Leslie Weatherhead

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.After serving in India, Manchester, and Leeds, Weatherhead became the minister of the City Temple, a Congregational Church on Holborn Viaduct in London.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."[10] 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."[11] 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.Encountering it in Weatherhead's The Christian Agnostic,[12] Unificationist theologian Young Oon Kim adopted it as the best explanation of the birth of Jesus in her work Unification Theology, a standard textbook of the church.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, he writes, was perhaps the most striking example in the British Isles of "the increasing horizontalization and psychologization of the sermon",[21] a tendency wittily characterised by E. Brooks Holifield as "From Salvation to Self-Realization".[24] 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'"."[21] John Taylor, reviewing Doctor of Souls states that "[Weatherhead's] writings still have an impact on Churches today, and Christians read and re-read his works".