Doing Theology - Thinking about God

Always be ready to make your defence to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and reverence. (1 Pet 3:15)

All Christians are theologians, in the sense that every Christian thinks about God, and tries to bring their life and experience into conversation with God's word in scripture and our tradition. Anglican theology displays the same diversity as its worship, or teaching on baptism, but generally Anglican thinking about God has followed the guidelines first laid down by the sixteenth century Anglican writer, Richard Hooker (1554-1600). His book, On the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1593), was the first substantial piece of systematic Anglican writing, and he has had a huge influence on all who have come after. Some of his thoughts have passed unconsciously into Anglican tradition. For example, he said, "Alteration though it be from worse to better hath in it inconveniences, and those weighty", a founding principle which is often still heeded. He also laid down some guidelines for thinking about God. He believed that we ought to proceed by consulting, and balancing, the testimony of Scripture, tradition and reason. None of these could be understood apart from the other two. In order to understand the Scripture, we need reason (a mind that can read and think) and tradition (an awareness of what previous generations thought it meant), reason needs to be helped along by the tradition of worship and God's revelation in Scripture, the tradition must be understood critically by reason, and judged by Scripture. All these are interconnected; and this scheme is sometimes called 'Hooker's three-legged stool'. If you remove any one leg, the whole thing falls over. At the Lambeth conference in 1988, the assembly of bishops added a fourth leg to the stool-the experience of the people of God.

This four-legged stool is represented in the graphic on this page. It suggests the way in which Anglicans, who balance all four sources of revelation, differ from those who do not. Fundamentalists claim to rely only on Scripture (although in fact they rely strongly on a particular tradition of interpretation as well). Philosophers rely only on reason; some Christians think that academic theologians belong up here as well. Traditionalists, like the break-away Anglican groups, the Anglican Catholic Church in Australia, or the Continuing Anglican Church in the USA, refuse to accept any change from the church's traditional position on things like the ordination of women, or liturgy. Anglicans differ from each other, and may call themselves catholic or evangelical, conservative or liberal. They might rely more on one source or another, but they all remain within the safety fence created by these four sources.

Lastly, the verse from 1 Peter at the start of this reflection points to the importance of charity in matters of theology, which is not a weapon given to us by God to belt each other. Most Anglicans retain a healthy awareness of the 'eschatological' nature of all human thinking. Christ is the Truth, not our words. And although his presence is with his people through his Spirit, we are all moving forward, into the future, where the fullness of Christ is waiting for us. Because we don't possess the truth, but are moving towards it, we must consider that our own positions could be wrong, or that as the church learns more of God, old positions need to give way to new insights. This is an old perspective on theology ("human language can no more contain the fullness of God than the palm of a human hand can contain the fullness of the sea"-Gregory of Nyssa), which lives on in the Anglican church.

Consider your own thoughts about God and the church. Are they formed by one of these sources more than any other? What might there be to learn from the other sources? Have your thoughts on something theological changed over the years? What, or which of the four sources, prompted the change?