Spiritual agency

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Often appears with: conversion and faith · transition to spiritual religion · the problem of evil and theodicy · salvation conditions · religious biography examples · providence and divine governance · intermediate state · infant baptismal theology · edward irving

Usually: argument (2) · crisis of belief (1) · the test or trial (1) · curiosity (1) · exhortation (1) · skepticism (1)

Aids to Reflection; and, The Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit primary

Samuel Taylor Coleridge · 1825-01-01
Letter I. 291 > Chapter following. In placing it here, I have been determined by the following convictions: 1. Every state, and consequently that which we have described as the state of Religious Morality, which is not progressive, is dead, or retrograde. 2. As a pledge of this progression, or, at least, as the form in which the propulsive tendency shows itself, there are certain Hopes, Aspirations, (1/21)

The commentary proposes an intermediate “transition” from religious morality to spiritual religion, claiming that religious biographies show recurring influences best explained as a real spiritual agency rather than delusion.

Yearnings, that, with more or less of consciousness, rise and stir in the Heart of true Morality as naturally as the sap in the full-formed stem of a rose flows towards the bud, within which the flower is maturing. 3. No one, whose own experience authorizes him to confirm the truth of this statement, can have been conversant with the volumes of religious biography, can have perused (for instance) the lives of Cranmer…

Aids to Reflection; and, The Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit primary

Samuel Taylor Coleridge · 1825-01-01
Letter I. 291 > Letter? To kill that which it is its appropriate office to enliven? (125/144)

Coleridge answers an objection about whether infants can receive spiritual influence, saying the argument assumes the contested premise and warning against a purely arbitrary condition of infant salvability.

been an Apostolic usage, or specially intended in any part of the New Testament: though deducible *generally* from many passages, and in perfect accordance with the *spirit* of the whole. A mighty wrestler in the cause of Spiritual Religion and *Gospel* morality, in whom more than in any other contemporary I seem to see the spirit of Luther revived, expressed to me his doubts whether we have a right to deny that an …