refuse mentally to close the canon as if inspiration had run out! Why should we follow traditional thought more than modern thought?”

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.65

“I am saying that truth may certainly be true whatever my opinion may be, but it has no authority with me until I perceive it to be true.”

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.56

“The factor that makes us question the authority of the expert is that we are personally emotionally involved in the result.”

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.53

“All lovers of Christ can believe in him without believing the same things about him.”

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.161