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 On any list of great
English theologians, the name of Richard Hooker would appear at or near the
top. His masterpiece is The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. Its philosophical
base is Aristotelian, with a strong emphasis on natural law eternally
planted by God in creation. On this foundation, all positive laws of Church
and State are developed from Scriptural revelation, ancient tradition,
reason, and experience.
The occasion of his writing was the demand of English Puritans for a
reformation of Church government. Calvin had established in Geneva a system
whereby each congregation was ruled by a commission comprising two thirds
laymen elected annually by the congregation and one third clergy serving for
life. The English Puritans (by arguments more curious than convincing) held
that no church not so governed could claim to be Christian.
Hooker replies to this assertion, but in the process he raises and considers
fundamental questions about the authority and legitimacy of government
(religious and secular), about the nature of law, and about various kinds of
law, including the laws of physics as well as the laws of England. In the
course of his book 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 Pope, on the other.
He is very heavy reading, but well worth it. (He says, on the first page of
Chapter I: "Those unto whom we shall seem tedious are in no wise injuried by
us, seeing that it lies in their own hands to spare themselves the labor
they are unwilling to endure." This translates into modern English as: "If
you can't take the intellectual heat, get out of the kitchen. If you can't
stand a book that makes you think, go read the funny papers.") The effect of
the book has been considerable. Hooker greatly influenced John Locke, and
(both directly and through Locke), American political philosophy in the late
1700's. 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 best short work is his sermon, "A Learned discourse of
Justification." In an earlier sermon, Hooker had expressed the hope of
seeing in Heaven many who had been Romanists on earth. A Puritan preacher
took him to task for this, saying that since the Romanists did not believe
the doctrine of Justification by Faith, they could not be justified. Hooker
replied at length in this sermon, in which (1) he sets forth the Doctrine of
Justification by Faith, and agrees with his opponent that the official
theology of Rome is defective on this point; (2) he defends his assertion
that those who do not rightly understand the means that God has provided for
our salvation may nonetheless be saved by it, in which connection he says (I
quote from memory): "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." His sermon is often bound with the Laws, and is also available in
the paperback volume Faith and Works (ed. Philip Edgecumbe Hughes,
Morehouse-Barlow, Wilton CN 06897, ISBN 0-8192-1315-2)
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