The Vocation of the Theologian

Routledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, 2021

Introduction. In addition to being one of the finest poets of the Romantic generation, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was a philosopher, theologian, and literary theorist whose work exerted a profound influence upon nineteenth-century thought in Britain and America. For John Stuart Mill, Coleridge's cultural conservatism formed a necessary counterweight to the radical utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham; for Newman and the Oxford movement, his treatments of conscience and the Trinity in his philosophical theology were of immense significance, while for Ralph Waldo Emerson, Coleridge's idealism reconceived the relationship between mind and nature in ways that would become fundamental to the American Transcendentalist movement. Coleridge borrowed freely (though not always transparently) from philosophical sources, especially German idealism, and his thought combines elements of transcendentalism, Platonism, and Christian theology. 1. Coleridge, S.T. (1969-2002) The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, et al. 16 vols., Princeton University Press / Routledge. This is the standard edition for Coleridge's published works. Volumes of philosophical interest are included in the list below. Coleridge, S.T. (1995) Aids to Reflection, ed. John Beer, Princeton University Press. Published in 1825, this is a collection of commentaries and aphorisms on the 17th-century divine Archbishop Leighton. It stresses the importance of personal revelation and develops Kant's distinction between Reason and Understanding. Coleridge, S.T. (1983) Biographia Literaria, eds. James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate, 2 vols., Princeton University Press. Published in 1817, Coleridge's principal philosophical work is part autobiography, part metaphysical treatise, and part literary criticism. In it, he sets out his ideas on German idealism, ancient philosophy, the poetry and poetics of Wordsworth, and his theories of imagination and poetic language. Coleridge, S.T. (1969) The Friend, ed. Barbara E. Rooke, 2 vols., Princeton University Press. Coleridge's periodical journal published originally in 1809-1810, revised in 1812, and reissued in 1818 as a three-volume rifacimento with the subtitle: 'A Series of Essays in Three Volumes to Aid in The Formation of Fixed Principles in Politics, Morals, and Religion with Literary Amusements Interspersed.'

This essay, a contribution to the study of secularisation, explores conditions under which a new genre, the lay sermon, emerged early in the nineteenth century. It does so through a reading of the texts that inaugurate the genre, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Lay Sermons (1817). In particular, the essay examines Coleridge's Lay Sermons' historical context, that is, to the beginnings of liberal politics. And it also pays attention to Coleridge's relation to the heritage of religious sermons, especially seventeenth-century sermons. It argues that the lay sermon, unlike the religious sermon, tends to be directed to particular social groups or formations rather than, more broadly, to Christians of a particular denomination.

English Studies, 2017

This essay, a contribution to the study of secularisation, explores conditions under which a new genre, the lay sermon, emerged early in the nineteenth century. It does so through a reading of the texts that inaugurate the genre, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Lay Sermons (1817). In particular, the essay examines Coleridge's Lay Sermons' historical context, that is, to the beginnings of liberal politics. And it also pays attention to Coleridge's relation to the heritage of religious sermons, especially seventeenth-century sermons. It argues that the lay sermon, unlike the religious sermon, tends to be directed to particular social groups or formations rather than, more broadly, to Christians of a particular denomination. In this essay we offer an historical analysis of the "lay sermon" as a genre which found a niche in British intellectual and cultural history for over a century after about 1820. Thus, for example, the working-class Scottish deist, James Hogg, published a series of lay sermons on manners in the mid 1830s. Thirty years later, the British idealists, Edward Caird, W. R. Sorley and T. H. Green chose the genre when they wished to address a public as practising Christians rather than as academic philosophers. (In Caird's and Green's cases as Anglicans; in Sorley's case as a member of the Free Church of Scotland.) It also became a genre in which members of the bourgeoisie could address and advise the working classes on secular matters as for instance in John Brown's Health: Five Lay Sermons to Working People (1862). The lay sermon could also be used to publish less prescriptive pieces, as by the socialite and one time prime minister's wife, Margot Asquith, who published a volume baldly entitled Lay Sermons in 1927. Later examples exist, like E. P. Thompson's 1969 defence of the young Wordsworth's and Coleridge's politics, provocatively named "Disenchantment or Default: A Lay Sermon". Perhaps the genre's most successful example, however, was Thomas Henry Huxley's Lay Sermons (1870) which consisted mainly of lectures delivered in the mid-1860s. These included the famous "The Physical Basis of Life", a widely read essay that made the radically secular case that protoplasm constitutes the material substratum for vitality. It was a contribution to popular science, but also a sermon because, enounced from a position of some authority, it envisaged and recommended a profound shift in the understanding of consciousness. However, the genre was first established by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his two Lay Sermons, the first published in 1816, the second in 1817. We concentrate on Coleridge's

Harvard Theological Review, 1983

This essay concerns two closely related subjects: the religious philosophy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the need for a new vision in Christian theology today. Though it is the second, more ambitious and adventurous topic that deserves the more sensitive treatment, it is rather to Coleridge himself that I have given the greater part of my attention. The reasoning behind this procedure is based upon a fairly simple fact: Coleridge's religious thought is still largely unknown to most people in the philosophical and theological communities. During the past twenty years or so, as many of Coleridge's hitherto unpublished notebooks and other manuscripts have been brought to light, a number of scholars of English literature have begun to study his thought, including his theology, with greater care. 1 But it is still rare to find a researcher outside literature per se who knows much of Coleridgean philosophy, beyond (perhaps) a few phrases from his theory of the imagination in the Biographia Literaria. 1 I have thought it !j Robert Barth, S J , and Thomas McFarland may be mentioned especially in this connection See, respectively, Coleridge and Christian Doctrine (Cambridge Harvard University, 1969) and Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford Clarendon, 1969) 2 The best known of Coleridge's observations on the imagination can be found in the thirteenth chapter of the Biographia The IMAGINATION then, I consider either as primary, or secondary The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation m the infinite I AM The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate, or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify It is essentially \itaU even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead (Biographia Literaria, J Shawcross, ed [Oxford Oxford University, 1907] 1 202) One finds this passage quoted frequently in recent works dealing with the theological ima-gination. As but one among numerous examples, see Ray L. Hart, Unfinished Man and the Imagination: Toward an Ontology and a Rhetoric of Revelation (New York: Herder and Herder, 1968) 200 As I hope to show, the imagination is only the tip of a Coleridgean iceberg.

A study of Coleriedge's influence, via the English Platonic tradition, on the contemporary British theologian, John Milbank.

Few commentators are willing to concede to a view of the late-Victorian novelist and poet Thomas Hardy as a profoundly Christian writer. Most often he is regarded as atheistic in principle, a view which tends to subdue those voices that would describe his religious allegiance in far less axiomatic terms. I suggest that Hardy's schooling in the interpretive activity of biblical exegesis absorbed from his early religious education resonates in his writings. In particular, my reading of The Mayor of Casterbridge argues for a text that applies 'covenantal hermeneutics', an interpretive activity essential to its inner workings, which functions to produce a novel that is Hebraic rather than Hellenic in character.

Literature & Theology, 2021

examination of Jefferson shows is the shift from 'Christian faith and theological truth to Christian cultural identity and its relationship to the nation state' (p. 353).

Coleridge Bulletin, 2007

2009

THOROUGHLY COMPILED, forty-page timeline initially suggests what the reader finds parcelled out in the subsequent thirteen chapters on Coleridge’s reception in nine European countries: as translations from and criticisms of his works, after a slow start in the nineteenth century, become rapidly more widespread in the twentieth, the European reception of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poetry as well as his critical, philosophical, and theological writings assumes a centrifugal trajectory. The contributors to Shaffer and Zuccato’s volume aptly convey how this reception has unfolded into increasingly uneven, disparate, even contradictory fragments between and within their countries and cultures of reception. This is what makes this volume Coleridgean in the most profound sense, as I shall elaborate below. In the extensive number of works of reception cited throughout, the reader encounters, firstly, a multiplicity of often conflicting interpretations and appropriations of Coleridge’s politi...

Szólító szavak / The Power of Words : tanulmányok Fabiny Tibor hatvanadik születésnapjára / Papers in honor of Tibor Fabiny's sixtieth birthday, ed. by Sára Tóth et al., 2015

Two books fascinated Coleridge throughout his life: the Bible and Shakespeare. Not that he did not read and interpret numerous other works with passion-his life as a "library cormorant" was spent mainly in the company of books, by others and by himself. 2 But these two were clearly the most prominent among them all. In his critical writings they appear as books a fortiori, with all the features and problems that accompany the "idea" of the book. Th e problem of the author and the authoritative, fi nished, or even "sealed" nature of the book; their inter-and intra-textual complexity (both being whole "libraries" in themselves); the problems related to their historical transmission, their construction through canonization, and the process of a metaphorical or literal translation that is required to bridge the gap between book and reader-in one word, their historicity-meant a constant challenge to Coleridge's thinking. Moreover, he regarded these books as the imaginative foundations of communities of primary importance to him-Christianity and the English nation-and therefore their right understanding, besides being a question of philology, was a matter of church and state and personal conviction. Recognizing that both books created ideal communities, Coleridge stressed the importance of the ongoing tradition of Bible interpretation, as well as the consensual reading of Shakespeare, while leaving his own very personal mark in both fi elds. Th e parallel status and the similarly problematic nature of these books is acknowledged in Coleridge's writings in several ways, directly or indirectly.

Romanticism, 1998

To a great extent, she succeeds. The uncritical enthusiast is given fair warning, the wary admirer encouraged. Ashton's commentary is tactful and compassionate: Coleridge is never reduced to a set of psychological predictabilities. Two themes thread a way through the tangle. There is, first, the persistent loneliness of the child who perceived himself unloved. To this urgent need for affection is added the guilt of the opium-eater: the horror of a self- incurred and possibly unforgivable bondage. Given these guiding elements, Coleridge's biographer, working through the extensive notebooks and letters, needs to be on guard. Insecurity is a poor environment for truthfulness and 'addicts, we know, lie' (p. 6). They also manipulate affection. The 'wonderful man' needs constant watching lest he make off with the emotional silver. Ashton is at her best in mapping the poet's ambivalence and sometimes tortuous shiftiness. There is, for instance, a particularly fine narrative of the despairing flight to Malta and of the excuses and delays by which Coleridge prevented his direct return home. Ashton offers nimble analyses of Coleridge's letters and his self-disclosive notebook entries. She trains the reader in an affectionate suspicion, alert to accents of insight and self-deceit, defensiveness and honest apology, love and resentment, superiority and self-deprecation, pleading and poison. Ashton provides a tenacious posthumous conscience, monitoring the wriggles of deceit and the seductiveness of need. Days after his move to Nether Stowey, Coleridge boasts

Religious Studies Review, 2008

The Wordsworth Circle, 2023

Review of Tom Marshall's book

Reviews in Religion & Theology, 2008

seems to fall far short of Edwards's later definition of true religious affection as disinterested love of God for his own beauty).

Holiness

From 2015-21, I was seconded to the British Methodist Church to help implement pastoral supervision for its ministers. This arose from the pioneering work of Wesley House in this area which began in 2003. 6 A key formational tool deployed in the teaching of practical theology in the Cambridge Theological Federation. 7 Cameron et al. I would choose the sermon and the hymn as forms of theological reflection worthy of study. In British Methodism, the doctrinal standards of the church are formed in part by a collection of 44 of John Wesley's sermons. Far better known in practice, however, than those sermons, are the hymns of Charles Wesley-albeit in diminishing numbers. These hymns were written not only to teach doctrine, but also to provide meditations on scripture that might act as a reliable means of grace to bring the singer into the transformative presence of God. 10 All three texts were composed during the centenary year for specific occasions: one was preached to an 'internal audience' of staff, students, alumni, and friends in October 2021 at a centenary event; one was preached before the University of Cambridge at Pentecost 2022, to an external audience of academics, heads of house, and people from the town; and the hymn was written for our final centenary celebration in July 2022 as part of a collaboration, also to mark the 150th anniversary of Southlands College. 11 Because they were all written in the context of Wesley House's centenary, they make explicit attempts to offer some theological reflection on the identity and vocation of the college, but I hope they also reveal something not just about the 'brand' of the college, but perhaps also about the identity and vocation of theological education more broadly.