Christian agnosticism

History

Leslie Weatherhead

In 1965 Christian theologian Leslie Weatherhead published The Christian Agnostic, in which he argues:

... 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.

Although radical and unpalatable to conventional theologians, Weatherhead's agnosticism falls far short of Huxley's, and short even of weak agnosticism:

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.

In the summary chapter of The Christian Agnostic, Weatherhead stated what he believed in a sort of twelve-part creed:

1. God: Weatherhead believed in God, whom he felt most comfortable referring to as "Father". Like most Christians, he felt that the Creator was higher on a scale of values, but that God must also be personal enough to interact in a direct relationship with people.
2. Christ: Weatherhead believed in the divinity of Jesus, in that he stood in a special relationship with God and "indeed an incarnation of God in a fuller sense than any other known Being." Weatherhead argued that the New Testament never refers to Jesus as God, and neither did Jesus refer to himself in this way, instead calling himself the Son of Man and the Word. To say that Jesus was the "only begotten son" of God would be an impossibility to Weatherhead, as such information was not available. The virgin birth of Jesus was not an issue for Weatherhead, having (in his view) never been a major tenet for being a follower of Christ. Moreover, the New Testament traces Jesus' lineage through his father Joseph, not Mary, to show that he descended from the house of David. Weatherhead did not believe Jesus to be sinless, as evidenced by the fact that Jesus got angry, cursed a fig tree because it did not produce fruit and rebuked Peter, one of his closest disciples, calling him Satan. Since Jesus was morally superior, many theologians assume him to be sinless, though Jesus never made that claim for himself. Weatherhead apparently agreed with Nathaniel Mickelm, whom he quoted regarding the blood sacrifice of Jesus as something that was unnecessary for forgiveness. For Mickelm (and subsequently for Weatherhead), it would be a perversion of God to suppose that "God did not and could not forgive sins apart from the death of Christ." Yet that sacrifice revealed something of the nature of God that made one want to be forgiven.
3. Holy Spirit: Weatherhead conceded agnosticism when regarding the Holy Spirit, stating that "Few Christians, whom I know, think of the Holy Spirit as a separate Person". His view was that this would equate to worshiping two gods instead of one.
4. Church: Weatherhead's view of the church was an idealistic one. The church on earth should be a photocopy of the divine original, in which all who loved Christ would be joined together to "worship and move forward to the unimaginable unity with God which is his will."
5. Bible: Weatherhead believed the Bible to be an amazing and often inspired collection of works that progressively revealed man's search for and understanding of God, culminated in the best representation of God's true nature in Jesus Christ. He was, however, critical of many passages, including some from Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, because they went against the nature of what Jesus taught, stating that "some of the passages of Browning are of far superior spiritual value." Weatherhead insisted that one must reject anything in the Bible that did not coincide with the gospel of Christ, that is, anything that did not harmonise with the spirit of "love, liberty, gaiety, forgiveness, joy and acceptance."
6. Providence: Webster's defines this as "God conceived as the power sustaining and guiding human destiny". Weatherhead understood that God cared for humankind but that some would find this difficult (since suffering exists in the world). If "God is love" it would be difficult to deny God's Providence.