In today’s Gospel lesson we heard, as we always hear on the Second Sunday of Easter Season, the story of “doubting Thomas.” What is striking about the Thomas’s demand … “unless I see” … is that our Lord accepts and encourages it … “Reach out your hand.”
This deceptively simple story is a great encouragement to those of us who follow the Anglican path in Christianity. We have the inheritance of a method of engaging the Faith (and Life) which is described in the work of the seminal Anglican theologian Richard Hooker. Fr. Mike Russell, who has recently published a re-issue of Hooker’s Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity, describes this method this way:
Anglicans frequently talk about the three-legged stool of authority that distinguishes them from Roman Catholics and Protestants. The former give more authority to Church traditions, the latter to Holy Scripture, but Anglicans somehow add them together and then mix in human reason. Once again, that mixture is Mr. Hooker at work re-framing the discussion. What emerges hardly fits our popular notion of a code of laws and, in fact, we come to understand that in talking about laws, Mr. Hooker is actually speaking throughout about the nature and exercise of authority.[1]
