Hooker's Hope

I am thankful we no longer settle our theological debates with a stake and torch. The atrocities perpetrated in the name of God, like burning at the stake, disembowelment and drownings to name only a few, have been replaced by less violent power plays. Recently it was reported that yet another Anglican congregation in Northern Ohio has lost a costly legal battle with its former Episcopal Diocese, and now has vacated its church facility built and paid for by the current congregation. No one in its membership has chosen to remain in The Episcopal Church. This congregation has been a leader in the Renewal Movement in the church for decades and none of its members were actively supportive of the liberal drift and moral revisionism of the mother church. Sadly the building now sits empty on Sunday mornings.

I suppose we can count our blessing that their clergy were merely defrock on charges of "abandonment" and not taken out, strapped to a stake and set ablaze. In some way we can thank Richard Hooker and the English reformers who surrounded him. They were the next generation of Anglican leaders after the dark years of the protestant transformation of the church in England to the Church of England. It was Hooker's work that laid the foundation for structuring the church in a way that separated the power of the state from the power of the church. We no longer fear that the church has the power to imprison or execute its antagonist. Our generation has no memory of such power, but we have a sense, by the millions of dollars spent on litigation in secular courts, that if given such power some in the church today would been tempted to use it. Regardless of ones theological assumptions or position, one must conclude that such hurtful and unjust actions are at their core a result of unregenerate hearts in the leadership of the visible church. How else could Christian people treat each other this way? This should not surprise us for Jesus did teach that their would tares among the wheat even in His church.

The sad legacy of Protestantism is that the institutional church splits and splinters much too quickly. I suppose for Hooker's generation, having seen ecclesiastical carnage of the previous generation, they strove to eliminate from church polity a Popish Majesterium which held absolute power and authority. They laid before the church a more dispersed model of leadership. His vision was that institution should be lead by a counsel of Bishops as a model of dispersed power, yet he resisted diluting the structure of church down to a congregational model of polity his Puritan contemporaries practiced where each church fellowship was an island unto itself. The middle way of Hooker and others of the Elizabethan Settlement was to hold the church together through a system of institutional checks and balances.

Thankfully our current unpleasantness in Anglicanism will not be settled in the meadows of Smithfield. We lament that our differences rooted in our understanding of the authority of Scripture have caused the fabric of the Anglican Communion to be torn asunder. But it is appropriate to ask in our day; where are the voices of reason and moderation? Where is the leaders who can take the higher ground by sending the dissenters out with a blessing and not a curse? Where are the leaders, who after years of trying to live in the middle way, must bless opposing churchmen to pursue their new course of discipleship without punishing them. Shame on the Church leadership who have found punishment by civil litigation to be the way forward rather than discernment and justice for all parties involved.

I suspect Richard Hooker postulated in his heart such a day conflict and schism would once again fall upon the church, but I wonder if he would have hoped for a more genteel and God honoring outcome.