Read "Bull, Waterland, and the Trinity" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Bull and Waterland are the classical writers on the Trinity.[1]
In the Trinity there is, 1. Ipseity. 2. Alterity. 3. Community. You may / express the formula thus: --
God, the absolute Will or Identity, = Prothesis. The Father = Thesis. The / Son = Antithesis. The Spirit = Synthesis.
[Footnote 1: / Mr. Coleridge's admiration of Bull and Waterland as high theologians was / very great. Bull he used to read in the Latin Defensio Fidei Nicaenae, / using the Jesuit Zola's edition of 1784, which, I think, he bought at Rome. / He told me once, that when he was reading a Protestant English Bishop's / work on the Trinity, in a copy edited by an Italian Jesuit in Italy, he / felt proud of the church of England, and in good humour with the church of / Rome. -- ED.]
The author of the Athanasian Creed is unknown. It is, in my judgment, / heretical in the omission, or implicit denial, of the Filial subordination / in the Godhead, which is the doctrine of the Nicene Creed, and for which / Bull and Waterland have so fervently and triumphantly contended; and by not / holding to which, Sherlock staggered to and fro between Tritheism and / Sabellianism. This creed is also tautological, and, if not persecuting, / which I will not discuss, certainly containing harsh and ill-conceived / language.
How much I regret that so many religious persons of the present day think / it necessary to adopt a certain cant of manner and phraseology as a token / to each other. They must _improve_ this and that text, and they must do so / and so in a _prayerful_ way; and so on. Why not use common language? A / young lady the other day urged upon me that such and such feelings were the / _marrow_ of all religion; upon which I recommended her to try to walk to / London upon her marrow-bones only.