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The Stool Test

© John-Julian, OJN

I doubt that there is a single Church publication which has not, in these past year, published all sorts of hullabaloo about the so-called "three-legged stool" of Anglicanism. Someone some while ago jumped on Richard Hooker's 16th-century statement about the three sources of authority for Anglicans and touted Bible, Tradition, and Reason as the three-legged stool of Anglican thought.

Certainly much credit needs to go to Hooker for enunciating what came later to be thought of as the "typical Anglican position" - the via media. Mainly he was concerned to oppose the Puritan idea of regarding the Bible as a mechanical code of rules to be adhered to literally.

Hence virtually every party in the Church turns to Hooker to justify its position on almost anything - and, predictably, there are those who think they are radically revolutionary by de-bunking the three-legged stool altogether.

There are two points which need to be made in this controversy:

I

Hooker's "reason" is not what many contemporary critics think it is. "Reason" seems nowadays to be falsely identified wholly with the scientific method - producing such unusual theological phenomena as the teachings of Bishop John Spong or (British) Bishop David Jenkins. If "reason" is merely scientific examination of human experience, then both Bishops are surely on the right track, because, given that premise, they are faithful to their methods. But "reason" (as the word is used theologically) is NOT merely the application of the scientific method. As the Scholastics understood (who, by the way, actually introduced reason into the field of Christian theology) reason meant simply the application of flawless logical thought to the conundrums of theology - in fact, their ideal was to demonstrate that Christianity had a defensible basis in metaphysics and realistic philosophy and did not depend merely on fuzzy emotions or blindly unrealistic ideals.

Reason, for those Schoolmen, was literally the "image of God" in human beings. For them it was reason which humans held in common with God - it was reason which made humans enough like God so that we could eventually be united to Him. And part of their grasp on theology was the idea that much of our understanding about God can be determined by the application of reason to what we see and know to be real.

For instance, because we - God's creations - are rational persons, it is reasonable to believe that God is not merely an impersonal "force" (since an impersonal force could not create personal beings). Based on the order we can perceive in Creation, it is reasonable that God is not a god of chaos, but of order - indeed, that the Creator himself is "ordered". Nowadays there is an inclination, for instance, to say that since we do not experience "miracles" in the ordinary course of our lives, therefore Jesus did not perform any miracles, and all so-called miracles can be explained away in entirely natural terms. (You know the schtick: Jesus didn't really feed 5000 people with those few loaves and fish, but most in the crowd had brought box lunches, and shared them with others.)

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