Coleridge and the ‘master-key’ of biblical interpretation

Claude Welch, the distinguished historian of nineteenth-century religious thought, once declared that Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) ‘may be seen as the real turning point into the theology of the nineteenth century’ and that he ‘was as important for British and American thought as were Schleiermacher and Hegel’.2 Still, Coleridge remains largely marginalized in the annals of church history and theology despite his unwavering prominence throughout much of the nineteenth century. Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that Coleridge's posthumously published Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (1840), with its rejection of the verbal infallibility of Scripture and elevation of the importance of the individual in rightly discerning the truths of the Christian faith, has often been misread as an attestation of the primacy of the individual subject over the biblical text. It has been treated alternately as a document that signals the emergence of German higher criticism in England,3 a Romantic appeal to the fundamental importance of the subjective in religion,4 and an early form of reader-oriented literary criticism.5 In this article I suggest that the attention devoted to Coleridge's denial of the verbal inspiration of Scripture, epitomized by the phrase that biblical inspiration is constituted by ‘whatever finds me’, has overshadowed his equally significant attention to the authority of church tradition in that same document. More specifically, rather than arguing for subjectivism in biblical interpretation, Coleridge equally emphasizes the objective sources of revelation expressed in Scripture and the church traditions handed over from the apostles. Rather than proposing a model of biblical inspiration that is wholly individualistic, Coleridge maintains a vision of Christianity that affirms the vitality of both the authority of the church and that of the believer. Thus, Coleridge's theological contribution to religious history is not that of an aberrant, absent-minded poet, but rather that of a central participant engaged in an ongoing and pivotal debate in the history of England: the relationship between Scripture and church traditions. In order to draw out this important, though neglected, strand of thought in those ‘Letters on the Scriptures’, the name by which the Confessions is sometimes identified,6 I begin by briefly clarifying the nature of the idea of tradition both in relation to Coleridge and English theology in the nineteenth century. I then summarize the argument of the Confessions as a whole and turn more particularly to those sections of the Confessions that suggest the role Coleridge assigns to church tradition in relation to Scripture. Finally, after assessing the authority of the church in relationship to the divine Word, I turn to Coleridge's earlier works and his notes on the Works of William Chillingworth (1602–1644) in order to demonstrate that his views on the respective authority of both the individual and the church were consistently held since near the time of his conversion to Trinitarian Christianity. I conclude that Coleridge's conception of the relationship between Scripture and church traditions calls for a reevaluation of his place in the history of religious thought in England.