Richard Hooker
I want you to imagine for a moment that the Dean of Derby
preached this morning, a sermon of erudite and orthodox Anglican theology. Then this evening, along comes the reforming
Canon Chancellor and purports to correct, nay to refute the Dean’s teaching,
accusing him of popish heresy and of ignoring the Scriptures. And that this is a pattern that overall
continues for several years.
This is, of
course, not what is happening here tonight.
I do not stand here to refute the Dean’s heresies. Rather I stand here to speak of a man for
whom this experience of sermon and counter-sermon was a regular occurrence. The man is Richard Hooker, and he has come to
be seen as the greatest apologist for Anglicanism, and even by some as the
inventor of Anglicanism!
To
understand how this came about, we must look a little at what had happened to
the Church of England in his lifetime.
Richard Hooker was born in Heavitree near Exeter in about 1554. There is a little uncertainty about the date,
but if he was born in 1554, then he was born the year after the death of Edward
VI – the boy king – under whom a strongly Protestant Church of England was forged. In 1555, England was formally reconciled to
the Papacy under Mary 1 and her Cardinal Archbishop of Canterbury Reginald
Pole. Mary’s short reign saw firm
suppression of Protestantism and many leading reformers fled abroad, not least
to Geneva and to the city of John Calvin.
When Mary died, shortly after Pole, her half-sister Elizabeth came to
the throne. Hooker would have been about
four years old at this time. A different
sort of Anglicanism came too, and there is a real case for Elizabeth herself
being seen as one of the great Anglican theologians who have shaped the Church
of England. With Elizabeth came a real
sense of Anglicanism as a via media,
a middle way. Under Elizabeth the Church
of England once more broke from Rome, and Royal Supremacy (now under a ‘Supreme
Governor’ rather than Henry VIII’s ‘Supreme Head’) was restored. Cranmer’s prayerbook was also restored, but
modified to allow some traditional practices and beliefs to continue. The Church of England now faced opposition on
two flanks – from Roman Catholics on the one hand (Elizabeth was excommunicated
in 1570) but now for the first time from Protestants as well. Those who had fled Mary’s persecutions
returned to England and argued that the Church of England was not nearly
reformed enough. They became known as
the Puritans – those who wanted to purify the English Church.
The Puritan agenda was varied and
rarely stable. Amongst other things, they
wanted to do away with Bishops, and introduce congregational governance; to firmly
separate the church from the state and to do away with worship that relied on
beauty, visual or musical. Only this
week on an edition of ‘In our Time’ on Radio 4, I heard one scholar claim that
it was Elizabeth’s preservation of Cathedrals and Cathedral Choirs that particularly
irked the Puritans!
In 1573, well into Elizabeth’s
reign, a leading Puritan called Walter Travers produced what is often thought
to be the finest and most scholarly account of the Puritan objections to the
Elizabethan Church of England. It was
called ‘A Clear and Full Exposition from the Word of God of Ecclesiastical
Discipline and the Anglican Church’s Deviation Therefrom’ (pithy titles were
not a requirement). Travers was a Puritan
who did not seek ordination because he regarded the role of bishops in appointing
clergy to be contrary to the pattern laid down in Scripture. He was Reader at the Temple church in
London. Having been de facto Master of the Temple Church for three years, he was a
candidate to be appointed Master in 1585, a post that went to the candidate
proposed by the Archbishop of York – Richard Hooker. Travers, who was also related by marriage to
Hooker, stayed on at the Temple as Reader.
Hooker reinstated the used of the Book of Common Prayer, robed in
cassock and surplice for worship and had commissioned a musical setting for the
service of matins. For the next two years, Hooker would preach in the morning at
a service conducted according to the Book
of Common Prayer, and Travers would preach a rebuttal in the afternoon at a
service according to the Geneva Prayer
Book. Their sermons were a debate
between the defender of the Anglican establishment and one of the leaders of a
group who would reform that establishment in many different ways.
Travers was removed from his post
at the Temple in late 1586, having tried to unseat Hooker through a complaint
to the Privy Council. Hooker stayed
another five years, but in defending himself from Travers’ complaints he, and
the Archbishop of Canterbury, found that he was producing a theological account
of the Church of England and the Elizabethan Settlement. Hooker left the Temple in 1591, ultimately
taking on a parish in Bishopsbourne in Kent, and in 1593 published the work for
which he is known – Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity. This is a
long work, that deals in matters of theology, church order, worship and the
relations between church and state. Of
its eight books, only five were published in Hooker’s lifetime. Hooker’s early death in 1600 meant that the
publishing of the book was far from straightforward. At first, it made little impact, and was
never translated into Latin or any European language. Hooker wrote long, flowing and often
difficult prose. One writer suggests
that the paragraph was his natural medium, and some of Hooker’s paragraphs are
long and very dense. But over time the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity came to be
recognised as the great apology for Anglicanism.
In the time remaining to me, I
want to look at two aspects of Hooker’s work and how they might still help
Anglicanism today. First, I want to look
at how Hooker uses the Bible; and then at how conflict functions within his
work.
So first, the Bible. In his arguments with the Puritans, Hooker offers
a means of understanding the Bible that has become definitive of an Anglican
approach in that he appeals to Scripture but also to tradition and to
reason. Sometimes this is described as
the ‘three-fold stool’ of Scripture, tradition and reason that constitutes
something distinctive to Anglican theology and worship. However, as in so much of his argument, there
are many subtleties in Hooker’s approach.
First, Hooker is clear that this is an argument about reading
Scripture. It is less about what it
contains, but rather about what one does with the contents of Scripture. With the Puritans, Hooker complains about the
Roman Catholic tendency to add traditions of the Church to Scripture and see
them as being necessary for salvation.
Nor would he allow that human reason trumps the Scriptures. For Hooker, as for the Puritans, the Church
and human reason are under the authority of Scripture. Where Hooker parts company from the Puritans
is in his insistence that both tradition and reason are part of how we read the
Scriptures. The Puritans thought that
one could simply read out of Scripture an account of how to organise a
church. Hooker disagreed. Scripture is important and must not be
contradicted, but we need to understand what is being said and done, and may
find that the traditions of the church offer a better way forward. In fact, a strong reading of Hooker would
suggest that he feels that the Puritans themselves are using tradition and
reason to understand scripture. They are
simply not acknowledging this, and short-circuiting the work needed to argue
their case.
It follows from this approach to
Scripture that the image of the three-legged stool does not really work. That image implies that Scripture, tradition
and reason are equal in the contributions that they make to theological
argument. Hooker would not have accepted
this, for him Scripture is the ground of that argument. A better image might be that of a pair of spectacles
for reading the Bible: one lens is reason, the other tradition; both are used
to understand and to read the Scriptures.
This is a far cry from a common approach to Church politics, in which
the Church of England has three ‘parties’, the Evangelicals who take their
primary authority from Scripture, the Catholics who take their primary
authority from the traditions of the church, and liberals who take reason as
their primary guidance. Hooker would not
have welcomed this. Rather, he would
have said that we are all engaged in a conversation over the reading of
Scripture in which all our different understandings and traditions have a
contribution to make. Perhaps the Church
of England needs to recover this sense that we are all engaged together in the
same activity of reading the Scriptures.
We will disagree, but we are all trying to do the same thing!
Another consequence of Hooker’s
approach to Scripture is that conflict and dispute is inevitable. That should hardly surprise an Anglican. There has never been a time when the nature
of Anglicanism has not been in dispute.
It was true in Hooker’s day; it is true in our day. But what Hooker has to offer here are some
means of handling conflict. First, he
refuses to write off anyone because he disagrees with them (or they with him). In a sermon ‘On Faith and Works’, he says,
“You must learn that it is not in itself harmful, neither should it be
scandalous, nor offensive, if in cases where there is doubt about doctrine, we
listen to the differing opinions of others … If this offends you, the fault is
your own. Maintain peaceable minds and
you may find comfort even in this variety of opinion.” So we see Hooker taking Puritan argument
seriously and sharing their concerns to be true to scripture. We also see Hooker refusing to write off
Roman Catholics. It was his sermon on 1st
March 1586, on the prophet Habbukuk, that led to the complaints about him to
the Privy Council. In particular, his statement
that “The Church of Rome, however broken
and misshapen by its heresies, is still part of the church. She has never directly denied the foundation
of our faith.” For Hooker, the Church of
Rome was mistaken, but that did not mean that Catholics were beyond salvation,
either in terms of the Catholic ancestors of the Reformed Church of England, or
in terms of Catholics of his own day. As
a later Anglican theologian (David Jenkins) was to put it, “we are justified by
faith, not by faith in justification by faith!”
Hooker’s second contribution to
the handling of conflict in the church is to insist that theological disputes
should be settled by theological work.
He would not permit the quick and easy route of solving a theological
controversy by recourse to authority.
This put Hooker in opposition to the Roman claim to papal authority as a
means of settling dispute. But it also
placed him in opposition to the Puritan claim to settle argument by recourse to
the Bible. For Hooker the statement ‘the
Bible says’ was the beginning of an argument, not the end of it. Hooker would have approved of the claim
attributed to Bishop Rawlinson of Derby that “The Church of Rome claims to be
infallible. The Church of England is
more modest in her claims; she merely says that she is right”.
Alongside his refusals to write
off those with whom he disagreed and his refusal to take the quick route of an
appeal to a deciding authority, Hooker’s work demands of us
self-criticism. If we are invited to
join a great conversation about the meaning of Scripture, then we should take
part as those who have something to learn from it. Rather wonderfully, his work includes
quotations from the Jewish Mishnah, alongside the Church Fathers, Thomas Aquinas
and the Reformers. This threefold method
of refusing to write off opponents, insisting on theological work rather than
an appeal to authority, and a self-criticism that is willing to learn would be
a real contribution to dealing with the disagreements of contemporary
Anglicanism!
Hooker, in common with many systematic writers, is not
always clear whether he is writing about the Church of England as it is or the
Church of England as it should be. But
he has much to offer both, and continues to be a resource for Anglican theology
over 400 years after his death. Isaak
Walton, his first biographer, said that ‘He who praises Richard Hooker, praises
God’. Certainly, let us thank God for
the gift of this thinker and writer who has given so much to the Church of
England. But let the last words be
Hooker’s, words from the Preface to the Laws
of Ecclesiastical Polity. They are
words that speak to Hooker’s use of Scripture and handling of conflict; words
that speak of our common human nature; words that offer us a challenge and a
way forward; words that we need to hear more often than we might like. This is Hooker’s advice to his readers: “Think ye are men, deem it not impossible for
you to err”. Amen.
Given at Derby Cathedral Evensong 20.10.13. as part of a series on 'Great Anglicans'
Comments