Anglicans love a metaphor and none extra so than the so-called three-legged stool: Scripture, custom, and motive. Scripture is the anchor and touchstone for every thing else. Custom and motive assist the church learn, obtain, and stay Scripture faithfully over time. However even a well-balanced stool can wobble if it lacks the steadiness of a fourth leg. Traditionally, that assist was constitutionalism: a shared dedication to lawful authority, inherited limits, and reform that labored via present types slightly than sweeping them away.
To call constitutionalism as Anglicanism’s fourth leg isn’t to confuse theology with politics or to baptize the English structure. It’s merely to acknowledge that the attraction to Scripture, custom, and motive was by no means in a vacuum. The so-called Anglican technique took form inside an ethical and authorized creativeness shaped by restraint, continuity, and ordered disagreement. It emerged inside a world that assumed energy had limits, that disobedience ought to purpose for restoration and therapeutic, and that liberty with out construction might shortly curdle into tyranny. That constitutional sensibility formed how Anglicans considered authority, reform, and the bounds of obedience—no matter whether or not they named it explicitly.
This declare runs towards these made by many Christians, particularly Methodists, that “expertise” ought to operate because the balancing leg. On this view, expertise retains theology grounded in actual lives and actual encounters with God. There’s one thing proper about that intuition. Expertise issues. Nevertheless it’s a mistake to deal with it as a foundational assist. Expertise is inherently particular person and unstable. It varies from individual to individual and from second to second. It might probably illuminate religion, however it may well simply as usually obscure religion.
A greater case might be made for constitutionalism. Not like expertise, constitutionalism is company slightly than particular person. It’s shared, inherited, and constraining. It disciplines interpretation as a substitute of merely validating it. It assumes that reality is discerned over time by a individuals, not found afresh in every conscience. In that sense, Anglicanism has lengthy resisted theological individualism. It’s wedded, usually implicitly, to a company understanding of how authority works and the way reality is acquired.
That stabilizing intuition—authority bounded by legislation, reform formed by inheritance, resistance ordered towards restore—wasn’t an unintended characteristic of Anglicanism. It was articulated early and with exceptional readability by Richard Hooker. Hooker is commonly celebrated because the champion of “motive” towards Puritan appeals to Scripture alone. However Hooker wasn’t elevating personal judgment or rational autonomy. He was defending a imaginative and prescient of legislation because the means by which God orders human life in widespread.
In Of the Legal guidelines of Ecclesiastical Polity, Hooker presents Scripture as absolutely authoritative whereas insisting that it doesn’t exhaust God’s governance of the world. God guidelines via an ordered hierarchy of legal guidelines—everlasting, pure, human, and ecclesial—every taking part in divine motive. Custom issues not as a result of it’s past correction, however as a result of it represents the gradual ethical studying of a individuals over time. Purpose shouldn’t be private desire however communal discernment exercised inside inherited types. What holds Scripture, custom, and motive collectively in Hooker’s imaginative and prescient is exactly a constitutional sensibility: authority is actual however restricted; obedience is owed however not absolute; reform is feasible however have to be disciplined by continuity slightly than will.
Hooker’s theology assumes a constitutional world. Authority is distributed, not concentrated. Regulation restrains rulers in addition to topics. Authority is reliable solely when exercised underneath legislation and inside acquired types. The Church of England didn’t merely coexist with this order; it was formed by, and helped to form, this order. Constitutionalism wasn’t an exterior affect on Anglican theology. It was the bottom on which that theology developed and developed.
Earlier than the nineteenth century, political idea in Britain was not often the province of secular specialists. Lots of its most influential voices had been clergy. Questions of authority, obedience, resistance, and legislation had been understood as theological questions earlier than they had been political. In that context, it’s hardly stunning that Anglican theology absorbed constitutional habits of thought as a part of its ethical formation.
Revolution, Resistance, and the Worry of Beginning Over
The Wonderful Revolution of 1688 makes the constitutional character of Anglicanism unmistakable. When James II fled the dominion and William and Mary had been invited to rule, England underwent a revolution that originally refused to name itself a revolution. As an alternative, it appealed to established rights and an historical structure.
The Invoice of Rights didn’t declare to invent liberty from scratch, however slightly to articulate limits that had been already understood to exist. This mattered theologically. The church might affirm resistance to tyranny with out turning insurrection into a really perfect. Authority could possibly be opposed with out denying that authority as such was divinely ordered. Resistance was understood as corrective and restorative, not revolutionary within the radical sense. The purpose wasn’t to recreate in response to summary beliefs, however to restore what had been broken.
Anglican unease about radical political innovation got here into sharp focus on the finish of the 18th century. What alarmed many Anglican observers of the French Revolution wasn’t merely its violence, however its underlying logic. Jacobinism handled inherited establishments as obstacles to freedom slightly than as its precondition. Church, crown, legislation, and customized had been swept apart within the title of summary motive and widespread will. To Anglican eyes, this regarded much less like liberation than the destruction of an ethical ecology. When constitutional restraint disappears, energy doesn’t—it merely breaks free from its limits.
This constitutional intuition discovered one among its clearest public expressions within the 18th-century thinker Edmund Burke. Although a politician slightly than a theologian, Burke articulated an ethical creativeness that Anglicans instantly acknowledged: societies are shaped over time, establishments educate the ethical creativeness, and reform indifferent from inheritance shortly turns into coercive. His warning—that establishments shouldn’t be dismantled sooner than individuals can learn to stay with out them—captured a concern broadly shared amongst Anglicans. Regulation, on this view, isn’t merely a technical instrument. It’s formative. It trains endurance, accountability, and mutual obligation. Destroy a constitutional order recklessly, and what follows isn’t freedom however a scramble for energy.
Nevertheless, if we glance a bit of sooner than Burke, John Locke complicates the story. Like Burke, he successfully stood comfortably inside the Whig custom in affirming that authorities exists by consent and that rulers who violate their belief could also be resisted. But Locke carried these ideas to a extra radical conclusion. Within the Second Treatise of Authorities, which appeared in 1689, the yr after the Wonderful Revolution, Locke argued that the individuals stay the final word sovereign and will dissolve a authorities that betrays its cost.
Extra putting nonetheless, they’re underneath no obligation to protect the traditional structure once they accomplish that. Civil society could also be liberated from inherited types in response to widespread will. In Locke’s account—supercharged by later radical thought—constitutional order not displays a secure, divinely ordered cosmos, however relies on the need of the individuals. For Locke, resistance doesn’t should purpose at restoration. It might probably justify recreation ab initio from Enlightenment ideas.
Right here Locke elements methods with Hooker. Hooker’s constitutionalism assumed what earlier Anglicans usually referred to as passive obedience: not blind submission, however a disciplined willingness to endure illegal instructions with out dissolving the bonds of order. It is a type of civil disobedience—resisting injustice with out undermining the establishments. Locke, in contrast, handled resistance as doubtlessly foundational: when belief is damaged, the individuals might dissolve the political order and begin anew with out regard for historical constitutional types. In making this transfer, Locke opened the door to resistance as re-founding slightly than restraint—a shift that will decisively form the trendy political creativeness.
Thomas Paine, one of many mental founders of the US, gave this shift one among its sharpest widespread expressions. In Frequent Sense (1776) and Rights of Man (1791), he dismissed appeals to custom, inheritance, and historical constitutional types as irrational constraints on freedom. Political legitimacy, he argued, flows not from historical past however from motive and the current will of the individuals. Paine captured a temper that was decisively post-Hookerian: suspicious of inherited authority, impatient with restraint, and assured within the capability to reinvent rationally.
The American Revolution marked a decisive shift in the best way political legitimacy was justified. Its arguments leaned closely on Lockean language of pure rights and widespread sovereignty slightly than on Scripture or inherited constitutional custom. Not like the Wonderful Revolution, it didn’t declare to revive an historical structure however to discovered a brand new one—borrowing from Enlightenment idea even because it retained parts of English legislation and common-law apply.
Inside this political context, the Episcopal Church turned one thing of an anomaly. Disestablished by legislation, it existed as a voluntary church in a voluntary society. But American Anglicans didn’t abandon the habits of thought formed by centuries of constitutional restraint. They valued restricted authorities, resistance to tyranny, and the rule of legislation—the identical beliefs celebrated within the new republic—however now these beliefs had been justified not by inherited constitutional authority, however by widespread sovereignty and consent. The problem was to carry an Anglican understanding of authority, order, and disciplined reform whereas residing inside a political tradition oriented towards innovation and re-founding. On this sense, the fourth leg of the stool wasn’t eliminated, however it was reconstructed to suit the American experiment.
That pressure is seen within the Structure of the Episcopal Church. Its construction is unmistakably American: consultant governance, distributed authority, and checks and balances. But its said goal is distinctly Anglican. The Preamble affirms that the Church exists “upholding and propagating the historic Religion and Order as set forth within the E book of Frequent Prayer.”
For the Episcopal Church, the religion contained in Scripture and the E book of Frequent Prayer capabilities very like the “historical structure” of earlier English constitutionalism: it’s the enduring framework that provides authority, shapes apply, and constrains change. The Structure governs how the church organizes its widespread life, however doesn’t generate the religion the church receives; religion gives the bottom and limits inside which governance operates.
If constitutionalism has certainly functioned as Anglicanism’s unacknowledged fourth leg, then remembering it now isn’t an train in nostalgia. It’s a matter of vocation. We are able to’t—and shouldn’t—return to a pre-Lockean world. The language of consent, rights, and widespread sovereignty is woven into trendy life. However Anglicanism nonetheless has one thing distinctive to supply: an older ethical grammar of restraint, continuity, and restore.
That grammar is seen within the Episcopal Church’s life. Fashionable process is married to inherited substance. Authority is shared and restricted. Disagreement is actual however bounded. At a second when constitutional habits are strained and inherited limits are simply dismissed, the Episcopal Church could also be particularly nicely positioned to supply a selected form of witness—not partisan or nostalgic, however theological. It is a witness to the reality that freedom relies on restraint, that reform have to be formed by constancy to our inheritance, and that resistance is most trustworthy when it goals to heal slightly than to demolish.
By residing extra deliberately by this constitutional theology—rooted in Scripture, sustained by widespread prayer, and stabilized by its inheritance of religion—the Episcopal Church could possibly mannequin how a divided individuals needn’t dissolve into fragments. In doing so, it may well assist regular a wobbling stool, providing renewed confidence that widespread life stays potential when it’s formed not by will alone, however by restraint, constancy, humility, and hope.
The Rev. Mark Clavier, PhD is Canon Theologian of the Diocese of Swansea and Brecon within the Church in Wales, Bishop’s Chaplain, and Vicar of St Mary’s Brecon. He’s the writer of 5 books together with Eloquent Knowledge: Rhetoric, Cosmology, and Delight within the Theology of Augustine of Hippo. Earlier appointments embrace Vice Principal of St. Stephen’s Home, Oxford, Dean of St. Michael’s Theological Faculty, Llandaff, and parish ministry within the US and the UK.
