The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 4Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
Religion
The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 4
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
Literature -- History and criticism
And why, then, did not Dr. Waterland,--why did not his great
predecessor in this glorious controversy, Bishop Bull,--contend for a
revisal of our established version of the Bible, but especially of the
New Testament? Either the unanimous belief and testimony of the first
five or six centuries, grounded on the reiterated declarations of John
and Paul, and the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, were erroneous,
or at best doubtful;--and then why not wipe them off; why these
references to them?--or else they were, as I believe, and both Bull and
Waterland believed, the very truth; and then why continue the
translation of the Hebrew into English at second-hand through the
'medium' of the Septuagint? Have we not adopted the Hebrew word,
Jehovah,? Is not the [Greek: Kyrios], or Lord, of the LXX. a Greek
substitute, in countless instances, for the Hebrew Jehovah? Why not then
restore the original word, and in the Old Testament religiously render
Jehovah by Jehovah, and every text of the New Testament, referring to
the Old, by the Hebrew word in the text referred to? Had this been done,
Socinianism would have been scarcely possible in England.
Why was not this done?--I will tell you why. Because that great truth,
in which are contained all treasures of all possible knowledge, was
still opaque even to Bull and Waterland;--because the Idea itself--that
'Idea Idearum', the one substrative truth which is the form, manner, and
involvent of all truths,--was never present to either of them in its
entireness, unity, and transparency. They most ably vindicated the
doctrine of the Trinity, negatively, against the charge of positive
irrationality. With equal ability they shewed the contradictions, nay,
the absurdities, involved in the rejection of the same by a professed
Christian. They demonstrated the utterly un-Scriptural and
contra-Scriptural nature of Arianism, and Sabellianism, and Socinianism.
But the self-evidence of the great Truth, as a universal of the
reason,--as the reason itself--as a light which revealed itself by its
own essence as light--this they had not had vouchsafed to them.
Query XV. p. 225-6.
The pretence is, that we equivocate in talking of eternal generation.
All generation is necessarily [Greek: ánarchón ti], without dividuous
beginning, and herein contradistinguished from creation.
Ib. p. 226.
True, it is not the same with human generation.
Not the same 'eodem modo', certainly; but it is so essentially the same
that the generation of the Son of God is the transcendent, which gives
to human generation its right to be so called. It is in the most proper,
that is, the fontal, sense of the term, generation.
Ib.
You have not proved that all generation implies beginning; and what is
more, cannot.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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