What
Three-Legged Stool?
By Chuck
Bradshaw +
If you are a member or
prospective member of the Episcopal Church, someone at some point is going to
tell you about the “Three-Legged Stool” of scripture, reason, and tradition, as
a way of describing the Anglican ethos.
The image of a stool with three equal legs is an appealing picture of
something perfectly balanced. But, at
the risk of being called un-Anglican, I have some objections, or at least
questions, about the way we use the term “three-legged stool,” especially if it
is intended to present scripture, reason, and tradition as three equally
authoritative, and possibly independent, sources of revelation; or as if by
consulting reason and tradition we might overrule scripture.
On what basis do people refer to
the three-legged stool as somehow foundational for us Anglicans? You won’t find it explicitly spelled out in
the Bible, or in the collection of “Historical Documents” in the fine print at
the back of the Prayer Book. The
alleged source of the three-legged stool is the Rev. Richard Hooker
(1554-1600), an Oxford University scholar who wrote the first 5 volumes of The
Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity between 1594 and 1597.
The Lawes were mostly
ignored in Hooker’s lifetime (and are rarely read today even by people who
claim to be quoting Hooker), but after his death they were recognized as
providing a rationale for what is has been called “the Elizabethan settlement”—
how, during the reign of Elizabeth I, the Church of England settled
after about 50 years of fluctuation into an identity as the “Protestant
Catholics”: that household of Christ’s Church which participated in the
Reformation, with the Reformers’ emphasis on the authority of Scripture, and
the centrality of the biblical teaching on salvation by grace through faith;
while retaining the catholic orders of ministry (bishop, priest, and deacon)
along with the catholic sacraments.
Hooker
described a dynamic relationship— not competing, but hierarchical— between scripture,
reason, and tradition. That
relationship is summarized in Book V:
“What Scripture doth plainly deliver, to that the first place both of
credit and obedience are due; the next whereunto, is what any man can
necessarily conclude by force of Reason; after this, the voice of the church
succeedeth.”
Against the Roman Catholic
Church, which cited tradition to justify adding “beliefs necessary to
salvation” to what the Bible teaches, Hooker stood for the sufficiency of the
Scriptures; to the Puritans, who argued that the “plain meaning” of the Bible
is enough, without the aid of human reason, he pointed out that there are some
questions not explicitly covered by the Bible, but with the aid of reason we
can at least ground our approach to them on biblical principles; and besides,
even to cast suspicions on reason in favor of the “plain sense” of Scripture,
requires some exercise of reason. “The
Scripture could not teach us the things that are of God, unless we did credit
men who have taught us that the words of Scripture do signify those things.”
Many 20th and 21st
century commentators who invoke the three-legged stool seem to misunderstand
what Hooker meant by reason. Opinion
polls and questionable “research” in the social sciences are sometimes cited on
the side of “reason,” as if to discredit what the Bible, supported by
tradition, clearly teaches. Such
authors are often afflicted with “chronological snobbery” (I think that was
C.S. Lewis’ phrase), the assumption that ancient people were by definition more
stupid than people are now, and that the more reasonable one is, the more
likely one is to side with the assumptions of the present age against a
long-standing Christian consensus.
Hooker
acknowledged that sinful human beings fail to act on what their reason
perceives, and that even reason has to be converted. Also, reason, in Hooker’s sense, included both left-brained
linear-sequential logic and something he called “right reason,” that is,
right-brained, intuitive common sense, along with an intimate, relational
“knowing.” I think Hooker would say
that reason, in this sense, validates what the Church has come to understand as
the Bible’s teaching.
The Rev. Dr. Christopher Seitz,
Professor of Divinity at the University of St. Andrew’s in Scotland, offers
this warning against the misapplication of the “three-legged stool”
concept:
We should
probably not be surprised that an organic notion found in Hooker would be
perverted by Western, consumerist Christians and turned into a sort of
channel-changer, to find a stool-leg to suit…
The conclusion to be reached is that a vacuum was created
after the failure of Anglicanism to retain a doctrine of scripture into the 20th
century, and the three-legged stool suddenly emerged as precisely the sort of
lens needed to accommodate varieties of Anglicans who had simply lost their
way. Some could hear it as a very
conservative principle… others could see it as a channel-changer for an
Anglican TV set inherently diverse and ambiguous… At least we should be fair and stop attributing such a view to
Hooker.
Reformed Catholicism of Hooker’s day can only be dragged
violently into the 20th century.
Legs would get sawed off, inevitably, and then used as clubs: some wielding one, and others another. It is hard to imagine a better way to
mislead and confuse Christians seeking guidance and revelation from scripture
called holy, within a church called catholic, in a world that scripture tells
us bears God’s design and glory, however poorly perceived by sinful women and
men, than by claiming a three-legged stool as a distinctive feature. This would wreak havoc, and indeed it has.
(email posted 12/7/2003 on the traditionalist Weblog: www.titusonenine.blogspot.com)
I’m not arguing against the use of reason (in case any reader should conclude that I am) or denying that there is a grain of truth in the three-legged stool analogy, or pretending that there aren’t a great many ambiguities for us to wrestle with. I’m just saying, when you hear references to the Anglican three-legged stool, remember that this dynamic relationship falls apart unless the Bible is recognized as the Church’s primary source of authority.