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Leslie Weatherhead
81 quotes
“Dr. Weatherhead contends that the theological demands of Christianity are a barrier to an honest participation by a great number of people and that many agnostics are much closer to belief in the true God than many churchgoers.”
Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1893–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Traditionalists may be shocked by the opinions expressed here; others will come to welcome them. Regardless of your own views, The Christian Agnostic demands to be read and pondered.”
Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In fact, many professing agnostics are nearer belief in the true God than are many conventional church-goers who believe in a body that does not exist whom they miscall God.”
Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Since I have talked with many self-styled * atheists, I have come to believe that the true species does not exist, and that atheism, so-called, is either an emotional deviation in the same category as neurotic illness and with a similar causation, or else the denial of the existence of a mythical figure who certainly does not exist.”
Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1893–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Why do men hug words to their hearts after the living truth has long since fled from them?”
Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Though not as important as loving, believing certainly matters. It matters so much that, if it has any relevance to the business of living, it must be born in the individual mind, not thrust by church authorities on others.”
Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1893–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1893–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Christianity of tomorrow will embrace all truth wherever it is found or however men have come to apprehend it, whether through specifically Christian teaching or through Buddhism or Mohammedanism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Taoism, Zoroastrianism or even through the bleak desert of apparent atheism.”
Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1893–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1893–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1893–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the cases of nearly all of us, what our fathers were, we are, and we make up our reasons afterwards.”
Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1893–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When I really believe a thing, I mean that its truth possesses me. . . Truth is self-authenticating, and when it possesses me, nothing can shake it from its enthronement until some greater truth displaces it or gives it less prominence.”
Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We still make of prime importance matters about which Jesus said nothing. How can a matter be fundamental in a religion when the founder of the religion never mentioned it?”
Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No argument or logic carries the same degree of conviction as insight, and it is the kind of conviction by which we know that dawn over the Alps on a perfect morning is beautiful. Argument cannot produce it and doubt cannot remove it. The outward beauty meets the inward recognition and in our hearts we know.”
Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Any man, to the extent to which he is good, reveals the nature of God.”
Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Thought must be free to range as it likes over all phenomena and philosophy, unhampered by compulsions. A man cannot be bludgeoned by vulgar threats of damnation, into accepting that what other people say is true.”
Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“. . . 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 (1893–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1893–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The factor that makes us question the authority of the expert is that we are personally emotionally involved in the result.”
Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1893–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1893–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1893–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“. . . while we must not thrust beliefs on people, belaboring their minds to try to make them accept orthodoxy, we may set these same beliefs before people, showing them the rich truth which we have found and which they may come to receive as their questing mind develops and grows.”
Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1893–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1893–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is no authority for God’s existence except the inward conviction that is born of mystical experience.”
Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1893–1976) first seen 1963 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p.77-78, (Paul Tillich: The Shaking of the Foundations. 1963. Pelican Books. p. 164
“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 (1893–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To acclaim that the Bible contains the Word of God is not to say that all its words are the words of God.”
Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) first seen 1954 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p.96 (Unnamed * “scholarly writer”: London Times. December 4, 1954)
“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 (1893–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How can a doctrine be essential in a religion if the founder of the religion never mentions it, or teaches his apostles to pass it on?”
Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Virgin Birth, then, neither proves sinlessness, incarnation or divinity. We just do not know what divinity connotes, save that it implies a plus to his humanity, a plus which was both achieved and endowed.”
Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1893–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1893–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1893–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The word virgin, both in Hebrew (almah) and Greek (parthenos), simply means a mature young woman, not a “virgo intacta,” and more may have been deduced from the word than is warranted by its use.”
Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The nature of a Divine Being is seen more clearly in deeds which are loving than in deeds which are marvelous. He does not need miracle to make us love him or to prove that he is more than man. The unanswerable argument for his religion is that wherever he is sincerely followed men’s lives are changed.”
Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1893–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We must seek another interpretation of the cross, and at the same time we must realize that the generations ahead will discard our interpretations.”
Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“. . . 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 (1893–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1893–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All lovers of Christ can believe in him without believing the same things about him.”
Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Christianity must have a marvelous inherent power or the churches would have killed it long ago.”
Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“True, there are some great passages in Revelation, but the book on the whole is like boarding-school plum pudding, where the plums are scarce and far apart.”
Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The piety that sees a sign of divine favor in escape from a sudden danger which destroys other lives, is a spurious and egotistic travesty of the faith that knows that ‘God spared not His own Son, but freely gave Him up for us all.’ The true Christian will ask for no immunity from the common lot, for no freedom from the hardships of experience, for no miraculous deliverance from impending calamity, but he will ask for the power to overcome the world in a spirit that is courageous as well as meek, militant against all forms of evil while profoundly thankful for what seems good in his life.”
Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) first seen 1925 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p.207, (Dr. E. Griffith Jones: Providence, Divine and Human. 1925. Hodder and Stoughton. p107