Anglicans love a metaphor and none more so than the so-called three-legged stool: Scripture, tradition, and reason. Scripture is the anchor and touchstone for everything else. Tradition and reason help the church read, receive, and live Scripture faithfully over time. But even a well-balanced stool can wobble if it lacks the stability of a fourth leg. Historically, that support was constitutionalism: a shared commitment to lawful authority, inherited limits, and reform that worked through existing forms rather than sweeping them away.
To name constitutionalism as Anglicanism’s fourth leg isn’t to confuse theology with politics or to baptize the English constitution. It’s simply to recognize that the appeal to Scripture, tradition, and reason was never in a vacuum. The so-called Anglican method took shape within a moral and legal imagination formed by restraint, continuity, and ordered disagreement. It emerged within a world that assumed power had limits, that disobedience should aim for restoration and healing, and that liberty without structure could quickly curdle into tyranny. That constitutional sensibility shaped how Anglicans thought about authority, reform, and the limits of obedience—regardless of whether they named it explicitly.
This claim runs against those made by many Christians, especially Methodists, that “experience” should function as the balancing leg. On this view, experience keeps theology grounded in real lives and real encounters with God. There’s something right about that instinct. Experience matters. But it’s a mistake to treat it as a foundational support. Experience is inherently individual and unstable. It varies from person to person and from moment to moment. It can illuminate faith, but it can just as often obscure faith.
A better case can be made for constitutionalism. Unlike experience, constitutionalism is corporate rather than individual. It’s shared, inherited, and constraining. It disciplines interpretation instead of simply validating it. It assumes that truth is discerned over time by a people, not discovered afresh in each conscience. In that sense, Anglicanism has long resisted theological individualism. It’s wedded, often implicitly, to a corporate understanding of how authority works and how truth is received.
That stabilizing instinct—authority bounded by law, reform shaped by inheritance, resistance ordered toward repair—wasn’t an accidental feature of Anglicanism. It was articulated early and with remarkable clarity by Richard Hooker. Hooker is often celebrated as the champion of “reason” against Puritan appeals to Scripture alone. But Hooker wasn’t elevating private judgment or rational autonomy. He was defending a vision of law as the means by which God orders human life in common.
In Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Hooker presents Scripture as fully authoritative while insisting that it doesn’t exhaust God’s governance of the world. God rules through an ordered hierarchy of laws—eternal, natural, human, and ecclesial—each participating in divine reason. Tradition matters not because it’s beyond correction, but because it represents the slow moral learning of a people over time. Reason is not personal preference but communal discernment exercised within inherited forms. What holds Scripture, tradition, and reason together in Hooker’s vision is precisely a constitutional sensibility: authority is real but limited; obedience is owed but not absolute; reform is possible but must be disciplined by continuity rather than will.
Hooker’s theology assumes a constitutional world. Authority is distributed, not concentrated. Law restrains rulers as well as subjects. Authority is legitimate only when exercised under law and within received forms. The Church of England didn’t merely coexist with this order; it was shaped by, and helped to shape, this order. Constitutionalism wasn’t an external influence on Anglican theology. It was the ground on which that theology developed and evolved.
Before the 19th century, political theory in Britain was rarely the province of secular specialists. Many of its most influential voices were clergy. Questions of authority, obedience, resistance, and law were understood as theological questions before they were political. In that context, it’s hardly surprising that Anglican theology absorbed constitutional habits of thought as part of its moral formation.
Revolution, Resistance, and the Fear of Starting Over
The Glorious Revolution of 1688 makes the constitutional character of Anglicanism unmistakable. When James II fled the kingdom and William and Mary were invited to rule, England underwent a revolution that initially refused to call itself a revolution. Instead, it appealed to established rights and an ancient constitution.
The Bill of Rights didn’t claim to invent liberty from scratch, but rather to articulate limits that were already understood to exist. This mattered theologically. The church could affirm resistance to tyranny without turning rebellion into an ideal. Authority could be opposed without denying that authority as such was divinely ordered. Resistance was understood as corrective and restorative, not revolutionary in the radical sense. The goal wasn’t to recreate according to abstract ideals, but to repair what had been damaged.
Anglican unease about radical political innovation came into sharp focus at the end of the 18th century. What alarmed many Anglican observers of the French Revolution wasn’t simply its violence, but its underlying logic. Jacobinism treated inherited institutions as obstacles to freedom rather than as its precondition. Church, crown, law, and custom were swept aside in the name of abstract reason and popular will. To Anglican eyes, this looked less like liberation than the destruction of a moral ecology. When constitutional restraint disappears, power doesn’t—it merely breaks free from its limits.
This constitutional instinct found one of its clearest public expressions in the 18th-century philosopher Edmund Burke. Though a politician rather than a theologian, Burke articulated a moral imagination that Anglicans immediately recognized: societies are formed over time, institutions educate the moral imagination, and reform detached from inheritance quickly becomes coercive. His warning—that institutions shouldn’t be dismantled faster than people can learn how to live without them—captured a fear widely shared among Anglicans. Law, in this view, isn’t merely a technical instrument. It’s formative. It trains patience, responsibility, and mutual obligation. Destroy a constitutional order recklessly, and what follows isn’t freedom but a scramble for power.
However, if we look a little earlier than Burke, John Locke complicates the story. Like Burke, he effectively stood comfortably within the Whig tradition in affirming that government exists by consent and that rulers who violate their trust may be resisted. Yet Locke carried these principles to a more radical conclusion. In the Second Treatise of Government, which appeared in 1689, the year after the Glorious Revolution, Locke argued that the people remain the ultimate sovereign and may dissolve a government that betrays its charge.
More striking still, they’re under no obligation to preserve the ancient constitution when they do so. Civil society may be liberated from inherited forms according to popular will. In Locke’s account—supercharged by later radical thought—constitutional order no longer reflects a stable, divinely ordered cosmos, but depends on the will of the people. For Locke, resistance doesn’t have to aim at restoration. It can justify recreation ab initio from Enlightenment principles.
Here Locke parts ways with Hooker. Hooker’s constitutionalism assumed what earlier Anglicans often called passive obedience: not blind submission, but a disciplined willingness to endure unlawful commands without dissolving the bonds of order. This is a form of civil disobedience—resisting injustice without undermining the institutions. Locke, by contrast, treated resistance as potentially foundational: when trust is broken, the people may dissolve the political order and start anew without regard for ancient constitutional forms. In making this move, Locke opened the door to resistance as re-founding rather than restraint—a shift that would decisively shape the modern political imagination.
Thomas Paine, one of the intellectual founders of the United States, gave this shift one of its sharpest popular expressions. In Common Sense (1776) and Rights of Man (1791), he dismissed appeals to tradition, inheritance, and ancient constitutional forms as irrational constraints on freedom. Political legitimacy, he argued, flows not from history but from reason and the present will of the people. Paine captured a mood that was decisively post-Hookerian: suspicious of inherited authority, impatient with restraint, and confident in the capacity to reinvent rationally.
The American Revolution marked a decisive shift in the way political legitimacy was justified. Its arguments leaned heavily on Lockean language of natural rights and popular sovereignty rather than on Scripture or inherited constitutional tradition. Unlike the Glorious Revolution, it didn’t claim to restore an ancient constitution but to found a new one—borrowing from Enlightenment theory even as it retained elements of English law and common-law practice.
Within this political context, the Episcopal Church became something of an anomaly. Disestablished by law, it existed as a voluntary church in a voluntary society. Yet American Anglicans didn’t abandon the habits of thought shaped by centuries of constitutional restraint. They valued limited government, resistance to tyranny, and the rule of law—the same ideals celebrated in the new republic—but now these ideals were justified not by inherited constitutional authority, but by popular sovereignty and consent. The challenge was to hold an Anglican understanding of authority, order, and disciplined reform while living within a political culture oriented toward innovation and re-founding. In this sense, the fourth leg of the stool wasn’t removed, but it was reconstructed to fit the American experiment.
That tension is visible in the Constitution of the Episcopal Church. Its structure is unmistakably American: representative governance, distributed authority, and checks and balances. Yet its stated purpose is distinctly Anglican. The Preamble affirms that the Church exists “upholding and propagating the historic Faith and Order as set forth in the Book of Common Prayer.”
For the Episcopal Church, the faith contained in Scripture and the Book of Common Prayer functions much like the “ancient constitution” of earlier English constitutionalism: it is the enduring framework that gives authority, shapes practice, and constrains change. The Constitution governs how the church organizes its common life, but does not generate the faith the church receives; faith provides the ground and limits within which governance operates.
If constitutionalism has indeed functioned as Anglicanism’s unacknowledged fourth leg, then remembering it now isn’t an exercise in nostalgia. It’s a matter of vocation. We can’t—and shouldn’t—return to a pre-Lockean world. The language of consent, rights, and popular sovereignty is woven into modern life. But Anglicanism still has something distinctive to offer: an older moral grammar of restraint, continuity, and repair.
That grammar is visible in the Episcopal Church’s life. Modern procedure is married to inherited substance. Authority is shared and limited. Disagreement is real but bounded. At a moment when constitutional habits are strained and inherited limits are easily dismissed, the Episcopal Church may be especially well placed to offer a particular kind of witness—not partisan or nostalgic, but theological. This is a witness to the truth that freedom depends on restraint, that reform must be shaped by fidelity to our inheritance, and that resistance is most faithful when it aims to heal rather than to demolish.
By living more intentionally by this constitutional theology—rooted in Scripture, sustained by common prayer, and stabilized by its inheritance of faith—the Episcopal Church may be able to model how a divided people need not dissolve into fragments. In doing so, it can help steady a wobbling stool, offering renewed confidence that common life remains possible when it’s shaped not by will alone, but by restraint, fidelity, humility, and hope.
The Rev. Mark Clavier, PhD is Canon Theologian of the Diocese of Swansea and Brecon in the Church in Wales, Bishop's Chaplain, and Vicar of St Mary's Brecon. He is the author of five books including Eloquent Wisdom: Rhetoric, Cosmology, and Delight in the Theology of Augustine of Hippo. Previous appointments include Vice Principal of St. Stephen's House, Oxford, Dean of St. Michael's Theological College, Llandaff, and parish ministry in the US and the UK.
