I was reading Chris Seitz's "Figured Out" last night. It was written about 2000. His fourth chapter is excellent for anyone wanting to understand how ECUSA got to where it is today theologically. It is entitled "Scripture and a Three-Legged Stool: Is there a Coherent Account of the Authority of Scripture for Anglicans after Lambeth 1998?"
(Chris Seitz is an Episcopalian Professor who did his PhD under Brevard Childs and has been tenured at Yale and St Andrews, now at Wycliffe Toronto).
Anyway, his bit on the three-legged stool is quite provocative. I thought I'd share it, because it is still often referred to in Melbourne Anglican circles, particularly ordination candidate theological reflection groups, along with the Wesleyan quadrilateral which is open to similar abuses.
Perhaps we need to consider carefully what we are endorsing even by using the image of a stool or a quadrilateral - although we might keep affirming that biblical authority is primary, the equality of three legs or four quarters means the image works against any sense of primacy. I'd be interested in people's thoughts both on the article and how we might better express the usefulness of tradition, reason and experience in images that do not make biblical authority seem optional. Otherwise it's like having three/four parents you can ask for permission whenever you don't like the answer from one or other...
Anyway, at the head of the chapter he quotes what Hooker actually said:
"What Scripture doth plainly deliver, to that the first place both of credit and obedience is due; the next whereunto, is what any man can necessarily conclude by force of Reason; after this, the voice of the church succeedeth." Richard Hooker, Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Vol 5.
And in the body of the essay:
"At some point in the twentieth century, Anglican Christians became persuaded that they possessed a special divining rod for discerning Christian truth. Indeed, it was raised to the status of Anglicanism's special signature as such, against the denominational distinctives of others. It so took hold in the last century, in the vacuum created by the loss of a serious, pre-Tractarian doctrine of scripture, that it succeeded in cutting a wide swath through ecclesial discussions before it won a major victory: claim to antiquity and venerable, across-the-ages authority; that is, it became just the sort of comprehensive, sufficiently vague, allegedly distinctive Anglican "principle" needed to do duty once it was no longer clear what Pusey had bee worried about. This principle stood ready to accomodate Anglicans of every stripe, and indeed one might argue that it was the most lethal agent of obfuscation ever foisted upon Christian people, by virtue of its ability to confuse and forestall and shift and defer. The ultimate insult to history was to suggest that Richard Hooker was its progenitor.
'Scripture, reason, tradition' (and its various cousins) is a train able to stop at every station and always add one more carriage. There is practically nothing it cannot accomodate. 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. How could homosexual behaviour run this three-legged gauntlet? Is the scripture leg not clear? Would Hooker have regarded scripture as unclear on this matter? The answer is so obvious as to invite sheer puzzlement as to how anything so clear could have become unclear in the intervening centuries. This query into God's will would have been a real home-run ball for Hooker, where he got to touch all three bases and walk into home plate. In Hooker's universe, tradition would have been clear, and reason would have been even clearer. Hooker's natural law appeals are far closer to those of Calvin than of any post-Tractarian. Hooker's natural law was divine law, such as was described in scripture itself. It is precisely the same sort of appeal that Paul makes in Romans 1. Indeed it is uncontroversial that until the nineteenth century, reason and natural law cohered and derived their status as Christian authority because of scripture's own revealed word about creation and God's sovereign design therein (prior to the technological manipulation of all things 'natural'- scare quotes now being required).
The conclusion to be reached is that a vacuum was created after the failure of Anglicanism to retain a doctrine of scripture into the twentieth cntury, and the three-legged stool suddenly emerged as precisely the sort of comprehensive lens needed to accomodate varieties of Anglicans who had simply lost their way. Some could hear it as a very conservative principle, and did; others could see it as a channel-changer for an Anglican TV set inherently diverse and ambiguous. Indeed, it defined what Anglicanism is at its very center: a divinely given "right" to choose, and defer, and study, and then worship (in a Eucharist). At least we should be fair and stop attributing such a view to Hooker.
The most tragic episode in Anglicanism's recourse to the stool is difficult to pinpoint, because the so-called principle is, in the nature of the thing, a study in ambiguity, as soon as it is removed from the environment in which it was originally deployed. Reformed Catholicism of Hooker's day can be dragged only violently into the twentieth 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 a scripture called holy, with 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.
We should not be surprised that the stool is now in the attic. American Episcopalians and much Western Anglicanism inhabit a carriage the train added one day, when the stool seemed insufficient for adjudicating the moral high road claimed by revisionists. This new carriage is called either 'experience' or, more ominously, 'The Spirit'."
Extract from Christopher R. Seitz: Figured Out: Typology and Providence in Christian Scripture. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001, 59-61.
* Bold mine: this struck me as a vivid image of Anglican synodical 'debate'...
