Leslie Weatherhead Quotes

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.

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.

He revealed what God must be like and what man may be like, and he pledged himself to stand by his little brothers until they too achieved God’s age-long purpose on this minor planet; until all the sons of men realized their possibilities and became the sons of God.

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.”

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.

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.

To acclaim that the Bible contains the Word of God is not to say that all its words are the words of God.

Death, we are told, should be left to God. We do not leave birth to God. We space births. We prevent births. We arrange births. Man should learn to become the lord of death as well as the master of birth.

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.

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.

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.

I know we can go too far and try to whitewash what is plain sin; to seek to excuse really bad behavior and to account for it in terms of infantile environment, traumatic experiences, psychological complexes and the like. But I regard it as a sign of progress that we are at last doubting the value of the cane and tawse in the schoolroom and the birch and the hangman’s rope in the jails.

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.

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.”

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