My wife comes from a family of New England Episcopalians. She is a cradle Episcopalian. We were married in the Episcopal Church. I converted to Episcopalianism and its parent belief, Anglicanism. However, with all of this tradition and important life experiences to support our beliefs, we have strayed from the Episcopal Church. Why? Because it has strayed from us.

Case in point: The Episcopal Church, an offshoot of the English Anglican Church, lauds its greatest theoretician, philosopher, and theologian, the Elizabethan Richard Hooker, who wrote the ponderous The Laws of the Ecclesiastical Polity. This is an erudite and very difficult book to read. Few people have read it, I think; nor have Episcopalians, I gather from the evidence of my own experience participating in the Episcopal Church for twenty years.

There is a reason why, however, during the past four centuries Hooker’s work has been called the sine qua non of Anglicanism and Episcopalianism. The only other three books that provide the basis for the Episcopal Church are the Old Testament, the New Testament, and The Book of Common Prayer.

Hooker wrote the book to defend the union of Church and State represented by the English monarchy, as well as to argue why Anglicanism is a more fundamental representation of Christianity than the Puritans of England, the followers of John Calvin.

Hooker also provided a basis for Christian morality in general and the moral precepts of the Anglican Church in particular.

The reason why I said at the outset that the Episcopal Church has strayed from the Episcopal liturgy, ritual, and beliefs that I had come to know is because the Episcopal Church has strayed from Richard Hooker’s arguments in the Laws of the Ecclesiastical Polity. The Episcopal Church today is so focused on gender transitions and sexual choice that it strays far from what the church once stood for, and in so doing contradicts the chief point that Hooker made in the Laws.

Hooker’s arguments against the Puritans can be used especially well to condemn the postmodern Episcopal Church. In general, Hooker criticizes the Puritans for focusing too much on personal beliefs, for focusing too much on the present moment, for deciding that whatever they feel or think in time is in accord with God. He argues that they seek power as the moment, circumstance, and whim occurs. The result is inconsistency.

Hooker had a wonderful view of the errancy of individual human behavior and how a standard—the Scripture, Book of Common Prayer, and Church—can provide constancy and stability in our lives. “Nature worketh in us all a love to our own counsels. The contradiction of others is a fan to inflame that love. Our love set on fire to maintain that which once we have done, sharpeneth the wit to dispute, to argue, and by all means to reason for it.”

He wrote further, “nature teacheth men to judge good from evil, as well in laws as in other things” by “the force of their own discretion.” It follows then that “whatsoever we do, if our own secret judgment consent not unto it as fit and good to be done, the doing of it to us is sin, although the thing itself be allowable.” Some things (truth, morals) are obvious to all humans, but some things in Scripture are not, hence we rely on the wise to interpret them for us.

Hooker argued that the foundations to know what is true are three: Reason, Experience, and Tradition. Of reason, he wrote: Reason not feeling is key to knowledge; one must focus on “the nature of that evidence which scripture yieldeth.” The Holy Spirit, he implies, speaks to us through Reason. Feelings lead us to see how different we are from one another, thus it helps foment division. But “nature, Scripture, and experience . . . have all taught the world to seek for the ending of contentions by submitting itself unto some judicial and definitive sentence.” God, Hooker argued, prefers to have disputes settled in an orderly fashion by impartial judges who might err, have erroneous conclusions, that in time will be settled correctly, rather than to have continual disorderly disputes. God here is willing to be patient with humans to in time discover the truth. God is the author of peace not confusion; he wishes us to be patient in our discovery of what is true, and to yield to peace and order not confusion and disorder.

Are the current moral fads of the past twenty to thirty years so pressing, so obviously true, that an entire worldwide church would change its traditional path to follow a postmodern path?

Hooker wrote pointedly and truthfully: “For my purpose herein is to shew, that when the minds of men are once erroneously persuaded that it is the will of God to have those things done which they fancy, their opinions are as thorns in their sides, never suffering them to take rest till they have brought their speculations into practice.” Even more powerful was his argument that people who dispute the current order will always have hearers because of human restlessness and dissatisfaction, unlike those who defend the current order.

Also, a wonderful condemnation to the restlessness and rampant change of our times is this: of God’s laws we are generally ignorant, knowing only bits and pieces of the whole. Humans perceive disorder and chaos because we are ignorant of God’s true purposes and His eternal laws: all things work according to His will, which is good and perfect. The key to discovering the way to moral goodness is by following “the natural way of finding out Laws by Reason” so “to guide the Will unto that which is good.” To expand, he believed that the voice of reason and authority of teaching over time is the way to know the Good. Humans inquire for preservation, simply to know, and as a means to know how to act. Humans know what is true and right by examining all things in relation to themselves over time. The deep understanding of our soul or mind is the First Law, the basis for understanding all subsequent laws and actions. Intuitive natural understanding teaches us “axioms and laws natural concerning our duty.”

Therefore, humans who behave most closely to the apriori truths of nature most closely imitate nature, hence mirror the truth, that is God. There is a universal morality and truth.

Hooker argued for a kind of society based on simple human reason, like that formed by the Pilgrims in the Mayflower Compact. Hooker wrote, twenty-five years before the voyage of the Pilgrims: “To take away all such mutual grievances, injuries, and wrongs, there was no way but only by growing unto composition and agreement amongst themselves, by ordaining some kind of government public, and by yielding themselves subject thereunto; that unto whom they granted authority to rule and govern, by them the peace, tranquillity, and happy estate of the rest might be procured.”

Richard Hooker ultimately argued that tradition, experience, and reason–not the whims of the moment, what is popular today—are the basis of order, the basis of morality, the basis of government, and the basis of the Christian Church. Today we see governments forgetting such wisdom, and even churches. The Episcopal Church used to be a stalwart for tradition and order against the whims of the moment and the tides of change. But no longer. Now the Episcopal Church has become a Postmodern Church rushing along on its happy path into oblivion.