Лесли Уэтерхед: Ақыл-ойдың және діннің қайта жаңғыруы

Man of reason
the Anglican priest, Dean of Nassau

Leslie Dixon Weatherhead (14 October 1893 – 5 January 1976) was an English Christian theologian in the liberal Protestant tradition. Weatherhead was noted for his preaching ministry at City Temple in London and for his books, including The Will of God, The Christian Agnostic, and Psychology, Religion, and Healing.

Weatherhead was born in London in 1893. He trained for the Wesleyan Methodist ministry at Richmond Theological College, in south west London. The First World War cut short his training, and he became Methodist minister at Farnham, Surrey, in September 1915. After serving in India, Manchester, and Leeds, Weatherhead became the minister of the City Temple, a Congregational Church on Holborn Viaduct in London. He served there from 1936 until his retirement in 1960. From 1930 till 1939, Weatherhead was a member of Frank Buchman's Oxford Group and wrote several books reflecting the group's values, including Discipleship and The Will of God. He often symbolised the "head" of the Oxford Group London. His book This is the Victory was first printed in 1940 (preface dated November 1940) and reprinted in March 1942. In the period of time between these two editions, the City Temple was "gutted by fire from incendiary bombs dropped from enemy aeroplanes". He was able to continue his ministry thanks to the nearby Anglican St Sepulchre without Newgate church. After the war, Weatherhead raised the funds to rebuild the City Temple, largely from John D. Rockefeller. The City Temple is now a congregation of the United Reformed Church. Despite opposition, Weatherhead was elected as President of the Methodist Conference for 1955–1956. The re built City Temple was opened in the presence of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother in October 1958. In the 1959 New Year Honours he was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). In 1960, Weatherhead retired to live at Bexhill on Sea. He died in 1976. The three books of his sermons which Weatherhead considered his best were That Immortal Sea, Over His Own Signature and Key Next Door. Three biographies of Leslie Weatherhead have appeared: in 1960, for young people, Dr. Leslie Weatherhead of the City Temple by Christopher Maitland; in 1975 Leslie Weatherhead: A Personal Portrait by his son A. Kingsley Weatherhead, a professor of English; and most recently in 1999 Doctor of Souls: Leslie D. Weatherhead 1893–1976 by John C. Travell.

Weatherhead is identified as a liberal Christian. He believed in a God whom he felt most comfortable referring to as "Father." 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. 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. Weatherhead affirmed the belief that the New Testament never teaches that Jesus is God, nor that Jesus taught this, observing that Jesus preferred to refer to himself as the Son of Man. He believed the idea of Jesus being "the only begotten son" of God was impossible and that such information is not presently available. Weatherhead claimed that Jesus never said he was sinless. He comments that Jesus sometimes showed anger, especially to false teachers, that he cursed a fig tree because it didn't produce fruit and rebuked Peter, one of his closest disciples, which Weatherhead interprets as Jesus calling Peter Satan. Weatherhead taught that many theologians assumed Jesus' sinlessness because of his moral superiority, but that Jesus never made that claim for himself. Weatherhead was in agreement with Nathaniel Mickelm, whom he quoted, that the blood sacrifice of Jesus was unnecessary for forgiveness of sins. For Mickelm (and subsequently for Weatherhead), it was a perversion of God to suppose that "God did not and could not forgive sins apart from the death of Christ." According to Weatherhead, that sacrifice merely revealed something of God's nature that made one want to be forgiven. His view of the church was an idealistic one. The church on earth should copy 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."

Reformed minister Ian Paisley, later Lord Bannside, denounced Weatherhead in a 1969 sermon as "the man that said that Jesus Christ was the bastard son of Zechariah (John the Baptist's father) – and Mary, who was a prostitute of the temple That is about as vile a thing as anybody could say." He called Weatherhead "an arch apostate", whose place was "in hell". In his own view, Weatherhead had made every effort to present Mary as a very pure and sincere (if immature) young maiden—who had simply misinterpreted the Angel's Annunciation as a divine instruction to go and stay for three months with her cousin's husband, Zechariah—and that was when Jesus was conceived. Weatherhead considered it significant that the Gospels do not record that Jesus saying his mother had conceived him without a human father. Christian author Ruth A. Tucker comments in her book Another Gospel: "Kim's Christology is a prime example of liberal theology By diminishing the role of Jesus, Kim paves the way for the exaltation of Sun Myung Moon."

Weatherhead taught that the Bible is a collection of works that progressively reveal man's search for and understanding of God, culminated in the best representation of God's true nature in Jesus Christ. He was critical of many passages, including some from Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, that he claimed went against Jesus teaching, stating that "some of the passages of Browning are of far superior spiritual value." Weatherhead rejected interpretations of the Bible that relied on eternal conscious torture, instead holding an alternate view of 'the gospel of Christ', which he interpreted as the spirit of "love, liberty, gaiety, forgiveness, joy and acceptance."

Weatherhead was a highly controversial figure on account of his questioning of some of the central tenets of the Christian faith—he once said he regarded "creeds and confessions of faith" as "museum specimens"—and his incorporation into Christianity of elements from other religions and from spiritualism. In the view of Professor David D. Larsen, of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, "Weatherhead jettisoned historical Christianity". He denied the Atonement and the efficacy of the Blood of Christ in A Plain Man Looks at the Cross, and the bodily Resurrection of Christ in The Manner of the Resurrection in the Light of Modern Science and Psychical Research. He dismissed the virgin birth, was inclined to believe that Zechariah was the father of Jesus, thought that the "legion" of demons probably meant that the man had been molested as a child by Roman legionnaires, and regarded the Apostle Paul as hopelessly neurotic. Weatherhead regularly attended spiritist séances, at one of which John Wesley appeared to him. In 1957 he gave a lecture to the City Temple Literary Society on "The Case for Reincarnation". He continued to advocate reincarnation for the rest of his life in books like The Christian Agnostic and Life Begins at Death. For Professor Horton Davies, Weatherhead was "unrivalled as a twentieth century physician of souls and preacher of the integration of personality through Christ". Weatherhead's scorn for theology—he claimed that poets had more insight than theologians—and penchant for "preaching as psychotherapy" made him, in Larsen's view, "a tragic instance in which psychical research replaced 'sound doctrine'". Even his psychology, which drew on fringe thinkers as well as more mainstream figures like Freud, is now "severely dated. No one today talks about Odic force and the leakage of psychic energy. His 55 books are virtually unread today."