You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.7 AVERAGE
3.7 AVERAGE
Clinging to my faith has been a difficult task for me. Books like this make it easier. A majority of what is written here resonates so deeply with me—believing in God but coming to terms with the fact that I can't know everything because His ways are higher than mine. Anyone who has ever wanted to leave "church the building" but has wanted to love God in the midst of that confusion should read this book.
"I am writing for the Christian agnostic, by which I mean a person who is immensely attracted to Christ and who seeks to show his spirit, to meet the challenges, hardships, and sorrows of life in the light of that spirit, but who, though he is sure of many Christian truths, feels that he cannot honestly and conscientiously 'sign on the dotted line' that he believes certain theological ideas about what some branches of the Church dogmatize." - Leslie Weatherhead
First off, my rating of four stars is given largely for the incredibly thought-provoking ideas put forth by Leslie Weatherhead in this book, and for the liberating emotional response I had to some of those ideas. I'd have given it five stars except some of his later arguments aren't as well supported as the others, and some of the arguments feel dated. Were I to rate the writing style on its own merits, it would have been closer to two or three stars due to excessive quotations (which tend to make this read like a high school research paper) and a proclivity for mild repetition.
Second, I discovered this book after a friend of mine described himself as an atheist agnostic. "Doesn't that just make you agnostic?" I asked in ignorance. I later looked up the definition and found myself wondering if there were such a thing as a Christian agnostic, because if so, I was pretty sure at this point I was one. This all led me to Weatherhead's book, written in the 1960s. It seems to be out of print, but I was able to find a used paperback online for a decent price. I'm sure you can, too.
So, what are some of Weatherhead's ideas? First, he believes that there are essentials of the Christian faith that one can know with certainty. This certainty, he says, comes from "the authority which truth itself possesses when it is perceived to be true by the individual concerned." Yes, this seems to make truth too subjective, but he says the alternative is to delegate authority to someone else's subjective decision of what's true. Someone like the Pope, for example. "Truth may certainly be true whatever my opinion may be, but it has no authority with me until I perceive it to be true." For those other non-essentials, he chooses to remain agnostic and mentally set them aside as "awaiting further light."
An example of something he places in this category is the idea of the Virgin Birth. The doctrine is of no importance at all, he says, otherwise it would have been part of the missionary message of the early church. The gospel of Mark never mentions it, and neither do the writings of Peter, Paul and John. "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." And he goes on to say that Jesus himself never mentioned the circumstances of his birth, and throws doubt on the word that is translated as "virgin" in the Bible text. He tells the reader not to accept or reject the Virgin Birth, just to put it aside.
One of the more difficult concepts for me to explore is the idea that some of the sayings attributed to Jesus may not be accurate or authentic. Having grown up in a particularly fundamentalist branch of the Church, I was specifically taught that you can't simply pick and choose what you believe Jesus said; if it's written in the Bible, he said it. Further, I was essentially taught that the Bible was word-for-word the infallible Word of God. However, over the years I've come to believe that this view just doesn't hold up given, for example, the two varying accounts of creation in Genesis 1 and 2 (things are created in different orders) and the variations in the facts and events surrounding the gospel stories. Weatherhead says, "I cannot make myself believe that Jesus spoke certain words which are completely out of character with the total impact which his personality makes upon me, derived from all four Gospels, from the experiences of the saints, and from my own poor but sincere thought of him after half a century's meditation and experience. I must, I feel, judge the Bible by Jesus, not Jesus by the Bible, written as it was by fallible men who sometimes contradict one another, and who must sometimes have been mistaken in their estimate of him." While on the subject of the Bible, he questions the traditional doctrine that its writers could be more inspired than anyone else. "I regard the late T.S. Eliot as much more inspired than the author of the Song of Solomon. The late C.S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters would willingly be given a place in the sacred library had the list of books not been closed."
For most of the book, his arguments are compelling and he backs them up with seemingly sound logic and reason. However, it's when he attempts to discuss subjects like death and the afterlife that his arguments become more speculative and, in my mind, less convincing. The chapter on Death and Survival, for instance, is full of anecdotal evidence of life after death -- essentially ghost stories and tales from seances -- punctuated with statements that such "evidence" should be hard to deny. And while he truly does seem convinced, for my part, these chapters just make it easier to mark these ideas down as "awaiting further light."
I'm doubtful that my summary here does any justice to the book as a whole. For what it's worth, I highly recommend this book to everyone willing to question what they believe, regardless of what they believe.
First off, my rating of four stars is given largely for the incredibly thought-provoking ideas put forth by Leslie Weatherhead in this book, and for the liberating emotional response I had to some of those ideas. I'd have given it five stars except some of his later arguments aren't as well supported as the others, and some of the arguments feel dated. Were I to rate the writing style on its own merits, it would have been closer to two or three stars due to excessive quotations (which tend to make this read like a high school research paper) and a proclivity for mild repetition.
Second, I discovered this book after a friend of mine described himself as an atheist agnostic. "Doesn't that just make you agnostic?" I asked in ignorance. I later looked up the definition and found myself wondering if there were such a thing as a Christian agnostic, because if so, I was pretty sure at this point I was one. This all led me to Weatherhead's book, written in the 1960s. It seems to be out of print, but I was able to find a used paperback online for a decent price. I'm sure you can, too.
So, what are some of Weatherhead's ideas? First, he believes that there are essentials of the Christian faith that one can know with certainty. This certainty, he says, comes from "the authority which truth itself possesses when it is perceived to be true by the individual concerned." Yes, this seems to make truth too subjective, but he says the alternative is to delegate authority to someone else's subjective decision of what's true. Someone like the Pope, for example. "Truth may certainly be true whatever my opinion may be, but it has no authority with me until I perceive it to be true." For those other non-essentials, he chooses to remain agnostic and mentally set them aside as "awaiting further light."
An example of something he places in this category is the idea of the Virgin Birth. The doctrine is of no importance at all, he says, otherwise it would have been part of the missionary message of the early church. The gospel of Mark never mentions it, and neither do the writings of Peter, Paul and John. "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." And he goes on to say that Jesus himself never mentioned the circumstances of his birth, and throws doubt on the word that is translated as "virgin" in the Bible text. He tells the reader not to accept or reject the Virgin Birth, just to put it aside.
One of the more difficult concepts for me to explore is the idea that some of the sayings attributed to Jesus may not be accurate or authentic. Having grown up in a particularly fundamentalist branch of the Church, I was specifically taught that you can't simply pick and choose what you believe Jesus said; if it's written in the Bible, he said it. Further, I was essentially taught that the Bible was word-for-word the infallible Word of God. However, over the years I've come to believe that this view just doesn't hold up given, for example, the two varying accounts of creation in Genesis 1 and 2 (things are created in different orders) and the variations in the facts and events surrounding the gospel stories. Weatherhead says, "I cannot make myself believe that Jesus spoke certain words which are completely out of character with the total impact which his personality makes upon me, derived from all four Gospels, from the experiences of the saints, and from my own poor but sincere thought of him after half a century's meditation and experience. I must, I feel, judge the Bible by Jesus, not Jesus by the Bible, written as it was by fallible men who sometimes contradict one another, and who must sometimes have been mistaken in their estimate of him." While on the subject of the Bible, he questions the traditional doctrine that its writers could be more inspired than anyone else. "I regard the late T.S. Eliot as much more inspired than the author of the Song of Solomon. The late C.S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters would willingly be given a place in the sacred library had the list of books not been closed."
For most of the book, his arguments are compelling and he backs them up with seemingly sound logic and reason. However, it's when he attempts to discuss subjects like death and the afterlife that his arguments become more speculative and, in my mind, less convincing. The chapter on Death and Survival, for instance, is full of anecdotal evidence of life after death -- essentially ghost stories and tales from seances -- punctuated with statements that such "evidence" should be hard to deny. And while he truly does seem convinced, for my part, these chapters just make it easier to mark these ideas down as "awaiting further light."
I'm doubtful that my summary here does any justice to the book as a whole. For what it's worth, I highly recommend this book to everyone willing to question what they believe, regardless of what they believe.