Leslie Weatherhead Quotes

Man’s tragic apostasy from God is not something which happened once for all, a long time ago. It is true in every moment of existence. . . . It involves no scientific description of absolute beginnings. Eden is on no map, and Adam’s fall fits no historical calendar. Moses is not nearer to the Fall than we are, because he lived three thousand years before our time. The Fall refers not to some datable, aboriginal calamity in the historical past of humanity, but to a dimension of human experience which is always present—namely, that we who have been created for fellowship with God repudiate it continually; and that the whole of mankind does this along with us. Every man is his own ‘Adam,’ and all men are solidarily ‘Adam.’ Thus, Paradise before the Fall, the status perfectionis, is not a period of history, but our ‘memory’ of a divinely intended quality of life, given to us along with our consciousness of guilt.

. . . 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.

Let us never imagine that faith can ever be furthered by suppressing doubt, let alone by suppressing evidence. All truth is one, and religion must be as eager as science to know the truth as far as man can perceive it. If something we have treasured as truth is really contradicted by unanswerable evidence, then in the name of the God of truth we must part with it however venerable it may be. Let us never suppose that we can take over faith from our parents without examination, or believe anything merely because another says it is true. But let us not be content with a static agnosticism which never rouses itself to make inquiry. Let us examine the evidence and then in complete loyalty to its trend make a leap both of intellect and will, and, committing ourselves, acting as if all were established, try out in life the faith that carries us on wings after the hard road of fact and reason stops.

Some laymen feel that, out of loyalty, they ought to cling to ancient ways of expressing the Christian faith and that to doubt is to sin. But doubt is not the enemy of faith. It is the growing edge of faith. . .

No honest mind can exclude doubt, or ignore criticism, or shut its ears against reason. And if we could do these things we should be left, not with faith, but with a head-in-the-sand superstition.

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.”

We must go on praying, for sometimes prayer seems so to alter mental attitudes and reinforce mental energies as to strengthen the patient’s resistance to disease and even overcome it, and in any case to sustain him in the bearing of it. But we must not lose faith when God does not answer prayer in the way we think we should if we had his power.

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.”

The idea that God’s Providence means that he looks after those who serve him by a special use of his power in terms of favoritism is an immoral idea and insulting to both man and God. No true Christian wants to opt out of the trials that beset others, and no worthy idea of God could include his establishment of a kind of insurance scheme by which, if God be worshiped, cancer, for example, could be avoided.

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.

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 must have a marvelous inherent power or the churches would have killed it long ago.

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

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.

. . . 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.