Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
Faith
- Professor Herbert Butterfield, Christianity and History:
"There are times when we can never meet the future with sufficient elasticity of
mind, especially if we are locked is the contemporary systems of thought. We can do worse
than remember a principle which both gives us a firm Rock and leaves us the maximum
elasticity for our minds: the principle: 'Hold to Christ, and for the rest be
totally uncommitted."'
- Dr. Leslie Weatherhead, The Christian Agnostic:
"We are told to believe 'by faith' that Jesus is the Son of God. But when Jesus
praised faith and asked for faith he did not mean anything of the kind; he meant trust.
... when Jesus told the woman healed of menorrhagia that her faith had saved her, he meant
her "trustful expectancy," a risk which her will power enabled her to take, and
which made her fling herself before Christ in an abandonment of committal. 'If I touch but
His clothes I shall be made whole.' Let me write a little on this important difference
because I think it may help us to cut out some dead wood and silly superstition from our
thinking. God has given us our minds and we are to use them. Jesus said
that the very first commandment was that we must love God with our minds. 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. So, in the field of religion, I would define the faith of the intellect as
an attitude of complete sincerity, and loyalty to the trend of all the available evidence,
plus a leap in the direction of that trend, beyond the hard road of reason but not beyond
the kind of speculation which the nature of God suggests."
- Dr. Leslie Weatherhead, The Christian Agnostic:
"Unbelief is frowned on by some of the elect as though it were a sin, but no one can
make another believe until he can so exhibit the truth that the mind of the would-be
believer cannot do other than leap out and grasp it and make it his own. What is
sinful is a man's assertion that he does not believe, after truth has authenticated itself
in his own mind, or if he refuses to contemplate all the evidence, which one is
so prone to do if it is offered by someone who is disliked on other grounds. How wisely
Dr. John Oman, late Principal of Westminster College, Cambridge, to whom I owe so much,
writes:
'In the strict sense, we should not even try to believe; for we have no right to believe
anything we can avoid believing, granting we have given it entire freedom to convince us. Strictly
speaking, also, we have no right to exhort people to believe, and much of that very common
type of exhortation is mere distrust of truth and disregard of veracity ....
There is only one right way of asking men to believe, and that is to put before them what
they ought to believe because it is true; and there is only one right way of persuading,
and that is to present what is true in such a way that nothing will prevent it from being
seen except the desire to abide in darkness; and there is only one further way of
helping these, which is to point out what they are cherishing that is opposed to faith.
When all this has been done, it is still necessary to recognize that faith is God's gift,
not our handiwork; of His manifestation of the truth by life, not of our demonstration by
argument or of our impressing by eloquence; and that even He is willing to fail
till He can have the only success love could value--personal acceptance of the truth
simply because it is seen to be true."
- Dr. Leslie Weatherhead, The Christian Agnostic:
"Faith ... is not concerned with believing historical or other propositions
on inadequate evidence. It is reason grown courageous, the spirit which
inspires martyrs, the confidence that right must eventually triumph, that all things work
together for good to those who love God... Let us never think of faith--as the
schoolboy defined it -- as 'believing what you know to be untrue.' Let us be content to
leave many things in the box of the mind, labeled, 'awaiting further light.' 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."
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