When, in 2019, Abingdon Press resurrected Leslie Weatherhead’s 1965 classic, The Christian Agnostic, it described the book as, “An immensely liberating discussion, addressed to those who admire the Christian spirit, but find belief difficult.” In a 2020 essay for Areo Magazine, Zachary Strong, an amateur Christian theologian in Hamilton, Ontario, insists it was Weatherhead who, in this book, “first proposed” the “concept of an agnostic Christian…to describe people who…identify as Christian, but hesitate to profess belief in supernatural or miraculous matters.”
That was Weatherhead: Wikipedia has it that he denied the virgin birth, the bodily resurrection, the atonement; was uncomfortable with the doctrine of the trinity; regarded Paul as “hopelessly neurotic”; and embraced reincarnation.
Historian of religion E.B. Holifield “wittily characterized”—Wikipedia again—his sermons as moving on “from salvation to self-realization,” for Weatherhead was a pioneer in relating religion, psychology, psychiatry, and healing; so it was that John Travell titled his 1999 biography, Doctor of Souls. For almost 25 years, Weatherhead served as minister at City Temple in the heart of London, which, The Lutterworth Press reports, “was widely seen…as the greatest English Free Church pulpit.”
The Christian Agnostic
By Leslie Weatherhead
Abingdon Press, 2019
