When I joined the Episcopal Church in 2008, I heard about the three-legged stool. The teaching discussed that the three sources of authority are scripture, reason and tradition. It made sense to me that you would not rely on just one or the other, and three legs gave it balance.
The Rev. Chuck Collins in an article in The Living Church in 1998 took issue with the three-legged stool concept in that it isn’t written in the Book of Common Prayer and that three legs can end up in competition with each other. Rev. Collins’ recommendation is that we declare the Bible as the only authority and discount both reason and tradition as pillars of faith.
I agree with the importance of the Bible and that it is the inspired words of God. But the danger in the single leg is that we have many differing interpretations of the same verses. One example is the use of verses to condone slavery that were often quoted in Congress to support the oppression of an entire race (Ephesians 6:5).
I would like to propose a different solution to the three-legged stool by adding a fourth leg. The fourth leg is imagination. By imagination, I don’t mean that we can dream and come up with any solution we want, but instead that with our imagination, we can have a clearer vision of what God’s kingdom here on earth looks like and we can work toward bringing it into our today reality.
What if we used scripture, reason, tradition and added our imagination. Can we visualize our earth as a place where there are no longer any poor, where everyone acts with righteousness, peace, joy and where hearts are transformed to not only follow Christ but to be like Christ? It will be a lot easier for Jesus to separate us into goats and sheep at the end of time if we live now like we are in a new heaven and earth (Matt. 25:31-46).
Ross Douthat in his book Believe (Zondervan Books, 2025) says, “Once human beings inhabited a supernatural-infused cosmos, saw divinity in every tree and waterfall, lived under the influence of angels and demons, gods and stars and spirits. Now we inhabit a society defined by reason, science, and calculations, a natural world drained of metaphysical significance with selves buffered against the mystical and mythological…. Science supplanted prayer, for good reason, as the primary means of seeking healing, but people keep reporting that they’d been healed by intercessory prayer.”
What would our world be like if we used our imagination to once again see divinity in every tree and waterfall and to believe that intercessory prayer makes a difference in healing?
Blessings, my friend,
Agatha