Top 15 Leslie Weatherhead Quotes

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.”

It may take some eons, as we think of time, or even many reincarnations, but we have the highest authority for believing that the Great Shepherd himself will not be content if one of his sheep is missing from the final fold.

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.”

It seems strange indeed that so practical and pressing a truth as that of purgatory should be dismissed, while so remote and impractical a doctrine as the absolute everlastingness of hell should be insisted on.

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.

Hell may last as long as sinful humanity lasts, but that does not mean that any individual will remain in it all that time. The time of purging can only continue until purification is reached. And a God driven to employ an endless Hell would be a God turned fiend himself, defeated in his original purpose.

There is not one judgment day, surely, but a thousand! Every time we confront beauty, truth, goodness or love, our response to them judges us.

Faith in God includes faith in those who help 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.

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.

Death itself seems not to make a great difference. Certainly man’s eternal destiny is not determined by the act—often the accident—of dying. Spiritually, and apparently mentally, he goes on where he left off. . .

. . . 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.

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.

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.

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.