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THE THREE-LEGGED STOOL
It was in the reign of Elizabeth I that the Church of England produced one of its greatest theologians - Richard Hooker, and Hooker developed a description of Anglicanism that is wonderfully accurate and comparatively easy to understand – the three-legged stool. Where a four-legged stool or chair will wobble if the floor is uneven, a three-legged stool will stand without rocking. And in Hooker’s thinking, each leg represented one great pillar of Christian faith and understanding.
The first leg is The Bible. Anglicanism lays great stress on the Scriptures, and all the church’s services of worship, including its sacraments, are derived from what is read in them. Nobody is to teach anything as being necessary for salvation which isn’t taught in the Bible.
But what about the things Christians have learned since the Bible was written? Jesus promised the Holy Spirit would lead us into all truth, so where is the place for these teachings if the Church depends on the Bible alone? The Bible does not condemn slavery, for instance. Neither does the Bible take a position on over-population, or nuclear power, for these things were all unknown in Biblical days. There must be a second leg to uphold the church. And there is.
It is the leg of Tradition - the leg of history, the leg that depicts the Spirit’s guidance down the centuries. It was in the tradition of the Church that the creeds were compiled. It was in the tradition of the Church that the ministry of bishops, priests and deacons, came into being. It was in the tradition of the Church that the belief that God is a Holy Trinity was formulated. Tradition becomes the second leg of the Church.
But what about human reason? If God means us to use our brains, does it mean we must always be tied to accepting only the Bible and the lessons of history? What about the things we have learned in our own time – and the things we are discovering today? In 1931, for instance, a meeting of the world’s Anglican bishops decided that using contraceptives was sinful. The next time the world’s Anglican bishops met (it was in 1951), the bishops had learned a lot more about the growth in world population and the fact that contraceptives can reduce the spread of disease, and the bishops declared that the use of contraceptives was to be commended. The Bible did not know of contraceptives. There was nothing in the Church’s tradition over the centuries about contraception. So the bishops continued to pray and use their reasoning powers. Hooker said there must be a third leg, the leg of Human Reason.
The church is an organic, not a static, institution and so the church’s practice will change according to circumstances. And when the Church is faced with making a decision, we are all constrained to keep those three things in mind: the three things upon which the Church depends: the Bible, tradition, and human reason. Knowing about the three-legged stool is important, and a necessary to understanding what it is to be an Anglican.
Comments have been made to me that I seem to have an agenda in recent Tailpieces of promoting homosexuality. That’s not true. The agenda I have and to which I hold is the promotion of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Human sexuality appears to be the subject we are given as this generation with which to grapple. In the 19th century it was slavery, and then liturgy and ceremonial. In the 20th century it was relations between the great Christian denominations, of liturgical reform and development, of apartheid and nuclear disarmament. And now, in these early years of the new millennium, the Holy Spirit is moving us to look critically at the variety human sexuality, and to develop a Christian response faithful to the teachings of Jesus.
Our recent Sunday Gospel readings have shown us Jesus associating with those on the edges of polite society, seeking out those the established religion dismissed as unworthy, and eating and drinking with them. He told them to live a moral life, loving God and their neighbour as themselves. He told some not to sin again, but he issued no blanket condemnation of groups or individuals, unless it was for hypocrisy.
If my faith has any value, it has to reflect this Gospel. I grew up in a Church of England that had its doors open to the world, not barricaded shut against it. I was taught that the purpose of the faith was to be out amongst people in the marketplace, and not shut up in an Ark against the supposed flood waters of modern thinking and practice. I cannot promote or support a church that proclaims that all are welcome - welcome, that is, unless they are sexually attracted to, and intimate with, people of their own gender. That sort of stigmata used to be given to single mothers and bastard children, or those with a darker skin colouration..
And so my “agenda” is simply this: to promote the Gospel of Jesus Christ to our age, and to hold to Hooker’s teaching about the three-legged stool, i.e. - what the Bible says, how the Spirit has guided and is guiding us, and our human reasoning in the light of current understanding of what it is that makes us who we are.
Richard Thornburgh