Richard Hooker

 

Richard Hooker 

Homily Preached at Noon Healing Eucharist  

Nov 4, 2021 

Trinity Episcopal Church, Ashland Oregon 

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D. 

Richard Hooker (died 2 November 1600) was a priest on the Church of England and one of the most important English theologians of the sixteenth century.  His defense of the role of reason informed the theology of the seventeenth century Caroline Divines like Lancelot Andrewes, Thomas Ken, Jeremy Taylor, and George Herbert.  The influence of his work is seen in the Anglican “tripod” of theological method: scripture, tradition, and reason. 

Traditionally, he has been regarded as the originator of the Anglican via media between Protestantism and Catholicism, though recent scholarship tends to see him within the context of the Calvinism of the Church of England at the time, as one who sought only to oppose the extremism of thorough-going Puritans rather than moving the Church of England away from Protestantism.

His masterpiece is The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.  Like St. Thomas Aquinas before him, Hooker uses an Aristotelian method strongly emphasizing natural law planted by God in creation. On this foundation, all positive laws of Church and State are developed from Scriptural revelation, ancient tradition, and reason informed by experience.  He rejects the Calvinist contempt of reason a thing totally corrupted and tainted by Adam’s fall, and sees it as something put by God in human beings at creation and only impaired by the fall, whose proper use must be recovered through God’s grace and redemption. 

English Puritans were demanding a radical change in Church government. Calvin’s church polity in Geneva saw each congregation  ruled by a committee made up of two thirds lay people elected annually by the congregation and one third clergy serving for life. The English Puritans, who in the next century were to divide the country into civil war and behead both Archbishop Laud and King Charles I, argued that any church not following the Geneva model was not truly Christian.
Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity replies to this.  Hooker first considers prior questions about the authority and legitimacy of government (religious and secular), about the nature of law in its various forms, including the laws of physics as well as those of the state.  Without ever using the word Anglican, he sets forth the Anglican view of the Church, and the Anglican approach to the discovery of religious truth (the so-called via media, or middle road), and explains how this differs from the position of the Puritans, on the one hand, and the adherents of the Bishop of Rome, on the other.

He begins an apology of sorts for his dense and closely reasoned prose, a challenge for some:

“Those unto whom we shall seem tedious are in no wise injured by us, seeing that it lies in their own hands to spare themselves the labor they are unwilling to endure.”

In other words, if it’s too hard for you, you’re always free not to read it. 

Hooker greatly influenced John Locke, and through him, American political philosophy in the run up to the American Revolution. 

Although Hooker is unsparing in his censure of what he believes to be the errors of Rome, his contemporary, Pope Clement VIII (died 1605), said of the book: “It has in it such seeds of eternity that it will abide until the last fire shall consume all learning.”

Hooker's sermons contain some real gems. In one on justification he replies to a Puritan preacher who had taken him to task for saying in an earlier sermon that he hoped to see in Heaven many who had been Romanists on earth. The Puritan preacher said that since “papists” rejected the doctrine of Justification by Faith, they could not be justified. Hooker’s reply was that the Doctrine of Justification by Faith was indeed true, and Rome’s dogma was defective in rejecting it.  But he added that those who do not rightly understand the means that God has provided for our salvation may nonetheless be saved by it.  He puts it this way:

 

“God is no captious sophister, eager to trip us up whenever we say amiss, but a courteous tutor, ready to amend what, in our weakness or our ignorance, we say ill, and to make the most of what we say aright.”

 

In an era of great division and partisanship like our own, we need more voices like Richard Hooker’s, who advocate reason and a middle way between hardened positions that kill love between neighbors.  

 

In the name of Christ, Amen.  

 

(Sources: Wikipedia and James Keifer).