Leslie Weatherhead: Quotes about Christ

“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

Love , God , Silence , Past

“... 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]

Love , God , Children , Way

“... 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]

Love , God , Soul , Christ

“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]

God , Truth , Faith , Religion

“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

Men , Truth , Religion , Feeling

“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)

Books , Strong , Christ , Loyalty

“Christianity is a love relationship with Christ far below—or above, if you like—differences of belief or different ways of worshiping, far above differences of language or of color.”

Leslie Weatherhead

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

Love , Color , Way , Christ

“His death is a revelation of the nature of God, and a pledge that God will stand by me until I am made one with him... It was a revelation of God’s reaction to human sin. To be hurt and hindered by it, but to go on loving, and go on loving, and go on loving, without reprisal or answering violence until men see what sin is and what sin does, and turn with loathing from that which has so grievously hurt the greatest Lover of the human soul... It is not what God once was, or Christ once did, that can save us, but what Christ once did is the sacrament and visible pledge to us of what He is and does for ever... He committed himself to the task of recovering all humanity to God, however long it might take, however arduous the way, however unrewarding the toil.”

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.120-123 [ellipsis added]

Love , Death , Men , God

“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)

Life , Way , Feeling , Passion

“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)

God , Law , Nature , Universe

“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

Heart , Christ , Loyalty

“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

Truth , Christ

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

Leslie Weatherhead

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

Lovers , Christ

“I suspect that, living on the moral and spiritual levels on which Christ lived, he must have had temptations so subtle that I should not have had enough spiritual sensitiveness to see them as temptations at all.”

Leslie Weatherhead

p100
The Christian Agnostic (1965)

Christ

“I would like to be able with authority to present the case for believing in God, but I would far rather be an authoritative argument for believing in God. The saints are the best argument for Christianity. They have the highest authority in the world for they coerce us and yet our coercion is a willing one. They drive us along the way which in our best moments we want to go. When we read their lives, and even more when we touch their lives with our own in day-to-day living, we meet Christianity’s unanswerable argument. We know, with an authority nothing can resist or overcome, that Christianity changes lives and that if Jesus Christ were given a chance he would change the world.”

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.63

God , World , Way , Change

“We use the word divine because the word human is not big enough. He is so much more like God than any other. But the word “divine” is really only an expression of Christian agnosticism. I am quite ready to say that I believe in the divinity of Christ, but I do not know what it means, nor can I find anyone who can explain what it means, least of all some of the theologians from Paul onwards. I sincerely believe that he is the Savior of the World, and if I am immediately challenged about what he saves men from, my answer is that he saves men from the utter despair which would fall upon a thoughtful man, who, conscious of high aims and immense possibilities within himself, was condemned to try to achieve them without any aid save his own, and purely human help of his fellows.”

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.94

Men , God , World , Help