The Church: Tradition as the Master-Key of Interpretation

Abstract

Authority. A single word encapsulates theological controversy in the nineteenth century. Who collected the books of Scripture? Who has the right to interpret these books? What doctrines are legitimately derived from the Bible? These questions bring to light the challenge facing the churches in England. Many Christians looked to the infallible teachings of the Bible as the sole authority for Christian doctrine. But questions Coleridge willingly entertained about the Bible—the compositional origins of the Pentateuch and the first three Gospels, for example—proved scandalous for those who associated biblical criticism with German infidelity. Some feared that undermining the Bible’s far-reaching authority would remove the only adequate source of true doctrine and that the loss of a strong view of biblical inspiration, in Coleridge’s words, “would deprive the Christian world of its only infallible arbiter in questions of Faith and Duty, suppress the only common and inappellable tribunal” (CIS 50). Others looked to the far-reaching authority of the church. John Henry Newman, the famous leader of the Oxford Movement, shocked England just a decade after Coleridge’s death when he converted to Roman Catholicism, an act that appeared to signal Newman’s allegiance to the teachings of the pope in Rome rather than to the pure Word of God.

[T]he authority of the Church is nominally admitted, with the object of pulling down that of the Bible … “Confessions of an [I]nquiring Spirit,” teaches the very same principles which have enabled all the worst and most outrageous of the German Rationalists to get rid of every fact and doctrine which displeases them in the Bible … According to them, you may expunge from the Bible, as uninspired, whatever does not “find” you, or commend itself to your judgment as true or good.

Review of Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (English Review 258, 262)