Richard Hooker and Reformed Orthodoxy [1 ed.] 9783666552076, 9783525552070

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W. Bradford Littlejohn / Scott N. Kindred-Barnes (eds.)

Richard Hooker and Reformed Orthodoxy

Reformed Historical Theology Edited by Herman J. Selderhuis in Co-operation with Emidio Campi, Irene Dingel, Elsie Anne McKee, Richard Muller, Risto Saarinen, and Carl Trueman

Volume 40

W. Bradford Littlejohn / Scott N. Kindred-Barnes (eds.)

Richard Hooker and Reformed Orthodoxy

Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data available online: http://dnb.d-nb.de. ISSN 2197-1137 ISBN 978-3-666-55207-6 You can find alternative editions of this book and additional material on our Website: www.v-r.de © 2017, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Theaterstraße 13, D-37073 Göttingen/ Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht LLC, Bristol, CT, U.S.A. www.v-r.de All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher.

Contents

Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abbreviations and Note on Citations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

9

Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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W. Bradford Littlejohn / Scott N. Kindred-Barnes Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Part I: Situating Richard Hooker David Neelands 1. Richard Hooker, adiaphora, and the Defence of a Reformation via media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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W. Brown Patterson 2. Richard Hooker and William Perkins: Elizabethan Adversaries or Allies? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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A. S. McGrade 3. Hooker on Public Worship: An Offering to the Wider Reformation

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. .

Part II: Hooker’s Theological and Pastoral Method Paul Dominiak 4. Hooker, Scholasticism, Thomism, and Reformed Orthodoxy . . . . . . 101 Torrance Kirby 5. “Grace hath Use of Nature”: Richard Hooker and the Conversion of Reason . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127

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Contents

Daniel Eppley 6. Practicing What He Preaches: Richard Hooker as Practitioner of Loyal Opposition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 Rudolph P. Almasy 7. Richard Hooker, Reformed Sermon Making, and the Use of Scripture . 155 Scott N. Kindred-Barnes 8. “Symbolizing with Idolaters”: George Gillespie’s Critique of Hooker’s “Convenient” Way . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175

Part III: Richard Hooker in the Context of Reformed Orthodoxy Andrew A. Fulford 9. “A Truth Infallible”: Richard Hooker and Reformed Orthodoxy on Autopistos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203 Bradford Littlejohn 10. Cutting Through the Fog in the Channel: Hooker, Junius, and a Reformed Theology of Law . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221 Luca Baschera 11. Righteousness Imputed and Inherent: Hooker’s soteriology in the context of 16th century continental Reformed theology . . . . . . . . . . 241 J.V. Fesko 12. Richard Hooker and John Owen on Union with Christ . . . . . . . . . 255 Michael J. Lynch 13. Richard Hooker and the Development of English Hypothetical Universalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273 Andrew J. Martin 14. Richard Hooker and Reformed Sacramental Theology . . . . . . . . . 295 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319 List of Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 353

Acknowledgments

This project has been a joint undertaking from its inception, at the Richard Hooker Society conference in Toronto in November of 2013, which Scott organized. When Brad presented a paper there, “The Search for a Reformed Hooker: Some Modest Proposals,” the ensuing discussion led to a general sense that he had identified some important avenues for future research. Accordingly, Scott, in organizing panels for the 2014 Sixteenth Century Society Conference, proposed that Brad help bring together some papers investigating Richard Hooker’s relation to Reformed orthodoxy. That October in New Orleans, Herman Selderhuis and Luca Baschera were good enough to come over from Europe to join the usual band of North American Hooker scholars, lending their profound expertise in continental Reformed orthodoxy to the inquiry. We are very grateful to them in particular, but to all who presented on these panels, including Torrance Kirby, David Neelands, Rudy Almasy, Daniel Eppley, and Andrew Fulford. Herman Selderhuis graciously proposed a book project arising from these papers, and to put us in touch with Jörg Persch at Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, who enthusiastically took on the project. We are deeply grateful to them for their support of this project, and also to Christoph Spill at V&R, our editor. Over the following year, Stephen McGrade, Michael Lynch, John Fesko, Drew Martin, Brown Patterson, and Paul Dominiak joined the project, helping to vastly deepen and broaden the scope of the inquiry contained in this volume. We want to thank them, and all the contributors to the book, for their diligence and dedication, and also their great patience with us as editors, who have frequently demanded deadlines of them while constantly missing our own! We are thankful for the help of anonymous external reviewers for offering important and helpful feedback on some of these essays. Perhaps most of all we are grateful to our editorial assistant, Brian Marr, who has put in enormous hours to proof and reproof final drafts, standardizing formatting, spelling, and citations, somehow without sacrificing his sanity in the process.

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Acknowledgments

Finally, we would like to thank our wives, Rachel and Kerry, for graciously allowing us to put such long hours into this project. W. Bradford Littlejohn and Scott N. Kindred-Barnes

Abbreviations and Note on Citations

CO

FLE 1

FLE 2

FLE 3

FLE 4

FLE 5

FLE 6

LEP

Ioannis Calvini opera quae supersunt omnia. Edited by Johann Wilhelm Baum, August Edward Cunitz, and Eduard Reuss. In Corpus Reformatorum. Edited by C.B. Bretschneider and H.E. Bindseil. Brunswick: C.A. Schwetschke, 1864–1900. Hill, W. Speed, and Georges Edelen, eds. The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, vol. 1: The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: Pref., Books I to IV. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977. Hill, W. Speed, ed. The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, vol. 2: The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: Book V. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977. Hill, W. Speed, and P.G. Stanwood, eds. The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, vol. 3: The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: Books VI, VII, VIII. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1981. Hill, W. Speed, and John E. Booty, eds. The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, vol. 4: Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie: Attack and Response. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982. Hill, W. Speed, and Laetitia Yeandle, ed. The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, vol. 5: Tractates and Sermons. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1990. Hill, W. Speed, ed. The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, vol. 6: Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie, Books I–VIII: Introductions and Commentary. Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1993. Hooker, Richard. Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie. Eyght Bookes. London: John Windet, 1593, 1597; Richard Bishop, 1648; J. Best, 1662.

10 LW

ST WA

Abbreviations and Note on Citations

Luther, Martin. Luther’s Works: American Edition. Edited by Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann. St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, and Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1955–1970. Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae. Translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province. At New Advent, www.newadvent.org. D. Martin Luther’s Werke: kritische Gesamtausgabe (Weimarer Ausgabe). 120 vols. Weimar: H. Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1883–2009.

** All quotations or citations of Richard Hooker are from the Folger Library Edition unless otherwise specified. Citations are given first by Folger volume with page and generally line numbers, then by title of work (with the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie abbreviated LEP) with book, chapter, section number. So, for instance, the citation “FLE 1:343.23–344.9; LEP IV.14.7” denotes that the quotation is taken from Book IV, ch. 14, par. 7 of the Lawes, which can be found in vol. 1, beginning on p. 343, line 23, and ending on p. 344, line 9 of the Folger Library Edition.

Foreword

Thanks to the endeavors of the Richard Hooker Society, the study of the life and work of Richard Hooker has received new and increasing attention. Thus far, Hooker has been known mainly in Anglican circles but this has recently changed enormously, as this volume demonstrates. Brad Littlejohn and Scott KindredBarnes have managed to bring a great team of experts together and each one of them presents the latest in Hooker research. The editors themselves start off with a very clear introduction to the state of this research and their overview not only makes clear how vivid the academic discussion and thus the research on Hooker is, but also how necessary it is to review Hooker’s place in the Protestant tradition. This review can only take place by reading Hooker himself, but also by taking notice of his historical and theological context. In this respect, Hooker studies enjoys the ‘ad fontes’ movement that has engulfed research on early modern intellectual history in general and that of 16th and 17th century reformed Protestantism in particular. After the Second World War, an awareness arose that not only the works of Luther, Zwingli and Calvin should be available and accessible in scholarly editions, but also those of the unjustly so-called ‘minor reformers’. Editions of the works of, for example, Martin Bucer and Heinrich Bullinger were started and soon followed by the editions of many other Protestant thinkers as well as of ecclesiastical and political acta, a process still going on today. These editions resulted in a rich harvest of dissertations, conferences and translations, but also of research centers and societies dealing with these reformers, their life, works and influence. Slowly but surely the circle of these reformers has widened also chronologically to those Protestants of the second part of the sixteenth century. More and more, the conviction has grown that reformed Protestantism contained a wide varied of people and positions and yet was a theological unity, even if this ‘variety in unity’ was reflected in different confessional standpoints and documents. ‘Calvinism’, according to some scholars, should be seen as synonymous with ‘reformed Protestantism’, since a reappraisal of Calvin’s theology and that of his

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Foreword

contemporaries and students made clear that ‘Calvinism’ is far broader than the theology of Calvin also since Calvin himself took up leading ideas of the first reformers. In this reappraisal, studies on Richard Hooker also blossomed and brought those new insights that form the basis as well as much of the content of this volume. The concept ‘label’ can be called the red thread through this book but even more through the aforementioned research. The availability of new editions, the access to digital sources and the growing interdisciplinary, international and interconfessional academic cooperation have left most of the early modern labels void. Whether Lutheran, Calvinist, Anglican, Puritan or Baptist, all of these labels have lost much of their value—if they ever had such value—as a result of close reading of the sources, and Hooker studies is one of those that profit richly from it. Labels shut people out and lock others in, which seems to give a clear picture where each has a place. However, reading the persons who have these labels forces one to either conclude that they sometimes were inconsistent, as they do not always act or speak according to their label, or to conclude that labels need sublabels or simply need to be done away with. The papers of this rich volume prove that for a real appraisal of the work and person of Richard Hooker, the lastmentioned approach is best. The whole scale of Hooker’s life and work is dealt with in the chapters here presented, and this makes this book into a Hooker handbook that hopefully will be a useful tool as well as a welcome stimulus for research on this fascinating figure. For speaking of the harvest of new editions and newer research does not mean that we are almost done. Quite the opposite is true. Harvest means also to make place for new fruits and these are sure to come. This volume once again makes clear that it is highly fruitful and refreshing to skip labels and prejudices and return to the sources and to do so with combined forces. I am happy and somewhat proud that this volume appears in the series Refo500 Academic Studies, first of all because of the quality of the papers but also since Richard Hooker deserves a prominent place on the stage of Reformation studies. Therefore I wish this wonderful book into the hands of many colleagues and students. Herman Selderhuis

W. Bradford Littlejohn / Scott N. Kindred-Barnes

Introduction

I.

The State of Hooker Scholarship

For all the homage we pay them, we allow few great historical thinkers the dignity of resting in peace. Rather, no sooner are their bodies laid in the grave before they are disinterred, so to speak, and made to play various parts that have been written for them, and participate in every quarrel that their descendants can think up. They become the victims of an endless tug-of-war, pulled first this way and then that by the warring intellectual factions of each successive age. They are variously eulogized, canonized, criticized, and only occasionally humanized. Indeed, we might wonder whether the number of factions a thinker inspires, and the longevity of their disagreements, is not the surest mark of intellectual greatness: consider the warring legions of Platonists, Aristotelians, Thomists, and Calvinists that have filled many a library through the centuries, and continue to do so today. By this measure alone, Richard Hooker perhaps merits recognition as an intellectual giant of lasting historical significance. Since his death in 1600, his thought – and especially his monumental Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity – has been conscripted as a bulwark of many different self-understandings of that protean tradition called “Anglicanism,” with the odd Puritan or Catholic daring to claim Hooker’s mantle as their own.1 The progressive liberation of historical scholarship from the straitjacket of confessional identity over the past century might have promised to at last end such tug-of-wars and bring some clarity to the discussion over how best to understand this great Elizabethan. And to be sure, Hooker scholarship has witnessed a vibrant renaissance in the past half-century, beginning with the Folger Library Edition project in the early 1970s and continuing to steadily gather steam since then. The past twenty years have seen the publication of three new essay 1 For a full survey of the complex reception of Hooker’s work in the seventeenth century, see Michael Brydon, The Evolving Reputation of Richard Hooker: An Examination of Responses, 1600–1714 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

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collections on Hooker, with this present volume marking the fourth.2 During that period, a new monograph dedicated to Hooker has appeared nearly every year, with further discussion taking place in journal articles and conferences, both academic and occasionally popular.3 An outside observer, however, might be forgiven for thinking that this renaissance had succeeded in generating more heat than light, with profound disagreements persisting about Hooker’s basic theological identity and polemical agenda, as well as his views on a host of key theological and political topics, and little sign of resolution. In particular, since roughly 1988 two influential revisionist schools of Hooker interpretation have emerged, both of them sharply opposed to an older consensus view of Hooker as the quintessential representative of a moderate Anglican via media, but also sharply opposed to one another. One school is associated with the great historian of early modern England Peter Lake, who in 1988 published his groundbreaking assessment of Hooker in Anglicans and Puritans?, and the other with the prominent Reformation historical theologian Torrance Kirby, who that same year defended his Oxford dissertation, soon afterward published as Richard Hooker’s Doctrine of the Royal Supremacy.4 Before surveying these two schools, we should perhaps first pause to review the more traditional via media interpretation both were opposing. This view, which is well-represented in such mid twentieth-century works as John F.H. New’s Anglican and Puritan, F.J. Shirley’s Richard Hooker and Contemporary Political Ideas, and John S. Marshall’s Hooker and the Anglican Tradition,5 rested heavily on a certain self-understanding of Anglicanism as 2 A.S. McGrade, ed., Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community (Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies); W.J. Torrance Kirby, ed., Richard Hooker and the English Reformation (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2003); Kirby, ed., A Companion to Richard Hooker (Leiden: Brill, 2008). 3 Just the past few years have witnessed the publication of A.J. Joyce, Richard Hooker and Anglican Moral Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Charles Miller, Richard Hooker and the Vision of God (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2013); Dan Graves and Scott N. Kindred-Barnes, eds., Richard Hooker: His Life, Work, and Legacy (Toronto: St. Osmund Press, 2013); W. Bradford Littlejohn, Richard Hooker: A Companion to His Life and Work (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2015); Daniel Eppley, Reading the Bible with Richard Hooker (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2016); W. Bradford Littlejohn, The Peril and Promise of Christian Liberty: Richard Hooker, the Puritans, and Protestant Political Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, forthcoming 2017). 4 Peter Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought From Whitgift to Hooker (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988); W.J. Torrance Kirby, Richard Hooker’s Doctrine of the Royal Supremacy (Leiden: Brill, 1990). 5 John F. H. New, Anglican and Puritan: The Basis of Their Opposition, 1558–1640 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964); F. J. Shirley, Richard Hooker and Contemporary Political Ideas (London: Published for the Church Historical Society by S.P.C.K., 1949); John S. Marshall, Hooker and the Anglican Tradition: an Historical and Theological Study of Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity (Sewanee, TN: University Press at the University of the South, 1956).

Introduction

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having, from its inception, charted something of a middle course between Rome and Geneva. This self-understanding was for many Anglicans somewhat transparently self-congratulatory, claiming as the special charism of that tradition its ability to achieve moderation in the face of dogmatism and sweet reasonableness in the face of conflict. Richard Hooker, with his beautifully-balanced, carefullyqualified prose, and his commitment to search out the rational foundations of every dispute, was taken to be paradigmatic of this theological method. Not only that, but Hooker’s thought was often read as paradigmatic of such a “golden mediocrity” in its content as well, charting a course that steered the English church well away from the jagged rocks of Calvinist predestinarianism and Lutheran solfidianism, but without getting lost in the treacherous sea of postTridentine Catholicism. Hooker’s theology was Thomist above all, hearkening back to the best features of the scholastic synthesis before the late medieval corruptions and the Reformation tumults. Such a via media reading of Hooker was certainly not ubiquitous prior to the modern renaissance of Hooker studies, but it was undoubtedly the general consensus, at least since the Oxford Movement. The Tractarians, to be sure, were not responsible for manufacturing the via media idea of their church, or of Hooker himself, out of whole cloth, as is sometimes claimed, although they certainly did try to accentuate its distance from magisterial Protestantism. Nor is this understanding a thing of the past. It is still easily the dominant understanding of Anglicanism, and indeed of Hooker, among the Anglican rank-andfile, and those of other denominations who ever pause to think about Hooker. Several recent scholars have also continued to espouse something like this older interpretation. Lee Gibbs, for instance, stalwartly maintained it right through the revisionist wave of the 1990s and 2000s, and A.J. Joyce and Charles Miller have also presented a somewhat chastened and qualified version of the theory, mixed with elements of Lake’s revisionist reading.6 However, most scholars now writing on Hooker are keenly aware of the theory’s limitations. Chief among them is the recognition that there was no such thing as “Anglicanism” during the sixteenth century. There was a Church of England, to be sure, built on an Elizabethan settlement that did prize a certain “golden mediocrity,” or moderation. But as David Neelands shows in an essay in this volume, and as Ethan Shagan has relentlessly argued in his recent book The Rule of Moderation,7 these terms were neither unique to the English context, nor did they convey some determinate theological flavor that mediated between 6 See Lee W. Gibbs, “Richard Hooker’s Via Media Doctrine of Scripture and Tradition,” Harvard Theological Review 95, no. 2 (2002): 227–35; “Richard Hooker: Prophet of Anglicanism or English Magisterial Reformer?” Anglican Theological Review 84 (2002): 943–60. 7 The Rule of Moderation: Violence, Religion, and the Politics of Restraint in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)

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Protestant and Catholic churchmanship or dogma. On the contrary, there was little or nothing about the fundamental theology of Elizabeth’s church to set it at odds with its continental sister churches, particularly the Swiss and German Reformed. Calvin’s distinctive brand of the Reformed faith was, to be sure, in some disrepute, but this owed more to the taint of political radicalism that John Knox had left on Geneva than to any specifically theological issues. The liturgy and government of the Elizabethan church, on the other hand, certainly did stand out in rather sharp relief from most continental Reformed churches (though not nearly so much from the Lutheran, it should be noted) and seemed to some critics at the time as midway between popery and Protestantism. But this was certainly not how its defenders saw it; on the contrary, they contended, such outward variations in no way implied a theological departure from the Reformed faith or a sympathy with Catholicism. If there was a via media Anglicanism during this time, then, it was certainly not one that anyone was consciously identifying with or advocating. So whatever else Hooker might have been doing, he could hardly have been giving eloquent voice and systematic structure to such an English selfunderstanding. Indeed, for him to do so would have been rash and countercultural in the extreme. The theological consensus of the Elizabethan church was Calvinist, at least in a general sense, and the theology presented in the Lawes could hardly be expected to diverge radically from that consensus.8 Upon this much, both Kirby and Lake are agreed. But at this point, hermeneutical and methodological considerations lead them to quite different conclusions. Lake, although more an intellectual than a social historian, seeks to be meticulously attentive to the immediate ecclesiastical and polemical context in which Hooker wrote. Applying the most up-to-date historical and literary methodology to read between the lines of Hooker’s prose, he seeks to discern Hooker’s subtle departures from and critiques of the dominant Calvinist theology, which, thinks Lake, are rarely stated explicitly given Hooker’s delicate position.9 Kirby, on the other hand, approaches Hooker’s work with more systematic-theological concerns in mind. Having identified, with some measure of oversimplification but also a good deal of genuine insight, the core theological convictions that most or all of the magisterial reformers shared, Kirby looks for evidence of this theological framework (rooted in Luther’s “two realms” theology) in Hooker, and 8 For a summary of scholarship on the “Calvinist consensus” reading of this period that has become dominant since Nicholas Tyacke and Peter Lake’s work in the 1970s and 1980s, see Lake, “Introduction: Puritanism, Arminianism, and Nicholas Tyacke,” in Religious Politics in Post-Reformation England: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Tyacke, ed. Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2006), 1–15. 9 This basic mode of argument appears throughout his lengthy chapter on Hooker in Anglicans and Puritans, but see especially pp. 160, 170, 186–87, 196–97.

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finds it there in sharp relief, so much so that Kirby does not hesitate to portray Hooker’s theology as not merely consistent with magisterial Protestantism and the Reformed tradition, but as paradigmatic of it. Kirby takes Hooker’s writing largely at face value, including his claims to seek reconciliation in the shared truth of Protestant orthodoxy with his Puritan opponents, while Lake discerns a fiercely polemic and at times downright duplicitous work. Lake is much more interested in analyzing Hooker’s rhetorical positioning vis-à-vis the Puritans than in evaluating his theological relationship to Protestant orthodoxy, even if he is frequently led, despite his own professed methodological agnosticism, to draw conclusions about the latter. Lake’s basic conclusion, in the much-quoted words of Anglicans and Puritans, is that although Hooker cannot be said to have epitomized Anglicanism, since it did not yet exist, he could perhaps be said to have “invented” it.10 Bradford Littlejohn has called this revisionist reading the “via mediator” position,11 claiming as it does that Hooker was in fact the first to forge the sort of middle way that was later to characterize Anglican theology, piety, and self-understanding. Although certainly revisionist in its starting assumptions, it should be noted that the overall portrait of Hooker’s theology that emerges from Lake’s reading is not all that different from the old via media picture in certain respects; indeed, Kirby rarely bothers to distinguish the two in much of his writing. Lake contends that Hooker’s theology departs from Calvinism in an Arminian, high church, and sacramentalist direction, that his high view of human reason and reliance on scholastic authorities puts him at odds with Protestant biblicism, and that his robust emphasis on the outward means of salvation and sanctification sets him on a trajectory away from the Reformation’s commitment to sola fide.12 Each of these emphases could be found without much difficulty (albeit generally in cruder form) in older via media scholarship. Although Lake’s work, both on Hooker and more broadly on Puritanism and Anglicanism in the Elizabethan and Jacobean church, has attained virtually the status of a new dogma among many historians of the period, it has not gained a similar following among Anglican historical theologians or self-identified Hooker scholars. Most of these have tended to gravitate toward Kirby’s Reformed revisionism (or as Littlejohn has called it for convenience, “reformism”), albeit most of them in a more qualified and less dogmatic form than Kirby’s own formulations. Leading Hooker scholars such as Paul Avis and David Neelands 10 Lake, Anglicans and Puritans, 227. 11 W. Bradford Littlejohn, “The Search for a Reformed Hooker: Some Modest Proposals,” Reformation and Renaissance Review 16, no. 1 (April 2014): 69. 12 On reason and Scripture, see Anglicans and Puritans, 151–54; on sacramentalism supplanting Reformed understandings of justification, pp. 173–82; on the subversion of Calvinist orthodoxy, pp. 182–96.

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have consistently argued for a Hooker who, although very much his own man, stood firmly in the broad and varied stream of magisterial Protestantism as it was developing in the latter sixteenth century.13 They have also tended to hold, over against Lake, that Hooker’s writing is forthright enough to be interpreted accurately enough without resorting to hermeneutics of suspicion and polemical deconstructions. Most Hooker scholars to come on the scene since the year 2000, such as Dan Eppley, John Stafford, Ranall Ingalls, Dan Graves, and many of the contributors to this volume (and indeed, in the interests of full disclosure, its editors) have been deeply influenced by and broadly sympathetic to Kirby’s work. Of course, there are some notable exceptions, such as A.J. Joyce already mentioned and of course Nigel Voak, who with his 2003 Richard Hooker and Reformed Theology and several subsequent essays, has offered by far the most sophisticated and nuanced articulation of Lake’s general approach to Hooker.14 Hooker scholarship is of course far from the only subfield dogged by intractable disagreements, and indeed, robust disagreement is generally a mark of health when it comes to historical scholarship. In the present case, however, the stubborn persistence and even entrenchment of the rival schools of interpretation with little progress on key disputed points suggests that something is amiss. Without resolution – or at least sustained attention to – three sets of interpretive questions, our progress in understanding Hooker’s theological identity is sure to be slow. These three are (1) hermeneutics and the meaning of “irenicism”; (2) the scope of Reformed theology; (3) the character of Reformed theology. Let us touch on each of these briefly in turn.

II.

Hermeneutics and “Irenicism”

One of the persistent challenges to understanding Hooker rightly, as noted above, is the difficulty of discerning authorial intent. Of course, this is always going to be the case with any writer, historical or contemporary, but for some reason, the problem has loomed rather larger in Hooker scholarship than generally in Luther or Calvin scholarship, for instance. Perhaps Hooker’s rather 13 See for instance Paul D.L. Avis, In Search of Authority: Anglican Theological Method from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 93–129; David Neelands, “Predestination” and “Christology and Sacraments,” in A Companion to Richard Hooker, 185–220, 369–402. 14 Nigel Voak, Richard Hooker and Reformed Theology: A Study of Reason, Will, and Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); “Richard Hooker and the Principle of Sola Scriptura,” The Journal of Theological Studies 59, no. 1 (2008): 96–139; “English Molinism in the Late 1590s: Richard Hooker on Free Will, Predestination, and Divine Foreknowledge,” Journal of Theological Studies 60, no. 1 (2009): 130–77.

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more reserved disposition has something to do with it. Calvin and particularly Luther were fearless and occasionally intemperate combatants in the disputational arena, unafraid to speak their minds plainly and confident that they could prevail. Hooker, on the other hand, while clearly entering the arena against Puritan adversaries, is much more careful and circumspect, oblique in his attacks and intentionally understated at key points. This, together with his circumlocutory and ironical prose style, has left plenty of room for scholars to debate just how we should understand his intentions and meaning, both at the level of his work as a whole and at the level of individual phrases and sentences. Thanks to Kirby’s work, those inclined to read Hooker more-or-less at face value now tend to generally accept his Reformed identity, at least broadly construed. This certainly would not have been the case a few decades ago, when for many, the prima facie reading of Hooker was as a quintessential via media Anglican, patiently constructing the famed “Anglican tripod.” However, thanks in part to a fuller grasp of Hooker’s broader theological context, and to a more attentive reading of key passages, such as those on the sufficiency of Scripture, justification, the invisible church, the sacraments, and even the episcopacy, Hooker’s relative proximity to the mainstream of Reformed Protestantism has become much clearer. Many recent scholars, however, are not at all convinced. After all, the disputational arena of late Elizabethan England was marked by bewilderingly complex rhetorical posturing and jockeying for position vis-à-vis both theological and political authorities.15 If any theologian did dare to depart substantially from the Reformed consensus of the Elizabeth church, as writers like Lake have noted, he risked being immediately blacklisted. Accordingly, we should only expect that if Hooker too was setting himself against that consensus, he would have done so shrewdly, underhandedly, and elusively. The contemporary scholar, in determining the true shape of his theology, must be ready to read between the lines, uncovering the subtext beneath the text and refusing to take his protestations of Reformed orthodoxy at face value.16 While certainly plausible, this approach runs two rather serious dangers. First, it is somewhat circular, and can easily become viciously circular. If Hooker was opposing the Reformed consensus, we should expect him to mask the fact. But of course this is precisely the question at issue: was he? If we assume in advance that he is, we will have no difficulty accounting for the many times when he appears not to be – after all, such respectful nods to orthodoxy are precisely what we 15 See for instance Lake, “Antipuritanism: The Structure of a Prejudice,” in Religious Politics in Post-Reformation England, 80–97. 16 Thus Lake’s famous remark that “Hooker’s whole project had represented a sort of sleight of hand whereby what amounted to a full-scale attack on Calvinist piety was passed off as a simple exercise in anti-presbyterianism” (Anglicans and Puritans, 239).

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should expect from a shrewd subverter of the tradition. Such a reading can find itself in a position where it is armored in advance against contrary evidence: if, for instance, it is protested that Hooker offers a robustly Reformed formulation of the nature of the invisible church in Book III, ch. 1, we will be told that of course he would say something like that, and it cannot be taken seriously; instead we must focus our attention only on those places where his formulations seem more idiosyncratic. Second, this approach, at least if adopted as a universal hermeneutic, becomes self-refuting. If we are to assume that whenever we are reading a writer who is polemically-engaged, we must look for subtexts and double meanings, and refuse to take protestations at face value, then presumably the same rule applies to reading the contemporary historian who is making such claims in his or her journal article or monograph. And indeed it has been unsettling to note how often advocates of this hermeneutic have been quick to accuse their colleagues of readings motivated by theological partisanship (they read Hooker as Reformed because they are Reformed, or evangelical because they are evangelical, etc.) rather than historical fidelity. It is to avoid such self-refuting suspicion that most contributors to the present volume have insisted on exegeting Hooker’s text on its own terms, assuming that its affirmations should be taken literally unless there is good contextual reason to suppose otherwise, and when apparent internal contradictions arise, erring on the side of charity and assuming a self-consistent solution is possible. Nonetheless, it is clearly the case that given the complex theo-politics of the Elizabethan era, and the rhetorical sophistication of Hooker’s polemics, we must equally beware of naïve and oversimplistic readings that risk ironing out theological nuances and papering over polemical jabs. It is clear from recent writings such as A.J. Joyce’s Richard Hooker and Anglican Moral Theology that critics of Kirby’s revisionism see his reading doing just that. This complaint, however, which seems to be at the root of much of the intractability in recent debates over Hooker’s theology, appears to rest on a misunderstanding of the relationship between the terms “polemical” and “irenical.” Kirby famously characterized Hooker’s Laws as an “irenical appeal to the hearts and minds of the disciplinarian-Puritan opponents of the Elizabeth Settlement,”17 a characterization which Joyce sharply contests in chapter three of her book.18 Quite the contrary, argues Joyce, Hooker is vigorously opposed to many Puritan proposals, and pulls out all the weapons in his formidable rhetorical armory to resist and undermine them. The failure to recognize the fundamentally polemical character of the Lawes, argues Joyce, results in a complete 17 Kirby, Richard Hooker, Reformer and Platonist (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), x, cf. 20; see also Kirby, Richard Hooker’s Doctrine of the Royal Supremacy (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1990), 20. 18 See especially Joyce, Richard Hooker and Anglican Moral Theology, 52ff.

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misunderstanding of Hooker’s work, since it makes him out to be an ally, rather than an adversary, of Reformed theology and practice. She concludes, “In short, it is difficult to see how the kind of account that Kirby and Atkinson have attempted to give of the fundamental nature and purpose of the Lawes as demonstrating Hooker’s commitment to Reformed theology can possibly be sustained.”19 However, as Bradford Littlejohn has argued in his essay “The Search for a Reformed Hooker,”20 Joyce’s contention here rests on a conflation of irenicism of purpose (which Kirby does mean to attribute to Hooker) with irenicism of method, conceived of in opposition to polemics (which Kirby clearly does not mean to attribute to Hooker). No sensible reader would today deny that the Lawes constitutes a sustained argument against positions which Hooker takes not merely to be erroneous but in fact dangerous; indeed, the opening paragraphs of the Lawes should leave no room for doubt on that score. The key questions concern the scope of that disagreement and the intended outcome of the argument. Kirby’s claim is simply that the disagreement, profound and consequential though it is, takes place against the background of a shared commitment to certain received norms of Protestant orthodoxy, and accordingly, that the intended outcome, for Hooker, is successful persuasion and reconciliation, rather than the overthrow of his opponents by fair means, whether fair or foul. The chief task facing Hooker scholars today is not to determine whether or not the Lawes is a polemical text – clearly it is – but to determine what purpose the polemics are meant to serve and at precisely what points of disagreement they are aimed. Only by such careful discrimination can we begin to discern the extent to which Hooker does and does not accept theological common ground with his Puritan and disciplinarian opponents.

III.

The Scope of Reformed Theology

This point leads directly to consideration of our second main interpretive question, concerning the scope of the Reformed tradition. The attentive reader may have noticed a curious leap in the quotation from Joyce given above. She begins by contesting Kirby’s claim that Hooker shares common ground with his “disciplinarian-Puritan opponents” and concludes that, in the absence of such common ground, his “commitment to Reformed theology can[not] possibly be sustained.” The implication here is that the disciplinarian Puritan faction was, if not exclusively, at least authoritatively representative of Reformed theology. To 19 Joyce, Richard Hooker and Anglican Moral Theology, 63. 20 “Search for a Reformed Hooker,” 74–78.

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be sure, Joyce’s argument ranges a bit wider than that; her key contention is that Hooker sets himself firmly against John Calvin, and since (presumably) Calvin must be treated as a measuring-stick for Reformed orthodoxy, Hooker cannot possibly be himself committed to the Reformed tradition. It is certainly questionable whether Hooker was so pervasively hostile to Calvin as Joyce suggests,21 but even supposing he were, that would hardly resolve the question at hand concerning his “commitment to Reformed theology.” Implicit in this conclusion are two claims, both of which remain very widespread in much scholarship on Hooker and Elizabethan England in general: (1) Calvin’s most enthusiastic followers in England, the disciplinarian Puritans, could fairly claim close continuity with Calvin himself on all significant matters of doctrine and church polity; (2) Calvin’s own views on all significant matters of doctrine and church polity could claim to be representative and indeed authoritative for the Reformed tradition at large. Neither of these claims, however, remains tenable in light of the past several decades of scholarship in Reformed historical theology. We now know, for instance, that Calvin did not teach anything like strict jure divino Presbyterianism,22 or define the church over against the state;23 nor did he embrace a narrow biblicism that rejected natural law and looked askance at philosophy and jurisprudence.24 Every new stride in contemporary Calvin scholarship seems to corroborate the judgments of Paul Avis and Torrance Kirby that there exists a fairly wide gulf between Calvin and his most zealous English followers such as Thomas Cartwright and Walter Travers. The latter two, we now realize, made significant adjustments in the area of ecclesiology – Hooker’s main 21 See David Neelands, “The Use and Abuse of John Calvin in Richard Hooker’s Defence of the English Church,” Perichoresis 10, no. 1 (2012): 3–22. 22 See for instance Avis, Church in the Theology of the Reformers (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1981), 114–15; Gillian Lewis, “Calvinism in Geneva in the Time of Calvin and Beza (1541– 1605),” in International Calvinism, 1541–1715, ed. Menna Prestwich (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), 39–69. William Bouwsma, John Calvin: A Sixteenth-Century Portrait (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 223: “The details of ecclesiastical polity and cult can therefore vary according to local custom and need.” For the development of a stronger jure divino Presbyterianism in Calvin’s successor Beza, see Tadataka Maruyama, The Ecclesiology of Theodore Beza: The Reform of the True Church (Genève: Librairie Droz, 1978). 23 On the contrary, says Lewis, the two were “to complement one another, to dovetail perfectly in a common enterprise of edification, instruction, and discipline of the greater glory of God” (“Calvinism in Geneva,” 45). See more fully Harro Höpfl, The Christian Polity of John Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 190–97, and Matthew J. Tuininga, Calvin’s Political Theology and the Public Engagement of the Church: Christ’s Two Kingdoms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2017). 24 For Calvin’s doctrine of natural law, see for instance William Klempa, “John Calvin on Natural Law,” in John Calvin and the Church: A Prism of Reform, ed. Timothy George (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990), 72–95; see Kirby, “Richard Hooker’s Theory of Natural Law in the context of Reformation theology,” The Sixteenth century journal (1999): 681–703 for an application of this to issues of Hooker scholarship.

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concern in the Lawes – as well as shifting away from Calvin’s emphasis on matters such as predestination and the doctrine of Scripture.25 This recognition has yet to be taken fully on board among Hooker scholars, who are still apt to suggest that Hooker’s obviously sharp disagreements with many disciplinarian Puritans are evidence of his general discomfort with Reformed theology. This is not, of course, to endorse the “Calvin vs. the Calvinists” paradigm that dominated Reformed historical theology thirty or forty years ago. The point, rather, is to note that Reformed theology was always broader than Calvin – in contradiction to the second claim noted above. Indeed, the past few decades have seen an increasing trend to abandon the term ‘Calvinist’ in favor of ‘Reformed,’ in order to properly recognize the pluriformity of the tradition from the beginning. Figures such as Martin Bucer (1491–1551), Heinrich Bullinger (1504–1575), Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499–1562), Wolfgang Musculus (1497–1563), Theodore Beza (1519–1605), Zacharias Ursinus (1534–83), and Girolamo Zanchi (1516–90), and many more, have all emerged as significant original theologians in their own right, sharing a great deal of theological common ground, but with notable differences in approach and emphasis. Any attempt to triangulate Hooker’s relation to ‘Reformed theology’ simply cannot get off the ground unless it is willing to consider this broader context of diversity among the leadership of magisterial Reform on the continent.26 The relevance of such thinkers to Hooker, it should be noted, is hardly merely theoretical. A wave of recent scholarship has demonstrated the profound importance of Bullinger and Vermigli, surpassing that of Calvin, in setting the early theological tone for the English Protestant Church,27 and we know that Vermigli’s influence in particular was likely mediated to Hooker through his teachers and 25 On ecclesiology, see Avis’s important treatment in Church in the Theology of the Reformers, chs. 3–4, as well as Stephen Brachlow, The Communion of Saints: Puritan and Radical Separatist Ecclesiology, 1570–1625 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) esp. ch. 3, On predestination, R.T. Kendall’s Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979) certainly overstated the discontinuities, but is successful nonetheless in discerning a distinctive “experimental predestinarianism” that arose among the Puritans in the late sixteenth century. On the differences between Puritans and Calvin on the understanding of Scripture, law, and adiaphora, see Brachlow, ch. 1. 26 As an example of the remarkable neglect of this wider context, consider Nigel Voak’s Richard Hooker and Reformed Theology. While insisting that his study aimed at being “thoroughly comparative in nature,” (p. 21) in fact, the comparison is almost exclusively with Calvin, with only two mentions of Bullinger’s name, one of Vermigli’s, and none at all of Zanchi’s. In fairness to Voak, though, the Calvino-centrism is evident as well in much of Kirby’s early work, although he has subsequently incorporated at least much more extensive consideration of Vermigli in relation to Hooker. 27 Carrie Euler, Couriers of the Gospel: England and Zurich, 1531–1558 (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag Zu¨ rich, 2006); Kirby, The Zurich Connection and Tudor Political Theology (Leiden: Brill, 2007).

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mentors John Hooker, John Jewel, Lawrence Humphrey, and John Rainolds, the first three of whom were loyal students of Vermigli and the last of whom was a leading advocate of Vermigli’s legacy.28 Wolfgang Musculus was a favorite theologian of Hooker’s great predecessor in controversy against the Puritans, John Whitgift, and Zanchi was quoted by Hooker at several key points in his work, most notably in defense of his controversial claim that the Church of Rome was still in some sense a true church.29 Moreover, the Reformed tradition was a complex, living, and growing entity during Hooker’s own lifetime and beyond, not an ossified formula built upon the bones of certain original formulators. Perhaps the best way to discern Hooker’s claim to conformity with this broader tradition would be to compare him not so much to Calvin or even Vermigli, but to his own contemporaries, the most creative and influential shapers of the Reformed tradition in the last decades of the sixteenth century and first decades of the seventeenth. Obviously many studies have compared him, and rightly so, to his English contemporaries, but given the international character of Reformed Protestantism in this era, there is the need to cast our nets wider, particularly to the neighboring Netherlands. There we might find interesting parallels with elements of Hooker’s theology in the thought not merely of Jacob Arminius (1560–1609), as some have suggested, but also in less controversial authorities such as Franciscus Junius (1545–1602) and David Pareus (1548–1622). To be sure, many would dispute that such continental comparisons are really germane to understanding Hooker’s theological identity, which must be judged first and foremost within its English context. And certainly it must be conceded that Hooker scholarship ought always to attend chiefly to this narrower context, whatever additional light might be shed by broadening the lens. Even in this volume, the majority of essays do in fact focus chiefly on Hooker’s English predecessors, contemporaries, and followers. Given, however, the almost complete lack of attention to Hooker’s continental contemporaries to date, surely it is time for some Hooker scholars to at least pursue these new avenues of inquiry, and see what new insights they might generate for understanding Hooker’s place in the Reformed tradition. The relative insularity of Hooker scholarship to date is explained in part by the difficulty of accessing many of these early Reformed texts, but with the explosion of digital archives and the rapid appearance of new translations, there is little excuse for failing to undertake these much-needed 28 See Gary Jenkins, “Peter Martyr and the Church of England after 1558,” Studies in the History of Christian Traditions 115 (2004): 63. 29 See Hooker, A Learned Discourse of Justification, Workes, and How the Foundation of Faith is Overtrhrowne, II.27 (FLE 5:148.10–21), quoting Jerome Zanchi, De Religione Christiana Fides —Confession of the Christian Religion, 2 vols, ed. Luca Baschera and Christian Moser (Leiden: Brill, 2007).

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comparative studies. It is a singular virtue of the essays in this volume to finally begin bringing Hooker into conversation with a much wider range of representatives of Reformed orthodoxy, sometimes with the result of highlighting discontinuities, and sometimes with the result of uncovering surprising convergences.

IV.

The Nature of Reformed Theology

While the fruits of this re-contextualization of Hooker are for the most part yet to be gleaned, there are at least two points where attention to newer scholarship on Reformed orthodoxy seems certain to compel a reconsideration of Hooker’s relation to the tradition. The first of these concerns the matter of “Thomism” and “scholasticism,” terms with which Hooker has long been identified and which have often been used to drive a wedge between him and the magisterial reformers.30 If there has been one overwhelming verdict of the revolution in Reformed historical theology associated with the work of Richard Muller and Willem van Asselt in the past three decades, it has been that the Reformed tradition was pervasively scholastic and often Thomistic virtually from its outset.31 Not, to be sure, unanimously so; there was always enormous variation both in the use of scholastic methodology and terminology and also in the degree to which the content of medieval scholastic theology was endorsed. However, consideration of figures such as Vermigli, Zanchi, and Junius shows Hooker to be well within the mainstream in terms both of his occasionally scholastic method and his broad acceptance of a Thomistic natural law framework.32 Indeed, his rejection of “nominalism” and “voluntarism,” far from setting him at odds with mainstream Protestantism, could more plausibly be taken as badges of his membership within it. Paul Dominiak’s essay in this present volume is perhaps the finest contribution to date to the task of re-assessing this key aspect of 30 Joyce makes such suggestions in Anglican Moral Theology; see also Rosenthal, Crown Under Law: Richard Hooker, John Locke, and the Ascent of Modern Constitutionalism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008), 61–72. 31 For the most forceful statement of this re-reading, see Muller’s essays in his After Calvin: Studies in the Development of a Theological Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 32 For Vermigli, see Pietro Martire Vermigli, A Commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, ed. and trans. Emidio Campi and Joseph C. McClelland, The Peter Martyr Library 9 (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2006) and John Patrick Donnelly, S.J., Calvinism and Scholasticism in Vermigli’s Doctrine of Man and Grace (Leiden: Brill, 1976). For Zanchi, see Girolamo Zanchi, “Of the Law in General,” trans. Jeffrey J. Veenstra in Journal of Markets and Morality 6, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 305–398, and John Patrick Donnelly, S.J. “Calvinist Thomism,” Viator 7 (1976): 441–55.

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Hooker’s background and identity, and defining the nature of his commitment to the authority of reason. “Reason,” however much of a bad word it may have become for twentieth-century neo-orthodoxy, and however frequently maligned by some of Hooker’s opponents, was highly esteemed and regularly defended by most of the architects of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Reformed orthodoxy. Of course, extremely careful parsing of its proper functions was necessary, and remains necessary for historical scholars seeking to reconstruct the range of acceptable Reformed doctrine at Hooker’s time. Much work remains to be done here, although several of the essays in this volume make important contributions to the debate. A second point on which newer scholarship has exploded old stereotypes of “Calvinism,” compelling a reconsideration of Hooker’s relationship to it, concerns the set of doctrines most frequently associated with the term “Calvinism” – predestination. Long treated as the “central dogma” not merely of Calvin’s thought but of the whole tradition supposed to have grown from him, double predestination has been seen by many scholars as a litmus test for determining the loyalty of any theologian of Hooker’s era to Reformed orthodoxy. This is one point on which, for all the vast new light shed on the theological landscape of Elizabethan and Jacobean England by the revisionism of Peter Lake and Nicholas Tyacke, many of their claims still seem curiously theologically tone-deaf. At the very least, Muller and others have succeeded in showing that predestination never functioned, at least prior to the debates surrounding the Synod of Dort, as any such “central dogma,” and rarely served as a single-issue litmus test.33 Moreover, recent scholarship has increasingly recognized that there were virtually as many different ways of parsing what “double predestination” might mean as there were Reformed theologians in this era.34 That might be a bit of an overstatement, to be sure, but with the surge in interest in forms of Reformed “hypothetical universalism” in the early seventeenth century and its precursors in the sixteenth, there has been a slow but transformative realization that many of the formulas scholars have used to test a theologian’s allegiance to Reformed orthodoxy are at best unwieldy and oversimplistic, and at worst thoroughly misleading.35 Given how often Hooker scholarship has camped out on the sup33 See for instance Richard Muller, Christ and the Decree: Christology and Predestination in Reformed Theology from Calvin to Perkins (1986; repr., Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008). 34 The fullest study perhaps remains Donald W. Sinnema, “The Issue of Reprobation at the Synod of Dort (1618–19) in Light of the History of this Doctrine,” PhD diss., Toronto School of Theology, 1985. 35 See Jonathan D. Moore, English Hypothetical Universalism: John Preston and the Softening of Reformed Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), and Richard Muller, Review of English Hypothetical Universalism: John Preston and the Softening of Reformed Theology, by Jonathan D. Moore, Calvin Theological Journal 43, no. 1 (2008): 149–50.

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posed extent and importance of Hooker’s departure from Calvin on questions of predestination, this is one area where a wholesale re-examination is in order. Michael Lynch’s essay in this present volume constitutes a very important beginning to such a re-examination, which has key implications for how we gauge other key loci of Hooker’s theology, such as his soteriology, sacramentology, and ecclesiology, all the subjects of essays within this volume. On all of these points, to be sure, the essays herein contained constitute more initial explorations than final words on their respective topics. If, however, this volume may serve merely as an attempt to lay out the groundwork for something of a new beginning in Hooker scholarship, setting the whole discussion on firmer and more historically-sound footing than it has often previously been, we hope we may have rendered an important service to students of English church history and Reformed historical theology.

V.

The Essays in this Volume

The present volume aims to broaden the scholarly appraisal of Hooker’s adherence to Reformed orthodoxy. It aims to move the discussion beyond the narrow lens of comparison with John Calvin and his apparent heirs in England, even though Calvin and his followers have a place is this assessment. The aim of the volume is to bring Hooker into conversation and comparison with Reformed ideas of a broader basis. Readers will soon discover that this volume not only challenges many of the traditional ways of interpreting Hooker’s thought but it also aims to assess where Hooker might fit within the larger family that considers itself to be Reformed. Whereas previous volumes may have asked the question: “To what extent can Hooker be regarded as in the mainstream of Protestant reform?”, this volume moves the debate a step forward by asking: “What kind of the Protestant reformer was Hooker?” In order to answer this question with greater nuance, the volume is broken into various sections of appraisal. Part I begins with the difficult but necessary task of situating Richard Hooker and his theological reasoning into the changing historical and theological context(s) of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This assessment is complicated by the labels given to both Hooker and his opponents, along with the fact that Hooker has been claimed by a vast array of interpreters since the seventeenth century. As W. David Neelands aptly shows in the first chapter, Hooker’s own ideas must be distinguished historically and theologically from the ideas of those who later claimed to be his allies. Thus, his essay helps us navigate the often muddy waters of labels that have been applied to Hooker. To describe Hooker as a “Protestant,” for instance, is not entirely helpful if we mean to suggest he was one who protests the authorized religious settlement in England. And yet Hooker

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must be considered among the Protestant camp if we mean that he defended a reformation Church free from Rome and its perceived errors. Neelands also devotes very close attention to the idea of Hooker as a via media theologian; to be sure, he could claim to take a middle way, but middle in relation to what? By careful consideration of Hooker’s understanding of adiaphora, or “things indifferent,” and its relation to Aristotelian, Stoic, and Lutheran ideas, Neelands argues that Hooker’s moderation represented not a woolly commitment to compromise, but a coherent theological and political stance. The question of labelling Richard Hooker leads naturally to comparisons with other Reformed Christians in England who were also loyal to the Elizabethan Church of England. Following his recent monograph on William Perkins and the Making of a Protestant England,36 Brown Patterson, suggests that Hooker has a worthy ally in William Perkins, the most widely read divine in late Elizabethan England. While there is no evidence to suggest that the two men actually influenced one another, Professor Patterson challenges the more traditional claim that Perkins was an ally of English Puritanism. Perkins’s reputation among the later Puritans has led some to assume that he would have opposed Hooker. Perkins was undoubtedly in debt to Calvin and did share much with the “hotter sorts of Protestants” of the late Elizabethan and Stuart eras. Patterson argues, however, that both Perkins and Hooker, as loyal defenders of the Church of England, ought to be considered allies rather than adversaries. To demonstrate the affinity between the two Elizabethan churchmen, Patterson’s presents an overview of how the pressing question of further reform in England developed during the Elizabethan and early Stuart eras. This context forms the backdrop for the world in which both Perkins and Hooker articulated their respective defenses of the Church of England as a Reformed and yet catholic church. In chapter three, entitled “Hooker on Public Worship: An Offering to the Wider Reformation,” Stephen McGrade suggests we might read the Laws not only as an attempt to preserve and extend unity of Christians in Elizabethan England, but as a work intended to make a contribution to Reformation worship more broadly. In the seventeenth century, the Dutch jurist and ecumenist Hugo Grotius called for a translation of the Lawes. While nothing came of this call, McGrade sees Grotius’s appreciation of Hooker as a hint that scholars might read the latter’s magnum opus as written for the general “trial and judgement of the whole world” (I.1.3). Thus, McGrade’s chapter carefully takes us through the non-polemical portions of Hooker’s lengthy Book V, demonstrating that the core of this book was intended to appeal not only to Christians in England but more

36 W. Brown Patterson, William Perkins and the Making of a Protestant England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

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broadly to the Reformed audience in Europe, to offer a positive theology of public worship. Crucial to any discussion of Hooker’s theological identity is the question of his method and aims. How did the basic categories of his theology, as well as his style of writing and preaching, relate to contemporary models of theological and polemical literature, and how were they received by his readers? Part II accordingly seeks to survey “Hooker’s Theological and Pastoral Method,” and begins with the vexed question of Hooker’s relationship to “scholasticism.” As previously mentioned, the interpretation of Hooker as a Thomist has long been part of the scholarly landscape. Unlike his presbyterian opponents, so the old story goes, Hooker’s Thomism places him outside the voluntarist-nominalist tradition of Protestant, Reformed thought with regards to its doctrine of God and concept of law. More recently, however, Hooker’s Thomism has been shown to be within the intellectual stream of early Reformed orthodoxy. Building on some of these new insights, Paul Dominiak’s essay on “Hooker, Thomism, and Scholasticism,” challenges the lack of clarity over definitions used by scholars on terms such as “scholastic,” “Thomist,” and “Reformed orthodoxy.” After clarifying the conceptual landscape, he goes on to demonstrate compellingly that Hooker the scholastic was in fact one and the same time a theologian who stood firmly within the early intellectual stream of Reformed orthodoxy. This latter point is further reinforced by Professor Torrance Kirby, whose essay, “‘Grace hath Use of Nature’: Richard Hooker and the Conversion of Reason,” argues for the importance of the grace/nature dialectic as a hermeneutical key to Hooker’s theology. Hooker’s approach is consistent with the Thomistic dictum that “grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it”; however, Hooker adapts this harmonious relationship of grace and nature to the framework of magisterial Protestant theology. By tracing this grace-nature relationship through Hooker’s doctrine of Scripture, soteriology, and moral theology, Kirby argues for greater methodological consistency in Hooker’s theology than has generally been recognized. Just as important as Hooker’s theological method is our reading of his polemical and political aims. In recent years, a number of revisionist scholars have viewed Hooker as an ardent apologist of the status quo of the established Elizabethan Church, intent on justifying the practices of the Church of England at all costs. One distinguished historian has gone so far as to suggest that if the legislation of 1559 had directed English clergy to preach standing on their heads, Hooker would have found a reason to justify it.37 Daniel Eppley, however, looks to challenge this perception of Hooker in his essay entitled, “Practicing What He 37 Diarmaid MacCulloch, “Richard Hooker’s Reputation,” in A Companion to Richard Hooker, 570.

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Preaches: Richard Hooker as Practitioner of Loyal Opposition.” By “loyal opposition” Eppley maintains that Hooker was indeed a defender to the Church of England, but at the heart of his apology in favor of the Elizabethan Settlement was a desire to redirect Puritan reforms through the proper, authorized channels of the Church. Eppley builds on his previous work in this area, focusing specifically on Hooker’s defense of episcopal wealth and the formulation of church laws. Far from showing a cold and calculated defender of an institution, the Hooker that Eppley presents is a committed churchman who takes the important pastoral end of the Church of England into account in his defense. While Hooker is widely recognized as a theologian of the ages, scholars have paid less attention to Hooker the pastor who took the ultimate end of the Church as a priority. All Protestants rejected of the Roman medieval theology of the Mass as the central focus of worship. Thus, the new Church defined itself according two notae; the faithful preaching of the Word and the faithful administration of the sacraments. If this latter mark divided the churches of the Reformation along theological lines, Protestants of all shades agreed that the former was essential to Christian worship. Accordingly, Rudolph Almasy shows in his essay, “Richard Hooker, Reformed Sermon Making, and the Use of Scripture,” that Hooker took very seriously Reformed ideals of sermon making, with a commitment to letting the words of Scripture guide his sermons, while diminishing his own prominence as the human instrument of the Word. Indeed, through an intriguing comparison with undisputedly Reformed preachers in England, including William Perkins, Thomas Cartwright, Richard Greenham, and Robert Some, Almasy suggests that Hooker may have even been an exemplary model in this regard. Since many scholars of the Reformation have begun to move beyond the old “Calvin against the Calvinists” paradigm of assessing Reformed orthodoxy, there is a need to do more comparative work in historical theology between thinkers representing various trajectories of Reformed thought. If Calvin was indeed only one of several Reformed thinkers, albeit an important one, to contribute to Reformed orthodoxy, then certainly later theologians were justifiably at liberty to follow him closely on some theological questions while not so closely or not at all on others. Contemporary historians must beware of taking too much the polemical generalizations of earlier authors seeking to establish true followers of the tradition from turncoats. Accordingly, Scott Kindred-Barnes’s essay, entitled “‘Symbolizing with Idolaters’: George Gillespie’s Critique of Hooker’s ‘Convenient’ Way,” tries to offer a balanced assessment of one of Hooker’s leading critics, demonstrating that both Hooker and Gillespie were indebted to different facets of the Reformed tradition. This essay shows that claiming continuity with earlier respected-thinkers is part of the Reformed historiography and yet this is not always a matter of pointing out direct borrowings and quotations, as some have assumed when looking at Hooker’s debt to earlier Reformers. Calvin’s ideas,

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for instance, at least some of them, certainly factored into the context of both Hooker and his posthumous critic, Gillespie. Yet, both Hooker and Gillespie had a plethora of influences; some of them Reformed and some of them not. Kindred-Barnes argues that Hooker’s use of Thomas Aquinas, for instance, had a pastoral utility, not readily recognized by Gillespie and those with other ecclesiological fish to fry. Yet Hooker’s use of what Kindred-Barnes calls “the rule of the Convenient,” while derived from Aquinas, does not, he argues, place Hooker outside the pale of early Reformed orthodoxy. Instead, it put him at odds with Gillespie’s stream of Reformed thought and their emphasis on Liberty of Conscience; an idea equally part of the Reformed tradition but subject to historical appropriation and adaptation in different theological-political contexts. Having contextualized Hooker historically and methodologically, the third and final section of the book, entitled “Richard Hooker in the Context of Reformed Orthodoxy,” turns to closely analyze some of the key doctrines considered by scholars in seeking to assess Hooker’s relationship to Reformed orthodoxy. The authority of Scripture has always been recognized as an essential doctrine for all Protestants, and yet the prominence that Hooker gave to the role of reason has been viewed by some scholars as separating him from the Reformed position. Reformed orthodoxy would typically be understood as holding that the Scriptures are authenticated in believers as God’s Word by the inner witness of the Holy Spirit, not by reason. Andrew Fulford’s article, “‘A Truth Infallible’: Richard Hooker and Reformed Orthodoxy on Autopistos,” gets to the heart of this question as it relates to Richard Hooker. Challenging the arguments of Nigel Voak, Fulford asks how Hooker is able to balance his understanding of reason with the Reformed idea that the Scriptures are self-authenticating. Fulford notes that Calvin’s view on this question was only one of several options in early Reformed thought, as he surveys several Reformed confessions of faith from 1523 to 1581. Although his survey is not exhaustive, it suffices to show substantial breadth in how various Reformed standards understood the authentication of Scripture; with Calvin’s doctrine of autopistos hardly appearing a sine qua non of the tradition. Fulford develops this argument further by comparing Hooker to a later touchstone of Reformed orthodoxy, Francis Turretin. Turretin, he shows, appears to share Hooker’s view that the inspiration of the scriptures is demonstrated by the marks of divinity within them, which reason can recognize – an observation which strongly challenges those who want to distant Hooker from Reformed orthodoxy. With his discussion of Reformed theological jurisprudence, Bradford Littlejohn’s article continues the important comparative work of this volume by further challenging the idea that Hooker represented or even originated a via media position between Rome and Geneva. Littlejohn’s essay, “Cutting Through the Fog in the Channel: Hooker, Junius, and a Reformed Theology of Law,”

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compares Hooker’s thought to that of his continental contemporary, Franciscus Junius the Elder. Littlejohn finds much in Junius’s political and legal treatises that lines up with Hooker’s understanding of law in Of Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. While Junius dealt largely with civil law and Hooker with ecclesiological law, both men found themselves having to counter a hyperactive biblicism with a form of Reformed scholasticism. As Littlejohn shows, both men drew heavily on classical authorities, and found a common source in Thomas Aquinas in laying out their respective taxonomies of law. Instead of viewing their mutual debt to Aquinas as a departure from the Reformed family, however, Littlejohn shows that both Hooker and Junius appear to have applied a similar archetypal/ectypal distinction, absent from Aquinas’s theology of law, to bring it into closer conformity with Reformed orthodoxy’s pattern of ad intra-ad extra language about God. Hence, Littlejohn makes a case for viewing Hooker as a “Reformed catholic” who utilized various streams of thought in his theological synthesis, including Augustinianism, scholasticism and the best Reformed thinkers of his era. Although Hooker’s use of Aristotelian terms and categories was criticized by his opponents as an implicit confirmation of his distance from Reformed orthodoxy, Luca Baschera shows that there is more to the story when talking about the Reformed understanding of justification and sanctification. His essay, “Righteousness Imputed and Inherent: Hooker’s soteriology in the context of 16th century continental Reformed theology,” shows that the distance drawn between Hooker and the Magisterial Reformation by nineteenth-century “Tractarian” interpreters and many more recent scholars does not adequately stand up when Hooker is compared to continental Reformed theologians such Martin Bucer, Peter Martyr Vermigli, Girolamo Zanchi, Theodore Beza, and Lambert Daneau. Not only were they content to draw on Aristotelian categories, but they deployed these categories to offer a much more nuanced understanding of justification and sanctification than has often been attributed to the Reformers. The old story would have us think that for the Reformed, righteousness was exclusively understood as “imputed,” but as Baschera shows, this does not account for how the early Reformers understood “inherent” righteousness. When Hooker talked about “inherent” righteousness as the essence of sanctification he was not undermining the Reformed understanding of “imputed” righteousness. On the contrary, Hooker’s succinct formulation of the relationship between the two kinds of righteousness in his Learned Discourse on Justification appears in Baschera’s analysis as an eloquent summary of the Reformed consensus Hooker inherited. Closely related to this foundational soteriological question, of course, is the doctrine of union with Christ, a matter of frequent dispute within the Reformed tradition. The old Tractarian interpretation tends to portray the Reformed position as dominated by an extrinsic account of our appropriation of Christ’s

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righteousness, in contrast to more participationist accounts that have dominated the catholic tradition. In fact, however, John Fesko’s essay, “Richard Hooker and John Owen on Union with Christ,” shows that Hooker’s participationist doctrines of union and communion were largely echoed by no less a card-carrying Puritan than John Owen. While the two theologians were by no means clones, Owen quotes from Hooker in his polemical debates with William Sherlock, suggesting perhaps direct influence or at least the use of common sources. Particularly similar is the manner in which both men explain the union-communion dynamic between God and humanity in Christological and Trinitarian terms. If Hooker’s doctrines of justification and union with Christ have been battlegrounds in the debate over Hooker’s commitment to Reformed soteriology, this is even more the case with his doctrine of predestination, where he has often been read as proto-Arminian. In his compelling essay, “Richard Hooker and the Development of English Hypothetical Universalism,” Michael J. Lynch seeks to bring much greater critical rigor to this debate by carefully parsing the variation among Reformed predestinarian positions in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. By testing the category of “hypothetical universalism” as a description of Hooker’s theology, Lynch further augments the prevailing assumption of this volume: that Hooker’s proximity and/or departure from the Reformed tradition has too often been assessed according to his theological affinity of one particular Reformed thinker or confession without proper reference to the plurality of Reformed expressions. The author(s) of the Christian Letter, for instance, did in fact represent a formidable strand of Reformed orthodoxy. But as Lynch demonstrates, Hooker’s teaching that Christ died for all, with a general intention to save all on condition of faith, does not put him outside Reformed orthodoxy more broadly speaking. On the contrary, Lynch shows that Hooker’s “hypothetical universalism” links him to Reformed theologians of the continent such as Wolfgang Musculus, Zachary Ursinus and others along with his fellow Englishmen, John Davenant and James Ussher. This volume’s final essay, “Richard Hooker and Reformed Sacramental Theology,” by Drew Martin, seeks to offer some caveats and qualifications to the foregoing essays on Hooker’s soteriology by considering the implications of his sacramentology. While it may well be that on questions of justification, union with Christ, and predestination, Hooker used language consistent with many Reformed predecessors and contemporaries, his formulations of sacramental efficacy were more unusual, particularly in his Elizabethan context. Martin begins with a comparison of Hooker’s Christology to Calvin and sixteenth-century Reformed confessions, suggesting that Hooker’s distinctive emphases may signal a somewhat different direction in his sacramentology and ecclesiology. Martin then develops this thesis by analyzing Hooker’s treatments of baptism and the eucharist in particular comparison to William Perkins, whom Martin selects as

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representing something of an English Reformed consensus. Despite finding somewhat closer parallels to some later English theologians like Davenant, the distinctiveness of Hooker’s formulations, argues Martin, puts him on the margin of the Reformed consensus in his period. Together, we believe that the essays in this volume can serve to dramatically advance our understanding not only of the thought of Richard Hooker, but of the character and shifting boundaries of Reformed orthodoxy in this key phase of its development. Of necessity, these essays cover only a small range of the theological loci that merit consideration, and in most cases, their conclusions are tentative and suggestive, paving the way and providing the signposts for future research rather than settling any debate once and for all (something almost few historians can ever hope to achieve). However, while the debate over Hooker and Reformed orthodoxy may not be resolved by this volume, we are convinced that the discussion has been materially advanced. Careful attention to these essays by future scholars will help prevent the careless generalizations, terminological confusions, and anachronistic dichotomies that have so often hobbled Hooker research, and early modern historical theology more generally.

Part I: Situating Richard Hooker

David Neelands

1.

Richard Hooker, adiaphora, and the Defence of a Reformation via media1

From the 1580s on, Richard Hooker has attracted attention for his publicly stated views. This continuous attention may be a mark of his significance. It has not come with apparent agreement, since readers have attracted Hooker to a variety of positions that seem in themselves not entirely compatible: “in the course of history, Hooker has been claimed by moderate Whigs, Lockean Whigs, moderate Tories, ceremonialists, and Non-jurors, as well as Erastians, Anglo-Catholics, and the occasional Evangelical […].”2 And these positions have come with some powerful labels, some of which persist in debates into this time. But the human hunger for significance, which is behind generalizations of all kinds, including academic ones, is notoriously prone to false pattern recognition. Perhaps we cannot ask the question “who really was Richard Hooker?” without bringing the questioner’s needs and assumptions to the answer. In any case, our question may well be informed by the patterns Hooker claimed for himself and for the national church he claimed to be defending. Yet what would happen if we dropped the labels? Whom would we see? Peter Lake writes that “it would scarcely be an exaggeration to claim that the history of intra-Anglican theological and historical dispute, since the Restoration, could be traced in and through different attempts to appropriate Hooker for one ideological faction or another.”3 We might well add, and not just the “intraAnglican theological and historical disputes,” but also the work of the political 1 An earlier version of this paper, entitled “‘But who do you say that I am?’ The Labels we use for Richard Hooker,” was delivered at the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference, New Orleans, October 16, 2014. 2 Bryan Spinks, Review of A companion to Richard Hooker, edited by Torrance Kirby, Church History and Religious Culture, 90 (2010), 413–414. For an extensive treatment of factions and diversity within Hooker studies, cf. Egil Grislis, “The Hermeneutical Problem in Richard Hooker” in Studies of Richard Hooker: Essays Preliminary to an Edition of his Works, ed. W. Speed Hill (Cleveland, OH: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1972), 159–206. 3 Peter Lake, “The ‘Anglican Moment’? Richard Hooker and the Ideological Watershed of the 1590s” in Anglicanism and the Western Christian Tradition, ed. Stephen Platten (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2003).

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scientists4 and not just those who would appropriate Hooker, but, perhaps less often, those who would lay blame on him. This paper takes three of the labels given Hooker in the past and present, and compares them with Hooker’s own words.

1.1

Protestant and unProtestant

The label “Protestant,” used for a theological and ecclesiastical position, is not a transparent one. Rather, it emerged, as is well known, in connection with a particular event when a group of German princes issued a “protest,” that is, a dissent, against the edict of the Diet of Speyer of 1529, which reversed concessions made at a previous Diet of Speyer in 1526 to those adopting Martin Luther’s views. The word was initially limited to German theological politics and, even then, gave place generally to the term “Evangelical” (that is, “from the Gospel”) for the positions of the North German Reformation.5 The word “protestant” was apparently not used in any official statement of the Church of England until the Coronation oath of 1688, yet it persisted in popular use to speak of opinions and bodies that were not “papist.” A Christian Letter of 1599 attributes itself to “certain English Protestants,” otherwise labelling themselves as “unfained favourers of the present state of Religion, authorised and professed in England.” The title attributes to Hooker “certain matters of doctrine (which seeme to overthrow the foundation of Christian Religion, and of the Church among us).” That is, by implication, Hooker is not a pure or dependable Protestant, and a “Protestant” is someone who favours the currently authorized forms of religion in the Elizabethan settlement for England, a label that Hooker himself could accept. Hooker himself apparently never used the term “Protestant,” either with approval or disapproval. He does attribute to the period of the 1530s the beginning of the Reformation in England, but gives credit to Henry VIII, in few ways a “Protestant” and explicitly an opponent of Martin Luther, yet a follower of Luther’s plan of giving complete temporal authority in the existing church to the prince in order to “reform” it. When the ruines of the house of God (that house which consisting of religious soules is most immediatlie the pretious temple of the holie Ghost) were become not in his sight alone but in the eyes of the whole world so exceeding great, that verie superstition began

4 For instance Sheldon S. Wolin, “Richard Hooker and English Conservatism,” The Western Political Quarterly 6, no. 1 (March 1953): 28–47. 5 Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History (New York: Penguin, 2003), xx.

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even to feele it selfe too farre growne: the first that with us made way to repaire the decayes thereof by beheading superstition, was King Henry the eyght.6

Others, accepting the jurisdiction and authority of the Bishop of Rome and not the prince, are thereby labelled “papists.” This passage is preceded by a paragraph that distances the Church of England from the so-called “reformed churches”: To leave reformed Churches therefore and their actions for him to judge of, in whose sight they are as they are, and our desire is that they may even in his sight be found such, as we ought to endevour by all meanes that our owne may likewise be; somewhat we are inforced to speake by way of simple declaration, concerning the proceedings of the Church of England in these affayres, to the end that men whose minds are free from those partiall constructions, wherby the onely name of difference from some other Churches is thought cause sufficient to condemne ours, may the better discerne whether that we have done be reasonable, yea or no.7

Thus Henry VIII is in a way anachronistically held up in contrast to the “reformed churches” of Hooker’s own day, who in God’s sight, “are as they are.”8 For the Reformation in England was not like the Reformation in all other places. There are two kinds of Reformation, an extreme and rigorous Reformation and a moderate one: “as well this moderate kind, which the Church of England hath taken, as the other more extreme and rigorous which certaine Churches elsewhere have better liked.”9 Is Hooker then “un-Protestant”? From at least the time of Thomas Harding the Jesuit, in his polemical exchange with Archbishop Laud, Hooker has been claimed by various “papists,” Jesuit and otherwise.10 John Gauden, Hooker’s first biographer, thought this variable reception was worth mentioning. Referring to the notice of Hooker by Dr. Richard Holdsworth (1590–1649), whom he styles “a Confessor and Martyr in the late Persecution,” Gauden then quotes Holdsworth: 6 FLE 1:343.10–17; LEP IV.14.7. 7 FLE 1:336.10–19; LEP IV.14.1. 8 Hooker’s use of the rhetorical figure of litotes here may have the effect of distancing the Church’s position from that of the “partial constructions” of reformed churches, without explicitly rejecting those positions. Compare Hooker’s use of irony in describing Calvin, in David Neelands, “The Use and Abuse of John Calvin in Richard Hooker’s Defence of the English Church,” Perichoresis 10, no. 1 (2012): 3–22. 9 FLE 1:342.33–343.3; LEP IV.14.6. 10 Michael Brydon, The evolving reputation of Richard Hooker: an examination of responses, 1600–1714 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), passim. The view that Hooker was a witness for the papist view of the authority of church tradition was identified at least as early as William Laud’s Conference with Fisher the Jesuit. William Laud, Conference with Fisher, 6th ed. (Oxford: J.H. Parker, 1849), 101ff. Laud rejects the attempts of Allerton and the “Romanists” to claim Hooker’s support for their views of “tradition,” but he himself identifies Hooker’s phrase “authority of man” with tradition, and thus may be a source for the commonplace about Hooker and scripture, reason and “tradition.”

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“The very Papists owned Mr. Hooker that profound Divine, to be one of the most Learned, Holy and Modest of those that have asserted the Church of England, and Reformed Religion.” This, I have argued,11 is the most probable source of the improbable story in Isaac Walton of the admiration of pope Clement VIII for Hooker’s first book of the Lawes: There is no learning that this man hath not searcht into; nothing too hard for his understanding: this man indeed deserves the name of an author; his books will get reverence by age, for there is in them such seeds of eternity, that if the rest be like this, they shall last till the last fire shall consume all learning.12

And Hooker explicitly claims to desire agreement with those who advocate further reformation in England on the basis of what has already been established in the initial reformation from Rome: “Thinke not that ye reade the words of one, who bendeth him selfe as an adversarie against the truth which ye have alreadie embraced; but the words of one, who desireth even to embrace together with you the selfe same truth.”13 Yet when “reformed” is used to modify “church discipline” Hooker indicates that he disagrees with the “reformed” position in its claim to rest in its details on scripture: But let necessary collection be made requisite, and we may boldlie denye that of all those things which at this day are with so great necessitie urged upon this Church under the name of reformed Church discipline, there is any one which their books hitherto have made manifest to be conteyned in the scripture.14

1.2

Attitude to the papists

For Hooker, papists are in dire need of reforms, including the reforms accomplished under Henry VIII, yet they share and retain “main parts of Christian truth”; they are indeed Christians but Hooker and his Church are not among them, just as non-Christian Jews remain, for St. Paul, beloved of God, yet have become God’s enemies: For even as the Apostle doth saie of Israell, that they are in one respect enimies; but in an other beloved of God: In like sort with Rome we dare not communicate concerning sundrie hir grosse and greevous abominations, yet touching those maine partes of

11 David Neelands, “John Gauden, first biographer of Richard Hooker: an influential failure,” Perichoresis 3, no. 2 (2005), 125–136 (see esp. 133–34). 12 The Works of Richard Hooker, ed. John Keble (1888; repr. New York: Burt Franklin, 1970), 1:71. 13 FLE 1:3.1–4; LEP Pref.1.1. 14 FLE 1:126.32–127.3; LEP I.14.2.

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Christian truth wherein they constantlie still persist, we gladly acknowlege them to be of the familie of Jesus Christ.15

There is no more room for denying that papists are Christians, than for antiJewish Christian supercessionism, despite significant disagreements. And it is clearly important for Hooker to portray papist positions accurately and even respectfully, although this tended not to be the fashion in the polemics of the sixteenth century in England: not to “gyve them occasion to saie (as commonly they do) 16 that when we cannot refute theire opinions we propose to our selves such insted of theires as we can refute.”17 Hooker, to be clear, carefully lists the significant points of agreement on the theology of grace and even on the presence of Christ in the eucharist, and equally carefully lists the clear points of disagreement;18 furthermore, they erroneously erect “traditions” on a par with Scripture.19 But Hooker at least twice, in the Answer to the Supplication, refers to the Bishops at the Council of Trent as “the fathers of Trent,” far from an abusive term.20 Hooker’s insistence on accurate portrayal of the papists includes rejecting inherited erroneous interpretations of papist authors even though these canards have become commonplace.21 Yet, although the Church of England retained “parte of their ceremonies, and almost their whole government […] wee are devided from the Church of Rome by the single wall of doctrine.”22 “Heretiques they are” (though not apostates).23 Rome “constantly” persists in the “maine partes of Christian truth,” yet their errors of detail on theology of grace and the 15 FLE 1:202.13–18; LEP III.1.10. 16 FLE 4:115–121; Dublin Fragments, 14–18; cf. Bayne, Of the Laws of the Ecclesiastical Polity, the Fifth Book (London: Macmillan, 1902), 654n47. Does Hooker here refer to the polemics of Edmund Campion and the Jesuits in 1580–81? See David Neelands, “Richard Hooker’s Paul’s Cross Sermon,” in Paul’s Cross and the Culture of Persuasion in England, 1520–1640, ed. Torrance Kirby (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 253–56. 17 FLE 5:238.5–7; Answer to the Supplication, 12. 18 David Neelands, “The Theology of Grace of Richard Hooker” (Th.D. dissertation, Toronto: Trinity College and the University of Toronto, 1988), 60, 271–73. 19 FLE 1:231.15–18; 2:302.3–11; LEP III.8.14; V.65.2. The word “tradition” almost always has a negative sense for Hooker, as distinct from “custom” and “experience,” which are generally positive in tone. See David Neelands, “Hooker on Scripture, Reason and ‘Tradition’” in Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community, ed. Stephen McGrade (Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1997), 89–90, fn33. 20 FLE 5:239.31, 241.6; Answer to the Supplication, 13. 21 Hooker made a significant contribution to the accuracy of sixteenth century debates on the eucharist by his direct denial of the venerable canard of the supposed errors of the pseudoThomas and Catharinus, that Christ’s sacrifice was for original, the sacrifice of the Mass for actual, sin (FLE 5:203.21–24; Travers’s Supplication to the Privy Counsel; FLE 5:242.3–24; Answer, 14. See Francis Clark, Eucharistic Sacrifice and the Reformation (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1960), 469–503 for a history of this repeated error. 22 FLE 1:280.13–16; LEP IV.3.1. 23 FLE 1:289.26; LEP IV.6.2.

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presence of grace divides them from Hooker’s church “by the single wall of doctrine”, as well as by the revolution in supreme temporal jurisdiction. Yet Hooker, for all his professed affection for the more advanced Reformed communities’ position, still remains loyal to his Church, though his Church sometimes follows Rome rather than Geneva. Hooker admits he “loves” the Genevans better than the Church of Rome, whom he “likes not,” but thinks it is better to use the ancient customs also used by the Church of Rome despite the disparity of affection: Where Rome keepeth that which is ancienter and better; others whome we much more affect leavinge it for newer, and changinge it for worse, we had rather followe the perfections of them whome we like not, then in defectes resemble them whome we love.24

Our reformed friends are not heretics, but we will not adopt their mistakes. Although he does not use the term, Hooker is, by his own statements, a Protestant, an adherent and supporter of a church separated from Rome and its errors, but he and his church should not follow Protestant programs unconditionally, just to distance themselves from the papists. Thus the label “Protestant” certainly applies to Hooker, although it is a label he does not use, and he distances himself from his Protestant “friends” who favour positions from Geneva; yet calls himself “reformed”; nor does he deny that he is a Protestant, although his treatment of papists is unusual in his century as insisting on precision as to agreements, which are important and many, and to disagreements, which are equally important, though fewer. And thus, the label “unProtestant” is inaccurate in Hooker’s own terms.

1.3

A Via Media theologian

Does Hooker thus espouse an “in between” position, a “via media” between Rome and Geneva?

1.3.1 The Lutheran Via Media Although most if not all of the major Reformation movements, “Erasmians, Lutherans, Zwinglians, Anabaptists, and Schwenckfeldians,”25 claimed a via media of some kind, it is the via media position of Luther and with the Lutheran 24 FLE 2:121.24–28; LEP V.28.1. 25 Bernard J. Verkamp, The Indifferent Mean: Adiaphorism in the English Reformation to 1554 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1977), xiv.

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sources for the Church of England’s articles that most resembles Hooker’s. Early in his career, in his Lectures on Romans, Luther had evoked the spiritual road between the sins of security (in the absence of fear of God) and despair (in the absence of a sense of God’s mercy): Those at the right, who have rid themselves of the fear of God, sin through their sense of security, and those at the left, who have given up the mercy of God, sin through their despair. These do not know that this internal sin cannot possibly be taken away in this life, but this is precisely what they want. The former, on their part, do not know that it is to those who do not fear God that this is imputed. Both, then, do not know this sin and do not properly attend to it. As I have said, they are concerned only about actual sin, believing that it must be purged out so that one can become pure. And if this does not happen, those at the left think that they are lost. But the others at the right believe themselves saved because they regard themselves as pure, while in fact, it is impossible for anyone to be without any actual sin so long as that radical and original sin remains. This, therefore, is the royal road and the way of peace in the spirit: really to know and to hate sin and so to walk in the fear of God, lest he count it and permit it to rule in us, and at the same time to pray for his mercy that he free us from it and not impute to us. The fear of God cuts off the way at the right which leads to security and vain self-satisfaction, and faith in the mercy of God cuts off the way at the left which leads to despair of self and despair of God.26

This image of the royal road has a venerable history in medieval scholasticism. The Glossa ordinaria, a Carolingian commentary (Walafrid Strabo d. 849) copied in the margins of the Biblical text, interprets the road in relation to Christ: “On this road we must travel and we must not lose it. […] Turning neither toward works nor toward the devilish senses, we want peacefully to pass through the world.”27 Bernard of Clairvaux often gave the admonition that Christians should keep to the middle: “Keep to the middle […]. The place in the middle is safe. The middle is the seat of moderation and moderation is a virtue.”28 In connection with a discussion of the theological virtues, Gabriel Biel says that “hope can hold the middle between presumption and despair.”29 26 Luther, Lectures on Romans in Luther: Lectures on Romans, ed. Wilhelm Pauck (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1961), 137–38). Compare the path between security and despair in the Church of England Article 17 On Predestination and Election. Pauck adds this interesting explanatory note on the “royal road” or via media: “The notion of the ‘royal road’ (or via media), which Luther often referred to throughout his career, is derived from Num 21:22: [Israel sent messengers to the king of the Amorites, saying:], ‘Let me pass through thy land: we will not go aside into the fields, or the vineyards; we will not drink waters of the wells; we will go the King’s Highway, till we have passed thy borders.’” 27 Pauck, Lectures on Romans, 137n25. 28 Bernard of Clairvaux, De Consideratione, II.10. Cited in Pauck, Lectures on Romans, 137n25 29 Biel, III Sent., d. 26, q. un., a. 3, dub. 5. On Luther’s thought, cf. Gunther Jacob, Das Bild vom “Weg in der Mitte” in der Theologie Luthers, in H.-D. Wendland, ed., Kosmos und Ekklesia (Festschrift für W. Stählin) (Kassel: J. Stauda-Verlag, 1933), 84–92. Cited in Pauck, 137n25.

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Such a “royal road” informed Luther’s experience early in his public attempts at Reformation. He described his path as taking a middle road between those who hate him and his followers from outside, and those who cause dissension within, claiming to depend on the gospel and its God, comparing his position with that suffered by St. Paul. In the “Letter to the Christians at Strassburg in opposition to the fanatic spirit” (1524), Luther attempted to dissuade a Reformation church, having embraced reform, from now following Karlstadt’s further reform with respect to externals: For if our gospel is the true gospel, as I am convinced and have no doubt that it is, then it must naturally follow that it will be attacked, persecuted, and tested from both sides. On the left the opponents will show open contempt and hate, on the right our own will be guilty of dissension and party spirit. “For,” says Paul, “there must be factions among you in order that those who have stood the test among you may be recognized” [I Cor. 11:19]. Christ finds not only Caiaphas among his enemies, but also Judas among his friends. Knowing this, we must be equipped and armed as people who surely must expect at any moment to meet both kinds of attack. We cannot be at all surprised or frightened if dissension arises among us.30

Luther had pioneered a middle way in distancing himself first from Rome (compared to Caiaphas) in his challenge on theology of grace and then his excommunication, and then distancing himself too from those of his fellows who wanted to go too far (compared to Judas). Similarly, the Lutheran Augsburg Confession (1530),31 composed mostly by Philipp Melanchthon, identifies one unnamed opponent, “the other party,” in asking for a General Council in case “that in this matter of religion the differences between us and the other party should not be settled in friendship and love”32 and explicitly criticizes views of that “other party” as abuses to be corrected: that the eucharist is to be delivered to the people in only one kind; that priests are not to marry; that the Mass is abused, especially for gain; that Penance consists in contrition not enumeration of sins to the priest; that Traditions have the authority of faith and obscure faith; that Monastic vows are equal to baptism; that Ecclesiastical authority and jurisdiction automatically includes civil authority.33

30 31 32 33

This contrast between presumption and despair was the precise one Luther used in the Lectures on Romans. WA XV, 392–93; Luther’s Works (Philadelphia, Muhlenberg Press, 1958), 40:66–67. Roland Bainton describes this as “I take the middle road” between the papist and the sectaries, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1950), 258. Philip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom: with a history and critical notes, vol. 3 of The Evangelical Protestant Creeds (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1966), 3–73. Augsburg Confession, Preface to the Emperor Charles V; Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, 6. Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, 29–72.

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Thus Luther’s party explicitly differentiates itself from a party within the same church that advocates serious abuses in religion. Yet the Articles position themselves as supporting a common catholic truth, that is held even among the other party, now identified with the Roman Church: This is about the sum of doctrine among us, in which can be seen that there is nothing which is discrepant with the Scriptures, or with the Church Catholic, or even with the Roman Church, so far as that Church is known from writers [the writings of the Fathers]. (Article XXII)

This “other party” comprises those who resist Luther’s novelties and advocate, with Rome, traditional medieval views. Thus the distance from Rome in the Augsburg Confession is not presented so much as a distinction in doctrine, but in those abuses and corruptions of Rome that are corrected by the authority of the princes removing the usurped authority of the Bishop of Rome. There is relative silence on the errors of the other party (although room is left to acknowledge that some have crept in since the writings of the shared fathers) and Luther’s novelties are not pressed in much detail. In doing so, the Articles show themselves in agreement with commonly held truth in condemning those others who oppose “the other party,” but commit errors: the “Samosatenes” are rejected (Article I); the Anabaptists and others, who imagine that the Holy Spirit is given to men without the outward word, through their own preparations and works, are condemned (Article V); the Anabaptists, who deny that men once justified can lose the Spirit of God, and do contend that some men may attain to such a perfection in this life that they can not sin, are condemned (Article XII); the Anabaptists who forbid Christians civil offices are condemned (Article XVI); and the Anabaptists who think that to condemned men and the devils there shall be an end of torments (Article XVII), are condemned. Thus in opposing “the other party,” the Augsburg Confession also opposes some (called Anabaptists) who are also opposed to the other party and they to them. This appears to be a middle position, and would obtain in Lutheran confessions throughout the century. The Saxon Visitation Articles of 1592 maintained a similar middle position, the “fanatics” on the other side from Rome are not the Anabaptists, but “the Calvinists,” an identifiable group. Twenty-two “false and erroneous doctrines of the Calvinists” are to be condemned, six on the Lord’s Supper, six on the Person of Christ, six on Holy Baptism, and four on Predestination and the Providence of God.34 The Church of England had a similar (and related) beginning in its confessional statements. Just like the Augsburg Confession and the later Saxon Visi34 Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, 181–89.

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tation Articles, the Forty-Two Articles of 1552 (and the revised Thirty-Nine Articles of 1563/1571) took a middle position, ruling out both “scholastic” and Anabaptist positions, and corrupt medieval practices. The English Articles in both versions ruled against scholastic errors and the jurisdiction of the pope. The scholastic teaching regarding human merit and works of supererogation and regarding purgatory and indulgences were rejected in Articles 12 (13 of 39), 13 (14 of 39) and 23 (22 of 39). Art. 22 (21 of 39) affirmed the fallibility of church councils. Transubstantiation was rejected in Art. 29 (28 of 39). The pope’s jurisdiction in England was denied and the king affirmed to be supreme head on earth, under Christ, of the church, Art. 36 (37 of 39). Similarly, the English Articles ruled against corrupt medieval practices: medieval church practices, such as enforced clerical celibacy (Art. 31 [32 of 39]), and reservation, procession, elevation and adoration of the eucharist (Art. 29 [28 of 39]) were declared to be without divine warrant. On the other side, the English Articles ruled against the Radical Reformation as some of the Articles refuted points held by Anabaptists: Art. 8 (9 of 39) on Original Sin and Art. 37 (38 of 39) on community of goods mention the Anabaptists; Art. 6 (7 of 39) maintaining the continuing value of the Old Testament, Art. 9 (10 of 39) affirming preventing and co-operating grace, Art. 18 denying that salvation was available to honestly mistaken folk who reject salvation in the name of Jesus, Art. 19 (not in 39) denying the cause of those who thought they had become immune from the moral law, Art. 24 (23 of 39) ruling out unauthorized ministers, Art. 28 (27 of 39) commending the “custom of the church” in baptizing infants, Art. 38 (39 of 39) allowing oaths and Art. 36 (37 of 39) requiring obedience to the magistrate and affirming the lawfulness of wearing weapons, the death penalty and military service probably refer to Anabaptist beliefs. Articles 27 (26 of 39) and 39 to 42 (not in 39) rule out other heterodox beliefs that may be associated with the Anabaptists: the view that sin in the minister hinders the effectiveness of the ministry, belief that the Resurrection is already past, the death of souls with the death of their bodies, millenarian beliefs and universal salvation. Articles 2 to 4 affirmed a traditional orthodoxy about the incarnation, descent into Hell and Resurrection of Christ, all of which had been denied in some Anabaptist circles. In doing so, the Forty-Two Articles used a significant number of explicitly Lutheran sources including the Augsburg Confession itself, as well as articles agreed upon in various conferences with Lutherans in the 1530s: Articles 1, 2, 15 (16 of 39), 21 (20 of 39), 24 (23 of 39), 39–42 contained material from the Lutheran Augsburg Confession; Art. 11 followed the Augsburg Confession; Art. 27 (26 of 39) contained material from the Wittenberg Articles and from the Thirteen Articles, affirming that the sacraments are “certain sure witnesses and effectual signs of grace.”

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In the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion of 1563, the list was refined somewhat, but the same loyalty to Lutheran sources, and opposition to scholastic practices, now called Romish (since the Council of Trent had completed its work in the mean time and confirmed the positions already criticized) survive. The Anabaptist positions, however, were mostly gone. New material was included from the Lutheran Wurttemberg Articles of 1552.35 Thus the Church of England in its Articles of Religion, like the Lutheran Churches in their Augsburg Confession and Saxon Visitation Articles, could be seen as firmly via media in its confessions, between Roman errors and Protestant extremes. Indeed, Richard Hooker himself would comfortably describe his church’s position as a via media, in this Lutheran tradition. On the spectrum of the sufficiency of scripture, for instance, Rome and his puritan opponents assert poles or extremes in which the Church of England’s position is a middle one, avoiding extremes that bring scripture into bad repute: Two opinions therefore there are concerning sufficiencie of holy scripture, each extremely opposite unto the other, and both repugnant unto truth. The schooles of Rome teach scripture to be so unsufficient, as if, except traditions were added, it did not conteine all revealed and supernaturall truth, which absolutely is necessarie for the children of men in this life to know that they may in the next be saved. Others justly condemning this opinion growe likewise unto a daungerous extremitie, as if scripture did not onely containe al things in that kinde necessary, but all thinges simply, and in such sorte that to doe any thing according to any other lawe were not onely unnecessary, but even opposite unto salvation, unlawfull and sinfull. Whatsoever is spoken of God or thinges appertaining to God otherwise then as the truth is, through it seeme an honour, it is an injurie. And as incredible praises given unto men do often abate and impaire the credit of their deserved commendation; so we must likewise take great heede, lest in 35 Composed by Johannes Brenz for the Council of Trent, to explain the views of the Lutherans of South Germany, and largely by-passed within later Lutheran history. Articles 2, 3 and 6 include material derived directly from Brenz, and Articles 10, 11, 12 and 20 include shorter passages. Article 28 added a new paragraph, highly ambiguous, that in the mind of its Lutheran-minded author suggested the Body of Christ was present in the elements in order to be “given.” The paragraph about the whereabouts of the Body of Christ in heaven, similar to material in the Black Rubric, disappeared. Thus the Articles did not decisively rule out any position on the eucharist except a scholastic Catholic one and bare Zwinglianism. In 1571, another article was included that seemed to rule out the Lutheran view that the wicked received Christ in the sacrament, but was in fact also in tension with a passage in Calvin. Article XXIX. Of the wicked which do not eat of the body of Christ in the use of the Lord’s Supper. But compare: “And this is the wholeness of the Sacrament, which the whole world cannot violate: that the flesh and blood of Christ are not less truly given to the unworthy than to God’s elect believers, [yet] the wicked by their hardness so repel God’s grace that it does not reach them. Besides, to say that Christ may be received without faith is as inappropriate as to say that a seed may germinate in fire.” John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John McNeill, 1559 edition (Philadelphia, The Westminster Press, 1960), 2:1407 [IV.17.33].

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attributing unto scripture more than it can have, the incredibilitie of that do cause even those thinges which indeed it hath most abundantly to be lesse reverendly esteemed.36

And many readers have identified via media as a mark of Hooker’s thought. One scholar has recently gone as far as stating, “The ‘judicious’ Richard Hooker […] gave classical expression to the via media position of Elizabethan Anglicanism. He attempted to steer a middle course, appropriating what he considered to be the truths and avoiding what he considered to be the errors and excesses, between Roman Catholicism and the Magisterial Reformation (Lutheranism and especially Calvinism).”37 The most influential via media model was provided long before by the pagan philosopher Aristotle in his account of the “golden mean” in ethics, and Aristotle’s treatment is often casually taken as the model behind Hooker’s position. The situation is not so simple, as the comparisons with Lutheran sources show. In the Eudemian Ethics, Aristotle had moved the consideration of human action to the consideration of the character behind the good and vicious actions. In doing so, he introduced the phrase “middle state.” “Hence moral goodness must be concerned with certain means and must be a middle state. We must, therefore, ascertain what sort of middle state is goodness and with what sort of means it is concerned.”38 In the longer Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle gives a detailed treatment of the virtues of courage (concerned with fear and recklessness), temperance (concerned with pleasure), liberality (concerned with giving and getting), magnificence (concerned with giving and getting larger things), magnanimity or greatness of soul (concerned with honour and dishonour), ambition for smaller honours (concerned with lesser honours and dishonours), gentleness (concerned 36 FLE 1:191.14–192.1; LEP II.8.7. In the argument that foolish interpretations bring scripture into bad repute, Hooker probably refers to Augustine’s famous remark in The Literal Meaning of Genesis (New York: Newman Press, 1982), 42–44, 59 [I.19.39 & II.9.20]. 37 Lee W. Gibbs,“Richard Hooker’s Via Media Doctrine of Justification,” Harvard Theological Review 74, no. 2 (1981): 211. The inadequacy of characterizing the Church of England and Hooker’s position as a via media in the ordinary Aristotelian sense, as Gibbs appears to do, has been effectively argued by W.J. Kirby in Richard Hooker’s Doctrine of Royal Supremacy (Leiden: Brill, 1990). The fact remains that Hooker uses the language, and even the logic, of via media, but does not explain it in the standard Aristotelian sense. 38 Eudemian Ethics, 2.3.3, 1220b; Aristotle, The Athenian Constitution, The Eudemian Ethics, The Virtues and Vices, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 249–251. Hooker does, on occasion, appear to use the model of a mean between two extremes for purposes of illustration, but not explanation, for instance, his reference to generosity as the mean between prodigality and miserliness, FLE 2:319.22–320.12; LEP V.65.20. In this case, the sign of the cross at Baptism, is justified by the same double opposition described below. Similarly, on the question of attitudes to breaches of human laws, Hooker supposes that “a meane there is between these extremities, if so be we can finde it out.” (FLE 3:401.1–2; LEP VIII.6.9).

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with anger), friendliness (between obsequiousness and quarrelsomness), truthfulness about oneself (between boastfulness and self-deprecation), and good humour (between boastfulness and boorishness), as “means” between excess and deficiency. His treatment of other topics, such as justice and fairness (opposed to greed, and not a mean), and friendship, do not follow the general pattern of a mean between excess and deficiency, but do involve some sense of developed character in opposition to a weakness.39 Various problems have been noted in Aristotle’s treatment: courage, for instance, is not in the middle of the extremes of fear and foolhardiness; it is more involved in dealing with fear. And virtues themselves considered in opposition to vices, as stable dispositions, are not middle ways, but simply opposition (as Stoic ethicists would hold).40 These problems might be considered to infect Hooker’s position, and suggest that he simply chooses a middle course for the sake of choosing a middle course, without other principle, yet there is another source that does not share these problems, and shows how Hooker’s via media is closer to the Lutheran position, and through that, to the account of the Stoics.

1.3.2 Behind via media in the Sixteenth Century: the theory of adiaphora Aristotle’s analysis of the virtues in terms of “excess and deficiency,” belonging as a mid-point on a continuum of more and less, was of considerable influence and often became the normative manner of understanding moderation. Sometimes in the sixteenth century, this “golden mean” was commended as the measure of the “true religion” imposed by the prince in the separation from the papists Hooker treated as the decisive moment. Thomas Starkey (c.1495–1538), in an apology for Henry VIII’s policy for church and nation, An Exhortation to the People, Instructing Them to Unity and Obedience (1536),41 had argued that the prince had the authority to “moderate” between the excess of “superstition” and the deficiency of “impiety” or “contempt for religion.”42 The account is strikingly parallel to the approach of Richard Hooker. Like Hooker, Starkey identifies all those matters that are “indifferent,” the adiaphora, as the arena where the 39 Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics III.6–V.11 in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House. 1941), 974–1022. 40 R.D. Hicks, trans., Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925), 2:199 [Zeno vii.91]. 41 See Ethan Shagan, The Rule of Moderation: Violence, Religion and the Politics of Restraint in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 135–147, who points out various crucial ways in which Hooker’s treatment is unlike Starkey’s Rule of Moderation. 42 Thomas Starkey, An Exhortation to the People, Instructing Them to Unity and Obedience (London: Bertheleti, 1536) sig. Y4r.

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commonwealth, that is, the church in Hooker’s case, can order customs and traditions. The realm of the matters indifferent is not simply an area for human individual freedom, but rather, an area where the Church rightly may simply order customs not ordered in Scripture.43 Customs include actions of the Church, including authorized teaching and confession, and thus include doctrinal matters. In these, the customs ordered might be ordered because they were important or convenient; some might be rejected even though they might be found in Scripture.44 Before adiaphora had offered an apologetic opportunity in the English Reformation, it had been of use to Luther. Like his middle way on spiritual assurance and on externals illustrated above, Luther adopted a “middle way” on ceremonies. This “middle way” related to the observation that few ceremonies were strictly required or forbidden (i. e., they are, as far as the words of scripture are concerned, adiaphora). Luther commended what he saw as the scriptural middle – the “royal road” – “as a man is not righteous because he keeps and clings to the works and forms of the ceremonies, so also will a man not be counted righteous merely because he neglects and despises them […]. Hence the Christian must take a middle course and face these two classes of men,” that is, opposed to both, not between them.45 And before it had been used by Luther, the vocabulary of adiaphora had entered critical apparatus long before the sixteenth century in the thought of ancient Cynic and Stoic philosophers; it was relevant in the first instance to questions of the good life, the virtues and vices already referred to. Initially, the Cynics had used the term to illustrate their freedom from the conventional norms of Greek society, which were to be of no relevance to the sufficient interior moral

43 David Neelands, “Hooker on Scripture, Reason and ‘Tradition’,” 75–94. The realm of the “indifferent” was not limited to those things “neither commanded nor forbidden” in scripture, but included those things neither required nor prohibited by reason, as is clear from Hooker’s use of the term “a thing arbitrarie” in his general consideration of the origin of government. (FLE 1:100.18–19; LEP I.10.5). 44 “Stoic wisdom did not teach, like Pyrrhic skepticism, an ideal of indifference and general apathy. Constantly active, the wise person must take into consideration differences, the value of the things on which morality requires action. Although they do not worry or trouble the wise, such things require our care and concern; the whole of stoic morality lives in the tension between [general morality and applied morality]” (V. Goldschmidt in Émile Bréhier, Les Stoïciens [Paris: Gallimard, 1962], 257). In other words a truer definition of the notion of adiaphora would be “secondary things,” not things totally devoid of interest or unimportant; for the Stoic, the wise recognize the few things that constrain and the freedom that comes from that recognition, but do not neglect other matters which are important, though not necessary, and thus not constraints on their freedom. 45 Luther, “On the Freedom of the Christian,” in Luther’s Works (Philadelphia, Muhlenberg Press, 1957), 31:372–73; cf. Verkamp, The Indifferent Mean, 158 for other examples.

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self. All external norms were “things that make no difference.”46 The Stoics accepted the vocabulary but noted that some external things were in accordance with nature, that is, not strictly matters indifferent to the moral life in themselves, but giving to some human actions an appropriateness or inappropriateness.47 There are thus, by Stoic reckoning, three classifications to be noted with respect to adiaphora: (a) those matters strictly required (for virtue) and those strictly and clearly ruled out; (b) those matters that, while strictly speaking are neither required nor ruled out, are in regard to nature, appropriate or inappropriate; and (c) those matters which are truly indifferent. The critical apparatus was applied early in the sixteenth century to matters of doctrine and matters of action, especially ceremonial.48 Many humanists noted that the religion of Western Europe placed an “intolerable burden” on the faithful, regulating all manner of belief and action. Desiderius Erasmus, from the 1510s on, promoted the idea of a philosophia Christi, the few essential matters, above theological dispute, that were required for belief or action, leaving most other matters as things indifferent. As already noted, the defence of the Henrician Reformation made extensive use not only of the Aristotelian mean between excess and deficiency, but also of the three-fold Stoic division. Starkey had held that, strictly speaking, the only things required rather than indifferent in matters of religion were those “necessary to man’s salvation”;49 yet things required by scripture “are but few in number and open to every man’s eye.” Everything else – even things praised in scripture but not expressly commanded – should be seen as “of no necessity, but as things indifferent.”50 This left enormous room for the prince to regulate religious matters for the church, acting on personal wisdom and wise counsel, guided by scripture and reason, in other words to determine the second Stoic classification, the realm of the appropriate or inappropriate, and to leave other things in the third Stoic classification as truly indifferent. And once regulated by the prince, such matters were no longer simply adiaphora for the subject, despite being in the second Stoic classification as far as essential doctrine and action is concerned: neither required nor forbidden as essential, but ordered by the prince for the church as appropriate.51 46 Hicks, trans., Diogenes Laertius, 13, 109 [6.11, 105]. 47 Hicks, trans., Diogenes Laertius, 197, 213–15 [7.89, 108]. The primary sources are found in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers and an elegant summary of these developments in ancient philosophy is given in Verkamp, The Indifferent Mean, 20–21. 48 As has sometimes been noted, the concept of adiaphora is implicit in the Corinthian correspondence of Paul of Tarsus (esp. 1 Cor. 6:12, 10:23): eating meats sacrificed to idols is not strictly unlawful since idols are not real gods, yet it may not be edifying. 49 Starkey, An Exhortation to the People, C2r, sig. B2v, sig. Z4r, and elsewhere. 50 Starkey, An Exhortation to the People, sig Z4v. 51 An illustration of this principle of authority proscribing matters obviously indifferent as appropriate might be seen in the fanciful legislation in Thomas More’s Utopia.

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A dictum of Marsilius of Padua (ca. 1275–ca. 1342), who had sided with an imperial claimant against the pope and argued for unlimited imperial power, especially in regard to the Church, that Christ “never taught one point of worldly policie,” therefore princes need to control all matters, was a welcome theory for the “crown imperial” of Henry VIII, and was taken up enthusiastically by the apologist Starkey.52 Since this dictum thus made all political matters adiaphora with respect to divine order, the prince had power to determine all temporal matters, including the ordering of church administration and ceremonies, except those already ordered in scripture. This “secular” theory of social and political authority was reflected in Hooker’s account of the contract of governance.53 Reason and the mandate of the prince could rightly determine all public matters, since they were in the second classification. The concept of adiaphora informed the Augsburg and Leipzig Interim settlements, in effect from 1548 to 1552, and was accepted by Phillip Melanchthon but not all Lutherans. Melanchthon made a critical use of the concept of adiaphora when the Emperor regulated the religion of the Empire in those two “interim” settlements of religion, imposing some positions repugnant to the Lutherans. Yet since they were matters indifferent, they could be ordered and followed without threatening the salvation of the reluctant Lutheran. Yet there was a crucial difference between the use made of adiaphora by Starkey and the English advisers to Henry VIII and by Melanchthon in obeying the emperor: “For Melanchthon, then, the purpose of adiaphora was to promote Christian liberty and the primacy of scripture. For Starkey, however, the purpose of adiaphora was to promote unity, and it was not particularly unified for everyone not to perform ceremonies.”54 This use of the concept of adiaphora to enforce or enable unity persisted into the Elizabethan world.55 The Lutheran Formula of Concord (1577), which later imposed a unity on quarrelling Lutherans on the matter, severely limited and clarified the concept’s use, but retained some sense of the second Stoic classification: most ceremonies 52 53 54 55

Verkamp, The Indifferent Mean, 168. FLE 1: 95–110; LEP I.10. Shagan, The Rule of Moderation, 85. Compare the later dictum of Queen Elizabeth, turning this principle to an ecumenical conclusion, in her words to the French Ambassador: “If there were two princes in Christendom who had good will and courage, it would be very easy to reconcile the religious difficulties; there is only one Jesus Christ and one faith, and all the rest is a dispute over trifles.” Frederick Chamberlin, The Sayings of Queen Elizabeth (London: J. Lane, 1923), 123. The concept silently undergirds the surprising but sound conclusions Hooker draws in the sermon A Learned Discourse Of Justification, Workes, and How the Foundation of Faith Is Overthrowne: Papists and Lutherans, though they hold serious errors of Divinity, do not thereby remove themselves from God’s mercy, since they do not “deny the foundation,” that is the essential that salvation is in Christ, except perhaps “by consequence.” Lutherans are referred to in the sermon at FLE 5:125; A Learned Discourse of Justification, 17 footnote l, papists everywhere.

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and rites are indeed matters indifferent, and they can be ordered by proper authority, but it is wrong to impose them or to treat them as of divine origin, as some advocates had argued.56 The concept of adiaphora was not unknown in the Swiss and French Reformations,57 although used more sparingly than in the German and the English. John Calvin occasionally made the distinction between necessary matters in ceremonial and important ones that were not strictly necessary: for instance, for Calvin the prohibition of women preaching was important, but not strictly essential.58 There were thus a variety of applications of the theory of adiaphora available in the sixteenth century: the theory could justify imposed authority in definition of teaching and in establishment of order, or the opposite – liberty of the individual: in the Institutes, Calvin had included the notion of “things indifferent” as defining Christian freedom before God, and avoiding hyperbolic scruple.59 Throughout the sixteenth century, the concept of adiaphora proved a useful critical tool, especially among those who wished to distinguish themselves from the “intolerable burden” inherited from the medieval church and state, to help organize what was thought to be at stake in the Christian religion. It was always a potentially liberating concept, even though it could be used to limit liberty. Different matters were treated as essential, and on different criteria. Early in the period, for instance, John Frith (1503–33), following Erasmus and others, identified the regula fidei from medieval scholastic thought, especially Thomas 56 Formula of Concord, Art. X; Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, 161–64. 57 Verkamp, The Indifferent Mean, passim. 58 See John Lee Thompson, John Calvin and the Daughters of Sarah (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1992), esp. 227–268; and John L. Thompson, “The Good, the Bad, and the Indifferent: Myths, Realities, and Ambiguities in Calvin’s Teachings about Women,” in John Calvin, Myth and Reality, ed. Amy Nelson Burnett (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2011), 37–52. The distinction between the necessary and the merely important had already been implicit in Calvin’s distinction between the soul of Christianity, i. e., worship and salvation, and the body of Christianity, i. e., sacraments and polity, in his address to the Emperor, “The Necessity of Reforming the Church,” in Selected Works of John Calvin, trans. and ed. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1844), 1:126–127. In that work, Calvin had held that “God disapproves of all modes of worship not expressly sanctioned by his word” (128), implying that some of those modes may be merely important, not essential, but no worship is to be required that cannot be justified by scripture, leaving a wide berth for adiaphora in ceremonies. Calvin did not bring the distinction forward frequently, but the status of specific order as important but not necessary may also be implicit in Calvin’s apparent deviation from the presumed New Testament precedents on the order of deacon, for the reason that Geneva already handled the work of deacons in an appropriate way, and therefore the scriptural precedent should be adapted to the good order already present. Jean Calvin, Ordonnances ecclésiastiques de la Ville de Genève IV, (1541; Geneva: DeTourne, 1735), 56 [clvi]. 59 Calvin, Institutes, 838f [III.19.7]. See also 836 [19.4]. Calvin quotes Rom. 14.22 in a fashion opposite to that of the English Puritans (Institutes, 840 [19.8]). See Neelands, “Hooker on Scripture, Reason and ‘Tradition’,” 92n39.

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Aquinas, the twelve creedal articles of the Apostles’ Creed, as sufficient for salvation, i. e., everything necessary to be believed for salvation;60 all other doctrine was ancillary, though it might be important. For Frith and others of his persuasion, the twelve creedal articles all shared important criteria: they were clearly found in scripture, they were necessary for salvation, and they were connected to the doctrine of justification in that trusting in the God described by the creedal articles led to saving faith.61 Echoes of this idea became embedded in the English Articles of Religion, in its statement of the precise uniqueness of scriptural authority (a precise and limited treatment of sola scriptura, without the phrase, in a general environment where prima scriptura was being promoted, without the term) and survived there: “Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation.” (Art. 6) The English Articles did not actually specify what these essentials are, but defined the critical principle that they must be found in scripture, a restriction not itself made in scripture. What is not found in scripture cannot be essential, what has been found in scripture may be inessential, as we will see. Other important matters were, however, considered not to be part of the core, though they might be important. William Tyndale (ca. 1494–1536) joined in a conversation with Frith in classifying various theories of the eucharistic presence, as distinct from the basic principle of Christ’s presence in the eucharist, as adiaphora, at least until agreement could be reached in the Christian household.62 Such agreement was not ever reached in the sixteenth century, and Richard Hooker would use the principle for his eucharistic minimalism: there are three major views of the manner of Christ’s presence in the eucharist, his church’s own “sacramentalism,” papist transubstantiation, and Lutheran consubstantiation. Since scripture did not prove either of the latter, an eirenical and ecumenical minimalism could be shared.63 In deciding matters that were, strictly speaking, adiaphora, various principles were important: the conscience of the weak may recommend that certain matters indifferent, such as clerical marriage and pious ceremonies, be regulated, either accepted or forbidden (cf. I Cor 7.29–32);64 similarly, the two precepts of charity (Lev 19.18, Mark 12.31, Rom 13.9, Jas 2.8, etc.), which some considered to be essential teaching about behaviour, precludes unbridled desire, vanity and im60 61 62 63 64

Verkamp, The Indifferent Mean, 99. Verkamp, The Indifferent Mean, 96–97. Verkamp, The Indifferent Mean, 97. FLE 2:340–43; LEP V.67.12. Verkamp, The Indifferent Mean, 121.

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moderate prodigality, which thus must not be considered matters indifferent.65 Ceremonies, matters otherwise indifferent, must be legislated in terms of decency and order (1 Cor 14.40.66 Yet the church’s freedom and responsibility to order ceremonies could not ordain anything that was “contrary to scripture,” such as denying the chalice to the congregation (Mat. 26.27, etc.) or permitting idolatrous acts (Exod. 25) (Articles 20, 30, etc.). Even the doctrine of justification by faith alone (with the emphasis on “alone”) might from one standpoint fall within the realm of adiaphora. In ordering those things not essential, but nevertheless important, and subject to controversy (Article 20), the Church and its Supreme Governor, had the responsibility to order required confession of faith and authorized opinion – assensus faith as opposed to fiducia faith. The Apostle’s Creed had prefaced all of the articles of the regula fidei, with the phrase “I believe in,” so that fiducia faith might be assumed in the recitation of the twelve articles, which were seen as the list of essential truths. Yet, if the “alone” were emphasized, sola fide was not a scriptural doctrine, in fact, it was against the plain words of scripture (Jas 2.24). Luther had argued that “faith” in Rom. 3:28 needed that qualifier “alein” to make sense in German,67 and his translation read thus. However, none of the other major vernacular translations of the sixteenth century – other than Luther’s German version – followed suit, even that of William Tyndale, who was heavily influenced by Luther’s translation project. The sola was not referred to in the Article on Justification in the Augsburg Confession of 1530.68 Luther’s Smalcald Articles of 1537 did add the qualifier sola, but did so as derived from more basic, and apparently essential, statements about salvation in Christ alone (as in English Article 31of the 39). The entire Reformed world, including the Church of England, honored the principle of sola fide, though often with hyperbole. Melanchthon argued that it was the primary article, and made all other articles of faith adiaphora.69 Thomas Cranmer had provided an impressive argument for justification sola fide in the doctrinal Homily of Salvation, borrowing heavily from Melanchthon. The English Articles, by subtle and precise contrast, assumed it a matter of significant utility but avoided any risk of hyperbole: “that we are justified by Faith only is a most wholesome doctrine, and very full of comfort” (Article 11). This made it a teaching that might appropriately be required, although, it would seem, strictly speaking adiaphora, because of its “wholesomeness” and because it strengthened the faithful – it was “very full of comfort.” 65 Verkamp, The Indifferent Mean, 125. 66 Verkamp, The Indifferent Mean, 133. 67 Luther, “On Translating: an open letter” (1530) WA 30, 2, 637; Luther’s Works (Philadelphia, Muhlenberg Press, 1960), 35:188–89. See also pp. 182n3–4 and 187n31. 68 Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, 10. 69 Verkamp, The Indifferent Mean, 26, 96, 106.

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In terms of salvation, does a matter otherwise indifferent contribute to saving faith or detract? 70 Hooker would observe the principle in his famous justification of the possibility of salvation for those in papist error: so long as they did not “deny the foundation,” that is, deny the essential confession that their salvation comes through Christ, they might have erroneously added other matters as applying the benefits of salvation, or they might “deny the foundation,” but only “by consequence.”71 Our ancestors living before Martin Luther did not confess that justification is by faith alone, and probably understood the meaning of justification in an erroneous sense, as the constitution of the faithful person as righteous rather than the attribution of righteousness to the repentant sinner. Yet they did not necessarily thereby deny that all salvation is in Christ. The dictum that sola fide is the article on which alone the church stands or falls expresses a truth, but it expresses it as a hyperbole. Faith never comes “alone” in the justified. As the words of the Homily of Salvation, echoing words of Cardinal Cajetan, put it, “And yet that faith doth not exclude repentance, hope, love, dread, and the fear of God, to be joined with faith in every man that is justified; but it excludeth them from the office of justifying.”72 And even Lutherans may be in error in matters authorized, yet those errors do not deny the foundation, that is, they are adiaphora.73 An otherwise superfluous note74 in the Proclamation for Uniformity in Religion (1536) indicates how pervasive this theory of the king’s prerogative in ordering matters otherwise indifferent was. The Convocation of the Province of Canterbury had petitioned King Henry in 1534 to make provision for an authorized English version of the Bible. In the Proclamation, the King, though maintaining that he was not compelled by God’s Word to set forth the Scripture in English, yet “of his own liberality and goodness was and is pleased that his said loving subjects should have and read the same in convenient places and times.” It

70 Verkamp, The Indifferent Mean, 96. 71 FLE 5:124.9–21, 136.16–22; Discourse of Justification 17, 25. 72 Cajetan’s Exposition of Romans 3.24. Ashley Null, Thomas Cranmer’s doctrine of repentance: renewing the power to love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 215–17. 73 FLE 5:125; A Learned Discourse, 17 footnote l. See above. 74 Perhaps other decrees and statutes bear the same claim, in terms of what the church cannot do. In 1526–27, Parliament, under direction from King Henry VIII and his Council, passed “An Act for the Establishment of the Imperial Crown of this Realm,” decrying the marriages of persons “within the degrees of marriage prohibited by God’s law” [Lev. 18.1–29, 20.1–27]. It also declared that the Church cannot give dispensations for such impediments (as had been done so that Henry could marry Catherine) and clarified that it is “carnal knowledge” itself and not marriage that creates the affinity, a Biblical principle not part of Roman law. This statute overruled church courts and canon law, which had used the Roman system of degrees of kinship.

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is a matter of “indifference,” and the King may determine to provide for an English Bible if he judges that suits moderation.75 In 1534, the Dispensations Act (An Act for the exoneration of the exactions paid to the see of Rome, 25 Henry VII, c. 21) noted that “this act nor any thing or things therein contained shall be hereafter interpreted or expounded that your Grace, your nobles and subjects, intend by the same to decline or vary from the congregation of Christ’s church in any things concerning the very articles of the Catholic Faith or Christendom; or in any other things declared in Holy Scripture and the word of God necessary for your and their salvation.”76 That is, the king and his subjects were and remained under the authority of scripture for those few things required for salvation, as they are not adiaphora, yet the King could make regulations, or change existing ones among those many matters not so determined. In 1571, in adding a phrase from the Wurttemberg Articles, Article 20 of the Thirty-Nine Articles simply noted that “the Church hath power to decree Rites or Ceremonies, and authority in Controversies of Faith: and yet it is not lawful for the Church to ordain any thing that is contrary to God’s Word written, neither may it so expound one place of Scripture, that it be repugnant to another.” Article 37 already made clear that it was the King [or Queen], as Supreme Governor, who had authority over the church: The King’s Majesty hath the chief power in this Realm of England, and other his Dominions, unto whom the chief Government of all Estates of this Realm, whether they be Ecclesiastical or Civil, in all causes doth appertain, and is not, nor ought to be, subject to any foreign Jurisdiction. Where we attribute to the King’s Majesty the chief government, by which Titles we understand the minds of some slanderous folks to be offended; we give not our Princes the ministering either of God’s Word, or of the Sacraments, the which thing the Injunctions also lately set forth by Elizabeth our Queen do most plainly testify; but that only prerogative, which we see to have been given always to all godly Princes in holy Scriptures by God himself; that is, that they should rule all estates and degrees committed to their charge by God, whether they be Ecclesiastical or Temporal, and restrain with the civil sword the stubborn and evil-doers.

75 Francis Proctor and Walter Howard Frere, A New History of the Book of Common Prayer (London: Macmillan, 1901), 30. Note that the question of the proscription of vernacular translations of the Bible, “the forbiddig of scripture to be red in the mother tonge, & in the churches so to be rehersid” was mentioned by Starkey in the same year as one of the “things indifferent” that could be moderated by the prince (Starkey, An Exhortation to the People, sig. L3v). 76 G.R. Elton, The Tudor Constitution, Documents and Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 363.

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1.3.3 Hooker’s Via Media ‘ If Hooker’s self-declared position is to be seen in the Aristotelian pattern of a mean between excess and deficiency in religion, then Hooker’s extremes are atheism and superstition (not impiety and superstition),77 but Hooker’s logic is the same as Starkey’s, and also goes along with the identification of the things necessary for salvation, the “essence of Christianity,” which are found in scripture, as John Frith and William Tyndale had earlier held—and scripture is sufficient [sola scriptura] for the purposes for which it was given—and which define the arena of matters not required by scripture, such as the forms of church order. Such matters may nonetheless be ordered and changed by human authority, possibly under the guidance but not necessarily the direction of scripture. In important, but strictly indifferent, matters scripture should guide [prima scriptura], but not dictate. In such matters, as Hooker famously said, scripture, reason and the church are authorities, in that order. Such matters may nonetheless be ordered and changed by human authority, possibly under the guidance but not necessarily the direction of scripture. In important, but strictly indifferent, matters scripture should guide, but not dictate. This does not mean that Hooker’s via media position suggests a simple midpoint between Rome and Geneva, a compromise or “average” of the two extreme positions. This approach would resemble the informal logical fallacy called Argument to moderation (argumentum ad temperantiam).78 This fallacy involves the conclusion that the truth can be found as a compromise between two opposite positions. But the Lutheran via media is a rhetorical, not a logical device: it is not the average or compromise between extremes, but the sequential opposition to error, first on one hand, and then on the other. The Lutheran via media relied not on Aristotle, but on another, competing, pattern for describing right action in the sixteenth century, that of the Stoics. The Stoics had usually rejected Aristotle’s account of virtuous action being a mean between extremes, and offered a binary model. Thus, for the Stoics, virtue involves following where reason leads, as opposed to following the passions. And the Stoics invented the terminology of adiaphora, the things indifferent,79 for those things in between. Thus, for Stoicism, it is not the golden mean that is commended for decision and action, but rather the path of following reason (as Hooker agrees). At times, the via media of the sixteenth century is more like a

77 FLE 2:22–29; LEP V.2–3. 78 Sometimes known as argument from middle ground, the false compromise, the gray fallacy or the golden mean fallacy. 79 Hicks, trans., Diogenes Laertius, 7.108, 215.

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double Stoic opposition than like an Aristotelian mean, or compromise between two extremes on a continuum of more or less. It is this Stoic kind of via media that Luther commends in 1524 as we have seen: the first opposition is the Reformation versus the traditional Roman Christianity; the second, within the Reformation, is the opposition between Luther’s position and Karlstadt’s, which is explicitly compared to St. Paul’s opponents and Jesus’: one set of opponents is outside, the other inside: Christ has Caiaphas as an enemy without, Judas his friend (and enemy) within.80 Thus Hooker’s via media, like Luther’s and other Lutherans for that matter, as we have seen, is better interpreted as being Protestant, that is non-papist, yet while Protestant not Puritan: to apply Luther’s strong contrast, papists are compared to Caiaphas, the disciples of Geneva are as Judas, a worse opponent. Hooker is first a Protestant, although a careful one, and second, as a Protestant, not opting for the hyperbole arguments for further reform pressed upon his church from within. He is not unProtestant, although he insists on a careful delineation of papist views that differ from his Church’s own, and recognizes the considerable common ground, without endorsing or repeating the hyperboles of his friends. And the middle way is established in the control of the Prince to regulate for the Church the matters left indifferent by essential doctrine. The pattern in this instance is the one established by the Stoics on virtues and vices, as being opposed to each other, not the virtues as a mid-point between two vices. Thus the label via media, while appropriate for Hooker and used by him, should be interpreted in this case according to the Lutheran and Stoic model. In this adoption of a via media model, Hooker made use, judiciously, of the critical Stoic apparatus of the adiaphora, and did so in the developed English Reformation manner. As with the Articles of Religion of the Church of England, for Hooker, there are matters required for salvation, and there are matters that are important but to be ordered by the Church (by means of its lay governors), using Scripture where appropriate; Hooker apparently also included those matters determined by reason.81 If we look to Hooker in his own century, we see an apologist for the settlement of the Church of England, which had inherited Luther’s patterns of understanding both the limits on the authority of the church and the scope of church authority, and justified this position with the critical apparatus of adiaphora. He accepted a specific sense of the Reformation self-definition, not rejecting all the doctrines and ceremonies of the “other.” In doing so, he explicitly accepted the position of the via media, in the sense of the double opposition. 80 Compare the saying, “God save me from my friends, I can defend myself against my enemies.” A friend at variance can be worse than an enemy. 81 Neelands, “Hooker on Scripture, Reason and ‘Tradition’,” 91–92, n36.

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I have asked “What would happen if we dropped the labels for Hooker? Whom would we see?” I have tried to answer this question by using Hooker’s own words and positions as they relate to three of the labels – “Protestant,” “unProtestant,” and “via media.” These labels are all accurate within some range. As Aristotle long ago pointed out, truth is like a (barn) door; it is so wide that it is hard to miss.82 But I note that the use of hermeneutic lenses – “labels” – indicates that Hooker seems to be worth claiming. In claiming Hooker, we can be careful not to go further than he did; in our search for significance, we must be wary of false pattern recognition, and of substituting our more comforting labels for Hooker’s express words. If considering the labels that identify Hooker with the Reformation and pulling him away from the Reformation attend to the familiar concept of adiaphora, and the type of via media position that he holds, then they have some use. For Hooker does adopt a via media position, but it is not a compromise between two excesses, but an uncompromised distance from each of them.

82 “Therefore, since the truth seems to be like the proverbial door, which no one can fail to hit.” Aristotle, Metaphysics II.1 in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), 712.

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2.

Richard Hooker and William Perkins: Elizabethan Adversaries or Allies?

Richard Hooker and William Perkins had strikingly different agendas, wrote in very different styles, and are generally remembered as occupying widely separated places on the English religious spectrum. Hooker is seen as a philosophical theologian who strenuously opposed Puritanism in Elizabeth I’s reign and was one of the principal founders of Anglicanism.1 Perkins is seen as an anti-Roman Catholic controversialist, a thoroughgoing Calvinist, and a leading Puritan thinker.2 Were they adversaries in the turmoil of religion and politics of the late sixteenth century? Or were they allies in a common cause?

2.1

Divergent Legacies

Richard Hooker is usually regarded as the chief theological defender, after his patron John Jewel, of the Elizabethan Settlement – the name usually given to the queen’s religious policies. This settlement, affirmed by Parliament, was based on recognizing the monarch as Supreme Governor of the Church of England, authorizing a Book of Common Prayer for public worship, and affirming the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion as the Church’s theological standard of belief. The resulting established Church had something of the look of traditional Catholicism in its church government and liturgy, as well as the vestments worn by its clergy. Its profession of faith was broadly Protestant. The next several decades, 1 F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone, eds., The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 793–794; W. J. Torrance Kirby, Richard Hooker, Reformer and Platonist (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 1–9; Charles Miller, Richard Hooker and the Vision of God: Exploring the Origins of ‘Anglicanism’ (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2013), 15– 26. 2 Cross and Livingstone, eds., The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 1264–1265; Geoffrey Rowell, Kenneth Stevenson, and Rowan Williams, eds., Love’s Redeeming Work: The Anglican Quest for Holiness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 5, 119, 190; John Coffey and Paul C. H. Lim, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 191–205.

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however, were to be marked by bitter divisions.3 In the last decade of Queen Elizabeth I’s reign, Hooker defended the Royal Supremacy, church government by bishops, and the contents of the Book of Common Prayer in his Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie. He also treated important theological and political subjects in a way that has proved to have continuing relevance for the English Church and its daughter churches around the world. Not all of this work was published during the queen’s lifetime. The first five books of the Lawes were published in 1593 and 1597, but the eighth book, which deals with the role of the monarch in the Church, and the seventh book, which deals with church government by bishops, only appeared in print in 1648 and 1662 respectively. The sixth book, intended to challenge a proposed system of elders who would administer spiritual and moral discipline in the local churches – an important part of the polity favored by Hooker’s opponents – was published in what was clearly an incomplete form in 1648. In the portions of the Lawes published in the late Elizabethan period, Hooker advanced a theological understanding of the scriptures that was distinct from that of the more Biblicist views of his opponents. Moreover, he developed a broad view of the nature of law, both human and divine, stressed the role of reason and the need to be aware of Christian history in understanding the scriptures, and argued that beliefs and practices which could be considered soundly Christian ought not to be rejected simply because they were adhered to by Roman Catholics.4 William Perkins, on the other hand, is generally regarded as a member of a group of theologians who were determined to bring about a more thoroughgoing and energetic reformation of the English Church than had so far been achieved. Perkins first came to the notice of many of his contemporaries outside Cambridge by his book on the doctrine of salvation, including predestination. This book, entitled A Golden Chaine, published in Latin in 1590 and in an English translation in 1591, provides a systematic theology that describes salvation as a series of stages involving both justification and sanctification. Grace, he asserts there, enables the redeemed sinner to participate in a Christian life that includes social action.5 In addition to his works in Latin, Perkins supplied English treatises that went through many editions during the last dozen years of Queen Elizabeth’s 3 Lucy E. C. Wooding, Rethinking Catholicism in Reformation England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 181–222; Alexandra Walsham, Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 244–283, 315–338; Patrick Collinson, Richard Bancroft and Elizabethan Anti-Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), ix–xvi, 1–82. 4 Arthur Stephen McGrade, “Introduction,” in Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 1:xxiii–xxiv, xxxvi–xciv. 5 William Perkins, A Golden Chaine: or, The Description of Theologie (London: Edward White, 1591). For Perkins’s predestinarian theology, see Leif Dixon, Practical Predestinarians in England, c. 1590–1640 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 61–122, 271–272, 349–356.

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reign. Books that had appeared only in Latin during his lifetime were translated into English and published during succeeding decades, making it possible for his teachings to reach a large audience. Other writings that were left in manuscript were edited by friends and colleagues after his death and published during the early seventeenth century.6 Perkins explicitly acknowledged his indebtedness to John Calvin, as well as to other Reformed theologians of his own day, including Theodore Beza, Calvin’s successor in Geneva. Many of Perkins’s writings were also published in translation in vernacular languages on the Continent. These languages included Dutch, French, German, Czech, Hungarian, and Spanish. An edition of his complete works in Latin was published in Geneva and several times reprinted in the seventeenth century. As a result, Perkins’s name was well known not only in England but also in Scotland, Ireland, and many Continental countries.7 Perkins was the most widely known English religious writer of his time. Hooker and Perkins had very different careers as ordained members of the Church of England. Hooker was born about 1554 on the outskirts of Exeter in southwest England and was educated at Oxford with the support of John Jewel, bishop of Salisbury. At Oxford he became a fellow of Corpus Christi College and deputy professor of Hebrew in the university. He subsequently became master of the Temple Church in London, located near the Inns of Court or law schools, and he afterwards served as the incumbent of parishes in Wiltshire and Kent.8 Perkins, for his part, was born in 1558 in the village of Marston Jabbet in rural Warwickshire in the West Midlands and educated at Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he became a fellow and tutor. He also became an influential lecturer or preacher at Great St. Andrew’s Church across the street from his college. His academic and pastoral career was spent largely in the university town of Cambridge.9 Hooker had friends and connections in high places. His writing of the Lawes was part of a project by ecclesiastical leaders including John Whitgift, archbishop 6 See Ian Breward, ed., The Work of William Perkins (Abingdon: Sutton Courtenay Press, 1970), 613–632. 7 Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 400; Howard Hotson, Johann Heinrich Alsted, 1588–1638: Between Renaissance, Reformation and Universal Reform (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 42–43, 103–104; Graeme Murdock, Calvinism on the Frontier, 1600–1660: International Calvinism and the Reformed Church in Hungary and Transylvania (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 55, 60–61, 117, 150–153, 163–164; Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided, 1490–1700 (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 459–460. 8 A. S. McGrade, “Hooker, Richard (1554–1600),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition, 1–16 (accessed 8 February 2015). 9 Breward, ed., Introduction to The Work of William Perkins, 3–33.

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of Canterbury, aimed at discrediting radical Protestant critics of the established Church. His colleagues and friends evidently included influential citizens in the nation’s capital.10 Perkins’s circle, on the other hand, was made up largely of fellow teachers and scholars, current and former students, and citizens and officials in East Anglia. Neither seems ever to have mentioned the other in print. Hooker was slightly older than Perkins, but they were close contemporaries. Each of them died near the end of Elizabeth I’s reign: Hooker in 1600 and Perkins in 1602.

2.2

Hooker, Perkins, and the Elizabethan Settlement

Both Hooker and Perkins wrote their major works in the 1590s, when the Church of England was at a crucial stage in its development and its emergence as a theological and ecclesial body. The Elizabethan Settlement proved to be unsuccessful in the short term as a program to promote peace and stability within the realm. Instead, the initial steps taken by the queen and Parliament ushered in decades of social and political unrest. This unrest was provoked in part by the Northern Rebellion of 1569–70, a revolt against official religious policies; by Pope Pius V’s bull of 1570 excommunicating the queen and calling upon her subjects to rebel against her; and by the arrival of Jesuit priests, beginning in 1580, intent on restoring papal power in England. These efforts coincided with vigorous expressions of discontent from the opposite extreme, namely from radical Protestants conventionally called Puritans. In the late 1560s, members of this group undertook a series of actions aimed at bringing about further religious reforms based on the examples of Reformed churches abroad. Their initial objective was to do away with the requirement that clergy wear the surplice, a traditional vestment, when conducting services. The gifted Cambridge theologian Thomas Cartwright challenged the polity and theological underpinnings as well as the liturgy of the English Church on the grounds that they were insufficiently scriptural. Two outspoken Admonitions to Parliament in 1572 charged the established Church with a wide range of failings for not following the example of the primitive Church. The sensational Marprelate tracts of 1588–89 attacked the bishops for a variety of moral offenses and theological shortcomings. Only in the latter part of Elizabeth I’s reign did a concerted effort to enforce clerical conformity led by Archbishop Whitgift begin to weaken the opposition. Meanwhile, Spain, the leading Roman Catholic power, attempted to 10 Patrick Collinson, “Hooker and the Elizabethan Establishment,” in Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community, ed. A.S. McGrade (Tempe, AZ: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1997), 149–181.

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invade England, topple the queen, and put the Church of England once more under the jurisdiction of the pope in Rome. The Church of England forged ties with Calvinist churches in France and the Netherlands, while diplomatic steps were taken to seek closer relations with German Lutherans.11 Amidst this turmoil of religious controversy and radical activity, Hooker and Perkins wrote on behalf of what have been seen as very different causes. According to a good deal of recent scholarly investigation, however, the conspicuous differences between Hooker and Perkins are not as obvious as has previously been thought. Not a few scholars have argued that Hooker was himself a Reformed theologian, especially on such important issues as the authority of the scriptures, justification by grace through faith, and the nature of the Eucharist.12 Perkins, as my recent book, William Perkins and the Making of a Protestant England, seeks to show, did not oppose church government by bishops or the Book of Common Prayer, nor did he advocate a parish discipline supervised by elders – central parts of the agenda of the Church’s radical Protestant critics.13 Both Hooker and Perkins, in other words, can be considered Reformed theologians and supporters of the Church as it was constituted in the Elizabethan era. Hooker’s writings were, as scholars have shown, indebted to the Aristotelian tradition of the pre-Reformation Church, as well as to the ancient Fathers and scholastic theologians of the Church. But so, in fact, were Perkins’s writings. Perkins has appropriately been called a Protestant scholastic for his indebtedness to Aristotle and medieval theologians, including St. Thomas Aquinas.14 Both universities, after all, offered a curriculum of studies that was heavily indebted to ancient and medieval writers, so that elements of patristic as well as scholastic 11 Wallace T. MacCaffrey, Elizabeth I: War and Politics, 1588–1603 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 73–298; Susan Brigden, New Worlds, Lost Worlds: The Rule of the Tudors, 1485–1603 (London: Allen Lane, 2000), 213–310; W. Brown Patterson, “The Anglican Reaction,” in Lewis W. Spitz and Wenzel Lohff, eds., Discord, Dialogue, and Concord: Studies in the Lutheran Reformation’s Formula of Concord (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977), 150–165. 12 Nigel Atkinson, Richard Hooker and the Authority of Scripture, Tradition and Reason: Reformed Theologian in the Church of England? (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 1997); Corneliu C. Simut, The Doctrine of Salvation in the Sermons of Richard Hooker (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2005), 47–62, 299–308; Corneliu C. Simut, Richard Hooker and his Early Doctrine of Justification: A Study of his Discourse of Justification (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 7–12, 143– 151; Kirby, Richard Hooker, Reformer and Platonist, 11–28. The most thorough discussion is Nigel Voak, Richard Hooker and Reformed Theology: A Study of Reason, Will, and Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), passim. 13 W. B. Patterson, William Perkins and the Making of a Protestant England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 45–61, 88. 14 A. J. Joyce, Richard Hooker and Anglican Moral Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 235–245; Paul R. Schaefer, “Protestant ‘Scholasticism’ at Elizabethan Cambridge: William Perkins and a Reformed Theology of the Heart,” in Carl R. Trueman and R. Scott Clark, eds., Protestant Scholasticism: Essays in Reassessment (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 1999), 147–64.

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teachings were very familiar to both theologians. Hooker and Perkins were also much indebted to the Renaissance humanism associated with Erasmus, Thomas More, and a range of English writers in the early sixteenth century. Hooker’s college at Oxford, Corpus Christi, was founded as a Renaissance “trilingual college” to educate its students in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, and he himself was a professor of Hebrew. Perkins, in addition to demonstrating his command of the scriptural languages and of ancient and medieval thought, advocated a social ethic that clearly reflected the views of the early Christian humanists in England, as Margo Todd has shown. This tradition of social teaching and preaching only gained in strength with the theological changes of the Protestant Reformation.15

2.3

Differences of Style

The two English theologians did write English prose very differently. Hooker wrote in language that was nuanced, discursive, eloquent, and often sonorous. He had one of the most distinctive prose styles in Elizabethan literature. A. J. Joyce has argued that Hooker adopted a literary persona that enabled him to appear peaceful and conciliatory while he attacked his opponents with devastating effect. Others have understood Hooker’s voice as one of reason, sometimes expressive of deep religious emotion, in an age of divisive partisanship and dogmatism. It is certainly accurate to say that Hooker was often polemical, as in the Preface to the Lawes, where he exaggerates the revolutionary nature of radical Protestantism within the English Church. But his evident willingness to consider with his opponents the chief issues in dispute, taking their views seriously, makes it also an irenic effort. Describing Perkins’s distinctive manner of writing is less of a challenge. Perkins wrote a direct, clear, forthright, and sometimes colloquial English, presumably close to the way ordinary English men and women of his time expressed themselves. In his book on prophesying, or preaching, he stresses the importance of presenting the contents of the scriptures accurately and persuasively, avoiding any ostentatious displays of learning, and using language intelligible to a wide range of hearers. He cites as an ancient adage that it is the nature of art to conceal art. The “plain style” characteristic of his books and sermons, and persuasively advocated by him in his book on preaching, helped to shape modern English prose.16 15 James McConica, “The Rise of the Undergraduate College,” in The Collegiate University, ed. James McConica, vol. 3 of The History of the University of Oxford, ed. T. H. Aston (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 1–68, esp. 17–29, 66–68; Margo Todd, Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 176–77, 101–113, 157– 65, 148–56. 16 Joyce, Richard Hooker and Anglican Moral Theology, 45–66; Brian Vickers, “Public and

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Differences in Topics Covered

One thing that clearly distinguishes the two theologians is the subject matter they deal with in their major publications. Hooker, in his Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie focuses on what might be called the structure of the Elizabethan Church: its government, liturgy, and relation to the English monarchy. But he also stresses what he sees as his opponents’ failure to understand fully the nature of law, the appropriate role of reason in theology and ecclesiastical practice, the importance of Christian history in understanding the Christian message, and the most appropriate ways to interpret scripture. Hooker also develops significant and distinctive themes that are still relevant to the Church’s life over four hundred years later. One of his most interesting and neglected ideas concerns councils and their possible role in resolving religious differences and bringing together the scattered parts of the universal Church. Like Thomas Cranmer, Hooker seems to have been strongly influenced by the Conciliar movement of the previous century. What had worked successfully in antiquity might restore the unity of the Church in his own day. Hooker saw the Church as the whole body of believers in Jesus Christ. It was alarming to him that much of Europe was engaged in a series of wars fought over religious issues. He raised the question of whether it would not be better, “if we did all concurre in desire to have the use of the auncient councels again renued, rather then these proceedings continued which either make all contentions endlesse, or bring them to one onely determination and that of all other the worst, which is by sword.”17 Could the coming together of representatives of different Christian traditions in the manner followed in antiquity not be effective in achieving a larger measure of unity among the followers of Christ even in the altered circumstances of the present day? 18 Another such subject dealt with in Hooker’s Lawes concerns the use of the past in theological discussions. As Scott Kindred-Barnes has shown, Hooker argued Private Rhetoric in Hooker’s Lawes,” in Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community, ed. A.S. McGrade, 95–145; Patterson, William Perkins, 114–134. For the significance of Perkins’s The Arte of Prophecying for English rhetoric, see Jameela Lares, Milton and the Preaching Arts (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2001), 12, 49, 68, 77, 79, 91–94, 104, 106, 144–145; and Mary Morrisey, “Scripture, Style and Persuasion in Seventeenth-Century English Theories of Preaching,” The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 51, no. 4 (October 2000): 686–706. For perceptive discussions of Hooker and rhetoric, see also Rudolph P. Almasy, “Rhetoric and Apologetics,” in A Companion to Richard Hooker, ed. Torrance Kirby (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 121–150, and “The Purpose of Richard Hooker’s Polemic,” Journal of the History of Ideas 39, no. 2 (April-June 1978): 251–270. 17 FLE 1:110; LEP I.10.14. 18 W. B. Patterson, “Hooker on Ecumenical Relations: Conciliarism in the English Reformation,” in Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community, ed. A.S. McGrade, 283–303.

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that key parts of the English liturgy reflect not only biblical teachings but also the practices and beliefs of Christians from earlier times.19 Charles Miller cites instances of historical thinking in a broad range of theological issues discussed by Hooker.20 Hooker both reflected and contributed to a new interest in history in the Elizabethan period – an interest manifested in polemical exchanges between Protestants and Catholics, the Chronicles of Holinshed, the history plays of William Shakespeare, and the scholarly activities of the Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries. This interest was demonstrated in the writings of eminent historians such as William Camden and John Stow. A deep-seated historical consciousness and sophisticated methods of investigation are pervasive among modern scholars. Rigorous historical inquiries offer the prospect of accurate and understandable findings in dealing with contentious subjects. In the most comprehensive recent assessment of Hooker’s thought in the Lawes, Arthur Stephen McGrade argues that if Hooker’s Book VIII, his treatment of the royal supremacy and of government in general, had been published in Hooker’s lifetime, it might have prevented the political and constitutional conflicts that helped lead to the English civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century.21 The reason is that Hooker insists that governments arise from human communities and derive their legitimacy from laws agreed to by those communities. Even monarchies have their origin in and derive their support from the consent of the governed. But the power of rulers is subject to definition by regularly constituted bodies of citizens or subjects in which every person is present or represented. Hooker’s distinction between executive authority and legislative authority and his emphasis on the rule of law anticipated Enlightenment political thought in important ways and continues to be relevant to problems of politics at the present day.22 What about Perkins? He is the first theologian of the English Reformation to provide systematic discussions of some of the most fundamental religious issues that confront Christians, including the nature of God, the work of Christ, and the ongoing role played by the Holy Spirit. He was a systematic theologian who wrote in a way that makes him stand out among sixteenth century English religious writers. Perkins takes great care to explain predestination as revealed in the 19 Scott N. Kindred-Barnes, Richard Hooker’s Use of History in His Defense of Public Worship: His Anglican Critique of Calvin, Barrow, and the Puritans (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2011), esp. 7–22, 38–48, 302–310. 20 Miller, Richard Hooker and the Vision of God, 35–36, 93–94, 183–187, 236–238, 271–272, 277. 21 Arthur Stephen McGrade, “Introduction,” in Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, 1:xci–xciii. 22 Lee W. Gibbs, “The ‘Judicious’ Mr. Hooker and the ‘Devious’ Mr. Locke: John Locke’s Use of Richard Hooker in his ‘Second Treatise of Government,’” and W. Brown Patterson, “Richard Hooker, John Locke, and the Origins of Human Rights,” in Lutheran and Anglican: Essays in Honour of Egil Grislis, ed. John K. Stafford (Winnipeg, Manitoba: St. John’s College Press, 2009), 71–95, 183–208.

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scriptures and as treated by a range of theologians in the past and in his own day. He provides a widely ranging theological perspective that addresses questions and problems his contemporaries were concerned about, centering on salvation and the most appropriate and fruitful ways to live a Christian life. He everywhere stresses the fallen state of humanity, but consistently shows the ways in which God’s grace heals and restores human beings. Perkins saw as a major threat to the vitality and integrity of the English Church the survival of Roman Catholicism in his country. His important book, A Reformed Catholic, argues that Protestants and Roman Catholics share many theological concerns, but differ in crucially important ways. Some of his earliest writings, which remained among his bestselling books, were addressed to those who adhered to an attenuated and incomplete version of beliefs and practices derived from the country’s Roman Catholic past. This survival of Roman Catholicism among the English populace was hardly surprising given the sporadic nature of the English Reformation and the reversal of religious policy and ecclesiastical affiliation that made England officially Roman Catholic during the reign of Mary I, Elizabeth’s immediate predecessor.23 The European Reformation was above all a struggle over religious ideas and the sources of authority, and this was as true for England as it was for every other part of Europe. It seems undeniable that the theological and moral teaching that the authorities had provided for the English populace before the latter part of Elizabeth’s reign was inadequate for the uncertainties and challenges that Christians faced. Between 1589 and 1602, Perkins wrote extensively in Latin and English on subjects of immense importance to his contemporaries. These subjects went to the heart of Christian belief – namely, the doctrine of salvation; the role of conscience in understanding God’s will and guidance; biblical study and preaching; the teachings of the Apostles’ Creed; and the most effective ways for Christians to deal with urgent economic and social problems. Perkins’s The Foundation of Christian Religion (1590), A Golden Chaine: or The Description of Theology (1591), A Case of Conscience (1592), Prophetica (1592) – translated as The Arte of Prophecying (1607) – and An Exposition of the Symbole or Creed of the Apostles (1595) were among his earliest and most frequently reprinted books. Perkins’s influential A Reformed Catholike (1597) set out key Christian doctrines as taught in the Church of England, while distinguishing them from Roman Catholic teachings. Perkins was conciliatory in the sense that he sought to state Roman Catholic doctrines accurately and adequately and to show where the Church of England agreed with them and where it did not, while citing relevant passages in the scriptures and in the works of leading theologians in all previous 23 Felicity Heal, Reformation in Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 113–151, 157–166, 172–178, 351–380, 386–424.

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periods of the Church’s history. His book dealt succinctly and incisively with the freedom of the will, justification, the nature of the Eucharist, the importance of the saints, and implicit faith, among other issues. Perkins affirmed that the Church of England was sound in its reliance on biblical theology and Catholic in its adherence to historic Christianity.24 Perkins’s A Reformed Catholike was as explicit an apology for the Church of England as Hooker’s Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie, and it was accessible to a far larger audience. Second only to A Reformed Catholike in its contemporary reputation and influence were Perkins’s writings on social justice. Here he focused his readers’ attention on contemporary problems of poverty, homelessness, official corruption, predatory business practices, and crime. These subjects were treated most fully in a posthumously published volume entitled The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience (1606). They were also treated in A Treatise of the Vocations or Callings of Men (1603), a book that deals with the mission of every Christian to help to fulfill God’s will, and in Christian Oeconomie (1609), a book concerned with the life and conduct of the Christian household. In these books, Perkins stressed the importance of the family, the Church, and the commonwealth, terms he frequently linked together. Perkins saw an important role to be played by civil government, both national and local, by parishes, and by the members of the household. Personal witness and actions were crucial to the resolution of then current social problems. Every Christian, Perkins stressed, was called to serve others and to respect their worth and dignity.

2.5

Conclusion: Allies, not Adversaries

Hooker and Perkins were not adversaries but allies.25 Richard Hooker anchored the distinctive governance, liturgy, and theological beliefs of the English Church in a scriptural and historical context, while throwing a flood of light on the nature of law and government. His contemporary William Perkins was a mainstream English Protestant, not a sectarian.26 He not only shaped English Protestant beliefs and practices, he profoundly influenced the general culture of his country. 24 William Perkins, A Reformed Catholike: or, A Declaration Shewing How Neere We May Come to the Present Church of Rome in Sundrie Points of Religion, and Wherein We Must Foreuer Depart from Them (Cambridge; John Legat, 1597). 25 Compare Bryan D. Spinks, Two Faces of Elizabethan Anglican Theology: Sacraments and Salvation in the Thought of William Perkins and Richard Hooker (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1999), 3, 162. 26 Philip Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 299, 302, 317–319; Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 37, 191, 283, 330, 440.

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English religious poetry, especially the work of John Donne, George Herbert, Thomas Traherne, and Henry Vaughan reflect his writings.27 Together, Hooker and Perkins gave substance and character to the reformed Church of England. The full effects of Hooker’s teachings were delayed because of the late publication of major parts of his most important work.28 His teachings were only fully known and appreciated in the period of the Restoration, following the English civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century. Thereafter, the Lawes had a profound effect on the way the members of the Church of England conceived of its character and its mission. The effects of Perkins’s writings were much more immediate, and his influence continued for many decades after his death. Perkins ought not be labeled a Puritan – a term that suggests he held subversive beliefs or acted in opposition to the Elizabethan Church and state. He was in fact the most widely known and effective apologist or defender of the English Church in his time. Perkins also had a European reputation that stretched far beyond England to The Netherlands, France, Switzerland, Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary. His writings, moreover, were known across an even wider geographical span. The English East India Company recommended them to its agents abroad, who were charged to represent their country while they exchanged goods and services with peoples of other nations. English men and women took Perkins’s books to settlements in North America, especially to New England, where they made a strong impact.29 Perkins’s legacy was deep and long-lived.

27 Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 14, 16, 24, 27, 101, 134, 136, 218–219, 224–226, 227, 270, 355. 28 Diarmaid MacCulloch, “Richard Hooker’s Reputation,” in A Companion to Richard Hooker, ed. Kirby, 563–610, esp. 591–597; Michael Brydon, The Evolving Reputation of Richard Hooker: An Examination of Responses, 1600–1714 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 81–122. 29 David Harris Sacks, “Discourses of Western Planting: Richard Hakluyt and the Making of the Atlantic World,” in The Atlantic World and Virginia, 1550–1624, ed. Peter C. Mancall (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 415–416; Stephen Foster, The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570–1700 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 87; Theodore Dwight Bozeman, The Precisianist Strain: Disciplinary Religion and Antinomian Backlash in Puritanism to 1638 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 68, 73, 84–85, 132, 145, 151, 213, 234.

A. S. McGrade

3.

Hooker on Public Worship: An Offering to the Wider Reformation

Very early in Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Richard Hooker offered “the laws whereby we live to the general trial and judgement of the whole world.”1 As far as I know, this offer was never taken up by reformed thinkers on the continent. In 1639 the eminent Dutch jurist and ecumenist Hugo Grotius called for a translation of the Laws but nothing came of this,2 and Grotius himself does not seem to have referred to Hooker in print. His appreciation of the Laws and Hooker’s submission of the work for broader assessment suggest, however, that we read the Laws not only as an attempt to preserve and extend the unity of English Christians but also as a work intended to be a contribution to the wider Reformation. Reading the Laws in this way may, I think, have some value for understanding Hooker’s relation to Reformed orthodoxy, the focus of this volume. My idea is that if we start with a significant subject or theme in Hooker and look for counterparts or plausible responses on the continent, we may find relationships that could be missed by starting from Reformed orthodoxy as a guide to choosing topics to study in Hooker. For example, Hooker’s renowned use of “reason” could be used as a starting point for charting reason in continental writings. Other reformers provide discussions of reason in relation to faith or as valid in understanding the natural world, but perhaps Hooker’s extensive controversies with the Puritans would make him an especially rich base for comparison. As another example, Hooker’s use of Jewish sources could be a 1 Quotations from Hooker in this paper are from my critical edition of Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), [I.1.3]. 2 In a letter to the classical scholar Meric Casaubon, Grotius wrote of having read the Laws years earlier and “how desirous he was that Hooker’s books were turned into Latin, for the good he expected they would do, if more generally known.” Grotius’s letter is printed in full in unnumbered pages at the end of Meric Casaubon’s A Vindication of the Lord’s Prayer (London: T.R., 1660). A translation was made by John Earle at some point but it remained in manuscript and was then lost. Diarmaid MacCulloch, “Richard Hooker’s Reputation,” in Torrance Kirby, A Companion to Richard Hooker (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 581n63.

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good starting point for looking at the use of such sources on the continent. Hooker served as Deputy Professor of Hebrew at Oxford for some time and seems to have acquired competence in rabbinic as well as biblical Hebrew. As we will see below, he refers to Jewish authors on key points regarding public worship, and there are dozens of other references to Jewish authors and practices in the Laws. My own starting point in this paper is Hooker’s discussion of public worship in the first 75 chapters of Book V of the Laws.3 I have three reasons for this choice. One is the importance of public worship for individual Christians and for shaping the overall culture of a period. Another is that Hooker provides one of the most extensive and reflective discussions of the subject written during the Reformation. My third reason involves our text of Book V. By taking advantage of what we now know about its history, I hope to focus attention more clearly on Hooker’s fundamental views on public worship, views that are easy to overlook in the book as first published in 1597. There are difficulties with taking Book V seriously as a text of interest for the wider Reformation. It may seem to be nothing more than a detailed, exhaustive and exhausting, defense of particular forms of worship legally prescribed in the 1559 Book of Common Prayer, and by Hooker’s own account most of the controversies about ceremonies that he takes up “are in truth for the greatest part such silly things, that very easiness does make them hard to be disputed of in serious manner.”4 It may thus seem that in Book V Hooker defends what he himself regarded as arbitrary, theologically insignificant forms and ceremonies. An eminent and sympathetic historian of the Reformation has suggested that if the legislation of 1559 had directed English clergy to preach standing on their heads, Hooker would have found a reason to justify it.5 But why should anyone outside England have given serious attention to an extended discourse on apparently trivial matters in a foreign country? The best response to this problem of parochialism and triviality is that there is a basic framework of public worship laid out in Book V, an account of what public worship is and does, that is far from local or indifferent. There is evidence from a succession of textual discoveries and analyses that what Hooker had prepared as Book V by 1593, when the Preface and Books I–IV were published, was just such a framework, including criteria for ceremonies and other aspects of public worship which showed sufficiently that the authorized ceremonies were acceptable without any need for point-by-point defense. This “first form” of Book V has been reconstructed by putting together the constructive or non-polemical 3 The remaining six chapters of Book V, concerned with church ministry, will not be discussed here. 4 Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:2 [V.Dedication.3]. 5 Diarmaid MacCulloch, “Richard Hooker’s Reputation,” in Kirby, Companion, 570.

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chapters of Book Vas published in 1597, namely, chapters 1–11, 18, 23–25, 50–58, and 67.6 The many chapters of skirmishing with Puritans interspersed among these constructive chapters, isolating and obscuring them and much increasing the length of the book, were apparently added in revision between 1593 and 1597 at the behest of Hooker’s associates Edwin Sandys and George Cranmer. I do not want to warn anyone off these chapters. They are valuable with regard to specific issues, but there is much to be gained from starting with the constructive chapters highlighted above. This is the course I will follow, first working through these chapters to spell out Hooker’s idea of what public worship is or should be and then considering a few of the added polemical chapters to see how his responses to Puritan objections relate to the basic framework. I will conclude with a non-specialist’s effort to suggest a very few ways in which Hooker’s offering on the subject of public worship could have contributed to the wider Reformation. In brief, Hooker begins with three substantial chapters on “godliness,” the consummate religious virtue, and two vices opposed to it and to each other, “affected” atheism and superstition (chapters 1–3). Accepting the need to defend authorized forms of worship against the wholesale Puritan complaint that there was much superstition in them, Hooker strikingly underlines the intrinsic worth of public worship before proposing criteria for assessing its details for positive value as well as freedom from superstition (chapters 4–10). The remaining chapters in this first form of Book V briskly treat places for public worship (chapter 11), instruction or preaching (chapter 18), and prayer (chapters 23–25), culminating in seven extraordinary Christological chapters supporting the necessity of sacraments and a chapter each on baptism and the eucharist. A recurrent theme is the difficulty that human beings have in fixing their minds and hearts on God, our “imbecility” in this regard, and the consequent need for public worship that helps us focus both cognitively and emotionally.

3.1

Virtue and Vices in Religion (Chapters 1–3)

Chapter 1. True Religion is the root of all true virtues and the stay of all well ordered commonwealths. Hooker begins the extraordinary first chapter of Book V with a distinction he had made before and would make again between the good laws governing the Elizabethan church and the personal defects of the men 6 The listed chapters are those identified by John Booty, the Folger edition commentary editor of Book V, as making up the first form of the book (FLE 6:189). For background see William P. Haugaard on the 1593 publication of the Preface and first four books of the Laws at FLE 6:37– 51.

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administering those laws.7 The rest of the chapter is concerned with the two points indicated in its title: religion as the root of virtue in individuals and the support of well-ordered commonwealths. The second point is addressed first, with testimony from rulers to the protection they have received at God’s hands and a general statement of the force religion has to shape all sorts of men and make them more “serviceable” in public affairs – governors more apt to rule with conscience and inferiors for conscience’s sake more willing to obey. The discussion of virtue and character in the heart of the chapter explains how this shaping and serviceability come about. Political affairs require fit instruments, and it is their virtues that make men such instruments. As a result, polity must acknowledge its debt to religion, for “godliness” is the “chiefest top and wellspring” of all true virtues, as God is of all good things. Hooker refers to Aristotle’s Magna Moralia on the connection between virtue and public well-being and to Philo of Alexandria on the connection between godliness and virtue, quietly combining Aristotelian moral psychology with Judaeo-Christian moral cosmology. We are to think of character as an effective force for good in the world, not simply an admirable personality trait without traction outside itself. And we are to think of the highest point of character as directed toward the highest of all realities, God. Hooker’s choice of “godliness” for Philo’s eusebia, a term more commonly translated as “piety,” is significant in two ways. First, it appropriates a term often used by Puritans to distinguish themselves and their followers from the mass of English Christians. Second, “godliness” would seem to have a more active connotation than “piety” for Hooker if we recall his contention in Book I of the Laws that reason, the law of our nature, directs us to the “imitation of God.”8 In any case, whether called godliness, piety, or religion, this is the highest virtue and the source of all true virtues, making its cultivation and practice a matter of utmost importance.9 To give substance to this exaltation of godliness, Hooker proceeds to brief demonstrations of its generative character with regard to three cardinal virtues of the classical tradition: justice, practical wisdom, and fortitude. “So natural is the union of Religion with Justice,” he argues, “that we may boldly deny there is either where both are not.”10 Unfeigned justice, he contends, depends on what is essentially a religious motivation, and no one can be genuinely religious who is 7 Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2.9–10 [V.1.1], and cf. 1:103–104 [II.1.1] and 3:172–179 [VII.24.1–15]. 8 Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 1:42 [I.5.title]: “The law whereby man in his actions is directed to the imitation of God.” 9 A similar role as highest virtue and a requirement for other true virtues is ascribed to charity by Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, ed. Commissio Piana (Ottawa, Canada: Harpell, 1953), 3:1525b–1528a [IIaIIae, q. 23, aa. 6–8]. 10 Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:10 [V.1.2].

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not found such by just actions. The relationship between religion and justice holds, not only for those in authority. but for every human agent. It moves every individual to do as much good as possible in his or her circumstances.11 Godliness leads over time to practical wisdom, for individuals who delight in actions beneficial to others will be diligent observers of the circumstances and effects of their actions, gathering experience and through experience wisdom. Concerning fortitude, “how should we look for a constant resolution of mind” in the face of great and unexpected evils except where sincere “affection to godward” has bred confidence in God’s assistance? In the Christian context within which almost all of Hooker’s argument is conducted, this first chapter could very well have ended with the encomia of religion which follow the preceding demonstrations. According to Hooker, even if those who write of an innocent world in which men embraced fidelity and honesty of their own accord do not refer to religion, they nevertheless declare what comes only from her. Or again, an individual with every other perfection of mind but divorced from piety could only be a spectacle of commiseration, like a body without sight.12 But Hooker does not end here. He goes on to consider “how far forth there may be agreement in the effects of different religions”13 and gives four examples of “sparks of the light of truth intermingled with the darkness of error” producing good effects in the lives of non-Christians.14 In the midst of this account he introduces “affection” for one’s religion as a decisive factor, ranking bland profession of the truest religion behind loving devotion to a less true one: “They that love the religion which they profess may have failed in choice, but yet they are sure to reap what benefit the same is able to afford, whereas the best and soundest professed by them that bear it not the like affection, yields them, retaining it in that sort, no benefit.”15 Hooker’s extending the discussion to encompass religions other than Christianity and giving affection or love for one’s religion such importance for the value of professing it greatly affects the tone of everything that follows in Book V. For Hooker, attempts to cultivate Christian piety do not take place in a world without genuine piety elsewhere, “because no religion can wholly and only consist of untruths.”16 This proposition, together with the value placed on depth of devotion, suggests that a measure of respect is due to adherents of religions 11 “The same piety, which makes them that are in authority, desirous to please and resemble God by justice, inflames every way men of action with zeal to do good (as far as their place will permit) to all” (Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:10 [V.1.2]. 12 Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:11 [V.1.2]. 13 Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:11 [V.1.3]. 14 Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:13 [V.1.3, 5]. 15 Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:13 [V.1.4]. 16 Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:13 [V.1.5].

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other than one’s own. Surely there are also implications for the proper attitude of Christians toward churches other than their own. In his discussion of the visible church at the beginning of Book III, Hooker allows for differences of soundness from one church to another but insists that profession of one Lord, one faith, and one baptism makes any of them a part of the one body of the visible church.17 On this criterion, the Roman church, despite its “indisposition to be reformed,” is also part of the visible church, because it persists in confessing “those main parts of Christian truth.”18 Readers struck by parallels between the discussion of religions in Book V and churches in Book III, may also see Hooker’s point about personal depth of devotion to one’s religion as relevant to sixteenth century circumstances. It was not necessary to agree with Protestant martyrs under Elizabeth’s sister Mary or, closer to Hooker’s time of writing, Catholic martyrs in the reign of Elizabeth, in order to respect their possibly misguided devotion. None of this should be taken to suggest that, for Hooker, truth in religion is either relative to individual affections or unimportant. He began his discussion of the benefits of different religions by citing the bitter strife that arises over even small religious differences as evidence of a general belief that every individual “ought to embrace the religion which is true, and to shun, as hurtful, whatever dissents from it, but that most, which does farthest dissent.” He sees the generality of this conviction as a sign that God has imprinted it in us by nature, to spur us to search for and maintain “that religion, from which as to swerve in the least point is error, so the capital enemies thereof God hates as his deadly foes, aliens, and, without repentance, children of endless perdition.”19 On Hooker’s principles, then, a tone of respect for those of other faiths or churches is indeed called for in religious discourse. This goes along with a high sense of the importance of reaching and maintaining truth, but the arrogance commonly accompanying certainty of having the truth is considerably less in Hooker than in most controversialists of the period, in part, I suggest, because of the ideas put forward in this apparent digression into world religions in an apology for the English church. We emerge from the first chapter of Book V with the idea of godliness or genuine piety as the highest human virtue and the source of other virtues in their purest forms. Godliness is a virtue in Aristotle’s sense, a habit of character, not a collection of good deeds or isolated religious experiences, but a reliable and selfconscious disposition to perform godly actions for their own sake, a disposition that can be cultivated. This idea is developed further by Hooker’s description in the following two chapters of a pair of vices opposed to true religion and to one 17 Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 1:139 [III.1.3]. 18 Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 1:143 [III.1.10]. 19 Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:12 [V.1.3].

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another, “affected” atheism (not total lack of awareness of God, which Hooker considers extremely rare, but a refusal to acknowledge something one senses and cannot ignore20) and superstition, which arises from improperly guided zeal or irrational fear.21 These chapters, including Hooker’s critique of the cynical manipulation of religion for political purposes22 and the implication that we can be superstitious in campaigning against superstition,23 are of considerable importance in their own right.

3.2

Goodness of and in Public Worship (Chapters 4–10)

Almost everything Hooker has said in the first three chapters of Book V of the Laws bears primarily on individuals and God. It is individuals who are more or less godly or pious, and it is the character of individuals, their godliness and other virtues, that political society needs in order to work well. The rest of Book V is concerned with public, communal worship. Chapter 4 briefly lays out Puritan complaints about the inadequacy of the English church’s reform of superstitions in late medieval public worship, complaints to which Hooker responds in this book. In Book V as published in 1597 the response runs to dozens of chapters of close refutation of claims quoted from Puritan sources. In the first form of Book V with which we are concerned here, there is hardly any mention of the Puritans and their complaints after chapter 4. Rather, Hooker sets forth a positive account of his church’s public worship to offer the Puritans and the wider world as sufficient response, sufficient by standards of assessment he proposes in the following six chapters. Even before proposing his criteria, however, Hooker offers an apparently original demonstration of the supreme value of public worship, that “there can be in this world no work performed equal to the exercise of true religion, the proper operation of the Church of God.”24 This is a very strong claim for the importance of public worship in and of itself, apart from ceremonial detail or any civil legal requirement. The demonstration starts from the premise that the greatness and inherent worth of any action is measured by the worthiness of the subject engaging in that action and the object with which the action is concerned. Human beings are the worthiest creatures on earth, every society is worthier than any individual within it, and the most excellent society is the church. As to the object with which it is concerned, public worship is directed toward God, whose 20 21 22 23 24

Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:14–15 [V.2.2]. Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:17 [V.3.1]. Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:15–16 [V.2.3]. Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:17 [V.3.1]. Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:21 [V.6.1].

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greatness and power are infinite and who should be acknowledged as such “with unfeigned affection” as above and before all things.25 Given the importance of public worship, Hooker finds it obvious that the ceremonies involved should be judged on their own merits and not, for example, by distance from the practice of other churches. But what is a proper test of merit? In line with his earlier account of the virtue of godliness, the first criterion Hooker proposes is self-evident or provable effectiveness in “setting forward” godliness: Let our first demand be therefore, that in the external form of religion such things as are apparently or can be sufficiently proved effectual and generally fit to set forward godliness, either as betokening the greatness of God, or as beseeming the dignity of religion, or as concurring with celestial impressions in the minds of men, may be reverently thought of; some few, rare, casual, and tolerable, or otherwise curable inconveniences notwithstanding.26

What is apparent or demonstrable to one liturgist may not be so to another, but the essential point is effectiveness in achieving an appropriate end, not any characteristic of the ceremony or practice in itself or its legal establishment. If a law is involved, it is a law of cause and effect.27 25 “Now touching the nature of religious services and the manner of their due performance, thus much generally we know to be most clear, that whereas the greatness and dignity of all manner actions is measured by the worthiness of the subject from which they proceed and of the object whereabout they are conversant, we must of necessity in both respects acknowledge that this present world affords not anything comparable to the public duties of religion. For if the best things have the perfectest and best operations, it will follow that seeing man is the worthiest creature upon earth, and every society of men more worthy than any man, and of societies that most excellent which we call the Church; there can be in this world no work performed equal to the exercise of true religion, the proper operation of the Church of God. Again forasmuch as religion works upon him who in majesty and power is infinite, as we ought we account not of it, unless we esteem it even according to that very height of excellence which our hearts conceive when divine sublimity itself is rightly considered. In the powers and faculties of our souls God requires the uttermost which our unfeigned affections towards him is able to yield. So that if we affect him not far above and before all things, our religion has not that inward perfection which it should have, neither do we indeed worship him as our God” (Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:21 [V.6.1]). 26 Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:22 [V.6.2]. 27 See Hooker’s conception of law in general. “All things that are have some operation not violent or casual. Neither does anything ever begin to exercise the same without some foreconceived end for which it works. And the end which it works for is not obtained, unless the work be also fit to obtain it by. For to every end every operation will not serve. That which does assign to each thing the kind, that which does moderate the force and power, that which does appoint the form and measure of working, the same we term a Law. So that no certain end could ever be attained, unless the actions whereby it is attained were regular, that is to say, made suitable fit and correspondent to their end, by some canon, rule or law.” Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 1:44 [I.2.1]. Others “apply the name of Law to that only rule of working which superior authority imposes, whereas we somewhat more enlarging the

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Hooker’s second proposed liturgical test is longstanding precedent and current practice.28 This is not a new aim for worship, tradition for its own sake, but a new basis for supposing that a particular practice achieves the aim we already have in mind, setting forward godliness. Lacking self-evidence or a strong argument for such effectiveness, we are urged to use standing tradition as a sign of it. Hooker’s references to the possibility of “weighty inconvenience” or “strong exception” suggest caution in using this sign. The possibility that traditional usages may no longer be edifying is faced in Hooker’s third proposal, namely, that “the very authority of the Church itself” be respected in relation to newly instituted ecclesiastical laws.29 The elaborate qualifications with which he presents this proposal30 suggest reluctance to use it. I do not recall any instance in which he relies solely on church authority to defend a ceremony. Perhaps an edict that the minister should stand on his head to preach would have elicited such a response? Hooker’s attitude here contrasts with that of John Whitgift, his chief predecessor in responding to Puritan attacks, who frequently appealed to the authority of the Christian magistrate as sufficient defense of a usage attacked by the leading Puritan critic, Thomas Cartwright. Hooker’s fourth and last proposal deals with circumstances in which otherwise commendable requirements may be relaxed. He considers a number of such situations before concluding, “we lastly require that it may not seem hard, if in cases of necessity, or for common utility’s sake, certain profitable ordinances sometimes be released, rather than all men always strictly bound to the general rigour thereof.”31 His major uses of this rule of equity relate to circumstances in which some ordinary features of the baptismal rite may be omitted32 or de-

28

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31 32

sense thereof, term any kind of rule or canon whereby actions are framed a law.” Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 1:47 [I.3.1]. “We are therefore bold to make our second petition this, that in things the fitness whereof is not of itself apparent nor easy to be made sufficiently manifest to all, yet the judgement of antiquity concurring with that which is received may induce them to think it not unfit, who are not able to allege any known weighty inconvenience which it has, or to take any strong exception against” Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:24 [V.7.4]. Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:26 [V.8.5]. “We therefore crave thirdly to have it granted, that where neither the evidence of any law divine, nor the strength of any invincible argument otherwise found out by the light of reason, nor any notable public inconvenience does make against that which our own laws ecclesiastical have although but newly instituted, for the ordering of these affairs, the very authority of the Church itself, at the least in such cases, may give so much credit to her own laws, as to make their sentence touching fitness and convenience weightier than any bare and naked conceit to the contrary; especially in them who can owe no less than childlike obedience, to her that has more than motherly power” (Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:26 [V.8.5]). Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:29 [V.9.5]. Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:170–180 [V.60–61].

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partures from ideal practice in clergy deployment may be allowed when personnel and resources are stretched.33 The liturgical tests Hooker has proposed in the preceding chapters must be understood in relation to his belief in the supreme value of public worship. The same must be said of his strictures against following “the rule of men’s private spirits.”34 He is not objecting to freshness as such but to randomness in liturgy. By “spirit” here he means an inner sense of being divinely inspired, apart from any supporting reason, and he advises those who have such a sense to consider that if the inspiration came from God, “the same God which reveals it to them, would also give them power of confirming it to others.”35 At the end of chapter 10, Hooker says that he will now turn to particulars. As this indicates, the first ten chapters of Book V have general application. They are all presumed to have occurred in sequence in the first form of the book. From this point on, however, each chapter or small group of chapters in the first form of Book V will serve to anchor a larger group of chapters in the published book responding to Puritan complaints about particular authorized forms. Thus, chapter 11, the sole chapter on places for public worship in the first form, anchors six additional chapters in the book as published. Chapters 23–25, on prayer, anchor twenty-four further chapters of disputation with Puritans, mainly Thomas Cartwright, in the published Book V. We skip these more contentious chapters in what follows.

3.3

Places for Public Worship (Chapter 11)

Places set aside for service to God must be prepared “as beseems actions of that regard.”36 Hooker addresses the topic of seemliness here only by emphasizing the Jewish and Christian tradition of devoting substantial wealth to places of public worship whenever possible. He does this in giving a brief history of varied worship sites. Adam had a place “where to present himself before the Lord”37; the patriarchs used altars, mountains, and groves; a tabernacle traveled with the Jews in the wilderness; they later had synagogues and splendid temples (frequented by Christ and the apostles); Christians worshiped in private under persecution but then, when circumstances permitted, in well endowed churches. “The whole world did seem to exult that it had occasion of pouring out gifts to so blessed a 33 34 35 36 37

Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:311–316 [V.80]. Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:30 [V.10]. Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:30 [V.10.1]. Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:30 [V.11.1]. Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:30 [V.11.1].

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purpose.”38 Hooker clearly did not consider glorious buildings necessary for Christian worship, but to his mind the importance of such worship argued for splendor. The last three sentences of the published version of chapter 11 prepare for the six following polemical chapters by contrasting the honor traditionally accorded to builders of great churches with contemporary charges that such structures are idolatrous.

3.4

Preaching (Chapter 18)

Chapter 18, on public teaching or preaching,39 would follow smoothly from chapter 11 if the last three sentences of the published chapter 11 and the six intervening chapters on specific Puritan objections to English churches were omitted: “Places of public resort being thus provided for, our repair thither is especially for mutual conference and as it were commerce to be had between God and us.”40 Hooker’s own preaching drew mixed reviews from contemporaries, but it is not surprising that he considered preaching an essential part of common worship, rather than a “thing indifferent” to be included or not as determined by circumstances or competent authority. In the Reformation context it would have been astonishing if he had not considered preaching necessary. There are, however, distinctive points in his presentation of this element of worship. His apparently casual use of the term “commerce” in describing public worship here and at the beginning of chapter 23 was unusual enough for the Oxford English Dictionary to define it as a special sense of the term. The source he uses to support the need for religious instruction is striking: Because therefore want of the knowledge of God is the cause of all iniquity among men, as contrariwise the very ground of all our happiness and the seed of whatsoever perfect virtue grows from us is a right opinion touching things divine, this kind of knowledge we may justly set down for the first and chiefest thing which God imparts to his people, and our duty of receiving this at his merciful hands for the first of those religious offices wherewith we publicly honour him on earth. For the instruction therefore of all sorts of men to eternal life it is necessary, that the sacred and saving truth of God be openly published to them.41 38 Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:32 [V.11.2]. Hooker’s account of Christian tradition here, echoed in a 1598 sermon at Paul’s Cross by one John Howson, “heralded the beginning of an officially backed campaign for the rebuilding and beautification of English churches generally” (Kenneth Fincham, and Nicholas Tyacke, Altars Restored: The Changing Face of Religious Worship, 1547–c. 1700 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007], 2007), 89. 39 Of public teaching or preaching, and the first kind thereof, catechizing. 40 Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:43 [V.18.1]. 41 Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:43 [V.18.1].

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Hooker cites for support here Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed. At the beginning of Book V Hooker used Philo Judaeus as a key source for the idea of godliness as the highest of virtues and the source of all others; here, he uses a medieval Jewish sage to urge the necessity of instruction in common worship. Hooker defines preaching in his own way. The “open publication of heavenly mysteries is by an excellence termed preaching.”42 He explains the phrase “by an excellence” by observing that in a general sense when anything is “publicly notified” it could be called preaching, but “when the school of God does use it as a word of art, we are accordingly to understand it with restraint to such special matter as that school is accustomed to publish.”43 This way of using the term allows Hooker to devote the rest of chapter 18 to catechizing, a practice he presents as peculiar to Judaism and Christianity among the world’s religions, as a kind of preaching. There has been some thought that chapter 18 in the first form of Book V could have gone beyond catechizing to consider other forms of preaching, in Hooker’s sense of the term, such as the public reading of Scripture or other profitable instruction (the topics of the following two chapters in the published Book V), or perhaps even sermons (the concern of the remaining two chapters on preaching). In the published version, however, Hooker’s discussion of preaching by sermons is intensely polemical, closely focused on the Puritan contention that sermons are “the only ordinary way of teaching whereby men are brought to the saving knowledge of God’s truth.”44 Hooker’s conception of sermons as only one of several kinds of church preaching sounds odd to later ears accustomed to understand “preaching” and “sermons” as synonymous. For Hooker, however the distinction is of central importance. Allowing the public reading of Scripture to count as preaching avoids privileging the sermon above Scripture reading as an essential component of public worship.

3.5

Prayer (Chapters 23–25)

What Hooker means by using the term “commerce” to characterize what occurs in church services becomes clearer at the beginning of chapter 23, “Of Prayer.” “His heavenly inspirations and our holy desires are as so many Angels of intercourse and commerce between God and us.”45 I suggest that Hookers uses “commerce” for vividness and to underline what he takes to be a real relationship of exchange in public worship, exchange between human beings, in all their 42 43 44 45

Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:43 [V.18.1]. Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:43 [V.18.1]. Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:55 [V.21.title]. Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:73 [V.23.1].

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earthliness, and their eternal and infinite creator and redeemer. This does not give a new meaning to “commerce” but points to a new site for, and new parties to, commerce in its ordinary sense. Both participants are involved in instruction, God supplying it and worshipers dutifully, attentively receiving it. In prayer, worshipers send their desires upward as angels and God receives them. As we have seen, Hooker thinks public worship is the worthiest activity in which human beings can engage in this world. He repeats the higher valuation of group over individual prayer in chapter 24, Of Public Prayer, and adds to this “objective” superiority a number of features that make public prayer beneficial to the individuals participating in it. They may be more comfortable praying in public with others, for what they ask there is publicly approved with common consent. If one individual’s zeal weakens, it may be strengthened by that of others, while his own presence may help them. Chapter 25, Of the form of common prayer, is the last of the three chapters on prayer in the first form of Book V. At both the beginning and the end of this chapter Hooker celebrates the set form of service promulgated in the 1559 Prayer Book. His opening sentence explains why “religious minds” are “so inflamed with the love of public devotion.” It is largely, he thinks, because the set shape and solemnity of the service help to overcome our common weakness of heart and mind in addressing God.46 He goes on to speak of the glory of the place where public prayer is offered and the ancient teaching that there we are in the presence of angels.47 He urges the minister, who is ordained to stand and speak for the people in the presence of God, to show zeal and fervor in conducting the service, for if he fails to praise God with all his might and take the people’s causes to heart, “how should there be but in them frozen coldness, when his affections seem benumbed from whom theirs should take fire?”48 It is plain that the solemnity Hooker seeks in common worship is reverence in the presence of the sacred, a

46 “A great part of the cause wherefore religious minds are so inflamed with the love of public devotion, is that virtue, force and efficacy, which by experience they find that the very form and reverent solemnity of common prayer duly ordered has, to help that imbecility and weakness in us, by means whereof we are otherwise of ourselves the less apt to perform to God so heavenly a service with such affection of heart, and disposition in the powers of our souls as is requisite” (Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:75[V.25.1]). 47 Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:75–76 [V.25.2] 48 Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:77 [V.25.3]. It is perhaps significant that Hooker urges zeal on the minister in his attentiveness to the people’s concerns and in his conduct of the set service, but does not mention it with respect to sermons. In any case, outside of services, the minister ought to be an example of virtue and godliness of life, since the people, “for the most part are rather led away by the ill example, than directed aright by the wholesome instruction of them, whose life swerves from the rule of their own doctrine” (Ibid).

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reverence which is quite compatible with joy.49 The greatest help for such public worship, however, is “that very set and standing order itself,” which has been essentially the same for centuries throughout the church, no doubt proceeding from God and having “one original mould.”50 Hooker concludes the chapter with a contrast between this order and the scandalous services in which “every man’s private Spirit and gift […] is the only Bishop that ordains him to this ministry; the irksome deformities whereby through endless and senseless effusions of undigested prayers they oftentimes disgrace in most insufferable manner the worthiest part of Christian duty towards God.”51 We may wonder whether this last anguished sentence was added to the soaring praise of the rest of the chapter as revision, in anticipation of the polemical chapters that come next in Book V as published.

3.6

Incarnation and Sacraments (Chapters 50–57 and 67)

Chapter 50, Of the name, the author, and the force of Sacraments, which force consists in this, that God has ordained them as means to make us partakers of him in Christ, and of life through Christ, connects smoothly with chapter 25, which immediately precedes it in the first form of the book. The transition is especially direct if the final sentence of the former chapter is considered an addition to its positive account of the Prayer Book service. In any case, chapter 50 contains no reference to the intervening 24 chapters, which are almost entirely devoted to answering Puritan objections to particular authorized prayers. Hooker begins by stating the relationship between the preceding parts of Book V and what he will now discuss. “Instruction and prayer whereof we have hitherto spoken are duties which serve as elements parts or principles to the rest that follow, in which number the Sacraments of the Church are chief.”52 This brief chapter gives a preliminary account of what a sacrament is.53 Then, before returning to sacraments in chapter 57, Hooker offers six substantial chapters on the person of Christ.

49 Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:67–68, 75–76, 101, 222–223, 224, 229–231 [V.22.13, 25.2, 38.1, 67.2, 4, 12]. 50 Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:77 [V.25.4]. 51 Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:77 [V.25.5]. 52 Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:138 [V.50.1]. 53 When sacraments are said to be visible signs of invisible grace, “we thereby conceive how grace is indeed the very end for which these heavenly mysteries were instituted, and […] the matter whereof they consist is such as signifies, figures, and represents their end” ( Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:139 [V.50.3]).

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It is easy to recognize from the titles of these chapters that they summarize the chief Christological doctrines resulting from disputes in the fourth-century church: Chapter 51. That God is in Christ by the personal incarnation of the Son who is very God. Chapter 52. The misinterpretations which heresy has made of the manner how God and man are united in one Christ. Chapter 53. That by the union of the one with the other nature in Christ there grows neither gain nor loss of essential properties to either. Chapter 54. What Christ has obtained according to the flesh by the union of his flesh with deity. Chapter 55. Of the personal presence of Christ everywhere, and in what sense it may be granted he is everywhere present according to the flesh. Chapter 56. The union or mutual participation which is between Christ and the Church of Christ in this present world. Only chapter 55 may seem out of place, for it is concerned with the Lutheran claim that Christ is physically present everywhere, a claim Hooker considered untenable, taken literally, but susceptible of sound reinterpretation. What is not evident from the chapter titles is the extraordinary spirit and power of Hooker’s densely sourced but continuous and coherent presentation of doctrine in these chapters. The editor of an early twentieth-century edition of Book V found here a “clearness and brightness” in Hooker’s style, a “spiritual exhilaration” which makes these chapters “perhaps the most remarkable piece of theological writing in English literature.”54 As Hooker presents it, the participation of Christ and the church in each other involves not only Christ’s personal presence in the church but “a true actual influence of grace” which connects the Christian’s cultivation of godliness with Christ’s own life, “whereby the life which we live according to godliness is his.”55 The necessity of sacraments for realizing this influence is the subject of chapter 57, where their centrality is forcefully stated: For let respect be had to the duty which every communicant does undertake, and we may well determine concerning the use of Sacraments that they serve as bonds of 54 Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, The Fifth Book, ed. Ronald Bayne (London: Macmillan, 1902), cviii. 55 “But the participation of Christ imports, besides the presence of Christ’s person, and besides the mystical copulation thereof with the parts and members of his whole Church, a true actual influence of grace whereby the life which we live according to godliness is his, and from him we receive those perfections wherein our eternal happiness consists” (Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:163 [V.56.10], with reference to Galatians 2:20).

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obedience to God, strict obligations to the mutual exercise of Christian charity, provocations to godliness, preservations from sin, memorials of the principal benefits of Christ; respect the time of their institution, and it thereby appears that God has annexed them for ever to the new testament, as other rites were before with the old; regard the weakness which is in us, and they are warrants for the security of our belief; compare the receivers of them with such as receive them not, and sacraments are marks of distinction to separate God’s own from strangers. So that in all these respects they are found to be most necessary.56

In the short 58th chapter of Book V, Hooker refines his account of how the “parts” of a sacrament are to be understood.57 This is the only chapter on baptism presumed to have been included in the first form of Book V. The one point Hooker makes here is that in cases of necessity the sacrament may be administered without the ceremonies which ordinarily accompany it. The next chapter in the first form of the book is chapter 67, Of the sacrament of the body and blood of Christ. Hooker laments the persistence of disputes about exactly how or where Christ is present in the eucharist, noting that at the first eucharist the apostles, by disposition scrupulous and inquisitive, made there “no show of doubt or scruple.”58 All agree, as Hooker sees it, that there is a “real participation of Christ and of life in his body and blood by means of this sacrament” and that “the soul of man is the receptacle of Christ’s presence”59 From participation in the “fruit grace and efficacy” of Christ’s body and blood there follows a “kind of transubstantiation in us, a true change both of soul and body.”60 In treating the eucharist as the consummation of public worship, Hooker was not following current custom in the English church, where receiving communion at least three times a year was legally required, but common practice was to receive at most three times a year.61 With Hooker “a novel ‘sacrament-centered style of piety’ began to be taught in the English church.”62 56 Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:164–165 [V.57.2]. 57 Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:167–168 [V.58.2]. Usually the substance of a sacrament is spoken of as comprising the visible elements and the grace which they signify. For the outward substance to be complete, however, both an outward form and sacramental words are required. At times, then, three things are said to make up a sacrament: the grace which is offered by it, the element which is a sign of that grace, and the word expressing what is done by the element. 58 Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:223 [5.67.3]. 59 Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:223 [5.67.2]. 60 (Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:228 [V.67.11], with references to Cyprian [actually Arnold of Bonneval in a treatise ascribed to Cyprian], Leo I [for the term transeamus], Irenaeus, and Cyril of Alexandria). 61 See John Booty on “Hooker and Liturgical Tradition” at FLE 6:223–31. 62 Kenneth Fincham, and Nicholas Tyacke. Altars Restored: The Changing Face of Religious Worship, 1547–c. 1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 75.

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Constructive Chapters Outside the First Form (Chapters 38 and 69–72)

Besides the core chapters of Book V making up the first form of the book, a few other chapters largely share the constructive style of these chapters and hence merit consideration as part of Hooker’s positive account of common worship. Chapter 38, Of music with psalms, is a beautiful wide-ranging treatise on the power of music, including instrumental music, to touch the depths of the soul. Some music has the power to represent and bring us to love virtue, and “there is also that [which] carries [us] as it were into ecstasies, filling the mind with an heavenly joy and for the time in a manner severing it from the body.”63 Music sounding to the praise of God “does much edify if not the understanding because it teaches not, yet surely the affection because therein it works much.”64 The chapter concludes by quoting Basil the Great on music as a divinely inspired contribution to the church’s liturgy.65 Hooker’s chapter would support a much broader role for music than in the unaccompanied singing of psalms, the use that the chapter’s title might seem to suggest. It can “set forth godliness” in other ways as well, “concurring with celestial impressions in the minds of men.”66 Hooker’s treatment of church festivals and fasts in chapters 69–72 is also largely constructive and continues the theme of cultivating godliness. These repeated occasions of the church year are effective means “to bring to full maturity and growth those seeds of godliness […] sown in the hearts of many thousands during the while that such feasts are present. The constant habit of well doing is not gotten without the custom of doing well.”67

3.8

Polemical Sidelights (Chapters 33, 34, 35, 36, and 39)

Some chapters added to the first form of Book V to answer Puritan objections also show Hooker’s concern with helping people’s minds, hearts, and affections become alert and focused. He defends having many short prayers lest attention be “wasted or dulled” by few and long ones,68 intermingling lessons with prayers so that the powers of “vehement intention” exercised in praying and the power of understanding exercised in listening might not be wearied but each spur the 63 64 65 66 67 68

Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:101–102 [V.38.1]. Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:102 [V.38.3]. Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:102–103 [V.38.3]. Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:22 [V.6.2]. Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:249 [V.71.2]. Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:93 [V.33].

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other,69 praying for earthly things to take advantage of people’s intense immediate desires for them to raise their affections to God,70 repeating the confession and Lord’s Prayer after the minister so that individuals are “earwitnesses” of each other’s sinfulness and devotion,71and saying psalms, lessons and other parts of the service antiphonally to increase absorption of the words and raise people’s hearts.72

3.9

An Offering to the Wider Reformation

Hooker offered “the laws whereby we live” to the trial and judgment of “the whole world” of the wider Reformation. In this paper I have tried to clarify what Hooker’s offer and potential contribution amount to in the area of public worship as presented in the first 75 chapters of Book V of the Laws. As first published in 1597, Book V may seem only an extended, sometimes angry, defense of legally imposed forms of public worship in the English church, punctuated by occasional chapters that lack any apparent controversial edge. In the overtly argumentative chapters Hooker touches on many matters of theological import, however, and the collection of points for and against England’s authorized forms could have served as a reference work on similar issues for other churches of the Reformation. Hooker’s extended discussion of particular liturgical practices might also have been of interest in areas where civil rulers exercised a relatively free hand in shaping the worship of churches under their protection.73 The whole question of Book V’s potential contribution to the wider Reformation takes on a different cast when its less controversial, more constructive chapters are read, not as isolated moments of respite from the heat of battle, but as a framework for the essentials of public worship. These chapters seem to have been what Hooker had ready as Book V in 1593, when the Preface and Books I–IV were published. The chapters dealing with Puritan objections, apparently added at the behest of Hooker’s associates, can now be seen as more incidental and not the core of the book. Close attention to the framework chapters on their own reveals a coherent and distinctive presentation of what public worship is and is about. It is “commerce” with God in the cultivation of “godliness,” crowned with participation in the grace of Christ through the sacraments of the church. Nothing we 69 70 71 72 73

Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:94 [V.34.1]. Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:96–97 [V.35.2]. Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:99 [V.36.2]. Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:105–106 [V.39.4]. Cf. Susan C. Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of Ritual: An Interpretation of Early Modern Germany (New York: Routledge, 1997), 121f.

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do on earth is better than this, according to Hooker, but it is not easy for us. Accordingly, a main function of effective worship is coping with human cognitive and emotional “imbecility,” our difficulty in focusing on God. We need help from a setting worthy of the worship of God, the best possible language, broad congregational participation, uplifting music, and zeal and good character in our ministers. The trial and judgment of these ideas, as of Book V as a whole, would presumably have had varied results if the Laws had been known abroad. Hooker’s expansiveness in placing Christianity among other religions, or reformed churches among other churches, would surely have touched many nerves. Modeling godliness or piety on the structure of Aristotelian virtues, or beginning from the idea that our rational nature calls us to imitate God, might well have been offensive to reformers striving to derive everything in theology and public worship from faith or scriptural commandment. Lutheran readers would have welcomed Hooker’s strong endorsement of music in divine service but might not have been satisfied with his reinterpretation of the bodily ubiquity of Christ. The significant strain of Aristotelian scholasticism in Hooker would have been congenial to Reformed thinkers in Holland, and he could perhaps have been called on in relation to some developments in the Reformed churches of Switzerland and France, including cautious second thoughts about the Synod of Dort’s doctrine of predestination and the political consequences of Calvin’s rejection of anything approaching conciliation with Catholicism.74 Hooker’s teaching of a “novel” sacrament-centered style of piety in the English church75 could have been relevant to the sometimes difficult attempts to make the eucharist, as reinterpreted by various reformers, a focus of worship in continental churches.76 An adequate account of Hooker’s relation to Reformed orthodoxy regarding public worship would require much more than a few words at the end of a paper primarily concerned with clarifying what Hooker has to offer on the subject. It would need to consider the underlying assumptions, teaching, and practice of communal worship in various Reformed churches during some of the most turbulent decades of the Reformation. But surely an important part of that 74 Herman J. Selderhuis, A Companion to Reformed Orthodoxy (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 27–48, 121– 31, 198, 202f., 206f., 210–214, 222–25, 229f., 232–36, 239–41 (the Monarchomachs discussed by Hooker in Laws VIII.3.2; Keble chs. 2.7–8), 242, 244–47, 248–50. On Calvin’s refusal to endorse any degree of conciliation with Catholicism in France and the related theory and practice of armed resistance see Carlos M.N. Eire, War against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge University Press, 1989), 234–304. 75 Note 24 above. 76 Karant-Nunn, 91–137. Lee Palmer Wandel, A Companion to the Eucharist in the Reformation (Boston: Brill, 2014), 39–56, 97–114.

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account would be a comparison of Hooker’s views with those of Calvin. What follows is an attempted rough draft of such a comparison, one eminently subject to revision and addition from further study of Calvin and the secondary literature about him. An important difference in background assumptions should be mentioned at the start. For Hooker, as we have seen, no religion is entirely false, and any church professing one Lord, one faith, and one baptism is part of the one visible church of Christ. Accordingly, disputes about doctrine and worship are between more sound and less sound positions, sometimes radically opposed, but not between pure final truth and total error. For Calvin, on the other hand, at least in some presentations of his thought,77 a war between pure truth and irredeemable idolatry is a central force. Such a force seemed to be at work in some of Calvin’s English progeny, the more extreme Puritans, whose objections to the authorized English worship Hooker tried to contain in Book Vof the Laws. In chapter 4, after outlining their general topics of complaint, he concludes despairingly that “almost whatsoever we do in the exercise of our religion according to laws for that purpose established, all things are some way or other thought faulty, all things stained with superstition.”78 There is much more to Calvin (and to English Puritanism) than opposition to superstition, but this strain must be given its due. The worst form of the vice of superstition, in Hooker’s analysis, is giving to what is not God “such honours as are properly his.” This is “the crime of idolatry,”79 what Carlos M.N. Eire finds Calvin combating in his reform of Genevan worship and his influence on Reformed churches elsewhere. Eire’s account of Calvin’s theology of worship makes it the culmination of a War Against the Idols of late medieval piety, a war beginning with Erasmus, developing through earlier reformers and humanists increasingly dissatisfied with traditional Catholic worship, and achieving its victory in Calvin, who took the principles “glory only to God” and “the finite cannot contain the infinite” to require a wholly spiritual worship, one purged of any mixture of the corporeal with the spiritual. The two most obvious targets of this purge were worship directed toward Christ as present in the consecrated elements of the eucharist and the cult of saints and their relics, regarded as having a share of divine power. In his writings, Calvin quotes with respect many saintly figures of the early church, but the traditional distinction between veneration and worship was not enough to preserve such objects of respect for use in worship. Their mere representation in churches was not only a distraction but inevitably, given Calvin’s 77 Carlos, M.N. Eire, War against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge University Press, 1989). 78 Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:9 [V.4.1]. 79 Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 2:17 [V.3.2].

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view of human nature, a temptation to ascribe to them at least a fragment of the glory due to God alone. The trait of human nature Calvin saw operating here was the religious instinct itself, a sense of the divine, a seed of piety, which he believed almost inevitably moves us to idolize all manner of creatures. So innate in us is superstition, that the least occasion will infect us with contagion. Dry wood will not so easily burn when coals are put under it, as idolatry will seize and occupy the minds of men, when the opportunity presents itself to them. And who does not see that images are sparks? What! sparks do I say? nay, rather torches, which are sufficient to set the whole world on fire.80

For Calvin, on Eire’s account,81 the greatest danger in idolatry was the punishment it could bring from God: “The ultimate result of all misdirected worship is to bring additional calamities upon the human race: unreasonableness, famine, pestilence, and war.” At the same time, since idols have no real power of their own, Catholic superstitions were suitable objects for ridicule. Calvin’s most popular published work against idolatry was not a theological tract but the Inventory of Relics of 1543, “a sarcastic exposé of the ‘falsehood’ of Roman Catholic piety written in Erasmian vein.”82 Writing fifty years later, with the benefit of hindsight, Hooker gave the moderation of the English reformation credit for avoiding the continental situation of a “Christendom flaming in all parts of greatest importance at once.”83 In this he implicitly questioned whether full responsibility for the French wars of religion lay with the “misdirected worship” of Roman Catholics, unwilling to be reformed, and none with the intransigence of Calvin’s French followers, encouraged by Calvin’s own opposition to the more conciliatory “Nicodemites” among them.84 But France emerged from these wars with the grant of toleration to Protestants in the Edict of Nantes of 1598, becoming the first “part of greatest importance in Europe” to have a significant degree of religious freedom for more than a century. In England, too, toleration grew eventually out of a civil war that was partly religiously motivated. Hooker might also have wondered whether sarcasm, apparently without compassion, was the proper tone for a catalogue of Catholic superstitions at the time Calvin wrote or later. He himself especially reproved his chief Puritan antagonist, Thomas Cartwright, for his “disdainful sharpness of wit,”85 yet Hooker himself was certainly capable of sarcasm. 80 Calvin’s Commentary on I John, in CO 27:376. Quoted in Carlos M.N. Eire, War against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge University Press, 1989), 225–26. 81 Eire, War against the Idols, 227. 82 Eire, War against the Idols, 228. 83 Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 1:240 [IV.14.6]. 84 Eire, 234–75. 85 Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 1:10 [Preface.2.10].

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Hooker recognized superstition, especially idolatry, as vicious. He did not, however, regard other religions or other Christian bodies as wholly corrupted by their superstitions, as being nothing but superstition or idolatry. Not only did he find sparks of truth in them which were beneficial for life in this world, but he ventured to suggest that a lovingly devout follower of an unsound creed might be the spiritual better of a loveless adherent of a sounder one. Where this breadth of sympathy did not simply provoke outrage, Hooker’s work might have moderated passions on a number of issues facing all churches, if it had been known more broadly. There is much more to Calvin, however, than hostility to what he regarded as idols. Hooker and Calvin wholeheartedly agree on at least two basic points relevant to common worship: the need to deepen individuals’ cognitive and emotional focus on God, and the need for frequent celebration of the eucharist. It would be a sad misconception to suppose that Calvin’s view of predestination implies that, once individuals have some degree of assurance of their election, their spiritual lives have no place further to go. On the contrary, Calvin was dedicated to the cultivation of deeper knowledge and love of God: And here we must observe again that the knowledge of God we are invited to cultivate is not that which, resting satisfied with empty speculation, only flutters in the brain, but a knowledge which will prove substantial and fruitful whenever it is duly perceived and rooted in the heart. The Lord is manifested by his perfections. When we feel their power within us, and are conscious of their benefits, the knowledge must impress us much more vividly than if we merely imagined a God whose presence we never felt.86

Again, “the seed [of religion] is the same in all, but scarcely one in a hundred cherishes it in his heart and not one in whom it grows to maturity.”87 In the pastorally oriented first French edition of the Institutes (1541), Calvin’s chapter on the Christian life is gently encouraging, not demanding perfect initial righteousness but envisioning the possibility of daily progress: I do not ask that the morals of the Christian person be only pure and perfect gospel. Although that would be desirable and we must strive to make it so, nevertheless, I do not so strictly and rigidly ask for Christian perfection that I will not recognize as Christian anyone who has not attained that.88

86 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge, 1559 edition (London: James Clark, 1953), 1.5.9. 87 Calvin, Institutes, trans. Beveridge, 1.5.9. 88 Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Elsie Anne McKee [1541 French edition] (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 684.

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Or again, “let each one go along according to his little ability and let us not cease to pursue the path that we have begun. No one will make such poor progress that he will not each day […] gain some ground.”89 Towards the end of his discussion of the Lord’s Supper in the 1541 edition of the Institutes, Calvin declares that what he has said about the sacrament “shows fully that it was not instituted to be taken once a year and that by way of paying a debt or fulfilling an obligation – as is now the public custom – but to be frequently used by all Christians to remind them often of the passion of Jesus Christ.”90 Indeed, “We should offer the Supper of our Lord to the assembly of Christians at least once a week, and the promises in the Supper which feed and nourish us spiritually ought to be declared.”91 In his “A Short Treatise on the Lord’s Supper” of 1541 he is even more emphatic, holding that “the custom ought to be well established in all churches of celebrating the supper as frequently as the capacity of the people will endure.”92 To those who think it is superfluous to receive communion often, “since, if we have once received Jesus Christ, there is no need to return so often afterward to receive Him,” he replies, “this spiritual bread is not given us in order that on the first occasion we eat our fill of it; but rather that, having had some taste of its sweetness, we may long for it the more and use it when it is offered us.”93 Like Calvin, Hooker held that the crucial point about the eucharist was its effect in the faithful communicant’s soul. Compared to this, disputes about the manner of Christ’s presence in the sacrament were, in his view, distracting. Calvin’s language at times assimilates the sacrament to preaching the word: it should be used frequently to “remind” Christians of the passion of Jesus Christ. Hooker speaks of it as the site of a transubstantiation of soul and body through participation in Christ. But however described, there is agreement that the eucharist provides spiritual nourishment repeatedly needed by every Christian. In the chapter on prayer in the 1541 edition of the Institutes, Calvin mentions public prayer only in passing. He recognizes that, “God’s word ordains public prayer among the faithful” and that temples are required for the purpose, but he warns us to be on guard against considering them “the proper dwellings of God and places where our Lord gives us a more attentive ear.”94 There is a considerable contrast here with Hooker’s praise of public prayer as the best things mortals can do in this world. 89 90 91 92

Calvin, Institutes, trans. McKee, 684f. Calvin, Institutes, trans. McKee, 567. Calvin, Institutes, trans. McKee, 568. John Calvin, Writings on Pastoral Piety, ed. Elsie Anne McKee (New York: Paulist Press, 2001), 109. 93 Calvin, Writings, 109, 111. 94 Calvin, Institutes, trans. McKee, 475–77.

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A broad difference between the two theologians’ approaches to public worship is that Hooker is prepared to allow a variety of humanly devised ceremonies if they meet the criterion of setting forth godliness, while Calvin often seems more concerned to strip worship of the temptations to idolatry provided by elements not directly required by God. In a few passages in the 1559 edition of the Institutes and elsewhere, however, he shows an attentiveness to the details of public worship that suggests more tolerance for prudent human judgment in working out specific ceremonial applications of general scriptural directives. Thus, at Institutes 4.10.29 he explains his conception of “decency” as “that which, suited to the reverence of sacred mysteries, forms a fit exercise for piety, or at least gives an ornament adapted to the action, and is not without fruit, reminds believers of the great modesty, seriousness, and reverence, with which sacred things ought to be treated.” He adds to this that “ceremonies, in order to be exercises of piety, must lead us directly to Christ.” This sounds very much in the spirit of creative liturgical design, such as Cranmer and his successors employed in producing the English Book of Common Prayer. In the next section of Calvin’s chapter, 4.10.30, this relatively liberal position on ceremonies is connected with the requirement that God should be worshiped, not as we please, but as he requires. Calvin takes the example of bending the knee in public prayer and asks whether it is divine or human. His answer is, both! “I say, that it is human, and that at the same time it is divine. It is of God, inasmuch as it is a part of that decency, the care and observance of which is recommended by the apostle; and it is of men, inasmuch as it specially determines what was indicated in general, rather than expounded.” The Lord has clearly unfolded everything necessary for salvation. “But as in external discipline and ceremonies, he has not been pleased to prescribe every particular that we ought to observe.” For the edification of the Church, such things “should be accommodated to the varying circumstances of each age and nation […] as the interest of the Church may require.” Here he gives charity as a rule. “Charity is the best judge of what tends to hurt or to edify; if we allow her to be guide, all things will be well.” He then proceeds, in 4.10.31, to give liturgical and disciplinary force to the preceding principles: “Things which have been appointed according to this rule, it is the duty of the Christian people to observe with a free conscience indeed, and without superstition, but also with a pious and ready inclination to obey.”95 Hooker’s program for public worship as exercising and deepening the primary virtue of godliness is set out with an eye to the states of mind and heart produced in participants by features of the service (visual aspects of the place of worship, the solemn reading of Scripture, other “preaching,” music, the speech and song 95 I owe these references to E.J. Hutchinson, “Calvin on Posture in Worship,” The Calvinist International, April 9, 2015 (accessed on April, 13, 2016).

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of other worshipers) and by the participants’ own speech, song, and gestures. The aim of all this is to overcome a presumed natural weakness in our awareness and love of God. It seems clear that Calvin would agree with this aim, in his terms the cultivation of a more substantial and fruitful knowledge of God, rooted in the heart. It now seems clear from the passages just reviewed that, in principle, he could also allow a significant degree of human judgment in devising means to that end and even the requirement that properly approved forms be used in public services. It is thus surprisingly easy to imagine that Calvin himself might have found the official prescription of some of the ceremonies Hooker defended consonant with Reformed orthodoxy, given the circumstances in which Hooker wrote. Conversely, there is nothing in Hooker which would condemn as theologically unsound the simpler orders of service that Calvin used in Geneva.96 Hooker believed that well chosen ceremonial elements could be exercises of piety leading directly to Christ, rather than dangerous distractions, but he was not an advocate of ritual for its own sake. He would surely have agreed that, in some circumstances, less in public worship can be more. Indeed, he held that “our safest eloquence concerning him [God] is our silence, when we confess without confession that his glory is inexplicable, his greatness above our capacity and reach.”97

3.10 Hooker and Grotius Hooker’s relevance for the wider Reformed tradition becomes clearer if we fastforward three-quarters of a century from Calvin to one of the most celebrated Reformed thinkers of the seventeenth century, Hugo Grotius (even if his orthodoxy was suspect in the eyes of some of his Reformed compatriots), the only continental Reformed thinker known to have engaged with Hooker’s Laws.98 In relation to his important work on The Law of War and Peace99 and his extensive defense of the authority of civil rulers in religion in the De imperio summarum potestatum circa sacra,100 he would have had considerable interest in Hooker’s 96 Calvin, Writings on Pastoral Piety. 97 Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 1:45 [1.2.2.] 98 On Grotius’s “love-affair with England” and his indefatigable and sometimes perilous attempts to promote reconciliation among the Christian churches, see H.R. Trevor-Roper, From Counter-Reformation to Glorious Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). On his significance for modern ideas of personal and institutional autonomy or sovereignty, see Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 99 The Law of War and Peace, trans. Francis W. Kelsey (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1924). 100 Hugo Grotius, De imperio summarum potestatum circa sacra, ed. Harm-Jan van Dam, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2001).

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political thought, particularly his treatment of spiritual and civil authority in the concluding books of the Laws. Unfortunately, these books were not available to him.101 As an astute reader, Grotius could have gathered some useful points from the politically pregnant tenth chapter of Book I, but perhaps the most useful feature of the early books for his own activities as a jurist and political thinker would have been the whole structure of Book I as a theoretically complete survey of the nature102 and basic kinds of law, including, briefly, “the law of nations”103 and of “nations Christian.”104 If we consider Grotius not only as a political thinker but also as a committed ecumenist and a champion of reason and moderation, other features of the first five books of Hooker’s work could well have attracted his attention: the defense of human reason in Book II against an extreme Puritan version of sola Scriptura, the correlative argument in Book III against any supposed necessity that Scripture dictate a particular church polity, and the account in Book IV of the English reformation as distinctive for its moderation. These parts of Hooker’s work all had a bearing on Reformation controversies that Grotius himself sought to moderate, and each might have done some good abroad if the Laws had been more widely known. The breadth of Hooker’s conception of godliness or piety, which shaped his treatment of public worship in Book V, must also have appealed to Grotius, whose other major treatise, On the Truth of the Christian Religion, was meant for the whole world.105 Indeed, the lack of any general comparison of Hooker and Grotius to date is evidence of just how much clamors to be done in terms of bridging the gap between Hooker scholarship and continental Protestantism. At the same time, the fact that Grotius was virtually alone among his continental contemporaries in knowing and appreciating Hooker’s work is perhaps a sad testimony to the failure of Hooker’s offering to the wider reformation to bear significant fruit in his own era. Perhaps his modern-day heirs, in this age of ecumenism, can have greater success in making that offering known.

101 An edition of Book VIII, on the range and limits of the English crown’s authority in church affairs, was apparently ready for the press by the end of 1612, but disagreement as to who was to be credited as editor prevented publication. Richard Hooker, Works, ed. John Keble, Oxford: Clarendon Press (1888), 1:xxxi–ii. Books VI and VIII were published in 1642; Book VII, in 1662. 102 Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 1:44 [I.2.1]. 103 Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 1:72 [I.10.3]. 104 Laws: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, 1:79–80 [I.10.14]. 105 See J.P. Heering, Hugo Grotius as Apologist for the Christian Religion: A Study of His Work De Veritate Religionis Christianae, 1640 (Leiden: Brill, 2004).

Part II: Hooker’s Theological and Pastoral Method

Paul Dominiak

4.

Hooker, Scholasticism, Thomism, and Reformed Orthodoxy

4.1

Hooker and Taxonomies of Theological Identity

Once Hooker was a Thomist. The old story about Hooker claims that Book One of his Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie essentially represents a Thomistic framework derived with some small changes from Aquinas’s treatise on law in the Summa Theologiae I.II.90–108. In Book One, the old story says, Hooker argues (as did Aquinas) that all natural, revealed, and positive laws commonly participate in the rational order of eternal law.1 Hooker’s Thomism thereby emphasises the rationality of law against the voluntarism of his presbyterian opponents, which also accordingly places him outside of the voluntarist-nominalist tradition of Protestant, Reformed thought in relation to the doctrine of God and concept of law.2 This Thomistic framework, the old story declares, then structures the following books of the Lawes because Hooker intends to move from “general” principles to “particular” points of controversy: “I have endeavoured throughout the bodie of this whole discourse, that every former part might give strength unto all that followe, and every later bring some light unto all before.”3 In fact, then, the Lawes as a whole presents a simulacrum of Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae in which reason stands to faith as nature does to grace, the former perfected by the latter according to the dictum that gratia non tollit naturam, sed perficit.4 If the 1 For example, see A.P. D’Entrèves, The Medieval Contribution to Political Thought: Thomas Aquinas, Marsilius of Padua, Richard Hooker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939), 117– 135; J.S. Marshall, Hooker and the Anglican Tradition: An Historical and Theological Study of Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity (Sewanee, TN: The University Press at the University of the South, 1963); A.S. Rosenthal, Crown under Law: Richard Hooker, John Locke, and the Ascent of Modern Constitutionalism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008), 54–61. 2 L.W. Gibbs, “Book One,” in FLE 6:103n36. 3 FLE 1:57.25–32; LEP I.1.2. 4 See P. Munz, The Place of Hooker in the History of Thought (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952), 175–93; cf. W.D. Neelands, “Hooker on Scripture, Reason, and ‘Tradition’,” in Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community, ed. A.S. McGrade (Tempe, AZ: Medieval & Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1997), 78–89.

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anonymous, conforming Puritan authors of A Christian Letter in 1599 attacked Hooker for betraying the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, as well as the broader Reformed movement, by seeming to suggest that “reason is highlie sett up against holie scripture,” then they were right in so doing, for Hooker was only partially a Reformed theologian, if at all.5 Thus, Hooker stands as “the St Thomas Aquinas of Anglicanism […] with his powers for systematic thinking”6 and “invented”7 Anglicanism as something ultimately distinctive from the Protestant or Reformed churches, especially leaving as his enduring bequest an exaggerated sense of the superiority of reason over revelation.8 Fissures were already apparent in elements of this old story, however, which would soon cast Hooker in a different light. Hooker seems unable, the old story admits, to reconcile rationalist and voluntaristic conceptions of law across the Lawes: Thomistic principles about the rationality of law in Book One fall to the apologetic realities of the Tudor political situation in Book Eight, appealing to Marsilius of Padua and so implying that the state was purely secular and voluntaristic.9 Hooker’s “scholastic theology broke down”10 when it also seemingly fails to explain in satisfactory terms how the Reformation principles of sola fide, sola gratia, and solus christus can coherently stand alongside the Thomistic idea that grace perfects but also assumes nature. In this regard, Hooker’s “philosophical failure”11 remains evident. A new story soon emerged, however: namely, that that Hooker was fully a Reformed thinker after all12 and that any debt to scholasticism was largely ge5 See H.C. Porter, “Hooker, the Tudor Constitution, and the Via Media,” in Studies in Richard Hooker, ed. W. Speed Hill (Cleveland, OH: Press of Case Western University, 1972), 103; cf. A.J. Joyce, Richard Hooker & Anglican Moral Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 85–87. 6 D. De Lara, “Richard Hooker’s Concept of Law,” Anglican Theological Review 44, no. 4 (1962): 388. 7 P. Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterian and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London and Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1988), 225–29. 8 J.L. O’Donovan, Theology of Law and Authority in the English Reformation (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press for Emory University, 1991), 142–45. 9 See H.F. Kearney, “Richard Hooker: A Reconstruction,” Cambridge Journal 5 (1952): 300– 311; cf. Munz, The Place of Hooker, 49–57, 101. 10 J.G. Devine, Richard Hooker’s Doctrine of Justification and Sanctification in the Debate with Walter Travers 1585–1586 (PhD thesis, Hartford Seminary Foundation, 1976), 299. 11 G. Hillerdal, Reason and Revelation in Richard Hooker (Lund: CWK Gleerup, 1962), 148. 12 See R.V. Kavanagh, Reason and Nature in Hooker’s Polity (PhD thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1944); W.J.T. Kirby, Richard Hooker’s Doctrine of the Royal Supremacy (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1990); W.J.T. Kirby, “Richard Hooker as an Apologist of the Magisterial Reformation in England,” in Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community, ed. A.S. McGrade (Tempe, AZ: Medieval & Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1997), 219–33; W.J.T. Kirby, The Theology of Richard Hooker in the Context of the Magisterial Reformation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Theological Seminary, 2000); and N. Atkinson, Richard Hooker and

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neric, owing more to commonplace scholastic ideas than to Aquinas as such.13 Such scholasticism, where it existed, remained incidental to his apologetic purpose to defend the English Reformation from its presbyterian detractors who (according to Hooker) betrayed Christian and Reformed orthodoxy. Rather than Aquinas, the thought and principles of the magisterial Reformers therefore offer the correct interpretive paradigm for the Lawes. Yet, clefts appeared in this new story too. The newer story remains unable to generate a scholarly consensus: confusion still persists over what degree Hooker might be classified as standing within magisterial Reformed thought or Reformed orthodoxy more broadly,14 especially when he seems to suggest that reason authenticates Scripture as sacred rather than that, as Calvin and Reformed orthodoxy understood it, the scriptures self-authenticate their identity as God’s word.15 This essay argues that, in certain regards, both stories witness something of the truth about Hooker, who should properly be identified as a scholastic in general, as a Thomist in particular, but also as a thinker who stands firmly within the intellectual stream of early Reformed orthodoxy. All of these labels of course require greater clarity and a certain degree of remedial qualification which most Hookerian studies to date have paid scant attention, at great cost to their clarity and accuracy. This essay aims to fill that lacuna. This essay unpacks, then, what the labels “scholastic,” “Thomist,” and “Reformed orthodoxy” might mean and how they can be used in relation to Hooker’s thought.

4.2

‘Sic et Non’: medieval and early modern scholasticism

Peter Abelard’s controversial but influential work Sic et Non, finished in the early twelfth century, established his place as one of the founding fathers of early scholasticism. In the text, Abelard first sets out basic logical rules with which students might reconcile apparent contradictions. He then presents 158 disputed philosophical and theological questions, giving in each case patristic sources that imply a positive answer (sic) to the question and then others implying a negative answer (non). Abelard’s logical method of reconciling texts for or against a the Authority of Scripture, Tradition and Reason: Reformed Theologian of the Church of England? (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 1997). 13 N. Voak, Richard Hooker and Reformed Theology: A Study of Reason, Will, and Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 25–28. 14 See C. Simut, Richard Hooker and His Early Doctrine of Justification: A Study of His Discourse of Justification (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 1–12. 15 See Lake, Anglicans & Puritans?, 153–55; D. Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), 28, 41–42; Voak, Richard Hooker and Reformed Theology, 253–54; and Joyce, Richard Hooker & Anglican Moral Theology, 114–18.

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theological position proved crucial for the emergence of a distinctively scholastic technique in subsequent centuries. Yet, scholasticism came to be an incredibly protean phenomenon in the medieval and early modern periods. Therefore, if Hooker is indeed to be identified as “scholastic,” then it needs to be admitted that the difficulty of defining “scholasticism” in any meaningful terms has long been recognised in academic scholarship.16 Furthermore, given the apparently firm non given to medieval scholasticism by the early reformers of the sixteenth century, the burning question remains: where would a sic to Hooker’s scholastic identity place him with respect to Protestant thought? The problem over the term “scholastic” does not arise in terms of etymology. The term “scholasticism” derives in a straightforward fashion from the Greek words σχολή (referring to the leisurely pursuit of philosophy) and σχολαστικός (often a substantive meaning a scholar devoted to studies), rendered in Latin as schola and scholasticus in reference to a learned person who receives instruction in a school. In the medieval period, then, the “scholastics” were simply those who pursued theology in the schools, especially as they developed in the emerging universities such as at Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, and (to a lesser degree) Bologna.17 As a substantive term, “scholastic” was not necessarily a controversial title, even given the later ambivalence of the early reformers towards medieval scholasticism. For example, even in Calvin’s Genevan academy, the students were called scholastici.18 Similarly, as an historical designation, “scholasticism” is fairly unproblematic. As Jean Leclerq points out, scholastic theology was a relatively late development arising out of cathedral schools and which stood alongside a far older monastic form of theology that emphasised the liturgy and scriptural exegesis rather than philosophical questions or theological disputations.19 Although some place the genesis of medieval scholasticism as early as the ninth century, historians generally divide medieval scholasticism into three periods, each with its own theological emphases and innovations.20 First, there was the early scholasticism of the 16 Cf. F.A. James III, “Peter Martyr Vermigli: At the Crossroads of Late Medieval Scholasticism, Christian Humanism and Resurgent Augustinianism,” in Protestant Scholasticism: Essays in Reassessment, ed. C. Trueman and R.S. Clark (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 1999), 64–67. 17 J. Hankins, “Humanism, scholasticism, and Renaissance philosophy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy, ed. J. Hankins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 30–48. 18 See W.J. van Asselt and P.L. Rouwendal, “Introduction: What is Reformed Scholasticism?,” in Introduction to Reformed Scholasticism, ed. W.J. van Asselt (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2011), 6. 19 J. Leclerq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture (New York: Fordham University Press, 1961). 20 P.L. Rouwendal, “The Method of the Schools: Medieval Scholasticism,” in Introduction to Reformed Scholasticism, ed. W.J. van Asselt (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books,

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eleventh and twelfth centuries, such as in the thought of Anselm and Abelard who responded positively to the philosophical renaissance of the period and began to develop a scholastic method in order to explore how faith and reason could enlighten one another. Second, high scholasticism emerged in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, with Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas as the most influential representatives who attempted to unite the rediscovered Aristotle (whose complete Organon was available by the middle of the twelfth century) with Christianity. Third, there was later scholasticism from the fourteenth to the fifteenth centuries, such as seen in John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, who developed voluntarism and nominalism against the intellectualism and realism of their predecessors. In the early modern period, scholasticism continued in new and protean guises. The period after the Council of Trent saw both Scotist and Thomist scholasticism briefly revived, largely in the sixteenth-century Spanish universities led by Salamanca and Alcalá. Amidst internal scholastic debates between Spanish Thomists and Jesuits, Catholic apologists also brought their scholasticism to bear against Reformed doctrine in polemical terms, such as in Cardinal Bellarmine’s monumental work of 1586, Disputationes de controversiis christianae fidei adversus huius temporis haereticos. Hooker takes note of Bellarmine a number of times across his works, including the Disputationes, a work that was contemporaneous with the Lawes.21 In response to Catholic scholastic attacks, the second and third generations of reformers soon found adopted and transformed medieval scholastic methods and ideas in order to defend Reformation principles, contributing to the emergence of the so-called Reformed and Lutheran scholasticism from the late sixteenth century onwards.22 Bellarmine’s Disputationes provoked, for example, over two hundred responses from Lutheran and Reformed circles that often adopted his scholastic forms and terms, such as William Whitaker’s Disputatio de sacra Scriptura of 1588, a series of scholastic disputations on the nature and authority of Scripture.23 As such, scholasticism took on an ecumenical note that, despite the bitter polemical context and 2011), 63–67; cf. S.P Marrone, “Medieval philosophy in context,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Philosophy, ed. A.S. McGrade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 10–50. 21 For a list of references, see the entry for “Bellarmine” in Index of Names and Works (FLE 7:30). 22 See W.J. van Asselt, “Scholasticism in the Time of Early Orthodoxy,” in Introduction to Reformed Scholasticism, ed. W.J. van Asselt, (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2011), 105–111; and R.D. Preus, The Theology of Post-Reformation Lutheranism, 2 vols (St Louis: Concordia, 1970–72). 23 See E. Dekker, “An Ecumenical Debate between Reformation and Counter-Reformation? Bellarmine and Ames on liberum arbitrium,” in Reformation and Scholasticism: An Ecumenical Enterprise, ed. W.J. van Asselt and E. Dekker (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001), 141–54.

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squabbles of the period, ultimately saw a great deal of theological convergence around theological principia such as the doctrine of God in the confessions and catechisms of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to which both Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed alike could ascribe.24 Indeed, the inter-confessional quality of early modern scholasticism could be seen, for example, in the fact that Suárez’s Catholic Disputationes metaphysicae of 1597 was soon regularly consulted even by Protestant and Reformed scholastics as an important metaphysical textbook. The wider formative influence of Suárez on Reformed orthodoxy is also well noted in modern academic scholarship.25 Yet, while Protestant or Reformed scholasticism gave it an ecumenical claim to a form of “catholicity” inasmuch as it stood in continuity with western theological endeavours from the eleventh century onwards,26 it still begs the exegetical question of what exactly constitutes being “scholastic.” Here is where the problem with the term comes to the fore. Brian Armstrong articulated the once popular view in studies of Reformed orthodoxy that scholasticism involved the idea that reason plays an equal, if not superior, role in relation to faith, laying stress on Aristotelian categories in defence of a reasonable theology.27 Armstrong was clear on his disavowal of such scholasticism in the period of Lutheran and Reformed orthodoxy, which he viewed as a betrayal of the original Protestant biblical kerygma. Yet, pace Armstrong, more recent studies repeatedly make clear that the various medieval scholastics possessed little common identity in terms of theological substance. In particular, the work of Richard Muller28 and Lambertus M. De Rijk29 has helped shape an alternative understanding that scholasticism ought not to be defined in terms of shared content but rather in terms of methodology. Crucially, Muller consistently argues that scholasticism was a method, primarily that of the medieval quaestio which stated a question, 24 See R.J. Pederson, Unity in Diversity: English Puritans and the Puritan Reformation, 1603– 1689 (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 132–33. 25 See J. Kronen, “Suárez’s Influence on Protestant Scholasticism: The Cases of Hollaz and Turretin,” in A Companion to Francisco Suárez, ed. V. Salas and R. Fastiggi (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 221–47. 26 W.J. Van Asselt and P.L. Rouwendal, “Introduction: What is Reformed Scholasticism?,” 1; cf. W.J. van Asselt, “ ‘The Abutment against Which the Bridge of All Later Protestant Theology Leans’: Scholasticism and Today,” in Introduction to Reformed Scholasticism, ed. W.J. van Asselt (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2011), 196–97. 27 B. Armstrong, Calvinism and the Amyraut Heresy: Protestant Scholasticism and Humanism in Seventeenth-Century France (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 31–32. 28 See R.A. Muller, “The Problem of Scholasticism – A Review and Definition,” in Reformation and Scholasticism: An Ecumenical Enterprise, ed. W.J. van Asselt and E. Dekker (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001), 45–64; and Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics. The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, ca. 1520 to ca. 1725, 2nd ed., 4 vols (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003). 29 L.M. De Rijk, Middeleeuwse wijsbegeerte: Traditie en verniewing (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1981).

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listed arguments for and against, and refuted objections, but which also included the practice of scholarly public discussions or disputatio on debated theological questions.30 Similarly, De Rijk considers scholasticism primarily as “a method which is characterised, both on the level of research and on the level of teaching, by the use of an ever recurring system of concepts, distinctions, definitions, propositional analyses, argumentational techniques and disputational methods.”31 Van Asselt and Dekker offer a comparable, succinct definition: “Scholasticism is a scientific method of research and teaching, and does not have a doctrinal content, neither does it have reason as its foundation.”32 Against sloppy Protestant scholarship which drew a pejorative inference between scholastic form and content in certain Reformed thinkers, Muller, De Rijk, van Asselt, and Dekker have shown that early modern Protestant or Reformed scholasticism used and transformed medieval modes of analysis and ratiocination, applying them to their novel context and own theological commitments.33 Their argument echoes the commonplace Catholic scholarly appreciation that scholasticism represents a method rather than a particular theological content.34 While early reformers such as Luther and Calvin remained fiercely critical of particular scholastic figures and ideas, giving them a vitriolic non, they were nevertheless equivocal and ambivalent about scholasticism as such, often say sic to employing scholasticism in certain ways. Scholastic methodology can be discerned both in their writings (in the form, say, of the quaestio, such as found in Calvin’s Institutes) and also in the academic practices of their theological communities, especially through the continued practice of public disputatio, such as practiced by Calvin’s scholastici in Geneva.35 Indeed, Luther was trained in scholasticism and remained indebted in varying ways to both the nominalistvoluntarist traditions of Scotus and Ockham as well as features of Thomistic Aristotelianism.36 Similarly, Bucer and Vermigli received Thomistic training, and 30 Cf. Rouwendal, “The Method of the Schools,” 59–62. 31 De Rijk, Middeleeuwse wijsbegeerte, 11, quoted in van Asselt & Rouwendal, “Introduction,” 7. 32 W.J. Van Asselt and E. Dekker, “Introduction,” in Reformation and Scholasticism: An Ecumenical Enterprise, ed. W.J. van Asselt and E. Dekker (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001), 39. 33 Cf. D.C. Steinmetz and D. Bagchi, “Conclusion,” in The Cambridge Companion to Reformation Theology, ed. D. Bagchi and D.C. Steinmetz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 248–56. 34 See J.A. Weisheipl, “Scholastic Method,” in The New Catholic Encyclopedia (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1967), 12:1145–1146. 35 See D.V.N. Bagchi, “Sic et Non: Luther and Scholasticism,” in Protestant Scholasticism: Essays in Reassessment, ed. C. Trueman and R.S. Clark (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 1999), 3–15; and D.C. Steinmetz, “The Scholastic Calvin,” in Protestant Scholasticism: Essays in Reassessment, ed. C. Trueman and R.S. Clark (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 1999), 16–30. 36 See A. Raunio, “Natural Law and Faith: The Forgotten Foundations of Ethics in Luther’s Theology,” in Union with Christ. The New Finnish Interpretation of Luther, ed. C.E. Braaten

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Zwingli was trained in both Thomism and Scotism.37 It may also be the case that Calvin as an autodidact plunged himself into the study of various medieval scholastic traditions and, despite his criticism of various scholastic distinctions or schools, adopted other scholastic distinctions and methods without comment in the Institutes.38 Even Melanchthon’s Loci communes can be read as being influenced by medieval scholasticism.39 As such, Luther, Melanchthon, Calvin, and other early reformers furrowed the ground in many ways for what became Lutheran and Reformed scholasticism in the period of Protestant, Reformed orthodoxy. “Scholasticism” primarily refers, then, to method and a certain elaborate technical vocabulary which medieval theology had developed and which Protestant or Reformed thinkers increasingly took up and transformed in the early modern period. As such, “scholastic” remains an appropriate label for Hooker on three different levels: the macro, the meso, and the micro.40 On a macro-level, Hooker’s attention to logical order in the Lawes echoes the conscious scholastic habit of treating theological topics in a deliberate sequence in order to best see the way in which ideas systematically gesture towards and imply one another. In this regard, Hooker also does not differ from, say, Calvin’s Institutes which is organised according to structured and overlapping topics much like the works of medieval scholastics and the early Christian fathers.41 As already noted, Hooker intends to structure the Lawes such that “every former part might give strength unto all that followe, and every later bring some light unto all before.”42 Since Hooker addresses the Lawes primarily to “them that seeke (as they tearme it) the reformation of Lawes, and orders Ecclesiasticall, in the Church of England,” he proposes initially to pare back the particular debates over church order, the liturgy, and lay ecclesiastical supremacy to their meta-

37 38

39 40 41 42

and R.W. Jenson (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1998), 96–124; and S. Juntunen, “Luther and Metaphysics: What Is the Structure of Being According to Luther?,” in Union with Christ. The New Finnish Interpretation of Luther, ed. C.E. Braaten and R.W. Jenson (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1998), 148–53. See G.W. Locher, Zwingli’s Thought: New Perspectives (Leiden: Brill, 1981). See R.A. Muller, The Unaccommodated Calvin: Studies in the Foundation of a Theological Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 39–61; and A. McGrath, “John Calvin and Late Medieval Thought. A Study in Late Medieval Influences upon Calvin’s Theological Thought,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 77 (1986): 58–78. L.C. Green, “Melanchthon’s Relation to Scholasticism,” in Protestant Scholasticism: Essays in Reassessment, ed. C. Trueman and R.S. Clark (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 1999), 273–88. Cf. W.J. van Asselt and P.L. Rouwendal, “Distinguishing and Teaching: Constructing a Theological Argument in Reformed Scholasticism,” in Introduction to Reformed Scholasticism, ed. W.J. van Asselt (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2011), 99–100. See Steinmetz, “The Scholastic Calvin,” 24–27; cf. A.N. Williams, The Architecture of Theology. Structure, System, & Ratio (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 155–60. FLE 1:57.26–28; LEP I.1.2.

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physical roots by systematically considering the general nature of law itself. Hooker writes: Because the point about which we strive is the qualitie of our Lawes, our first entrance hereinto cannot better be made, then with consideration of the nature of lawe in general, and of that lawe which giveth life unto all the rest, which are commendable just and good, namely the lawe whereby the Eternall himselfe doth worke. Proceeding from hence to the lawe first of nature, then of scripture, we shall have easier accesse unto those things which come after to be debated, concerning the particular cause and question which wee have in hand.43

The attention to how parts relate to whole, as well as the notion of ordered progress from metaphysical generalities to particular points of controversy, remains immediately suggestive of the influence of scholastic method on Hooker’s thought. On a closely related but broader meso-level, Hooker’s literary form in the Lawes possesses certain further similarities with the medieval scholastic method of the quaestio and disputatio. Brian Vickers convincingly argues that, “Hooker’s use of rhetoric is ultimately subordinate to, and dependent upon, logical argument.”44 For Vickers, Hooker appeals to a particular genus of Aristotelian rhetoric – the judicial oratory – through which he hopes to establish the justice or injustice of certain actions and beliefs in relation to the Elizabethan Settlement and lay ecclesiastical supremacy. The genre of the judicial oratory implies settling a dispute through logical demonstration and thus depends more upon cumulative reason and judgement rather than persuasive guile. Vickers focuses here on Hooker’s logical and orderly attempt to provide a coherent account of the disputed ontological, epistemological, and political aspects of the Elizabethan Settlement. As such, “it is abundantly clear that Hooker has structured his work using the terms and techniques of formal logic” which “soon develops strands or filaments that reach out to make other connections.”45 While Vickers remains persuasive about Hooker’s use of Aristotelian rhetoric, it is also possible to see the emphasis on logic and order in the arguments advanced by the Lawes as remarkably close to the scholastic structure of the quaestio. After the first book of the Lawes, Hooker opens most chapters of the subsequent books either with a proposition he wishes to rebut advanced by his presbyterian interlocutors (typically Thomas Cartwright or Walter Travers), or with a proposition he wants to defend, just as a quaestio begins with some disputed idea. Again like a scho43 FLE 1:58.11–19; LEP I.1.3. 44 B. Vickers, “Public and Private Rhetoric in Hooker’s Lawes,” in Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community, ed. A.S. McGrade (Tempe, AZ: Medieval & Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1997), 113. 45 Vickers, “Public and Private Rhetoric,” 129–30.

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lastic quaestio, Hooker then weighs arguments for and against, either from scriptural exegesis, from various Christian and non-Christian authorities, or from some first principle, and so resolves the question at hand. Unlike the voluminous and exhausting point-by-point debates of earlier English polemics (such as between Jewel and Harding or Whitgift and Cartwright), Hooker selects the most salient questions to debate, chooses the order of the argument, the scholastic-like structure, and the goal of rational persuasion in the Lawes. In the latter regard, the scholastic method of the disputatio comes to the fore, at least in a literary form. The rigours of public disputatio based on Abelard’s scholastic mode of argumentation would have previously formed an important part of Hooker’s education at Oxford.46 Although in the Preface to the Lawes Hooker defers the presbyterian call for a public “tryall by disputation,” he nevertheless hopes to resolve the conscience of his adversaries by calling them to “reexamine the cause yee have taken in hand, and to trie it point by point, argument by argument,” just as he spends time in the Lawes “sifting” their claims that “scripture ought to be the only rule of all our actions.”47 As such, Hooker expects that any properly reasoning person will see the propriety of the Elizabethan Religious Settlement, and so confidently offers up “the lawes whereby we live unto the general triall and judgement of the whole world.”48 Finally, on a micro-level, Hooker employs a number of scholastic distinctions and concepts across the Lawes and indeed in other places in his extant works, such as in Notes towards a Fragment where, as he discusses God’s knowledge, he employs the Thomistic distinction between scientia simplicis intelligentiae and scientia visionis (or simplex intelligentia and Visio as he phrases it) rather than Scotist ideas of synchronic contingency.49 On this micro-level, Aristotelian ideas about causality and science, as well as Platonic notions of participation, prove vital to Hooker’s thought. Strands of thought within medieval scholasticism in general, and Thomism in particular, mediate these concepts to Hooker. This essay will return in the next section to this micro-level and explicate some of the significant ways in which these ideas relate to Hooker’s Reformed theological commitments.

46 47 48 49

P.B. Secor, Richard Hooker and the Via Media (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2006), 60. FLE 1:34.15–36.14, 1:51.24–29; LEP Pref.7.1–7.7, 9.1. FLE 1:58.5–6; LEP I.1.3. FLE 4:84.9–19; Notes toward a Fragment on Predestination. See N. Voak, “English Molinism in the Late 1590s: Richard Hooker on Free Will, Predestination, and Divine Foreknowledge,” The Journal of Theological Studies 60 (2009): 130–77.

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The One and the Many: Aquinas and Thomism(s)

To also label Hooker as a “Thomist” hides the further difficulty in defining what in fact constitutes “Thomism,” a problem often over-looked by Hookerian scholars who assume a monolithic and monochromatic Thomist tradition when they apply the term to him. On the one hand, “Thomism” certainly offers a convenient epithet to refer to the historical development of thought inspired by Aquinas. On the other hand, however, as Géry Prouvost points out, “almost all of the essential theses of Thomas were, over the course of history, either contested or ignored by one or another ‘Thomist’.”50 In short, while Aquinas remains the principal source for Thomism as a tradition, his work generated many subsequent streams, some mutually incompatible with elements of Aquinas’ own thought as well as other Thomistic courses. It remains necessary, therefore, to ask two pertinent questions. First, in what sense might Hooker be a “Thomist”? Second, where might this identity place Hooker with regards to Protestant or Reformed thought? A response to the latter of these questions will be considered later in this section and the next. In order to answer the first question, however, it is useful first to delineate the history of Thomism and see if there are recognisable patterns or divisions in the broad tradition into which Hooker fits. There have been numerous attempts to separate Thomism into three distinct periods, although scholars disagree over how best to divide these periods in chronological terms.51 Despite these disagreements, Thomism can therefore be said to have an early, a second, and a third moment.52 The early phase of Thomism began almost immediately after Aquinas’ death in 1274. Following various condemnations of certain ideas found in Aquinas’ work, some of his fellow Dominicans defended him, such as William of Macclesfield and John of Paris. Through them, Aquinas emerged from intellectual purgatory and was canonised in 1323. By the fifteenth century, Aquinas had become the favoured theologian of the Dominicans, who produced commentaries on the Summa Theologiae both to spread his teachings but also to combat the rival followers of Scotus and Ockham. In the second phase, the Dominican Pope Pius V elevated Aquinas to the title of doctor ecclesiae in 1567. The championing of Aquinas by the newly created Jesuits, along with the work of the Post-Tridentine Dominicans, led to an explosion of commentaries on 50 G. Prouvost, Thomas d’Aquin et les thomismes (Paris: Le Cerf, 1996), 9. My translation of “À peu près toutes les theses essentielles de Thomas furent, au cours de l’histoire, soit contestées, soit ignores par l’un ou l’autre ‘thomiste.’” 51 See R. Cessario, A Short History of Thomism (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2005), 28–33. 52 See C. Paterson and M.S. Pugh, eds., Analytical Thomism: Traditions in Dialogue (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006), xiv–v.

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Aquinas’ work by people such as Cajetan and John of St Thomas, as well as the exegetical Jesuit works of Domingo de Soto, Luis de Molina, and Francesco Suárez. Through this revival, Thomism achieved an influential position during the Renaissance that surpassed even what it had enjoyed during the medieval period.53 Yet, internecine conflicts over grace and free will, as well as the Cartesian revolution in the seventeenth-century, led to this second phase of Thomism rapidly diminishing. Finally, the publication in 1879 of Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris gave birth to a third moment, that of neo-Thomism, which sought to apply Aquinas’ thought to modernity but also to repristinate it from later interpretation. As with scholasticism, historical periodization still begs the question: who counts as a Thomist and what makes them count as such? Romanus Cessario (following James Weisheipl) therefore suggests a useful threefold typology to circumscribe the various ways in which a particular writer may be designated as a “Thomist.”54 First, there are strict Thomists who embody, in the words of Weisheipl, “a systematic attempt to understand and develop the basic principles and conclusions of St. Thomas Aquinas in order to relate them to the problems and needs of each generation.”55 This first group attempt a pristine observance of Aquinas’ teachings and so “eschew large-scale importations from other conceptual systems.” Second, there are wide Thomists who give “the principles and conclusions of Thomas Aquinas a privileged place in the development of [their] own proper theological or philosophical reflections.” Finally, there are eclectic Thomists who borrow from Aquinas but show a “willingness to import large portions of other philosophical and theological systems,” thus relativizing the importance of his principles and conclusions to other goals. What distinguishes, then, the strict Thomists from the merely eclectic are particular paradigmatic and non-negotiable commitments such as hylomorphism, material individuation, metaphysical realism, the distinction between essence and existence, and analogical predication.56 Cessario’s tripartite typology of Thomism perhaps best serves as a spectrum of possibilities rather than as intractable categories. As such, Hooker seems to float somewhere between wide and eclectic Thomism. As will be shown, Hooker certainly gives particular kinds of Thomistic propositions a privileged place in the Lawes, but they ultimately remain instrumental to wider Protestant or Reformed theological commitments. Indeed, in order to locate Hooker intellectually, both the late medieval and Renaissance background proves vital. Hooker shows an 53 Cf. P.O. Kristeller, Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic, and Humanist Strains (New York: Harper and Row, 1961). 54 Cessario, A Short History of Thomism, 13–19. 55 Quoted in Cessario, A Short History of Thomism, 13–14. 56 Cessario, A Short History of Thomism, 21–24.

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eclectic and even esoteric range of influences and source materials beyond Aquinas. The contemporary strands of thought that most influenced Hooker include Aristotelianism, Augustinianism (beloved by both Protestant and Catholic alike, although often for different reasons), scholasticism, and humanism.57 While humanism and scholasticism were previously seen as diametrically opposed intellectual movements, more recent studies point to their harmonious co-existence58 such that it should come as no surprise to see them both as influential on Hooker. Indeed, early modern scholasticism adapted itself to the renewed Aristotelianism of the Renaissance; it was no mere medieval traditio received without change. Hooker’s range of references remains equally staggering: classical, patristic, scholastic, Jewish, legal, Neoplatonic, and Protestant or Reformed sources ebb and flow as focal points of discussion and persuasion.59 Above all else, however, scriptural texts prove the principal and most important source material for Hooker even in the more philosophical first book of the Lawes, just as they do for both medieval scholastics and Protestant thinkers alike.60 Aquinas certainly enjoys a privileged place in Hooker’s theological and philosophical reflections, but Hooker also imports a broad swathe of other commitments into his thought. The formative influence of scholasticism and Aquinas on the sixteenth-century Hooker can be seen in a number of ways.61 First, Hooker enjoyed an intellectual formation in what John Booty calls an “orthodox Protestant scholasticism” current in English universities at the time.62 At Oxford, where Hooker studied at Corpus Christi College, Aristotle continued to enjoy a privileged place as the major authority, and the Oxford faculty looked with suspicion on the alternative development of Ramism that was popular in continental universities.63 In the Lawes, Hooker shares a similar disdain for the “Ramystry” 57 See W.J. Bouwsma, “Hooker in the Context of European Cultural History,” in Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community, ed. A.S. McGrade (Tempe, AZ: Medieval & Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1997), 41–57; and R.J. Schoeck, “From Erasmus to Hooker: An Overview,” also in McGrade, 59–74. 58 See W.J. van Asselt, “The State of Scholarship: From Discontinuity to Continuity,” in Introduction to Reformed Scholasticism, ed. W.J. van Asselt (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2011), 20–22; and Hankins, “Humanism, scholasticism, and Renaissance philosophy,” 30–48. 59 A.S. McGrade, “Classical, Patristic, and Medieval Sources,” in A Companion to Richard Hooker, ed. W.J.T. Kirby (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 52–55. 60 See Gibbs, “Book One,” 6:91–96; cf. R.A. Muller, Scholasticism and Orthodoxy in the Reformed Tradition: An Attempt at Definition (Grand Rapids: Calvin Theological Seminary, 1995), 10. 61 Cf. Rosenthal, Crown under Law, 49–61. 62 J.E. Booty, “Hooker and Anglicanism,” in Studies in Richard Hooker, ed. W. Speed Hill (Cleveland, OH: Press of Case Western University, 1972), 213. 63 J.M. Fletcher, “The Faculty of Arts,” in The History of the University of Oxford, III, ed. J. McConica (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 157–200.

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popular at Cambridge, the intellectual centre of nonconformity and puritanism.64 In turn, Philip Secor notes that “before Hooker arrived at Oxford all of Corpus Christi’s presidents had decidedly Romanist leanings.”65 Indeed, at Corpus Christi Hooker would have been exposed to Reformed and Catholic influences alike in the variety of figures he encountered there, from his Reformed tutor Rainolds through to the former Catholic Antonio del Corro and the early latitudinarian Francesco Pucci. The personal library of Richard Allen, one of Hooker’s peers at Corpus, certainly contained a text of Aquinas, and the College library contained copies of the texts of Aquinas and Scotus.66 Even an extant Latin letter from the Reformed Rainolds to George Cranmer shows the two discussing parallel passages from Scotus and Aquinas,67 further illustrating how the writings and thought of medieval scholastics were in common circulation across confessional divides. In his own writings, Hooker seems well aware of sixteenth-century Catholic Thomism as exemplified by figures such as Cardinal Cajetan, whose edition of Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae was used by Hooker68 and whose Thomistic commentary Hooker references in a footnote at one point in relation to baptismal grace.69 Second, the role of scholasticism in general and Thomism in particular can be seen in how Hooker employs scholastic figures and arguments. In the Lawes, Hooker appeals to a variety of scholastic authorities. He considers, for example, Duns Scotus to be “the wittiest of the Schoole divines.”70 At times Hooker therefore appeals to Duns Scotus in order to affirm a theological principle, such as in Book One when he acknowledges that Scotus has “affirmatively concluded” in his commentary on the Sentences that only Scripture contains the necessary knowledge for its appointed end of salvation.71 Nigel Voak even sees Scotus as the scholastic influence behind Hooker’s account of the will.72 Yet, Aquinas (rather than Scotus) forms the principal scholastic authority for Hooker in terms of the number of explicit references, implicit paraphrases, and wider structural dependence in the Lawes.

64 Hooker, FLE 1:76.6–20 x.; LEP I.6.3–4; cf. Gibbs, “Book One,” 6:177–88. 65 P.B. Secor, Richard Hooker: Prophet of Anglicanism (Tunbridge Wells: Burns and Oats, 1999), 85. 66 Rosenthal, Crown under Law, 51, 87. 67 See J. Keble, ed., The Works of that Learned and Judicious Divine, Mr Richard Hooker, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1855), 106–108. 68 See Marshall, Hooker and the Anglican Tradition, 56–62; and J.E. Booty, “Book V,” in FLE 6:207. 69 R. Hooker, Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie, FLE 2:260 g.; LEP V.60.6. 70 FLE 1:117.19; LEP I.11.5. 71 FLE 1:125 q.; LEP I.14.1. 72 Voak, Richard Hooker and Reformed Theology, 51–60.

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There are 27 explicit references to seven works of Aquinas across the Lawes, which makes him the most common theological authority next to patristic sources such as Augustine, Tertullian, Cyprian, and Jerome, and also the most commonly cited figure of all of the 86 medieval sources in the Lawes. Hooker’s explicit use of texts or arguments from Aquinas are sometimes cursory, sometimes evaluative, and at other times critical. In Book One, for example, Hooker paraphrases in a footnote Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae I.II.93.4–6 in which “everything which comes to be in created things is the matter of eternal law” (Id omne quod in rebus creatis fit est materia legis aeternae).73 Here, Hooker’s Thomistic paraphrase serves to further his own claim that all creatures are subordinated to eternal law. Other uses of Aquinas in Book One serve a similar purpose of both establishing and forming theological credentials in relation to Hooker’s own claims. At a number of key points, Hooker gives a privileged place to Thomistic principles: in 3.5 that God is the first mover; in 8.10 on the nature of the law of reason; in 11.4 on the natural desire for God; and in 12.2 that sin can cloud whole nations such that they fail to know the proper secondary precepts of natural law. Elsewhere, Hooker can take a more critical line. In Book Six for example, as he considers the relationship between penance and grace, Hooker criticises the “Scholasticall invention received from Thomas” about the status of penance as a sacrament.74 In the two tightly argued sections that follow, Hooker claims that Thomists and the Roman tradition (as adopted by the Councils of Florence and Trent, as well as Bellarmine and Allen) abandoned the position of Peter Lombard that the priest merely declares absolution, instead making “poenitencie” a sacrament with absolution as its external efficacious sign which contains and conveys grace. Hooker aligns himself with the alternative Franciscan position of Bonaventure (appropriated by Scotus, Ockham, and Pierre d’Ailly amongst others) that outward sacramental signs only have efficacy through the “will of Almightie God” who joins the “power of the holy Ghost” to them. Similarly, in Book Eight, Hooker chides “a little overflowing of witt in Thomas Aquinas” when the latter uses Exodus 19 and 1 Peter 2.9 to justify the hierocratic supremacy of the sacerdotal over the regal authority.75 Appropriation of Aquinas does occur in Hooker’s thought, then, but so does antithesis. More broadly, as already noted earlier, the structural similarity between Hooker and Aquinas’ accounts of law remains highly suggestive that the former also significantly depends in implicit ways upon the latter. These are not mere scholastic commonplaces that Hooker could have gleaned from any medieval source. The clear structural dependence of Hooker’s metaphysics upon that of 73 FLE 1:64 s.; LEP I.3.2. 74 FLE 3:83.27; LEP VI.6.9. 75 FLE 3:356.7–18; LEP VIII.3.6.

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Aquinas’, as well as the level of explicit references, makes Aquinas the most probable and credible source. An exhaustive list of all of the implicit ways in which Aquinas seems to influence Hooker is not possible in this short essay, but two sets of examples should suffice to illustrate the point. In the metaphysical account of law in Book One, for example, Hooker clearly adopts a Thomistic account of act and possibility, as well as of causality and participation, in order to explain how the manifold species of law participate in God’s eternal law. God is the metaphysically simple and pure act of eternal law, while creatures are composites of potency and act.76 God’s eternal law acts as an efficient, formal, and final cause in creation; insofar as creatures exist and move towards actuality, they participate in God as pure act.77 Yet, such Thomistic ideas work within Hooker’s Augustinian and Reformed commitment to the immediacy of God’s grace. The Thomistic ideas transmit the Dionysian concept of mediating hierarchies, the legal dispositions that move creatures to return to their creator. Hooker uses the dispositive hierarchy of law in order to maintain a positive evaluation of the natural world in the first ten chapters. Yet, for Hooker (as for Aquinas) Christ ultimately remains the only via of return to God because of the radical impact of sin upon that same natural world. As such, Hooker emphasises (as do the Reformers) in chapters 11 through 15 of Book One of the Lawes the role of grace, Christ, and Scripture as the triumvirate that immediately re-establishes, repristinates, and elevates the soul’s direct communion with God. Indeed, when Hooker later considers the hypostatic union in chapter 52 of Book Five, he similarly holds together Thomistic ideas and Augustinian-Reformed commitments. Hooker commends the Alexandrian account of the hypostatic union, derived from Cyril of Alexandria, adopted at the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon, and enhanced by Aquinas with the language of subsistence (subsistens). He further appeals in chapter 53 of Book Five to a reduplicative account much like that of Aquinas in order to explain the manner in which the relationship between Christ’s natures can be expressed. Yet, Hooker’s primary claim is that Christ directly reconstitutes human nature and offers immediate participation in the life of God through “that mutuall inward hold which Christ hath of us and wee of him.”78 Hooker’s use of Aquinas allows him to situate the Lawes, then, within the historic western and catholic tradition; it also arguably serves to strengthen and nuance Reformed theology, especially over the inherent value of creation as that which grace assumes and Christ embraces. Second, in Books Two through Five, Hooker also makes use of the Thomistic idea (derived from Aristotle) that theology is a science (scientia) subalternate 76 FLE 1:58–59, 1:72–73; LEP I.2.1, I.5.1. 77 FLE 1:73.8–10; LEP I.5.2. 78 FLE 2:234.29–31; LEP V.56.1.

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(subalternatio) to the light of a higher science, namely the scientia of God shared with the blessed in heaven.79 Hooker never directly uses the Greek word favoured by Calvin and Reformed orthodox theologians to describe the self-convincing character of Scripture, namely αὐτόπιστος. Rather, he uses Aquinas’ idea of theology as a subaltern science in order to offer a nuanced Reformed account of how believers can be assured that the scriptures are the word of God.80 Scripture provides the fundamental axioms of theological science; yet these axioms are not self-evident to us apart from faith, but only to God and the blessed. The metaprinciple that the scriptures are sacred is similarly not self-evident to us, then, but our knowledge of this meta-principle rather grows by degrees through contingent historical forces, primarily the authority of the Church and ratiocination of scriptural texts. Existential assurance that the scriptures are sacred comes, however, from the inward testimony of the Spirit, which itself both works through and is also tested within the public demonstration of reason. While some scholars have placed Hooker definitively outside the Reformed camp in relation to autopistos, he rather recasts back into Thomistic terms the Reformed commitment to the priority of God’s grace. This recasting allows him to maintain a high evaluation of reason’s role in faith alongside a Reformed commitment to the direct internal witness of the Holy Spirit. As such, Hooker sees himself as faithfully interpreting the theology of “grave and learned men” such as Calvin within his own polemical context where the role of reason seems under threat. Indeed, in certain regards, Hooker here foreshadows the later Reformed orthodox thought of Gisbertus Voetius in the seventeenth century. In the first disputation of his Disputationes theologicae selectae (1648–1669), Voetius sets reason as an instrumental or elicitive principle of faith because it is the psychological faculty illuminated by the Spirit and in which the Spirit causes faith.81 The similarity with Hooker is striking and yet, while Voetius remains regarded as a theologian within Reformed orthodoxy, Hooker’s Reformed credentials are questioned. Pace A.P. Monahan, Hooker’s Aristotelian Thomism need not place him outside Protestant thought, therefore, as some kind of Counter-Reformation thinker.82 Rather, it may establish him as part of a broader, emerging Reformed or Protestant Thomism of the late sixteenth century. Indeed, in addition to those studies already mentioned that look at the scholastic background of the early 79 FLE 1:229–235; 2:289–91; LEP III.8.11–13; V.63.1. 80 FLE 1:231–35; LEP III.8.14–18. 81 See H. van den Belt, The Authority of Scripture in Reformed Theology (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 167–69. 82 A.P. Monahan, “Richard Hooker: Counter-Reformation Political Thinker,” in Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community, ed. A.S. McGrade (Tempe, AZ: Medieval & Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1997), 203–218.

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reformers, renewed attention has been paid to the relationship between the early Reformed tradition, Thomism, and the seventeenth-century development of Protestant scholasticism. Brian Armstrong once venomously identified Peter Martyr Vermigli, Theodore Beza, and Girolamo Zanchi as the “villainous triumvirate” who “most evidently inclined towards the budding Protestant scholasticism.”83 Pace Armstrong, later studies now see the development of Protestant scholasticism as standing in positive continuity with its medieval and Protestant roots; such studies commonly identify Vermigli and his student Zanchi in particular as the most Thomistic of the Reformed theologians of the sixteenth century. The influence of Thomism upon Vermigli is therefore now well established,84 although he stands, as does Hooker, as an ambivalently wide or eclectic Thomist, still capable of critically saying that Lombard, Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham “filled everything with darkness.”85 While Hooker never met Vermigli, he attended lectures by his student successor Lawrence Humphrey, and both Hooker’s patron Bishop John Jewel and tutor John Rainolds were intimately familiar with and sympathetic to Vermigli’s thought, making it highly likely that Hooker also was. Similarly, Zanchi’s works (such as the Opera Theologia) display significant Thomistic influences;86 along with the works of Franciscus Junius, they also exhibit close correspondence with many of aspects of Hooker’s thought, especially in relation to law, as Brad Littlejohn points out in another chapter in this collection. By the seventeenth century, numerous Lutheran and Reformed theologians used Thomistic ideas87 and, in relation to the doctrine of God at least, Reformed authorities all but disappeared in seventeenth-century writings and were “replaced by Thomas Aquinas and the many Roman Catholics who expounded and developed his thinking during the early modern period.”88 Such Protestant Thomism calls into question the idea (repeated by Gibbs in relation to Hooker) that Protestantism necessarily represents a turn to nominalism and voluntarism against Thomistic intellectualism.89 The variegated and protean influence of Thomism, Scotism, and nominalism on the early reformers 83 Armstrong, Calvinism and the Amyraut Heresy, 38. 84 See C. Cleveland, Thomism in John Owen (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013), 12–15; and L. Baschera, “Aristotle and Scholasticism,” in A Companion to Peter Martyr Vermigli, ed. W.J.T. Kirby, E. Campi, and F. James III (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 133–60. 85 From Loci Communes (London: Thomas Vautrollerius, 1583), 1050, quoted in James III, “Peter Martyr Vermigli,” 66. 86 H. Goris, “Thomism in Zanchi’s Doctrine of God,” in Reformation and Scholasticism: An Ecumenical Enterprise, ed. W.J. van Asselt and E. Dekker (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001), 121–39. 87 See J.K. Ryan, The Reputation of St. Thomas Aquinas Among English Protestant Thinkers of the Seventeenth Century (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1948). 88 S. Hampton, Anti-Arminians: The Anglican Reformed Tradition from Charles II to George I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 221. 89 See J.P. Donnelly, “Calvinist Thomism,” Viator 7 (1976): 454.

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has already been noted. The broad phenomenon of Protestant Thomism further shows that, by the period of late and high orthodoxy (if not before), nominalism was not the monolithic metaphysical basis for Protestant thought, if it ever had been. Scholars accordingly debate what does constitute the major medieval source for Protestant metaphysics, with Antonie Vos arguing that it is Scotism,90 while Carl Trueman alternatively suggests that it is a Scotistically-modified Thomism.91 Yet, the Thomism of Vermigli, Zanchi, Hooker, and others indicates that, as Richard Muller rightly advocates, Protestant or Reformed scholasticism was metaphysically eclectic and so defies any reductive generalization.92 Hooker’s Thomism therefore does not abrogate his Protestant or Reformed credentials. Rather, it helps set him as a wide, eclectic, and Protestant or Reformed Thomist, part of a broader phenomenon already emerging in the period of early orthodoxy as one particular expression of Protestant commitment.

4.4

‘Philosophie and schoolemens divinitie’: Reformed scholasticism and orthodoxy

Traditionally, Protestant theology between Luther’s original protest and the Enlightenment was seen as a slow but steady decline back into the dark recesses of scholasticism. As such, scholarship on Reformed orthodoxy was for a long time dominated by Basil Hall’s “Calvin against the Calvinists” theory,93 which argued that Calvin’s successors betrayed the biblical focus of the Genevan reformer, fatally replacing it with the dead word of scholasticism. Hooker faced, of course, the same criticism in A Christian Letter of 1599. Towards the end of the Letter, the anonymous authors attack his “speculative doctrine” and “stile and maner of writing,” seeing them as dangerously different from the “simplicitie of holie Scripture,” a veil to hide his doctrinal heterodoxy when compared with the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion.94 The authors claim that Hooker would: have men better seene in Philosophie and schoolemens divinitie, and namely in Aristotle […]. [You] would shew your selfe another Aristotle by a certaine metaphisicall and

90 A. Vos, “Scholasticism and Reformation,” in Reformation and Scholasticism: An Ecumenical Enterprise, ed. W.J. van Asselt and E. Dekker (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001), 113–114. 91 C.R. Trueman, John Owen: Reformed Catholic, Renaissance Man (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007). 92 See Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, passim. 93 B. Hall, “Calvin against the Calvinists,” in John Calvin, ed. G.E. Duffield and Ford Lewis Battles (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1966), 19–37. 94 FLE 4:48.28–53.21; 4:71.8–11; A Christian Letter, §18; §21.

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crupticall method to bring men into a maze, that they should rather wonder at your learning, then be able to understand what you teach in your writing.95

While Hooker defends himself in many ways in his autograph notes to the Letter, he does not respond with any depth to this criticism, seeming to be comfortable with his casting as “another Aristotle” versed in philosophy and scholasticism, and confident that this did not abrogate his Reformed credentials but rather signalled his faithfulness to Protestant Reformed scholasticism. Although his untimely death prevented a thorough response to the Letter, Hooker had good cause for comfort. As this essay has already pointed out at several points, more recent studies have rejected the discontinuity thesis of scholars such as Basil Hall. Instead, most studies now emphasise the positive continuity of Reformed or Protestant scholasticism with its medieval and early modern theological contexts such that it would be wildly inaccurate to claim that the Renaissance, humanism, or the Reformation were by definition anti-scholastic. As such, Hooker stood within a growing trend of Protestant scholasticism in the late sixteenth century; in contrast, the authors of A Christian Letter vainly stood against inevitable historical and theological tides. The question remains, however: how might Hooker’s scholasticism relate to the wider currents of Reformed orthodoxy? “Protestant” or “Reformed orthodoxy” emerged as a natural attempt to codify and systematise the theology of the early reformers such as Zwingli, Bucer, Calvin, Luther, Melanchthon, Vermigli, and Cranmer. Willem van Asselt and Eef Dekker therefore write: The term “orthodoxy” basically refers to a certain period in this history of Protestantism after the Reformation, relating to developments in both Lutheran and Reformed circles. This period continued into the 17th and 18th centuries. With regard to the original meaning, various nuances can be discerned in the term. In the sense of “the right doctrine” or “opinion,” the word refers to a certain content, which was to be defended in confrontation with deviating views. Here, the term orthodoxy formulates a strong linkage between systematic theology and ecclesiastical confessions. During the period of orthodoxy theologians were motivated by their desire to work for and in the church.96

Protestant or Reformed “orthodoxy” and “scholasticism” do not exactly coincide. Rather, Protestant or Reformed orthodoxy relates to its scholasticism as a whole to a part: the latter is contained within the former but does not exhaust it; and the latter primarily describes a particular theological method, while the former circumscribes broader Protestant or Reformed theological content.

95 FLE 4:72.5–17; A Christian Letter, §21. 96 Van Asselt and Dekker, “Introduction,” 5–6.

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“Reformed orthodoxy” in particular can be divided into three periods: early, high, and late orthodoxy.97 Early orthodoxy covered approximately 1565 to 1640 and marks the second generation of Reformers such as Ursinus, Zanchi, and the Synod of Dort. High orthodoxy roughly spanned 1640 to 1725 and marked the coming to maturity of Reformed thought in thinkers such as John Owen, Francis Turretin, and Johannes Cocceius. Finally, late orthodoxy marked the decline of orthodoxy after 1725 as Reformed thinkers increasingly adopted concepts and paradigms from Enlightenment thought. In historical terms, Hooker obviously stands within the period of early orthodoxy, although that alone does not necessarily secure his status as a theologian of Reformed orthodoxy. There are solid reasons, however, for seeing Hooker as formed within early Reformed orthodoxy. While Cambridge became the most significant centre for Puritan theologians in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Hooker’s studies in Oxford certainly exposed him to required studies in Hebrew, Greek, the Bible, patristics, and Reformation theology. Hooker’s Reformed tutor Rainolds urged his students, including Hooker, to be familiar with and follow the judgement of Calvin in particular. Hooker also existed, of course, in an Elizabethan era in which “numerous significant developments took place relative to Reformed Orthodoxy.”98 First, the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity in 1559 re-established lay ecclesiastical supremacy and the Book of Common Prayer. Second, the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion (published in Latin in 1563 with an English translation in 1571) became the legal expression of Reformed Protestant theology as the official position of the established church. Third, the major national source of tension in the 1560s and 1570s revolved around the use of vestments and the related issue of state power in liturgical practice and discipline. In turn, Elizabethan theologians were also aware of continental debates which shaped English theological education: Whitgift made Bullinger’s Decades required reading, and Calvin’s Institutes found a large following, eventually displacing the Decades. Yet, while figures such as William Whitaker and William Perkins are often celebrated as English examples of Reformed orthodoxy, Hooker is rarely included as another local expression of the broader phenomenon. There may be several reasons for this exclusion. First, the nature of the Lawes perhaps render it as apparently parochial in outlook rather than international: Hooker wrote the work in the English vernacular rather than academic Latin, and the polemical questions addressed in the Lawes were raised by national debates with presbyterian interlocutors rather than continental disputes more broadly. Second, such 97 Cf. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, 30–32. 98 C.R. Trueman, “Reformed Orthodoxy in Britain,” in A Companion to Reformed Orthodoxy, ed. H.J. Selderhuis (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 268.

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parochialism is perhaps compounded by Hooker’s relative lack of explicit engagement on any significant scale with the magisterial Reformers or with other figures in early Reformed orthodoxy. Third, the authors of A Christian Letter impugned Hooker’s Reformed credentials, and later Hookerian scholars have perhaps too readily accepted this polemical premise as true. Hooker’s scholasticism, Thomism, and broad Reformed commitments make it possible, however, to see him as consonant with other Protestant or Reformed Thomists and scholastics of early orthodoxy. While Hooker’s apparently ambivalent attitude to Calvin in the Lawes has made some critics assume that he does not ultimately stand within either Calvinism or Reformed orthodoxy, Hooker in fact depended in some ways upon Calvin and in other ways remained independent.99 On the one hand, in the Preface to the Lawes, Hooker portrays a pejorative picture of Calvin’s jure divino defence of his otherwise understandable reforms (given the sociopolitical context) in Geneva; Hooker’s caveat undermines the proposals of his English presbyterian opponents for ecclesial reform supposedly in accordance with Calvin’s legacy.100 On the other hand, Hooker lauds Calvin both as “the wisest man that ever the French Church did enjoy” (although he qualifies this praise with the phrase “since the hour it enjoyed him”) and also as a “grave and wise man,” adopting a number of Calvin’s arguments when they contradict the claims of English presbyterians or advance his own, especially in his autograph notes to A Christian Letter but also at numerous points in the Lawes.101 Thus, Hooker was “identifiable as a Calvinistic theologian, although not an unconditional one,” largely adopting Calvinist accounts of sanctification and Christ’s presence in the eucharist,102 while also refusing the naïve insistence that “Geneva will not erre.”103 How does Hooker’s scholasticism situate him in relation, then, to Reformed scholasticism? Van Asselt and Rouwendal suggest four distinctive characteristics of “Reformed scholasticism,” a term which: (1) refers to the academic theology of the schools (2) as practiced in the period of orthodoxy, (3) using scholastic method in the exposition of doctrine and (4) in content, is bound to the Reformed confessions.104

99 W.D. Neelands, “The Use and Abuse of John Calvin in Richard Hooker’s Defence of the English Church,” Perichoresis 10 (2012): 3–22. 100 For example, see FLE 1:10.7–27; 1:26.9–27.1; LEP Pref.2.7; 4.8; cf. FLE 4:55.11–13; 4:57.30– 58.6; 4:58.30–59.2; 4:59.7–8; Autograph Notes, §19. 101 See FLE 1:3.13–15; LEP Pref.2.1. Cf. FLE 5:246.2 and marginal note g.; Answer to the Supplication, §16. Also see Neelands, “The Use and Abuse of John Calvin,” 10–13. 102 D. Neelands, “Christology and the Sacraments,” in A Companion to Richard Hooker, ed. W.J.T. Kirby (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 382–98. 103 FLE 4:55.5–6; Autograph Notes, §19; cf. FLE 4:3.7–14; Autograph Notes, Title. 104 Van Asselt and Rouwendal, “Introduction,” 9.

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Hooker’s work clearly displays the first three of these characteristics; the only problem in relation to Hooker’s status as a Reformed scholastic might be the fourth aspect. The closest thing to a Reformed confession in the Elizabethan Church was the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion. While there are similarities with a confession, the Articles were never intended as a complete statement of the Christian faith; rather, they set out the position of the Church of England in relation to the Roman Catholicism and dissident Protestants. What constitutes the standard of orthodoxy for Hooker needs some explanation, then, in order to understand how he might be a Reformed scholastic within early orthodoxy. How the Thirty-Nine Articles stand in relation to continental Protestant confessions shows both the influence of Protestant thought in the English context, but also the limits of the comparison with Reformed thought. Even if no Reformed confession plays an explicit role, the Elizabethan Articles were certainly influenced by two Lutheran confessions. First, the editors of the Articles had before them the Confession of Würtemberg, previously submitted by Lutheran delegates to the Council of Trent. Second, and more importantly, the Augsburg Confession provided a form of words for some passages in the Articles on God and Christ (1 & 2), on justification (11), and the church (19). Yet, the influence of Protestant confessions on the Thirty-Nine Articles should not be pressed too far, either in terms of explicit content or in terms of authority. O’Donovan describes the equivocal doctrinal place of the Thirty-Nine Articles within the Elizabethan Church: It is certainly true that Protestant Anglicans who have championed the Articles have sometimes made claims for their role as a norm of Anglican belief which are too extensive. This has sprung from a desire to interpret the Anglican Church as a church of the Reformation based, like other Reformation churches, upon a great Confession. But although the Anglican Church is indeed a church of the Reformation, it does not relate to its Reformation origins in quite the same way as other churches do, and its Articles are not exactly comparable in their conception or in the way they have been used, to the Augsburg or Westminster Confessions or to the Heidelberg Catechism. It is not simply that they are supposed to be read in conjunction with the Book of Common Prayer. There is a more important difference, which is that the Anglican doctrinal tradition, born of an attempt (neither wholly successful nor wholly unsuccessful) to achieve comprehensiveness within the limits of a Christianity both catholic and reformed, is not susceptible to the kind of textual definition which the Confessions (on the Protestant side) and the conciliar decrees (on the Catholic) afford.105

In the Elizabethan context, doctrinal authority remained more diffused than in the continental Protestant and Reformed churches: the Book of Common Prayer,

105 O. O’Donovan, On the Thirty-Nine Articles: Conversations with Tudor Christianity (London: SCM, 2011), 5–6.

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the Thirty-Nine Articles, and (to a lesser extent) the Book of Homilies expressed the legal reality and performance of reformed practice. Yet, since doctrinal authority was legally diffused across documents and practices, rather than held in a singular confession, English theologians found it harder to systematise an academic theology around key doctrinal commitments. Hooker’s intense interest in the exercise and experience of the liturgy in Book Five of the Lawes, for example, illustrates how doctrine found its local theological expression in embodied practice just as much as it did in academic speculation. Yet the Thirty-Nine Articles still occupied some kind of critical role within Hooker’s scholastic thought, which arguably allows him to stand as an example of van Asselt’s four characteristics of Reformed scholasticism. While Hooker’s Lawes does not consistently follow the structure of the Thirty-Nine Articles, the authors of A Christian Letter certainly saw the latter (along with the catholic creeds) as the litmus test for the orthodoxy of the former. A Christian Letter therefore published 21 criticisms of Hooker whose arguments “in certayne matters of doctrine,” they alleged, “seeme to overthrowe the foundation of Christian religion, and of the Church among us.”106 In general, each criticism follows a comparable structure: one of the Thirty-Nine Articles, quotations from one or more of the English church fathers, a passage or two from Hooker, followed by the judgement of the letter’s authors with supporting quotations from Scripture and patristic authorities. Hooker does not question the premise of the Letter that the Thirty-Nine Articles are doctrinally normative; this suggests that he also saw the Articles as determinative of orthodoxy, at least in part. Hooker’s autograph notes on the Letter indeed suggest that he intended to respond to his attackers in the direct terms of the Thirty-Nine Articles. In his notes on the title page, Hooker characterises his critic as “this fellow” who “fighteth without eyes” and “in noe one point of Doctrine understand […] what he pretendeth the Church of England to establish.”107 At various points, Hooker makes note of a number of authorities with which he plans to make his response over how he maintains the orthodoxy of the Articles. These include Philo, Averroes, Lactantius, Aquinas, Tertullian, Dionysius, Augustine, Athanasius, Eusebius, Calvin, the Council of Nicea, Bullinger, and Beza, all of which show Hooker’s comfort with non-Christian, patristic, medieval, and Protestant sources alike. Indeed, in response to the criticism that his style differs from the simplicity of Scripture and the “learned Fathers of our church” such as Cranmer, Ridley, Latimer, Jewel, Whitgift, Fox, and Fulke, Hooker writes: You might with as great discretion find falt that I looke not like Calvin, Beza, Paulus Fagius, P. Martyr, M. Luther. For I hold it as possible 106 FLE 4:6.1–6; A Christian Letter, Title. 107 FLE 4:1–5; Autograph Notes, Title.

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to be like all these in countenance as them in stile whome you have mentioned […]. I must looke as nature, speake as custome, and think as gods good spirit hath taught me, judg you howsoever either of my mind, or of my stile, or if you will of my looke also.108

Hooker certainly seems to see himself as within the Reformed tradition broadly speaking, whatever his scholastic style and Thomistic Aristotelian commitments. Indeed, Hooker subtly receives the formative influence of the Thirty-Nine Articles in the Lawes as a doctrinal norm. For example, when he considers in chapter 14 of Book One the “sufficiency of scripture unto the end for which it was instituted,” Hooker asks whether Scripture contains everything required for salvation. Article 6 of the Thirty-Nine Articles, entitled “Of the Sufficiency of the Holy Scriptures for Salvation” (Divinae Scripturae doctrina sufficit ad salute), clearly stands as the doctrinal background to his discussion. The Article affirms that “Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation” (Scriptura sacra continet omnia quae sunt ad salute necessaria). Hooker accepts this Reformed doctrinal premise before going on to interpret the meaning of the manner in which Scripture contains all that is necessary. While the Articles are not exactly equivalent to a confession, they nonetheless shape Hooker’s intellectual commitments and frame the doctrinal claims he explores. A number of labels can finally, therefore, be more clearly applied to Hooker: he stands as a Protestant or Reformed scholastic; as a wide and eclectic Protestant or Reformed Thomist; and as an English theologian within the broad and varied historical phenomenon of early Protestant or Reformed orthodoxy. The latter aspect might well help scholars take more seriously how protean Protestant or Reformed orthodoxy could be: the variety of thought possible within the phenomenon entails that no one thinker, whether from the early reformers or from early orthodoxy itself, ought to be taken as exhausting what it might mean to be a Protestant or Reformed orthodox theologian.

4.5

‘General triall and judgement of the whole world’: some future research possibilities

The monumental and irreversible contribution to Hookerian studies of Torrance Kirby in particular revolves around seeing Hooker as essentially a Protestant or Reformed theologian rather than as the father of the Anglican via media. While some scholars continue to challenge this premise, the real work ahead consists of giving nuance and clarity to Hooker’s Reformed identity. First, more attention should be paid to the broad scholastic influence on Hooker’s thought, how his 108 FLE 4:71.18–30; Autograph Notes, §21.

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scholasticism compares to other examples of Protestant scholasticism, and how his use of Scotist thought moderates, alters, and relates to his Thomism. Second, there similarly needs to be an in-depth analysis of the explicit and implicit presence of Thomistic premises in Hooker’s thought which pays attention to the variegated historical qualities and contexts of the Thomist tradition(s) in both Catholic and Protestant circles. Here, rather than asking how Hooker’s Thomism abrogates or changes his Reformed commitments, the inverse question needs to be addressed: how do Hooker’s Reformed commitments cause him to apply or alter his use of Aquinas? Third, further studies (such as those found in this volume) need to examine Hooker more carefully within the context of Reformed orthodoxy by comparing his thought to other British and continental writers of the late sixteenth and seventeenth century, as well as to the Thirty-Nine Articles and Reformed confessions. Here, rather than a narrow focus on a small handful of individuals, there needs to be a sense of the breadth and plasticity of Reformed orthodoxy such that deviation from one particular thinker does not necessarily entail departure from the historical phenomenon itself. As these types of questions are addressed, the place and value of Hooker as a Reformed orthodox theologian, as a Reformed scholastic, and as a wide and eclectic Reformed Thomist can then be offered to the “general trial and judgement of the whole world.”

Torrance Kirby

5.

“Grace hath Use of Nature”: Richard Hooker and the Conversion of Reason

“Whatsoever our hearts be to God and to his truth, believe we or be we as yet faithless, for our conversion or confirmation the force of natural reason is great.” (LEP III.8.11)

In the third book of his treatise Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie (1593) Richard Hooker grapples with the disparagement of the authority of human reason by leading critics of the Elizabethan religious settlement, in particular by the authors of An Admonition to the Parliament (1572) and by Thomas Cartwright, whose engagement with John Whitgift in the course of the Admonition controversy provided the polemical occasion of Hooker’s great livre de circonstance. In Hooker’s own words: The name of the light of nature is made hateful with men; […] A number there are, who think they cannot admire as they ought the power and authority of the word of God, if in things divine they should attribute any force to man’s reason. For which cause they never use reason so willingly as to disgrace reason.1

To what extent is “secular philosophy” reconcilable with the authority of scripture as understood by the magisterial reformers? How does Hooker distinguish sound knowledge attained by the natural discourse of reason from that philosophy which fosters doctrinal error through “a fraudulent show of reason”? And finally, is the light of reason necessary to right discernment of the testimony of the spirit? The aim of the paper is to probe Hooker’s discussion of the “the force and use of man’s reason in things divine.”

1 FLE 1:229.14–15; LEP III.8.11.

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Locating Hooker in Relation to Magisterial Reform

In 1599, an anonymous tract titled A Christian Letter, which proclaims itself to have been authored by “certaine English Protestantes, unfayned favourers of the present state of religion, authorized and professed in England,” set out to portray Richard Hooker’s theology as fundamentally inconsistent with established standards of Reformed doctrinal orthodoxy, chief among them the Thirty-Nine Articles approved initially by the Convocation of the Province of Canterbury, and later confirmed by statute and ratified by the Crown.2 We have compared your positions and assertions in your long discourses, unto the articles of religion sett forth Anno Domini 1562. and confirmed by Parliament the 13. of her Majesties most blessed and joyfull reigne (i. e. 1571), and unto the Apologies of such Reverend Fathers and chiefe pillars of our church, as from time to time since the Gospell began to shine among us, have written and preached, and everie way laboured to advaunce and defende the same, with the Liturgies and church government established among us.3

The Letter accuses Hooker of promoting “Romish doctrine” and “the darknesse of schoole learning,” chiefly on the ground of his optimistic assessment of the capacity of the human faculties of intellect and will. As Diarmaid MacCulloch has shown, Hooker’s reputation, especially concerning such matters as these, has fluctuated to a remarkable degree over the intervening centuries.4 One of the most recent scholars to write on Hooker, Charles Miller, seems to affirm the judgment of A Christian Letter when he writes that, in his adherence to the authority of reason, “Hooker may have distanced himself from Reformed theology, but in so doing he stood within a long-established line of Roman Catholic theology.”5 The question that hangs in the air, therefore, is whether the ‘evolving project’ of Reformation in England necessarily entails the abandonment of the first principles of orthodox Reform and an edging towards Rome, as the nineteenth-century via media thesis held. Scholars associated with a recent revisionist interpretation, however, are equally convinced that these anonymous sixteenth-century critics fundamentally misconstrued Hooker’s theology as in-

2 See Torrance Kirby, ed., “The Articles of Religion of the Church of England (1563/71), commonly called the Thirty-Nine Articles,” in Andreas Mühling and Peter Opitz, eds. Reformierte Bekenntnisschriften, Band 2/1, 1559–1563 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2009), 371–410. 3 FLE 4:9.11–18; A Christian Letter, Title. 4 ‘Richard Hooker’s Reputation,’ in A Companion to Richard Hooker, ed. Torrance Kirby (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 563–612. See also Michael Brydon, The Evolving Reputation of Richard Hooker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 194–204. 5 Charles Miller, Richard Hooker and the Vision of God: Exploring the Origins of Anglicanism (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2013), 178.

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imical to Reformed orthodoxy. The singular merit of Nigel Voak’s monograph Richard Hooker and Reformed Theology is to press vigorously for resolution of this vexed question of Hooker’s theological reputation. “What is needed,” Voak maintains, “is not simply one further perspective, but a resolution to this debate.”6 Hooker cannot logically be both the conservative proponent of the reformed Elizabethan Church and a revolutionary formulator of a neo-Pelagian, proto-Arminian, cum avant-garde Laudian conformist rejection of reformed orthodoxy, or at least not both at the same time. Some, like Miller in his recent monograph Richard Hooker and the Vision of God,7 have argued for a transition of Hooker’s theological orientation from the former perspective to the latter. A definitive answer to this conundrum remains stubbornly elusive.

5.2

Grace and Reason

Nigel Voak’s interpretation, even if it fails finally to resolve the conundrum for us, does help by focusing attention on the key point of conflict. Early in his monograph he remarks that the “central problem of human nature is most important for understanding Hooker’s theology, and for resolving many of the controversies that beset Hooker scholarship today.”8 Later in his argument Voak identifies the more specific question concerning the faculties of reason and will, and the manner of their reception of divine gifts of grace as “the polemical heart of the Lawes.”9 Reason and grace; nature and grace – these are the crucial terms of dialectical tension that underpin the theological controversies which preoccupied the Elizabethan church. In A Learned Discourse of Justification, Hooker states that soteriology is “that graund question, which hangeth yet in controversie betwene us and the churche of Rome.”10 One might even say that Hooker’s reputation verges on the notorious for his robust confidence in reason, in its rich activity, and in its metaphysical scope. Rowan Williams very appositely defines Hooker’s theological orientation as “sapiential” in character.11

6 Nigel Voak, Richard Hooker and Reformed Theology: a study of Reason, Will, and Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 139. 7 Miller, Richard Hooker and the Vision of God. See my review of Miller in International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 13, no. 4 (2013): 357–361. 8 Nigel Voak, Hooker and Reformed Theology (Oxford: OUP, 2003), 18. 9 Voak, Hooker and Reformed Theology, 168. 10 FLE 5:109.12–13; A Learned Discourse of Justification, Workes, and How the Foundation of Faith Is Overthrwone, 4. 11 Rowan Williams, ‘Hooker: Philosopher, Anglican, Contemporary,’ in Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community, ed. A.S. McGrade (Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1997), 370.

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In the first of two main divisions of his argument, Voak undertakes an extensive discussion of Hooker’s philosophy of mind and action. Voak explores the scholastic intricacies of Hooker’s treatment of the faculties with great care; his findings provide a foundation for the central argument in the second half of his book where he considers the intellectual faculties in the light of their interaction with the influences of divine grace. Voak notes the high estimate placed by Hooker upon the human capacities of reason and will and further describes Hooker’s position as a “metaphysical libertarianism” akin to the theological anthropology of Scotus, Molina, and Suarez and consequently to be distinguished from the “soft-determinism” of both Calvin and Aquinas. A key consequence of this reading of Hooker’s anthropology is to render more plausible his putative leaning towards a proto-Arminian soteriology, by way of “softpedalling” as it were the doctrine of original sin. In short, Voak suggests, Hooker is to be interpreted as “optimistic” concerning the faculties of human nature to an extent that would firmly distinguish his stance from the mainstream Reformed tradition.12 As observed above, Voak identifies the question concerning the manner of the human reception of divine grace as the “the polemical heart of the Lawes.”13 This is a valuable insight, and it provides a convenient point of departure for addressing the current impasse over how to interpret Hooker’s theological orientation. In the remainder of this discussion we propose to address in turn the questions of the ‘sufficiency’ of scripture, the ontology of ‘grace and nature’ particularly as this question reflects Hooker’s relationship to the scholastics and the magisterial reformers, and finally the ethical implications of soteriology. In summing up we aim to draw together these various loci in a brief discussion of Hooker’s sapiential approach to theology in general.

5.3

Sufficiency of Scripture

Hooker’s contemporary critics in A Christian Letter question his adherence to Article 6 of the 39 Articles of Religion, namely that “The holy scripture containe all thinges necessarie to salvation.” Hooker stands accused of undermining this key tenet of Reformed doctrine and identity by his magnification of the role of natural human reason. In Book I of the Lawes Hooker had remarked that “the insufficiencie of the light of nature is by the light of scripture fullie and perfectlie supplied.”14 And in another place: “It sufficeth that nature and scripture doe 12 Voak, Hooker and Reformed Theology, 167. 13 Voak, Hooker and Reformed Theology, 168. 14 FLE 1:188.4–5; LEP II.8.34.

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serve in such full sorte, that they both jointlie and not severallie eyther of them be so complete, that unto everlasting felicitie we need not the knowledge of anie thing more then these two.”15 According to Hooker’s Elizabethan critics, he thus infers that “the light of nature teacheth some knowledge natural whiche is necessarie to salvation, and that the Scripture is a supplement and making perfect of that knowledge.”16 Not only is Hooker suspected of undermining the premise of sola scriptura in his elevation of the “naturall light,” in his teaching concerning the “morall virtues” he has challenged sola fide. It is a matter of interest that A Christian Letter draws such a close link between the epistemological and the practical on the question of “thinges necessarie to salvation” – the “natural” is distinguished from the “supernatural” in terms of both the source of salvific knowledge and the source of human virtue. This, of course, makes good sense when one considers that according to the Reformed doctrine of Justification, the individual Christian “is justified by faith without the workes of the law.”17 On this account, the question of the sufficiency of Scripture and Justification are both matters of “cognition.” Thus Hooker’s elevation of “the use of the law of nature in handling matters of religion” becomes a question of prime soteriological significance in the view of his contemporary critics. The “polemical heart of the Lawes” thus would seem to turn on understanding the relation of Grace to Nature. Along with such sixteenth-century reformers as Luther, John Calvin, and Heinrich Bullinger, Hooker plainly affirms the magisterial view that Scripture is alone sufficient for knowledge of saving doctrine, and thus constitutes the principium cognoscendi theologiae.18 While Hooker plainly regards Scripture as a higher infallible authority than demonstrative reason, Nigel Voak argues that his position cannot ultimately be reconciled with the magisterial Reformers’ position on sola scriptura. “Crucially,” Voak maintains, Hooker “makes the authority of the former evidentially dependent on the authority of the latter, in that Holy Scripture must be authenticated as divine revelation by demonstrative reasoning. In addition, some Christian doctrines, such as the Trinity, must be deduced from Scripture, and so are dependent for him on such reasoning.”19 In Voak’s view, Hooker appears to step beyond the boundaries of Reformed orthodoxy in his argument regarding the authentication of Scripture.

15 16 17 18

FLE 1:129.12–16; LEP I.14.5. FLE 4:11.22–23; A Christian Letter, 3. Rom. 3:27. See Art. XI of the Articles of Religion. See Nigel Voak, ‘Richard Hooker and the Principle of Sola Scriptura,’ Journal of Theological Studies 59, no. 1 (2008): 123. 19 Voak, ‘Richard Hooker,’ 97.

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We all beleeve that the Scriptures of God are sacred, and that they have proceeded from God; our selves we assure that wee doe right well in so beleeving. We have for this point a demonstration sound and infallible. But it is not the worde of God which doth or possibilie can assure us, that wee doe well to thinke it his worde.20

For Voak, Hooker’s willingness to allow anything other than the word of God itself to “assure us” that “it is his worde” is a rejection of Calvin’s doctrine of the self-authentication of Scripture. However, Hooker’s claim to a “demonstration sound and infallible” that the Scriptures have “proceeded from God” actually corresponds to arguments for scripture’s authentication based on the inner testimony of the Spirit such as one finds, for example, in Calvin’s Institutio.21 Hooker’s “infallible demonstration” is, in fact, the inner testimony of the spirit. At the same time, there is for Hooker a decisive role for a ratiocinative account of the marks and objective authenticity of the revealed word: “Scripture teacheth us that saving truth which God hath discovered unto the world by revelation, and it presumeth us taught otherwise that it self is divine and sacred.”22 In order to construe Hooker’s reconciliation of the inner testimony with the ratiocinative account it is necessary to probe further the underlying assumptions of his sapiential approach. For Hooker the sapiential theologian, claims regarding the respective authorities of Scripture and Reason are not to be construed in binary opposition, in ‘zero-sum’ fashion. Rather he views these two sources as simultaneously both presupposing and participating in a higher, unifying principle which is present in both as a cause in its effects.23 On this point it is worth quoting Hooker at length: Because we maintaine that in scripture we are taught all things necessary unto salvation, hereupon very childishly it is by some demaunded, what scripture can teach us the sacred authoritie of the scripture, upon the knowledge wherof our whole faith and salvation dependeth. As though there were any kind of science in the world which leadeth men into knowledge without presupposing a number of thinges already knowne. No science doth make knowne the first principles whereon it buildeth, but they 20 FLE 1:153.13–25; LEP II.4.2. 21 Calvin, Inst. I.7.4. On this point I find myself in agreement with Ranall Ingalls, Richard Hooker on the scriptures: Saint Augustine’s trinitarianism and the interpretation of sola scriptura (PhD Thesis: University of Wales Lampeter, 2004), 220. 22 FLE 1:231.12–15; LEP III.8.13. 23 FLE 2:236–37.15–25; LEP V.56.5: ‘All things which God in their times and seasons hath brought forth, were eternally and before all times in God, as a work unbegun is in the Artificer, which afterward bringeth it unto effect. Therefore whatsoever we do behold now in this present World, it was inwrapped within the Bowels of Divine Mercy, written in the Book of Eternal Wisdom, and held in the hands of Omnipotent Power, the first Foundations of the World being as yet unlaid. So that all things which God hath made, are in that respect the Offspring of God, they are in him as effects in their highest cause; he likewise actually is in them, the assistance and influence of his Deity is their life.’

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are alwaies either taken as plaine and manifest in them selves, or as proved and graunted already, some former knowledge having made them evident. Scripture teacheth al supernaturally revealed truth, without the knowledge wherof salvation cannot be attayned. The maine principle whereupon our beliefe of all things therin contayned dependeth is, that the scriptures are the oracles of God him selfe. This in it selfe wee cannot say is evident. For then all men that heare it would acknowledge it in hart, as they do when they heare that every whole is more then any parte of that whole, because this in it selfe is evident. The other we knowe that all do not acknowledge when they heare it. There must be therefore some former knowledge presupposed which doth herein assure the hartes of all believers. Scripture teacheth us that saving truth which God hath discovered unto the world by revelation, and it presumeth us taught otherwise that it self is divine and sacred.24

Whereas scripture alone is to be followed in the formulation of the rule of faith, reason, custom and human authority are necessary in order to avoid “infinite perplexities, scrupulosities, doubts insoluble and extreme despaires” in the external ordering of religion.25 It is not the purpose of the divine law as revealed in the scriptures to provide prescriptions for the political structure of the church; to this end Wisdom provides through the law of nature which Hooker defines as “an infallible knowledge imprinted in the minds of all the children of men, whereby both general principles for directing of human actions are comprehended, and conclusions derived from them; upon which conclusions groweth in particularity the choice of good and evil in the daily affairs of this life.”26 These two “waies of Wisdom” account for both the “outward procession” of the entire created order from the original divine unity in the form of the “natural law,” and its final redemptive return by a “way mystical and supernaturall” back to its source, i. e. scriptural revelation or “divine law.”27 By way of example, in his justification of the institution of episcopacy as being as divine in origin as civil government, Hooker maintains that of all good things God himself is author, and consequently an approver of them […]. If therefore all things be of God which are well done, and if all things be well done which are according to the rule of well-doing, and if the rule of well-doing be more ample than the Scripture: what necessity is there, that everything which is of God should be set down in holy Scripture? 28

Thus episcopacy for Hooker is not an institution to be construed as immediately iure divino, but rather divine sanction derives from the antiquity of practice and 24 25 26 27 28

FLE 1:230.25–231.15; LEP III.8.13. FLE 1:191; LEP II.8.6. FLE 1:191; LEP II.8.6. Cf. FLE 1:135.11–13 and 1:248.23–26; LEP I.16.1 and III.11.3. FLE 3:210.13–14, 18–23; LEP VII.11.10.

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constitutional tradition. As with kings so also with bishops: human ordinances are “many times presupposed as grounds in the statutes of God.29

5.4

Hooker and Aquinas

According to Charles Miller, in a more traditional reading, Hooker’s “Thomism” distinguishes him from both the early English Reformers, and from his Disciplinarian Puritan contemporaries – e. g. from Thomas Cartwright, Walter Travers, and the Admonitioners of 1572. Miller argues that Hooker’s devotion to Aquinas is the theological distinctive which sets him apart from the reformed mainstream. What exactly is this Thomism? Miller takes Aquinas’s dictum – “gratia non tollit naturam, sed perficit”30 (grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it) – as a “fundamental axiom” of Hooker’s theology. For Miller, it is Hooker’s “unique alchemy” to balance the requirements of Grace and Nature. Indeed, for Miller it is this very balance that enables him to tread a middle way between Rome and Geneva. Although he does not go so far as to label Hooker a proto-Laudian “avant-garde conformist,” Miller’s attachment to a via media paradigm of interpretation is plainly evident throughout his argument. Hooker’s intellectualism, his appeals to Aristotle and the scholastics, the prominence of a developed doctrine of Natural Law, emphasis on human freedom, and a eudæmonistic ethics are all adduced as deviating from the usual Reformed fare – just as the authors of A Christian Letter had argued back in 1599. While such emphases might distinguish Hooker to some extent from some of his philosophically less sophisticated English predecessors, they can hardly be taken as evidence of departure from the magisterial norms of continental Reformed thought. The Florentine Peter Martyr Vermigli, Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford during the reign of Edward VI, was one of the most sophisticated scholastics of his generation – many of his scriptural commonplaces set out definitions according to the principle of Aristotelian four-fold causality. Calvin and Bullinger both have highly developed theories of Natural Law, and they make important use of them in their practical and political writing. Phillipp Melanchthon composed a full-scale commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics in order to instruct Christians in the life of virtue as it is lived in the world (das weltliche Reich). In his essay “Hooker on Scripture, Reason, and Tradition,” David Neelands examines critically the commonly held view that Hooker is the source of the socalled “three-legged stool” of Anglican self-understanding – viz. the triple au29 FLE 3:335.22–336.4; LEP VIII.3.1. 30 ST Ia Q. 1 a. 8 ad 2.

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thority of Scripture, reason, and tradition. Neelands persuasively debunks the erroneous judgement that Hooker placed the authority of tradition on a level comparable with that of Scripture, and cautions against reading Hooker as articulating this triad. Neelands tends also to view Hooker as a Thomist in his views on the relation between Scripture and Reason; Scripture perfects Reason as Grace perfects Nature. Both derive from a common divine source, while tradition is “merely human” and inferior to both.31 What remains not entirely clear is what such a balancing of “Nature and Grace” – and by analogical implication of “Reason and Scripture” – might entail soteriologically. Do we take Hooker’s putative soteriological Thomism to imply a natural freedom of the will contrary to Article X? The article, as emended at the Convocation of Canterbury in 1563, states that “[t]he condition of man after the fall of Adam is such that he cannot turn and prepare himself, by his own natural strength and good works, to faith and calling upon God.” Does the corollary balancing the authorities of Reason and Divine Revelation imply the insufficiency of Scripture to salvation, contrary to Article VI? 32 And does the view of justifying grace such as we find in Aquinas’s soteriology require abandonment of the view that the grace of Justification is a forensic matter of being “accounted righteous before God” as the reformed doctrine of imputation maintains, and affirmation that such grace become an infused quality or habitus of the soul? In A Learned Discourse of Justification Hooker quotes Aquinas as representative of the so-called “Romish doctrine” which takes just such a “conjunctive” view of the relation of Nature to Grace. Aquinas regards justifying grace (gratia justificans) as a certain supernatural quality (qualitas quaedam supernaturalis) which is the root and principle of good works, yet this would appear to be at odds with both Article XI “Of Justification”33 and with Hooker’s clearly stated position on this doctrine: This grace [i. e. justification] they will have to be applied by infusion; to thende, that as the bodye is warme by the heate which is in the bodye, so the soule mighte be rightuous 31 W. David Neelands, ‘Hooker on Scripture, Reason, and “Tradition,”’ in Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community, ed. A.S. McGrade (Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1997), 75–94. 32 Art. VI: “Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is [neither] not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, [although it be sometime received of the faithful, as godly and profitable for an order and comeliness: yet no man ought to be constrained to believe it] is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the faith, [or repute it] or be thought requisite [to the necessity of] or necessary to salvation.” 33 Art. XI: “We are accounted righteous before God, only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by faith, and not for our own works or deservings. Wherefore that we are justified by faith only is a most wholesome doctrine, and very full of comfort; as more largely is expressed in the Homily of Justification.”

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by the inherente grace, which grace they make capable of increase: as the body maie be more and more warme, so the soule more and more justefied, accordinge as grace shalbe augmented, the augmentacion whereof is merited by good workes, as good workes are made meritorious by it, wherefore the firste receipte of grace is in theire [i. e. Rome’s] divinitye the first justification, the increase thereof the second justification.34

Charles Miller maintains that Hooker’s locating of works “as an intrinsic part of sanctifying righteousness challenged the sole sufficiency of Christ’s imputed grace, and in doing so effectively distanced Hooker’s soteriology from that of both his Lutheran precursors and Calvinist contemporaries.”35 This reading is tantamount to the suggestion that Hooker’s soteriology approximates a demiPelagian stance. On the matter of distinguishing the “two kinds of righteousness” Hooker’s position could not be more emphatically consistent with Luther’s and Calvin’s, and it is on precisely this theological ground that Hooker embraces their corollary concerning the distinction of the “two realms” and the “two regiments” which in turn provides the core structural principle of his doctrine of the Church.36 Hooker’s three-fold classification of grace – as 1) Justifying – perfect and not inherent; 2) Sanctifying – imperfect and inherent; and 3) Glorifying – perfect and inherent – is a brilliantly succinct summing up of Magisterial Reformed soteriology. Such an account ensures a clear distinction (though emphatically not a separation) of Grace and Nature; and in his vigorous application of the logic of Chalcedonian Christology to this theological matter – as well to others, notably the sacraments – Hooker is following in a path already blazed so brilliantly by John Calvin in his Institutes. Eleven hundred years after the fourth ecumenical council of the ancient Church (AD 451), Calvin invoked the Christological model of two natures united in a single person to lend support to the precarious dialectical task of simultaneously uniting within the individual subject or person and distinguishing the distinct natures of the spiritual and the external orders of reality – the forum conscientiæ and the forum externum – with their respective modes of governance: these two [for Calvin the “spiritual” and “civil” kingdoms] as we have divided them, are always to be viewed apart from each other. When the one is considered, we should call off our minds, and not allow them to think of the other. For there exists in man a kind of two worlds over which different kings and different laws can preside.37

34 FLE 5:110.24–111.6; Justification, 5. 35 Miller, Richard Hooker and the Vision of God, 165. 36 See W.D.J. Cargill Thompson, Studies in the Reformation: Luther to Hooker, ed. C.W. Dugmore (London: Athlone Press, 1980), 42–59. Torrance Kirby, Richard Hooker’s Doctrine of the Royal Supremacy (Leiden: Brill, 1990), 53–58. 37 Inst. III.19.15

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Yet while there are two distinct orders of reality they are nonetheless hypostatically united within each individual conscience; while the two modes of governance must be kept distinct, Calvin insists that they are by no means antithetical. Indeed Calvin insists that “we must know that they are not at variance.”38 According to Hooker, speaking in a similarly Chalcedonian vein, there is a communicatio idiomatum whereby “Grace hath use of nature”39 – but the utility of nature to the realization of divine purposes is not the soteriological equivalent of the perfecting of nature when viewed through the lens of imputed righteousness. His reformulation of this dictum is itself revealing of the revolution in theology that has intervened in the three centuries since Aquinas.

5.5

Soteriology and Moral Theology

A major methodological difficulty of A. J. Joyce’s approach to Hooker’s reputation as a reformed theologian in her monograph Richard Hooker and Anglican Moral Theology stems from the early decision to isolate this inquiry into Hooker’s ethical thought from the deep soteriological foundations upon which it rests.40 By representing Hooker’s moral thought narrowly through the lens of his teaching on the Natural Law, Joyce portrays his position as a reiteration of Thomist-Aristotelian “virtue ethics,” whereas Hooker’s Learned Discourse on Justification makes abundantly clear that in his view all Christian moral endeavour in the form of the active good works of “sanctification” is wholly dependent upon the antecedent divine gift of “justification.” In short, Hooker adheres to the magisterial reformers’ grounding of Christian ethics in the key Reformed teaching concerning Justification by faith alone. While Joyce admits that “Hooker can no longer be regarded as the founder of an Anglican via media as traditionally understood,”41 the thrust of her argument is to reformulate the definition of this middle way together with its concomitant notion of English 38 Inst. IV.20.2 39 FLE 1:223.26–29; LEP III.8.6;. In book I Hooker states that the Creator speaks through nature “whose voice is his instrument” (FLE 1:84.4; LEP I.8.3 and see also FLE 1:67.16–20, 68.18; LEP I.3.4: “Those things which nature is said to do, are by divine arte performed, using nature as an instrument: nor is there any such arte or knowledge divine in nature her selfe working, but in the guide of natures worke.” Compare Calvin, Comm. on Hab. 2:6, Calvini Opera 43:540.1; Commentaries on the Twelve Minor Prophets, trans. John Owen (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1950), 4:92–93: “Since some principles of equity and justice remain in the hearts of men, the consent of all nations is, as it were, the voice of nature or the testimony of that equity which is engraven on the hearts of men, and which they can never obliterate. This also is the dictate of nature.” 40 A.J. Joyce, Richard Hooker and Anglican Moral Theology (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 41 Joyce, Hooker and Anglican Moral Theology, 242.

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exceptionalism. In a fashion curiously reminiscent of the anonymous authors of A Christian Letter (1599), Joyce seeks to drive a wedge between Hooker and the continental magisterial reformers: “[Hooker] has no hesitation whatsoever in drawing upon the wisdom and insights of traditions that reformed Protestantism rejected out of hand.”42 To suggest that appeals to Aristotle, Aquinas, the Stoics and indeed broadly to the tradition of Natural Law were “rejected” by reformed Protestantism is to conflate the sophisticated mainstream magisterial reform of the likes of Philipp Melanchthon, Heinrich Bullinger, Peter Martyr Vermigli, Martin Bucer, John Gerhardt and other magisterial divines of their ilk with the narrow biblicising tendencies of Hooker’s Disciplinarian Puritan opponents.43 By summoning Hooker to the bar of enlightened post-modern judgement to require that he offer up his reasons in order that he might be “rated” for his usefulness to contemporary Anglican moral reflection, something of the elusively alien character of his mentalité has been overlooked. Like virtually all of his contemporaries among the magisterial reformers, both in England and on the continent, Hooker’s moral theology is wholly inseparable from his theology of grace. That such is the case is made clear in the argument of chapter 11 of the first book of the Lawes. “Had Adam continued in his original state” then the Natural Law would have been sufficient for the attainment of human ethical fulfilment. Yet, as Hooker very plainly states, the light of nature is never able to finde out any way of obtaining the reward of blisse, but by performing exactly the duties and works of righteousnes. From salvation therefore and life all flesh being excluded this way, behold how the wisedome of God hath revealed a way mysticall and supernaturall […] prepared before all worldes.44

Grace – a “way supernatural” – is for Hooker the source of the so-called theological virtues, without which there can be no attainment to moral fulfilment – eudaimonia. If it is the case that human value systems are, to a large extent, contextually determined, then with Hooker, as indeed with all of the magisterial reformers of the sixteenth century, the regulating context of moral theology is shaped ineluctably by the parameters established by the doctrine of grace. As Hooker observes in his Sermon on the Nature of Pride “the want of exact distinguishing between these two waies [viz. of nature and grace] and observing what they have common what peculiar hath bene the cause of the greatest part of that confusion whereof Christianity at this daie laboureth.”45 The chief concern of the Protestant Reformation bar none is the formulation of the principles of 42 Joyce, Hooker and Anglican Moral Theology, 244. 43 See my discussion of this question in “Richard Hooker’s Theory of Natural Law in the Context of Reformation Theology,” Sixteenth Century Journal 30, no. 3 (1999): 681–703. 44 FLE 1:117.17–18, 118.11–15, 23; LEP I.11.5,6. 45 FLE 5:313.19–23; A Learned Sermon of the Nature of Pride.

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soteriology, and it is entirely within the frame of this task that moral theology is undertaken by the reformers. It is certainly a perilous business to attempt to read Hooker outside this determining theological context. While Hooker most emphatically embraces “virtue ethics” he nonetheless does so in a manner closely comparable to that achieved by Melanchthon and Vermigli,46 for example, and altogether consistent with Art. XII of the Articles of Religion: “Good works are the fruits of Faith and follow after Justification, cannot put away our sins, and endure the severity of God’s Judgement: yet are they pleasing and acceptable to God in Christ, and do spring necessarily of a true and lively Faith.” Such soteriology is the source of the reformers’ classic distinction between the “two realms” of passive and active virtue, justice “before God” and “before men,” a distinction upon which Hooker’s moral theology rests. What does it mean to say that “Grace hath use of nature” and how might this be compared with the formula “Grace perfects nature”? Owing to humanity’s wilful rejection of the order of creation, human natural capacity, reason, and the natural law are by themselves no longer sufficient to restore the disrupted cosmic order. While fallen humanity continues to possess a natural desire for happiness, and thus to be reconciled with the divine source of order, on Hooker’s thoroughly Augustinian account of original sin man is “inwardly obstinate, rebellious and averse from all obedience unto the sacred lawes of his nature … in regard of his depraved mind little better than a wild beast.”47 Thus Reason is ineffectual in restoring or preserving the original, divinely constituted order. Nonetheless “it is an axiome of nature that naturall desire cannot utterly be frustrate,” says Hooker, citing Aristotle.48 The fulfilment or ‘perfecting’ of nature is accomplished entirely from the divine side according to Hooker, and thus there is no unaided human agency which can contribute to this end. For Hooker there can be no natural overcoming of the hiatus between human desire for a divine perfection and a complete natural incapacity to achieve that end desired. While the desire for

46 Philipp Melanchthon, “Oration on the Life of Aristotle,” CR XI:342–49; see A Melanchthon Reader (New York: P. Lang, 1988), 78–87. Peter Martyr Vermigli, In Primum, Secundum, et Initium Tertii Libri ethicorum Aristotelis ad Nicomachum (Zurich: C. Froschauer, 1563; and Lich: Nicholas Erbenius, 1598); Commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, ed. and trans. Emidio Campi and Joseph C. McLelland (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2006). See also Jill Kraye, Classical Traditions in Renaissance Philosophy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002). 47 FLE 1:96.26–29; LEP I.10.1. 48 FLE 1:114.15; LEP I.11.4I.11.4; 1:114.15. Hooker cites the Proemium of Aquinas’s commentary on Aristotle‘s Metaphysics. See Thomas Aquinas, Metaphysicorum Aristotelis expositio in duodecim libros (Turin: Marietti, 1950), 6. That nature does nothing in vain is a central doctrine of Aristotle’s Physics II.8. See also FLE 6(1):513; Commentary.

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theosis is a natural desire – “so that nature even in this life doth plainly claime and call for a more divine perfection”49 – nonetheless the light of nature is never able to finde out any way of obtayning the reward of blisse, but by performing exactly the duties and workes of righteousnes. From salvation therefore and life all flesh being excluded this way, behold how the wisedome of God hath revealed a way mysticall and supernaturall, a way directing unto the same ende of life by a course which groundeth it selfe upon the guiltines of sinne, and through sinne desert of condemnation and death.50

At the same time, the imputed gift of forensic Justification brings about a restoration of the natural faculties through its consequent gift of sanctification; these natural faculties restored are utilised in the rebuilding of an order in nature, church, and commonwealth: There are two kindes of christian rightuousness: the one without us, which we have by imputation; the other in us, which consisteth of faith hope and charitie and other Christian virtues […] God gyveth us both the one Justice and the other: the one by accepting us for rightuous in Christe, the other by workinge christian rightuousnes in us.51

5.6

The Unity of Wisdom

Underlying this crucial soteriological distinction of the “two kindes of christian rightuousness” is a distinction inherent in the divine governance itself – the duplex gubernatio Dei. Speaking of the divine Wisdom, Hooker observes As her waies are of sundrie kinds, so her maner of teaching is not meerely one and the same. Some things she openeth by the sacred bookes of Scripture; some things by the glorious works of nature: with some things she inspireth them from above by spirituall influence, in some thinges she leadeth and trayneth them onely by worldly experience and practise. We may not so in any one speciall kind admire her that we disgrace her in any other, but let all her wayes be according unto their place and degree adored.52

The “glorious works of nature” and the training of the rational soul in observation of them “by worldly experience and practice” together constitute an instrument of Wisdom to be honoured in accordance with their “place and degree.” Their place and degree is understood to be ancillary and instrumental. The “waie” of Nature and of Reason is a way which gives order and intelligibility to a cosmos which has been restored to its eternal source by a supernatural 49 50 51 52

FLE 1:115.18–19; LEP I.11.4. FLE 1:118.11–18; LEP I.11.5, 6. FLE 5:129.2–10; Justification, 21. FLE 1:147.23–148.6; LEP II.1.4. See The Wisdom of Solomon 11:20.

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means. Hooker affirms the magisterial reformers’ doctrine of sola scriptura, that the Bible contains all things “necessary to salvation.” Tradition and human authority cannot add anything to God’s written word for this purpose. At the same time, God the creator of the world speaks through nature “whose voice is but his instrument”53 and is manifest to the eye of reason in the glorious works of creation. Whereas scripture alone is to be followed in the formulation of the “rule of faith,” reason, custom and human authority are necessary to sustain the external ordering of religion. It is not the purpose of the revealed law to provide prescriptions for the political structures of the church. In maintaining a clear distinction between “two realms” of salvation and the outward organization of the church Hooker adheres to a critical presupposition of the soteriology and ecclesiology of magisterial reform.

53 (FLE 1:84.4; LEP I.8.3)

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6.

Practicing What He Preaches: Richard Hooker as Practitioner of Loyal Opposition1

In the past several decades it has become common to see Richard Hooker characterized as “an unyielding apologist of the status quo.” In the words of a 1997 essay by Debora Shuger.

A prominent trend in recent Hooker scholarship, reacting against the hagiographic tradition established by Walton’s Lives, has argued for Hooker’s narrowly polemical aims as a propagandist for Whitgift’s crackdown on dissent and pamphleteer for the anti-Puritan faction in the parliamentary debates of 1593 – as, in short, a “partisan thinker intent on window-dressing the command structure of English society.”2 This reading of Hooker has, in turn, been challenged by scholars arguing, again in the words of Shuger, that “there is reason to believe that the Lawes is not exclusively, or even primarily, anti-Presbyterian polemic.”3 The current essay adds a new dimension to this understanding of Hooker as seeking to reform the Elizabethan church even as he defends it. A few years ago I argued that in his defense of the Elizabethan church, Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity, one of Hooker’s aims is to redirect disorderly puritan energy into productive channels by calling on them to adopt a position that I called “loyal opposition.”4 Puritans are admonished to recognize the essential validity of the 1 Hooker’s position as both a proponent and an exemplar of what is here called “loyal opposition” is discussed more fully in the fourth chapter Daniel Eppley, Reading the Bible with Richard Hooker (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2016). 2 Debora Shuger, “‘Societie Supernaturall’: The Imagined Community of Hooker’s Lawes,” in Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community, ed. A. S. McGrade (Tempe, AZ: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1997), 307, quoting Richard Helgerson. 3 Shuger, “‘Societie Supernaturall,’” 308. In addition to Shuger, scholars presenting Hooker as seeking to re-envision the Elizabethan church include Peter Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterian and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988) and A. S. McGrade as outlined in note 24 below. 4 Daniel Eppley, “Richard Hooker and the Loyal Opposition” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference, Cincinnati, OH, October 26, 2012).

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established church but also invited to remain open to understanding God’s will for the church more fully, and when appropriate to work for reform within the structures of the church. I concluded in that paper that Hooker envisions puritans as a healthy part of a church that is reformed and always reforming, but without the breaches of charity, tumults, and schisms that all too often accompany efforts at reform. The current essay develops and expands this case, focusing on a way in which Hooker himself exemplifies loyal opposition. I consider several tensions, paradoxes, or contradictions related to the Lawes and explore the possibility that these inconsistencies are not accidental but rather are intended to foster amendment of ecclesiastical policy, particularly in the exercise of royal oversight of the church. Some of the tensions considered are external contradictions (inconsistencies between the actual state of affairs in the Elizabethan church and Hooker’s description of that state of affairs); others are internal contradictions (inconsistencies within the Lawes itself). Whether external or internal, the tensions all point to needed reforms. Two areas in which this is exemplified are Hooker’s defense of episcopal wealth and his consideration of the formulation of church laws.

6.1

God, Wealth, and Elizabeth’s Bishops

Starting with Hooker’s discussion of episcopacy, it has been noted that for a defender of the episcopal office, Hooker is extraordinarily free in his criticism of the actual state of Elizabethan bishops in the final chapter of Book VII of the Lawes. Patrick Collinson notes that Hooker only occasionally concedes that “the ecclesiastical establishment, which is to say the bishops, might be at fault and in need of reformation.” When, however, he does discuss episcopal shortcomings he “frankly acknowledges and engages with what might be objected against the Elizabethan bishops,” and in the end “no other apologist for the Elizabethan status quo chose to be as critical as Hooker of the institution he was supposed to be defending.”5 A. S. McGrade considers Hooker’s argument that bishops should not be deprived of their wealth due to their faults, noting that “while this thesis logically demands an acknowledgement that individual bishops do in fact have faults, Hooker’s cutting account of episcopal shortcomings […] goes well beyond the necessary minimum. Because of its systematic character, it is in some ways a more effective indictment than the invective and anecdote of much anti-epis5 Patrick Collinson, “Hooker and the Elizabethan Establishment,” in Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community, ed. A. S. McGrade (Tempe, AZ: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1997), 171.

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copal polemic.”6 Elsewhere I have argued that Hooker’s criticisms of the bishops also includes a subtle critique of royal fiscal policy in regards to the bishops.7 Here I expand on this exploration by considering Hooker’s use of ironic contrast in his efforts to reform royal practices relating to episcopal wealth. In Book VII of the Lawes Hooker defends the sanctity of ecclesiastical wealth, voicing harsh criticism of those who would plunder the resources of the church to enrich themselves. “The Sacrilegious intention of Church-Robbers, which lurketh under this plausible name of Reformation,” he writes, “is in [God’s] sight a thousand times more hateful than the plain professed malice of those very Miscreants, who threw their vomit in the open face of our blessed Savior.”8 “Beware,” he later warns, “of following Christ, as Thieves follow true [i. e. honest] men, to take their goods by violence from them.”9 Such words, coupled with Hooker’s extensive discussion of the spiritual and temporal benefits that accompany a thriving and respected episcopacy, amount to a severe warning to any who diminish episcopal wealth that they are destabilizing the realm, crippling the church, and imperiling their own souls. Fortunately, Hooker subsequently points out, the queen can be counted on to defend the wealth of her bishops. “Her sacred Majesty,” he writes, is “disposed to be always like herself, her heart so far estranged from willingness to gain by pillage of [the bishops’] estate” that she certainly will not be tempted to undertake actions “so dishonorable” as expropriating episcopal wealth.10 As it turns out, this description of the queen sits rather uncomfortably with her actual behavior in relation to episcopal wealth. In fact she seemed to be quite willing to gain financially at the expense of the bishops. Diarmaid MacCulloch states that under Tudor monarchs, including Elizabeth, the Crown “pursued [an] assault on church estates in the interest of its own pocket and the pockets of a series of eager courtiers.”11 “Royal resources,” Felicity Heal tells us, “were never sufficient to meet lay demands, and the queen had no hesitation in turning to the bishops for their assistance in maintaining the [fiscal] health of the body politic. Any resistance on their part was, she chose to believe, motivated by self-interest and was an affront to her majesty.”12 As a result, by the time Hooker wrote the Lawes, 6 7 8 9 10 11

A. S. McGrade, “Book VII,” in FLE 6(1):334. Eppley, Reading the Bible with Richard Hooker, 197–201. FLE 3:270; LEP VII.21.1. FLE, 3:290; LEP VII.24.1. FLE, 3:307; LEP VII.24.22. Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Later Reformation in England, 1547–1603, 2nd ed. (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 90. 12 Felicity Heal, Of Prelates and Princes: A Study of the Economic and Social Position of the Tudor Episcopate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 211.

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episcopacy in England had endured a long period of economic and social decline […]. Late medieval English bishops were very rich. On the eve of the Reformation they were peers of the realm in wealth as well as social and political status. Accordingly, episcopal lands, manors, and other endowments were second only to monastic holdings as prey in the lay expropriation of the church. By 1600 bishops were reduced in wealth to the level of the gentry.13

Hooker’s awareness of the incongruity between his description of the queen and actual royal policy soon becomes apparent. Just a couple of pages after Hooker praises Elizabeth’s scrupulosity in defense of episcopal wealth, he makes it clear that in fact the protection offered has been far from adequate. With a nod to latemedieval and early modern critiques of excessive episcopal wealth, Hooker concedes that in the past the generous piety of royals and nobles was such that perhaps ecclesiastical wealth grew excessive. Such problems, however, are firmly in the past. “That evil is now sufficiently cured, the Church treasury, if then it were over-full, hath since been reasonably well emptied.”14 Indeed, it hath fared with the wealth of the Church as with a Tower which being built at the first with the highest, overthroweth itself after by its own greatness, neither doth the ruin thereof cease, with the only fall of that, which hath exceeded mediocrity, but one part beareth down another, til the whole be laid prostrate; For although the state Ecclesiastical, both others and even Bishops themselves, be now fallen to so low an ebb, as all the World at this day doth see, yet because there remaineth still somewhat which insatiable minds can thirst for, therefore we seem not to have been hitherto sufficiently wronged.15

As a result, “All that we have to sustain our miserable life with,” Hooker laments, “is but a remnant of God’s own treasure, so far already diminished and clipped, that if there were any sense of common humanity left in this hard-hearted World, the impoverished estate of the Clergy of God, would […] even of very commiseration be spared.”16 To summarize, the financial position of the clergy, including the bishops, is at “so low an ebb,” “laid prostrate,” “impoverished,” “diminished and clipped,” leaving but a “remnant” of ecclesiastical wealth to sustain the “miserable” lives of clergy. In short, Hooker’s depiction of the bishops’ financial condition does not fit any more comfortably with his praise of a queen dedicated to defending the patrimony of the church than does their actual financial condition. In the internal contrast between Hooker’s lamentation on the condition of the church and his praise of Elizabeth as defender of episcopal resources, as well as in the 13 A. S. McGrade, “Episcopacy,” in A Companion to Richard Hooker, ed. Torrance Kirby (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 482. 14 FLE, 3:309–310; LEP VII.24.25. 15 FLE, 3:310; LEP VII.24.25. 16 FLE, 3:311; LEP VII.24.25.

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external contrast between his praise and the facts on the ground in the late Elizabethan church, we hear Hooker’s call for reform. Without leveling any type of direct charge, these tensions allow Hooker to circumspectly challenge the queen, calling on her to actually become the protector of episcopal wealth that he preemptively praises her for being.

6.2

Ecclesiastical Legislation

Similar tensions, perhaps with similar intentions, can be seen in Hooker’s discussion of hermeneutics in relation to church governance and the formulation of ecclesiastical laws. To ensure order in the church, Hooker admonishes puritans to obey ecclesiastical laws even in the face of conscientious scruples. A major barrier to such obedience, of course, is the protestant notion of the fallibility of all human authorities, a fallibility that Hooker acknowledges along with the corollary that reform of church laws will be necessary on occasion. As a consequence, Hooker does not call on puritans to give up assessing church laws in light of their understanding of scripture (a call that would have fallen on deaf ears at any rate). Instead, he calls on them to rethink the approach they take to discerning the meaning of the biblical text. Rather than reading the Bible in isolation and claiming an unrealistic absolute certainty that one’s reading of scripture is correct, puritans are challenged to recognize that they, like all Christians, are fallible and to respect the superior wisdom of the collective English church, speaking through its representatives in Parliament, in the discernment of God’s will. Ecclesiastical laws can and sometimes should be reformed, but such reform must be carried out by the church as a whole in an orderly way. “Laws that have been approved,” Hooker acknowledges, “may be […] again repealed, and to that end also disputed against, by the authors thereof themselves.”17 Rather than engaging in public disputation over the legitimacy of church laws, puritans should limit themselves to working with and through Parliament to promote reform.18 Should Parliament not find their arguments in favor of reform convincing, puritans ought to assume that they have misunderstood God’s will, accepting the superior wisdom of the community as a whole. In fact, Hooker’s case for obedience of church laws rests on the assumption that puritan complaints have been considered by the church as a whole, speaking through Parliament, and found 17 FLE, 1:28; LEP Pref.5.2; emphasis added. 18 In other words, they should actually do what the Admonition to the Parliament rhetorically claims to be doing, that is, address concerns to Parliament. Differences between the type of opposition that Hooker endorses and that exemplified by the Admonition include that calls for reform should be expressed as petitions, not admonitions, and that the discussions need to be kept within the walls of Parliament.

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unconvincing. He admonishes puritans that their refusal to acquiesce to church laws is simply prideful stubbornness because their calls for reform have been rejected by the consensus of the church.19 This assumes, of course, that the evidence brought forward by puritans intended to demonstrate that church reform is necessary has been thoroughly considered by the entire church, laity as well as clergy, speaking through Parliament. According to Hooker’s scheme it is only after such consideration that puritan arguments can meaningfully be said to be rejected by the entire English church as he claims they have been. The external contradiction reflected in this call for obedience is readily apparent. By and large puritan complaints against the Elizabethan church were not definitively rejected by Parliament because Parliament was not allowed to consider them. Repeatedly from the mid–1560s efforts at ecclesiastical reform were initiated in Parliament, and repeatedly such efforts were thwarted by Elizabeth’s flat refusal to allow Parliament to consider further reformation. Some of these proposals (such as establishment of presbyterianism) were radical and attracted only fringe elements, but others were far less controversial (such as efforts to improve the quality of preachers) and drew support from a broad spectrum of protestants including courtiers and bishops. The queen, however, “showed no sign of being more yielding to demands for reform simply because members were asking for a better qualified clergy rather than wanting to replace her supremacy with a Presbyterian structure.”20 In her eyes it was a matter of principle; Parliament simply had no ongoing business meddling in ecclesiastical affairs. As the queen put it in a draft message prepared for Parliament, “by your full consents it hath been confirmed and enacted [in the legislation of 1559] that the full power, jurisdiction and supremacy in Church causes, which heretofore the Popes usurped and took to themselves should be united and annexed to the imperial crown of this realm.”21 Whatever role Parliament may have played in the establishment of the Elizabethan church, the queen did not allow it to function as the sort of venue for ongoing debate of reform that Hooker’s hermeneutics envisions. In his recent biography David Loades calls attention to a prayer of the queen from about 1582; the queen asks that God teach her so that she may “feed Thy people with a faithful and a true heart, and rule them prudently with power.” Loades then comments, “Whether [the queen] ever accepted that God could 19 FLE, 1:338; LEP IV.14.2. For more detailed consideration of the role of Parliament in the formulation of ecclesiastical law and the hermeneutical significance of this role, see Daniel Eppley, “Royal Supremacy,” in A Companion to Richard Hooker, ed. Torrance Kirby (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 520–530. 20 T. E. Hartley, Elizabeth’s Parliaments: Queen, Lords and Commons 1559–1601 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 93. 21 Quoted in Hartley, Elizabeth’s Parliaments, 95.

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sometimes speak to her through those same subjects […] is not entirely clear. What is clear is that she did not believe that He usually did so, and the consistency of her approach lay largely in the fact that she saw her relationship with God as personal.”22 To the extent that the queen did not consult with her subjects (what Hooker calls the English church) regarding God’s will, English ecclesiastical law was not a distillation of the collective wisdom of the church but rather the judgment of one particular Christian. While the queen’s determinations may carry coercive weight, they do not have anything like the sort of hermeneutical weight that Hooker claims for church laws. Since specific puritan objections cannot realistically be said to have been thoroughly vetted by Parliament, puritan disobedience cannot be shown to be contrary to God’s will as discerned by the collective wisdom of the Christian community. In short, Hooker is calling on presbyterians to put aside scruples and accept the established laws of the church on the basis of an argument that does not correspond to the facts regarding the assessment of ecclesiastical laws in Elizabethan England. It is tempting to simply assume that Hooker misunderstands the way that ecclesiastical politics works in Elizabethan England, perhaps even that he is ignorant of attempts to reform the church initiated in Parliament and the queen’s response to such efforts. However, given Hooker’s position as Master of the Temple during the 1580s and his association with men of affairs, including members of Parliament, it stretches credulity to imagine that he knew nothing of the queen’s intervention to shut down discussion of ecclesiastical affairs in Parliament. Hooker argues that puritan disobedience is illegitimate because their complaints have been thoroughly considered and rejected by the entire community of English Christians speaking through Parliament. That simply is not the case, and it seems likely that he knows it. What, then, is Hooker up to?

6.3

Challenging Absolutism

I suggest that the contradiction between Hooker’s presentation of ecclesiastical authority and the actual exercise of authority in the Elizabethan church again allows him to promote reform by indirectly challenging the status quo in the church.23 Just as Hooker’s counterfactually idealized presentation of royal scrupulosity regarding episcopal wealth challenges the queen to actually become 22 David Loades, Elizabeth I (London: Hambledon and London, 2003), 238. 23 A. S. McGrade calls attention to Hooker’s efforts to reform the relationship between Crown and Parliament in the governing of the church, saying that “he seeks to shape the English constitution, not merely to defend it as given.” Again, “Hooker would transform contemporary understanding of established institutions in defending them.” A. S. McGrade, “Book VIII,” in FLE 6(1):355–77, especially 366–74; quotations are on pages 369 and 370.

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the defender of the church he praises her for being, so the arguments he brings forward to convince puritans to respect church laws highlight for the queen the dangers of royal absolutism in ecclesiastical affairs. The dangers accruing to the queen when she seeks to govern the church without consulting Parliament are of two types: first, there is the danger of error that she faces as a Christian seeking to know and promote God’s will; second there is a heightened danger of disorder within the church she governs. I begin with Hooker’s first implicit warning, the danger of error. A key element of Hooker’s argument that laws formulated by the entire church speaking through Parliament are worthy of obedience even in the face of conscientious scruples is the claim that the collective reason of the community is far less likely to fall into error than the reason of an isolated individual. Hooker’s appeal to the superior wisdom of the community compared to the isolated individual implicitly applies to all Christians, including an autocratic queen, as much as it explicitly applies to intransigent puritans. The safest means for any Christian of whatever status to ensure that he or she does not misunderstand God’s will is consultation and dialogue with the entire church speaking through Parliament. Hooker offers a counterfactual description of the role of Parliament in church government, presents the church government thus described as the surest source available for discerning God’s will, and thereby implicitly warns that autocratic rule puts the queen at risk of misconstruing and thus inadvertently opposing God’s will.24 Hooker also issues another implicit warning: the threat of disorder in the realm. In addition to the superior rationality of the collective church, a second argument Hooker puts forward to justify puritan obedience to church laws is that without submission to a final authoritative determination in matters of religion there can be no peace and unity in the church.25 This contains within it an implicit warning that if Parliament is not allowed a role in the formulation of church laws, disorder and division in the church are to be expected. After all, given human fallibility there will always be individuals who fail to appreciate the consistency of church laws with God’s will laid out in scripture, and everybody (certainly every puritan) knows that one must obey God before human authorities. One can no more justify putting aside private scruples regarding a law made by the sole authority of a prince than regarding a law made by the sole authority of a pope. 24 A parallel argument could be made regarding the role that Hooker claims for Convocation, speaking on behalf of the English clergy and acting in conjunction with Parliament. He thought it “unnatural” that clergy, experts in matters of religion, not play a leading role in ecclesiastical legislation. Yet Elizabeth did not generally allow Convocation to play such a leading role in the formulation and assessment of ecclesiastical laws. See Eppley, “Royal Supremacy,” 524–26; FLE 1:174–86; 3:403, 406; LEP II.7; VIII.6.11, 12. 25 FLE, 1:29–34; Pref.6.

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Only an ecclesiastical policy that can credibly claim to embody the collective wisdom of the entire church has the hermeneutical leverage to trump private conscience, convince skeptics that their doubts concerning the godliness of church laws are unfounded, and thus achieve universal acquiescence. Since in Hooker’s view such acquiescence is the sine qua non of a peaceful church, by failing to give Parliament a voice in the formulation and ongoing assessment of ecclesiastical laws, the queen is not only opening herself up to error but also providing a justification for those who refuse to obey church laws.

6.4

Practicing What He Preaches?

Hooker implicitly warns that if institutional structures are not established through which serious Christians can pursue church reform, reform will be pursued through unauthorized channels. The legitimacy of this concern is driven home by a final contradiction in the Lawes, in this case an internal contradiction. It is not clear whether this contradiction is intentional on Hooker’s part, but whether intentional or not, it serves to highlight the importance of establishing a community-based structure for assessing and reforming church policy. As noted above, Hooker recognizes that human fallibility means that the church will always need to be open to the possibility of reform. The process of reform, however, by its very nature is likely to involve contention and therefore to threaten the unity and order of the community. In order to mitigate the dangers entailed in reform efforts, they must take place within the proper forum, one that can resolve differences in an orderly and definitive manner. In the case of the English church, that proper venue is Parliament. For this reason one of the criticisms Hooker levels against puritans is that they spur division by airing calls for reform in public rather than working through the proper parliamentary channels. Arguments for reform must be heard and assessed in Parliament, not among the general public, to allow for orderly and effective change or for definitive determination that no change is necessary. This admonition to puritan dissenters can be contrasted with Hooker’s actual efforts to reform the English church in the Lawes. By re-envisioning various aspects of the church even as he defends it, Hooker is doing what he says puritans must not do – raising the need for reform of the church in a public forum. According to the procedure to which Hooker calls puritans, he himself should promote reform of the church by seeing that his concerns are raised in Parliament, not by raising them in the midst of a book aimed at a broad readership. Parliament, not private citizens like Hooker, should be ensuring that the resources of bishops are properly defended. Parliament should be debating and defining the extent of its own ecclesiastical authority, not private citizens. By

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working to promote reform publicly rather than bringing his concerns before Parliament, Hooker contravenes the rule that he lays down for would-be puritan reformers. In so doing, he calls attention to the fact that Parliament is not fulfilling the role that he says it does in much the same way that his lamentation over the poverty of Elizabethan bishops calls attention to the insufficiency of royal vigilance defending episcopal wealth. This ironic contrast between Hooker’s theory and his practice emphasizes that in a protestant kingdom imbued with the principle that all Christians have access to divine aid in approaching scripture, institutional structures must be established that allow for voicing and communally assessing calls for reform. Otherwise, reform will be pursued in unauthorized ways. Unless Parliament (or some other representative body that can speak on behalf of English Christians) is allowed to function as Hooker envisions it, concerned Christian subjects are going to promote reform through unauthorized channels; puritan agitation in an autocratic church is inevitable and perhaps even understandable. At the same time, Hooker also holds out the promise that if the ecclesiastical polity is allowed to actually function according to the ideal he presents, public agitation for church reform and conscientious disobedience of church laws should largely disappear, the few remaining malcontents would be marginalized and left without rational justification for their intransigence.

6.5

Conclusion

Hooker invites puritans to approach ecclesiastical reform from a posture of loyal opposition – accepting the basic legitimacy of the established church while remaining open to new insights regarding the need for reform of specific policies or practices. Beyond calling for puritans to adopt such a role, Hooker himself exemplifies a type of loyal opposition, subtly working to effect improvement of the church even as he defends it. As part of his efforts to encourage transformation of royal attitudes toward episcopal wealth and toward the role of Parliament in establishing church policies, Hooker employs internal and external contradictions, presenting the queen as governing the church in ways that he knows full well she does not in order to identify problems and propose solutions without directly criticizing any aspect of current royal governance of the church. Consideration of Hooker’s use of ironic tensions to promote reform adds another dimension to our understanding of Hooker as more than simply “a defender of the status quo, an advocate with a brief.” In the process of defending the Elizabethan church as “permissible by various theological and historical standards,” Hooker uses internal and external contradictions to promote reforms that, if applied, “would help make [ecclesiastical policies], not merely

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permissible, but genuinely desirable.”26 This adds nuance to our understanding of Hooker’s relationship not only to the ecclesiastical establishment but also to his puritan adversaries. Regarding reform of the Elizabethan church, there are few issues on which Hooker and his Presbyterian opponents see eye to eye. On point after point Hooker argues that specific puritan objections against the established worship and polity of the church are ill-founded both in principle and in application. There is, however, at least one fundamental point of agreement between Hooker and the church’s puritan critics. Rather than espousing a thoroughgoing Erastianism that entirely subordinates the conscience of the individual to the dictates of the state, Hooker envisions an ongoing role for individual assessment of ecclesiastical policy and calls for mechanisms through which English Christians can initiate reform of their church. Certainly reform efforts must be undertaken circumspectly, within the authorized channels whenever possible, and retaining a humble willingness to submit to the superior rationality of the final judgment of the church community. This is very different, however, from saying that such individual initiative is illegitimate in principle. Like puritans, and the mainstream of Reformed orthodoxy in general, Hooker recognizes the continuing responsibility of each Christian to seek ecclesiastical reform in obedience to scripture.

26 The phrasing is borrowed from A. S. McGrade, “The Three Last Books and Hooker’s Autograph Notes,” in FLE, 6(1):244.

Rudolph P. Almasy

7.

Richard Hooker, Reformed Sermon Making, and the Use of Scripture

On the title page of the 1607 printing of The Arte of Prophecying, William Perkins has duplicated verses from Nehemiah which guide what follows in his “treatise concerning the […] only true manner and method of Preaching.” Perkins reports that Ezra stood upon a wooden pulpit built specially for preaching, opened the holy book which was read, and then those with knowledge gave the sense of the reading and caused the people to understand. Perkins’s report foregrounds the Reformation’s sense of how scripturally-based preaching was to proceed for hearers and for readers. This essay explores some examples of sixteenth-century preaching to illustrate how scripture shaped the sermon and preaching event.1 As will be demonstrated, sermons grounded in a scripturally-based sense of the reading required a preacher to work with selected scripture throughout a sermon in order finally to bring the listener to understanding. My essay concludes with a description of some of Richard Hooker’s practices as he used scripture in his sermons, a description that demonstrates that Hooker followed the “true manner and method of Preaching” that characterized reformed preaching. We can say then that Hooker – and the other sermon writers included in this essay – were orthodox in their attitude toward sermon-making as they embraced the centrality of scripture in Reformation theology, worship, and devotion. Their preaching guaranteed a reformed priority, in the words of the Elizabethan preacher Robert Some, that God’s “holie worde […] a most precious treasure be not as a shut booke, and as a sealed letter unto us.”2 It is not unusual to hear that sixteenth-century reformed preaching was scripturally based. As Susan Wabuda has argued in Preaching during the English Reformation, the Reformation assured that scripturally-based preaching was at 1 For a description of the “English Reformed theory of preaching,” see Mary Morrissey’s essay “Scripture, Style and Persuasion in Seventeenth-Century English Theories of Preaching,” The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 53, no. 4 (October 2002): 686–706. 2 Robert Some, A godly sermon preached in Latin at great S. Maries in Cambridge, in Marche 1580. by Robert Some: and translated by himselfe into English (London: Henrie Middleton, 1580), 5.

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the center of worship.3 Lee Palmer Wandel adds that scripture was primary in structuring the sermon of the Reformation.4 And if the preacher were a Calvinist, he believed that preaching the word of God was, indeed, the word of God – so powerful and effective was the sermon built upon the words of scripture understood as the word of God.5 In sermon-making, the preacher was always to make the primacy of scripture obvious. But how was this achieved? As Torrance Kirby and P.G. Stanwood suggest in their introduction to Paul’s Cross and the Culture of Persuasion in England, 1520–1640, the sermon remains a much neglected genre in the early modern period.6 And I would add that although the importance and centrality of scripture to the Reformation is well-known, scholars have little explored precisely how scripture could be used to produce the English reformed sermon. With this in mind, this essay will also review some examples of how scripture surfaces within the discourse of the preacher and how that preacher’s play with scripture impacts or even directs the discourse. Scriptural passages and citations – often abundant – are present in reformed sermons, but what are they doing for the hearers or readers? How is the writer manipulating words and phrases, whole verses or pericopes – and to what purpose? In observing what is happening within the discourse, we need to go beyond merely saying that scripture appears at the beginning of the sermon as the announced text and that scripture is used in various places to support or illustrate whatever the preacher is saying. As Wabuda remarks, preachers taught, preachers explained, and preachers applied the text.7 What I hope to do is illustrate these generalizations by observing the appearance of scripture in a few sample sermons. I am particularly interested in seeing how Hooker’s practice reflects what we can come to see as reformed orthodox preaching. Perkins’ treatise on the “onely true manner and method of Preaching,” initially published in 1595, systematizes right teaching on sermon-making8 as well as reformed principles for 3 See Susan Wabuda, Preaching during the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 4 Lee Palmer Wandel, The Reformation: Towards a New History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 81. 5 Edward A. Dowey, Jr., “The Word of God as Scripture and Preaching,” in Later Calvinism: International Perspectives, ed. W. Fred Graham, vol. 22 of Sixteenth Century Essays & Studies (Kirksville, MO: Northeast Missouri State University, 1994), 7. Richard Hooker confronts this Calvinist notion in LEP V.22, where he argues that reading the word of God in the worship service can be as powerful as preaching from the word of God. Continuing to embrace the primacy of scripture, Hooker concludes: “surelie the power of the worde of God, even without the helpe of interpretors in Gods Church worketh mightelie, not unto theire confirmation alone which are converted, but also to theire conversion which are not” (FLE 2:91). 6 Torrance Kirby and P.G. Stanwood, ed., Paul’s Cross and the Culture of Persuasion in England, 1520–1640 (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 4. 7 Wabuda, Preaching during the English Reformation, 66. 8 Systematizing right teaching in terms of reformed thought and practice is one aspect, accor-

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scriptural interpretation, and so provides a useful context for observing and explaining what could be going on when a preacher gave the sense and caused the people to understand the reading. In reviewing a few sermons, Hooker’s included, and in using Perkins as context without suggesting that Hooker would have known or used this particular treatise, we can see that, although there were different ways of proceeding in the scripturally-based sermon, there was an orthodox way of producing scripturally-informed sermons. Scholars have been making generalizations about scripturally-based preaching for a long time. Mary Morrissey in her essay “The Paul’s Cross Jeremiad and Other Sermons of Exhortation”9 states that preachers could provide context, they could compare verses, and then they could cross-reference. Sermons were to focus (although they did not always do so) on the person and the words of Jesus to promote doctrinal understanding. That is, reformed doctrine, in the polemical context of so much reformist preaching, usually came first, for example justification by faith or Christ’s atonement, and then scripture was used to explain – or prove – the doctrine. In general, using New Testament models, preachers were to bring the people to repentance and were to perfect the faith of the elect.10 In this way preaching of the word of God when done emphatically could encourage selfreflection and then action.11 John W. O’Malley generalizes that sixteenth-century sermons often moved verse-by-verse through a pericope of scripture.12 A series of sermons (sequential preaching) could move verse-by-verse through an entire book of the bible. Humanist grammarians like Martin Luther and Richard Hooker interpreted a text to discover truths for the Christian life. O’Malley argues

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ding to William J. van Asselt, of determining “reformed orthodoxy.” See his essay “Reformed Orthodoxy: A Short History of Research,” in A Companion to Reformed Orthodoxy, ed. Herman J. Selderhuis (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 11–26. To better understand Perkins’ importance to Elizabethan preaching and his advice to preachers in The Arte of Prophecying, see “Biblical Preaching and English Prose,” in W.B. Patterson, William Perkins and the Making of a Protestant England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 114–34. Morrissey’s essay appears in Kirby and Stanwood, ed., Paul’s Cross, 421–38. Eric Josef Carlson sees the reformed preacher as an agent of salvation, particularly through a unique relationship between preacher and congregation. See his essay “The Boring of the Ear: Shaping the Pastoral Vision of Preaching in England 1540–1640,” in Preachers and People in the Reformations and Early Modern Period, ed. Larissa Taylor (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 249–96. Perkins defines preaching as “Prophecying in the name and roome of Christ, whereby men are called to the state of Grace and conserved in it.” Cf. The Arte of Prophecying (London: Felix Kyngston, 1607), 3. Although the call for self-examination seems always to be present in reformed sermons, such reflection could emerge at different points within the sermon as the preaching relates to the sermon text, or to a scriptural word, or to a point of doctrine, or to a theme not directly taken from scripture. See “Luther the Preacher,” in John W. O’Malley, Religious Culture in the Sixteenth Century: Preaching, Rhetoric, Spirituality, and Reform (Aldershot, UK: Variorum Publications, 1993), 7.

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that Luther stuck to the biblical text and let “it guide the movement of his discourse.”13 To push O’Malley’s argument further, I will contend that preachers like Hooker likewise used biblical verses to guide what they deemed as orthodox reformed preaching.

7.1

Perkins on the Art of Preaching

William Perkins advises the preacher, in arranging his discourse, to first read the text, then give the sense of the text, collect a few points of doctrine, and finally apply doctrine in plain speech to the manners of men. In composing the sermon, Perkins indicates that the priest, after selecting a text, determines the points he is interested in and then finds testimonies from scripture for those points of doctrine. Perkins advises that the one “to preach doe diligentilie imprint in his mind […] the severall doctrines of the place he meanes to handle, the severall proofes and applications of the doctrines, the illustrations of the applications, and the order of them all,” careful that the words selected follow the matter.14 To interpret scripture means to expound the faith in biblical terms, and the method of interpreting scriptural passages is drawn from other scriptural passages.15 With the biblical sentences or illustrations, the preacher can discuss context and then compare and collate. Points should flow logically as one draws conclusions based on the grammatical and rhetorical properties of the words, always sensitive to potential contradictions or ambiguities. In Perkins’ treatise there is significant attention to individual words that can become the substance of a sermon, and this may be one of the reasons sermon texts are short and often familiar. Individual words and short phrases – “Let not your heart be troubled,” for example – are also easy for a listener to remember.16 That is, doctrinal messages from simple scripture are internalized. Perkins defines attention to words as “right cutting” which might mean making distinctions and analyzing words and phrases in order to draw out the doctrine and apply the words or verse – along with illustrations – to Christian living. Much of The Arte of Prophecying instructs how to read words and to make sense of them in service to doctrine. Perkins’ logic 13 14 15 16

O’Malley, Religious Culture in the Sixteenth Century, 8. Perkins, Arte of Prophecying, 131. Dowey, “The Word of God as Scripture and Preaching,” 14. Andreas Hyperius cautions preachers to consider that their hearers “bee not to much burthened or overcharged with matter” and that in filling a sermon with scripture be careful “what the rude and ignorunte may best perceyve and retayne in memorye, to the intent that after they be returned home they may repeat and commende somwhat to their frinds and familiars being either sicke or haile.” Cf. The practice of preaching, otherwise called the Pathway to the Pulpet, trans. John Ludham (London: Thomas East, 1577), 72 v.

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suggests that one cannot preach a sermon without working through the words of a text which – if the preacher does it right – enables the Holy Spirit to persuade. In this regard, those words, whether written or preached, read or heard, can connect believers to the transcendent, one of the notions Nandra Perry explores in her study of the poetics of piety in early modern England as she argues that language is “a reliable medium of relation” to the transcendent.17 But the successful work of the Holy Spirit is coupled with the human effort of preparing to preach. Perkins counsels prayer, as well as attention to one’s commonplace books18 and to the seven ways of describing the different auditors. The soundness of expounding the text in terms of articles of faith is judged through six tests. When it comes to “cutting,” one can consult nine arguments to be assured that the doctrine is correct. All of this exegetical and intellectual work is prior to writing the sermon, so that when the sermon is delivered it is not a regurgitation. Rather, with the substance committed to memory during the “framing” of the sermon, the priest preaches from the heart. As the sermon is uttered, the congregation should not be persuaded by the forensic gifts of the preacher but by the power of God’s word transmitted through preacher and preaching. And apparently the more scripture the better, for as the reformer Urbanus Rhegius believed, the more scripture cited the stronger the faith of the auditor.19 What is encouraged in the delivery – perhaps required – is the masking of the human. Perkins calls it “the hiding of humane wisedome.”20 He continues: “understand that the Minister may, yea and must privately use […] the artes, philosophie, and varietie of reading, whilest he is in framing his sermon: but he oughte in publike to conceale all these from the people, and not to make the least ostentation.”21 In deciding how and when to include scripture within the discourse, the minister must make it apparent that the Holy Spirit is speaking through him;22 and, as Carlson comments, the words of a good Calvinist preacher must never distract from God’s sovereignty and be exalted over the word of God.23 17 Nandra Perry, Imitatio: The Poetics of Piety in Early Modern England (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014), 33. 18 Hyperius indicates that the commonplace book for the preacher is the Bible that contains a great number of illustrations, examples, sayings, and sentences from which one chooses only a few to use, keeping in mind the “capacytie” of one’s hearers (72 v). 19 Scott H. Hendrix, “The Use of Scripture in Establishing Protestantism,” in The Bible in the Sixteenth Century, ed. David C. Steinmetz (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), 43. 20 Perkins, Arte of Prophecying, 132. 21 Perkins, Arte of Prophecying, 133. 22 Perkins defines the “demonstration of the spirit” as “when as the Minister of the word doth in the time of preaching so behave himselfe, that all […] may judge, that it is not so much hee that speaketh, as the Spirit of God in him and by him.” He then quotes 1 Cor. 2:4: “Neither was my speech and my preaching in the persuasive words of mans wisedome, but in the de-

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Case Studies of Elizabethan Sermons

What follows are samples from various sixteenth-century sermons, including Hooker’s. With these samples I hope to show how scripture shaped preaching preparation and delivery in ways we might consider orthodox. But a word of explanation is in order. I have selected these sermons, by well-known clerics, at random, and they do not purport to be typical of the writer nor representative. Rather, my purpose is simply to demonstrate different ways scripture could be used in preaching.

7.2.1 Case Study 1: Perkins on Zephaniah 2:1–2 “Search your selves, even search you oh nation, not worthy to be beloved: before the Decree come forth, and you be as Chaffe that passeth on a day”24

We begin with a sermon by William Perkins on Zephaniah 2 preached at Stourbridge Fair in 1593. It should be no surprise that Perkins gives a word-forword explanation of the meaning and implications of this short, probably familiar biblical text – “Search your selves.” The explanation is based on Perkins identifying what “the meaning of the Holy Ghost seemeth to bee.” Rather than using a great deal of additional scripture, Perkins fixates on theological terms and on the notion of the Holy Spirit, through scripture, “giving us to understand” theological truths.25 Unlike Hooker, as we shall see, Perkins throughout links specific words and ideas to doctrine: Zephaniah’s words “containe in them 5. several points, touching the doctrine of repentance.”26 The listener knows almost immediately that the sermon theme is repentance, the goal of which is reflection on one’s salvation. Surely a sign of reformed preaching, Perkins does keep the text before his hearers, but he does so by relentlessly repeating “search” and later by playing figuratively with and repeatedly elaborating “chaff” and “fanning.” Beyond Zephaniah’s exhortation, there are few scriptural citations, and barely a scrip-

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monstration of the spirit and of power” (133). Morrissey, “Scripture, Style and Persuasion in Seventeenth-Century English Theories of Preaching,” 690, writes that “although the preacher had a duty to try to persuade his hearers, actually moving them to fully accept and follow his teaching was beyond him. According to Reformed doctrine, human beings are incapable of believing the teachings of Scripture without the help of God.” Carlson, “The Boring of the Ear,” 270. An Exhortation to Repentance (London: T. Creede, 1605). The sermon’s content is summarized in Patterson, William Perkins, 115–17. Perkins, An Exhortation, 3–4. Perkins, An Exhortation, 2.

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tural echo. By “echo” I mean a trace of scripture within the writer’s own prose but without a direct quotation or a citation, a gesture one finds Hooker using frequently. Only at the end are familiar biblical figures – in this case Lot, Moses, Noah, Daniel, and Job – mentioned and almost in passing. Many reformed sermons will include the names of familiar biblical characters, perhaps as a way of reminding a congregation of the stories they already knew which could be related to hearing the sermon. If Carlson is correct that reformed preaching established a special, more intimate relationship between preacher and congregation, then some comment is in order on the preacher/people dynamic found in the sermons under review. In my reading of Perkins’ sermon on Zephaniah, the preacher, whose stress is on doctrine and a call to repentance, seems separated from his listeners who are “brethren of this Realme of England” since Perkins’ sermon was initially for fair goers at Stourbridge Fair to whom he preached: “if thou Search into thy selfe, thou wilt finde thy selfe, and thy estate to be such, as will cause thee to repent, returne and take a new course: therefore, what the Prophet sayd to those Jewes, I say unto you also, my brethren of this Realme of England, who are here now gathered together out of so many countries, and quarters of this Realme: yea, in the name of the same God, I cry unto you. Search, O Search your selves.”27 The pronoun “we” is seldom used, and the “he” who is asked repeatedly to search himself seems removed from the preacher who spends time discussing the right way to repentance rather than moving the listener to self-reflection. As we shall see, this is a sermon far less personal than some of Hooker’s efforts, despite the occasional use of “you” for those who have come to buy and sell at Stourbridge Fair.

7.2.2 Case Study 2: Cartwright on Colossians 1:2–6 “To them which are at Colosse, Saints and faithfull brethren in Christ: Grace bee with you, and peace from God our Father, and from the lord Jesus Christ. We give thankes to God even the Father of our lord Jesus Christ, always praying for you: Since wee heard of your faith in Christ Jesus, and of your love towards all Saints. For the hope sake which is laid up for you in heaven, whereof ye have have [sic] heard from before by the word of truth, which is the Gospell.”

Thomas Cartwright preached a series of sermons on Colossians around 1580 which was not published until 1612.28 The second sermon in the series demon27 Perkins, An Exhortation, 42. 28 Cartwright opens his series with the first sermon on chapter 1, verse 1: “Paul an Apostle of Jesus Christ, by the wil of God, and Timotheus our brother.” Demonstrating another way that

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strates how one could proceed during this period in using scripture in one’s discourse and of how “we” – that is, Cartwright’s congregation – can learn from what is said to the “them” of the Bible. As the text for his sermon, Cartwright uses four longer than typical verses, and his strategy is to take specific words – saints, the faithful, love, and Jesus Christ – and to repeat them throughout the sermon. At the beginning of the sermon, Cartwright describes what Paul is doing in this passage. Drawing “attention to that he speaketh” is how Cartwright puts it.29 In describing how Paul proceeds – “here the Apostle meaneth” – he becomes Paul’s partner in extending the Apostle’s words of blessing such as “grace” and “peace” to the congregation. In doing so, Cartwright shows that such doctrinal directions, while not specifically related to the sermon’s text, are nonetheless important to him. And in this elaboration the preacher explicates words and phrases seriatim to focus on one’s “high estate in Chri[s]t”30 as a faithful saint seeking to withdraw from sin. Cartwright’s procedure enables him to speak like Paul to a congregation. As he explains what Paul said to the “they” in Colossae, he artfully turns to his own congregation to speak of “we” and “us.” By mentioning the Colossians’ faith in Christ Jesus, the sermon text provides “a bridle to withdraw us from sinne” and to “examine our selves.”31 Cartwright’s explication stresses that scripture “serveth” doctrine, for example to expose and condemn papal blasphemy, a topic obviously not directly drawn from the text. Cartwright does keep the four verses before the reader, and the sermon’s divisions are based on these verses. Dividing a sermon in this way was not an unusual procedure for it helped signal that scripture was in some way directing the discourse. There are plenty of additional scriptural citations and scriptural echoes throughout which serve to elaborate Cartwright’s points. They also serve as examples to support the general theme of the sermon, namely what it means to be blessed with the spirit of Christ. Beyond applying scripture to Christian life, Cartwright as preacher uses the text for his own inspiration, which results in his thinking further about matters of scripture could appear in a reformed sermon, Cartwright does not explicate verse 1 but rather paraphrases (without citations) the first chapter, giving the hearer (or maybe reader) the drift of Paul’s message as well as suggestions on how to read scripture. He then educates his listeners what to look for in the entire epistle (that is, Paul’s thought), as well as how Paul has divided the letter as the epistle speaks not only to the Colossians but to the contemporary Church of England. See Thomas Cartwright, A commentary upon the epistle of Saint Paule written to the Colossians. Preached by Thomas Cartwright, and now published for the further use of the Church of God, (London: Nicholas Okes, 1612). 29 Cartwright, A commentary, 10. 30 Cartwright, A commentary, 13. 31 Cartwright, A commentary, 12. It may be that Cartwright takes this rhetorical shifting between “they” and “us” from the sermon text itself which begins with “them which are at Colosse, Saints and faithful” and shifts to “we” who have heard about these saints and “we” who give thanks to God for them.

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doctrine (such as sanctification) not specifically in the text of the sermon. In other words, new matter comes to him as he meditates theologically on the ramifications of the text. The occasional exhortations, for example to pray publicly, are not in the text but come to Cartwright as he ponders the text. And here we have an example of how the mind could work in one’s study to draw out doctrine from a biblical verse, a practice much encouraged by William Perkins.

7.2.3 Case Study 3: Richard Greenham on Proverbs 22:1 “A good name is to be desired above great riches.”

A different kind of example is Richard Greenham’s 1595 sermon on Proverbs 22:1.32 Throughout the sermon Greenham repeats that phrase “good name,” insisting (but not showing) that scripture “useth many arguments” about the value of a good name. Scriptural verses are seldom used, however, in any of the “arguments” except at the beginning when riches and gold and silver are mentioned. Save for that biblical phrase “good name,” very few scriptural references or echoes are found in the several pages suggesting why one should have a good name and attend to one’s reputation. Greenham’s strategy is not an unusual one: taking inspiration from a familiar biblical phrase which then leads the preacher to give what he calls “instruction”33 but in this case with little attention to doctrine. One can find only about five or six scriptural citations that seem to be thrown in for illustration in a discourse which sounds like a lecture on behavior, a lecture which distances the preacher from the congregation. Greenham compares those who have a good name such as lawyers and schoolmasters with the “we” of the sermon who are taught the value of a good name and urged to watch their behavior: “if we wyll avoide an evyll name, then we must avoid all evyll surmises and devises against others.”34 The weakness in this approach is Greenham’s failure to incorporate a pastoral voice for the benefit of the “we,” creating distance between the congregation and the preacher counseling “you that feare the Lord”35 to behave. The exhortation to examine oneself and one’s good name is only loosely based on scripture. And when Greenham urges good works, they are 32 Richard Greenham, Two Learned and Godly Sermons, Preached by that reverende and zelous man M. Richard Greenham, (London: Gabriel Simson and William White, 1595). 33 Greenham’s “instruction” seems almost platitudinous: “if we be carefull of our owne good name, if we have any zeale of God his glory, if we have any care of the worlde, if we have any love of the saintes, then let us carefully shun all and every infirmitie whereby Gods name is dishonored, his glorious Gospel blasphemed, his children greeved, and we our selves discreditied amongst the wicked” (Two Learned and Godly Sermons, 16). 34 Greenham, Two Learned and Godly Sermons, 20. 35 Greenham, Two Learned and Godly Sermons, 25.

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linked merely to worldly reputation. So there is plenty of advice from “our common lyfe” about upright living and reputation. As it concludes, the sermon does force a call to self-examination and repentance as Greenham addresses the auditor – that “you” who is finally left in fear of losing a good name when ill “report” is “raysed on us.”36

7.2.4 Case Study 4: Robert Some on Hosea 14:2–3 “Take unto you words, and turne to the Lord and say to him, take away al iniquitie, and receive us graciously, so wil we render the calves of our lippes. Asshur shall not save us, neither will we ride upon horses, neither will we say any more to the worke of our hands, ye are our Gods, for in thee the fatherless findeth mercie.”

If we seek a sermon which demonstrates “the rich storehouse of Gods book,”37 one of the best examples would be this sermon by Robert Some.38 Some breaks the scriptural text into five sections, each of which discusses the ramification of one of the text’s phrases. As Some does this, he speaks of God’s judgment, describes various characters from the bible who repented, and addresses the truly repentant sinner. Throughout, Some uses familiar scriptural citations (often five citations per page) to explain Hosea’s message, and he singles out words from the text to keep before his congregation – “words,” “say,” “turne,” “lippes.” In fact the power of the words of scripture is assumed in Some’s presentation. His emphasis on the biblical stories attempts to systematically replicate what the prophets did with words, what David did, what the Israelites did, what God did, what he himself is doing – using scriptural words as the voice of God so those who listen will turn to God in repentance. But as Hosea exhorts “take unto you words,” the sole auditor is skillfully woven into all the words that Some duplicates. Illustrations are plentiful in showing the biblical pattern of repentance, and Some preaches “we must treade in the steppes” of those biblical figures.39 The single listener becomes “we” as he or she hears repeatedly “we must.” In addition to Hosea’s words, Some finds other scripture, especially the Psalms, that speaks of the sinner. Typical of sixteenth-century preachers, Some includes as examples biblical personalities, but more than we might find in other sermons – Eve, Cain, Isaiah, Daniel, David, Joel, Job, Judas, Peter, and Paul, and often their words. His pattern is predictable: “As David, Joel, Christ, and Hosea did, so must we”; in confessing, “Ezra, Job, Nehemias, and the Publicane did the 36 37 38 39

Greenham, Two Learned and Godly Sermons, 41. Some, A godly sermon, 23. The 1580 London printing of Some’s sermon lists the text erroneous as verses 3 and 4. Some lists Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Moses in A godly sermon, 13.

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like. So must we do, even freely and from the heart.”40 Further, he includes in his own prose scriptural echoes. In fact we could say, since there is so much scripture on repentance in this 25–page sermon, that the sermon’s sub-text is (and Hooker would agree) just read and hear “holy and sounde words.”41 Perhaps all the repetition (or bombardment) from scripture assures that the message “might take deep roote in the harts” of the auditors,42 clearly a goal of reformed preaching. There is little of the preacher Some in the sermon save for his concluding call for self-examination among his Cambridge University auditors – our sins, our praise, our lips. It is easy to conclude then that Some sees his task as gathering and organizing scripture (which he does expertly) in order to enable scripture alone to speak to all those who seek to turn to God.

7.2.5 Observations on These Case Studies We have seen how the orthodox or “one onely true manner and method of preaching” for Perkins is the careful and consistent use of scripture that forms and informs the sermon. The sermon finds its substance in scriptural words and sentences, and such substance explores basic reformed theological doctrine, an exploration to test the new way of understanding and embracing Christian doctrine. But there certainly is no “one onely true manner” of using scripture within the discourse, except perhaps practice in displaying the power of individual words or phrases, and searching for all that a verse or word can contain. There are different ways of performing “the sense of the reading” and in that performance scriptural language and analysis appear in a variety of ways, as do the attempts to establish or reflect the special relationship between preacher and congregation. One might find several pages in a sermon where no scripture appears; on the other hand one can find in any single page of certain sermons several scriptural references or citations. Not only are scriptural verses themselves duplicated, but there can be numerous scriptural echoes and paraphrasing that those familiar with the bible would easily recognize. However, both verse and echo need not be directly related to the text of the sermon. Writers might move 40 Some, A godly sermon, 17–18. 41 Some, A godly sermon, 9. Hooker’s defense of reading can be applied to Some’s heavy use of scripture within his sermon, for such abundant scripture used as illustration without much explication could “leave an apprehension of thinges divine in [the] understanding, and in the minde an assent thereunto” (FLE 2:85; LEP 5.21). To read scripture in the worship service and, I would add, to hear scripture read within sermons, as Some and others like Hooker would have done, would “furnish the verie simplest and rudest sorte with such infallible axioms and precepts of sacred truth […] whereby to judge the better all other doctrine and instructions which they heare” (FLE 2:89; LEP 5.18–22). 42 Some, A godly sermon, 26.

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verse by verse but more often word by word through a small selection. Sometimes preachers report what a biblical writer like Paul is doing rather than what Paul is saying, perhaps as an aid for congregants to read Paul on their own. As the examples explored thus far show, it is not unusual to find a great deal of repetition of single words or phrases in sixteenth-century preaching. In these examples, there is little comparing of biblical texts or reconciling of contradictions as Perkins recommends. There is, however, some collating or use of a scriptural passage to illustrate or reinforce another scriptural passage. It might be the case that Old Testament citations are deliberately found to support or illustrate the New Testament selections. It is true that, as Perkins sought, there is significant attention to individual words (Perkins’ notion of “cutting”) and how one can expand upon the importance of individual words to create discourse. But it might not be unusual to find that although there is a biblical text for the sermon, that text can be used minimally in the discourse. Context, however, is seldom explored, but if explored, seldom done deeply. It is possible that the doctrine exhorted (and there is always doctrine) really provides the context or motivation to explore words and phrases which then prompt the sermon writer to go off in certain directions important to him, probably enthusiastically in search of application or further support for doctrine.43 It is no exaggeration to say that display of doctrine is as important as the display of scripture, both fundamental, Morrissey would argue, to English reformed preaching theory.44 We might even venture to say that doctrine is more important. Perkins, of course, would approve of this turn to doctrine, especially when matters of doctrine, rather than scriptural display, encourage self-reflection. The masking of the human, which Perkins counsels, is not always obvious or successful. And there are a variety of ways preachers use scriptural texts to guide the movement of the discourse. More often, the discourse aims to bring about understanding of the doctrine that comes from the reading and an embrace of that doctrine in faith.

43 Although Hyperius counsels preachers to follow a certain sequential organization in a sermon based on a sentence from scripture, many writers often do multiple tasks throughout their sermons as they find inspiration in the popular reformist citation of 2 Tim. 3:16 to use scripture “to teach, to improve, to correct and to instructe in righteousness.” That is, in Hyperius’ scheme, all through a sermon when any scripture is quoted or cited the sermon writer is almost multitasking – identifying doctrine, admonishing for righteousness, reproving false assertions (that is, “redargucion”), and consoling or urging faith in God’s promises. 44 Morrissey, “Scripture, Style and Persuasion,” 693.

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Richard Hooker’s Sermonic Practice

With this long prelude behind us, we can turn now to review four sermon fragments from Richard Hooker to determine how orthodox he is in his use of scripture within his sermonic discourse. Since I am not examining the form of the Reformation sermon but the use of scripture within the sermon, I feel comfortable in commenting on Hooker’s sermon fragments rather than on the longer and more theologically complex full sermons that have come down to us. Unfortunately, longer works such as “Certaintie and Perpetuitie of Faith in the Elect” and “A Learned Sermon of the Nature of Pride” are often seen as typical of Hooker’s sermon making.45 Regardless of which sermon is in the making, Hooker’s use of scripture in the fragments is not dissimilar to what happens in various sections of the longer sermons, sermons that we might characterize as less pastoral, and more intellectual and combative. In the longer sermons, Hooker duplicates Perkins’ interest in the “right understanding” of scripture. Biblical verses are sprinkled throughout the texts and often lead Hooker to points of doctrine. In all his sermons, but especially in the Jude sermons, he does keep the biblical texts before the auditors while other scriptural verses, often woven into Hooker’s own prose, are there for illustration and elaboration. In the second Jude sermon, for example, as Hooker elaborates on “Our most holy faith,” he confidently announces “Every of these I have proved by the testimony of Gods owne mouth.”46

7.3.1 Case Study 1: Sermon Fragment on Proverbs 3:9–10 “Honour the Lord with thy substance, and with the first-fruits of all thine increase. So shall thy barns be filled with plenty, and thy presses shall burst out with new wine.”

Let us turn first to the fragment on this passage, no doubt familiar for the religious person of the sixteenth-century.47 In the fragment’s two and a half pages there are at least nine scriptural references in addition to the repetition of the sermon’s text. This is not unusual for Hooker: biblical references and scriptural echoes (words such as “multiply” and “famine” and “fruits”) abound and cohere to Hooker’s own prose. Also typical is a focus on two aspects: a promise (doctrine) and a duty (application). In good reformed fashion, the text then enables 45 See, for example, J.W. Blench’s discussion of Hooker under Elizabethan Preachers in chapter 11 (Form) and chapter 3 (Style) in Preaching in England in the Late Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1964). 46 FLE 5:51; “Second Sermon upon Part of S. Jude,” 27. 47 Hooker’s sermon fragment on Proverbs 3.9–10 is found in FLE 5:414–17.

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Hooker to turn to doctrine. God’s reward – “so shall thy barns be filled with plenty” – is not the result of one’s worthiness but of God’s goodness. Quoting additional scripture, Hooker interprets a verse from Hosea in support of the sermon’s text and duplicates a passage (unidentified) about God’s generous nature.48 Hooker the preacher joins with the hearers by means of the pronouns “you” and “our” (and never the writer’s “I”) as they all join together in repentance and prayer. The fragment which promises figuratively that “presses shall burst out with new wine” ends not with reference to the preacher’s performance but to the witness of the Holy Spirit: as God cares for “his family which is the world” the voice of the preacher and of God speak to the individual: “the spirit doth single every man out by himself […] as it were spoken to one by one.”49 Hooker has a “manner” and “method” of holding scripture before the auditor as he performs as Calvin’s disciple of scripture. Hooker is not, as the generalization goes, expounding verse by verse. Instead, it appears from what he announces as the five ideas he will consider from the Proverbs 3 text that he is explicating the text by word and/or by phrase – a type of “cutting.” The text of the sermon fragment (and this is true for the more complete sermons) is built on discursive units which we might call paragraphs. This compositional unit is less a matter of explicating a verse and more a textual movement out of the sermon text (not unlike Thomas Cartwright’s practice) – a word or idea that emerges from the text.

7.3.2 Case Study 2: Sermon Fragment on Matthew 27:46 “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me.”

These generalizations hold true for the sermon fragment on this familiar text, which, being so short, is easily duplicated more than once in the sermon. Hooker’s use of pronouns “my” “thou” and “me” is typical, and provides a personal dimension that brings the listener into the experience of Jesus’ being forsaken. Can we indeed, Hooker asks, “imagin”50 the feeling of being abandoned, of being forsaken. Hooker labels this “dereliction” either of probation or reprobation. As Perkins has advised, Hooker turns attention to doctrine; in this case God’s promise of faithfulness as well as Jesus’ human nature. He uses pas48 Hooker translates the Latin he cites as: “The things we owe unto God are in this respect so much the greater, for that of him we receive all things and are therfore the less able to answere his benefites, because though we covert to render unto him whatsoever we ow, yet we pay him nothing but out of his own” (FLE 5:416; “A Sermon Fragment on Proverbs 3.9–10”). 49 FLE 5:417, “A Sermon Fragment on Proverbs 3.9–10.” 50 FLE 5:401; “A Sermon Fragment on Matthew 27.46.”

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sages from Job, Isaiah, and Lamentation to comment on the notion of being forsaken. When Hooker explores probation and reprobation, however, it is the plain meaning of scripture rather than his own intellectual maneuvering which directs his analysis. As for the presence of scripture, Hooker duplicates five verses, one right after the other, about God’s “sweet and comfortable promises.”51 The listener hears not the preacher but God speaking in scriptural litany to those worried about abandonment: I had compassion on thee. My mercy shall not depart from thee. I will make an everlasting covenant. I will never turn away. No man shall take them out of my hands.

The doctrine is obvious: there is a provident and loving God who never abandons the elect. Although typical in reformed sermons, the duplication of the five verses is a bit unusual for Hooker who seldom merely lists verses as he does here but rather prefers to weave into his own prose either verse or echo, often without supplying a citation (at least in what we have that has survived). For example, in mentioning the dereliction of reprobation and that “no sonne of God exempt from it,” Hooker writes of Jesus: “That sonne of whome he hath testified with thundering voice from heaven, This is my welbeloved in whome I am well pleased, the sonne in whome I have joy and delight.”52 Hooker is artfully referencing a familiar scene, Jesus’ baptism. Additionally, an extraordinary passage that narrates the beating of Jesus by “the violent hands of miscreants” demonstrates Hooker’s skill at such weaving. Those listening would likely have the crucifixion scene in their imagination from the sermon text (if not for other reasons), and so Hooker preaches to capitalize on that pictorial with details found in all four gospels which he weaves into his own sentences: Jesus’ eyes wounded by scornful looks. His ears with the sounds of heinous blasphemies. His tongue with gall. The tortures—thornes, whippes, nailes, and the dint of the spear.

It would not have mattered that Hooker omitted citations for these scriptural gestures. Who in the congregation would not have heard from John chapter 19 of the soldier “with a speare” who “perced his side”? And might a few have thought of their own eyes and ears and tongues, the torture of whips and nails and thorns, regardless of how Hooker would have delivered the sermon? Hooker deliberately 51 FLE 5:399; “A Sermon Fragment on Matthew 27.46.” 52 FLE 5:399; “A Sermon Fragment on Matthew 27.46.”

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builds his own prose to include, in specific ways, details, words, phrases, images, and scenes as if scriptural detail is controlling what Hooker is writing. There comes a time for Hooker, in the face of scripture’s power to suggest the soul of Jesus “as a scorched heath, wherein no on[e] drop of the moisture of sensible joy is left”53 when the preacher ceases his performance and allows the informed imagination of the hearers to take over: “But I do foolishly to labour in explicating that which is not explicable; that whereof our fittest esteeme is our very astonished silence.”54 Within silence, within astonishment, perhaps this is where one senses the work of the Holy Spirit, so dear to the biblical preaching of the reformed minister.

7.3.3 Case Study 3: Sermon Fragment on Hebrews 2:14–15 “That through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the Devil: And deliver them, which for fear of death were all their life time subject to bondage.”

According to its editors, the sermon fragment on this text “seems mostly complete and may lack little more than a concluding sentence.”55 In this fragment, we see Hooker as a scripturally-possessed sermon writer, for the sermon deals exclusively with these verses from Hebrews, the words of which appear in almost all the fifteen paragraphs that comprise the fragment. Throughout, the listener, fearful of death, is brought in as a “you”: “Let not the subtiltye of Satan beguile you with fraudulent exceptions”;56 yet the preacher and the auditor together are constructed as the “we” or “us” of the text: “we should be contented to give place unto others by death, as by birth we have succeeded others dead.”57 Additionally, the scriptural echo of “all” is also often heard: Christ hath died to deliver all; inviting all unto him that labour; that he might deliver all. Hooker designs the sermon around six things he wants to cover which as sections of the sermon emerge directly out of the verses from Hebrews or points of doctrine from those verses.58 For example, “They who lived as sonnes [of God], 53 FLE 5:401; “A Sermon Fragment on Matt. 27.46.” 54 FLE 5:401; “A Sermon Fragment on Matt. 27.46.” 55 P.G. Stanwood and Laetitia Yeandle, “Three Manuscript Sermon Fragments by Richard Hooker,” Manuscripta (1977) 21:35. 56 FLE 5:407; “A Sermon Fragment on Hebrews 2.14–15.” 57 FLE 5:412; “A Sermon Fragment on Hebrews 2.14–15.” 58 As Greg Kneidel explains in his essay “Ars Praedicandi: Theories and Practice,” Hooker’s announcing his six points would not have been unusual since early modern sermon writers used various signals to help the listener understand what was being discussed and what was to come. Kneidel’s essay is in The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon, eds. Peter McCullough, Hugh Adlington, and Emma Rhatigan (Oxford: Oxford University Press Press, 2011), 3–20. Pettegree observes that the intensely biblical preaching reflected “a method and

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being dead are as heyres blessed.”59 As Hooker works with the biblical text, he allows the apostle to speak, rather than telling the listeners what the apostle is doing and saying. In each paragraph there are not only references to the sermon text but also frequent paraphrases and direct citations as well as numerous scriptural echoes. There is good reason for John Stafford to celebrate this “huge density of biblical allusions.”60 Surely this is what is meant by scripturally-based preaching, and surely this reflects orthodox reformed sermon-making which demonstrates through the density of scripture the primacy of scripture to the believer. But Hooker might be going beyond typically orthodox reformed practices. Through his scriptural tapestry – that is, using scripture repeatedly and weaving in scripture in multiple ways – Hooker gives to the bible an urgent and present discursive authority, and this is not always found in reformed sermons when the preacher is not able to disappear into the text or where scripture is used infrequently. In Hooker’s fragments, the text and the themes are clearly and directly kept before the congregation; the performance does not draw attention to the preacher nor to any textual distractions or digressions. Two illustrations from the Hebrews sermon will suffice. Of the thirteen sentences in paragraph eight, ten are either directly scriptural or refer to scripture or echo scripture, all of this in a well-organized, coherent paragraph that never seems tedious nor forced. Then, in paragraph thirteen the word “death” (three times in the sermon’s text) appears ten times within seventeen lines. With death inescapable and fear a fundamental emotion, some listeners might be slaves to fear, godless, undelivered, but others – the sons of God – have a great deal less fear. With that binary, Hooker goes beyond a mere “right understanding” of doctrine. He makes it personal. Christ’s atonement becomes, for Hooker and for his congregants, our deliverance; Satan’s defeat “the end that [Christ] might deliver all.”61

7.3.4 Case Study 4: “A Remedie Against Sorrow and Feare” (John 14:27) “Let not your hearts be troubled, nor feare.”

pattern entirely appropriate for illiterate and semi-literate populations: the purposeful use of lists, paired contrasts, repetition, summary and reiteration.” Cf. Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 39. 59 FLE 5:413; “A Sermon Fragment on Hebrews 2.14–15.” 60 John K. Stafford, “Sustaining Reform: Mighty Themes in Hooker’s Sermons on Jude,” in Lutheran and Anglican: Essays in Honour of Egil Grislis, ed. John Stafford (Manitoba, Winnipeg: St John’s College Press, 2009), 239. 61 FLE 5:407; “A Sermon Fragment on Hebrews 2.14–15.”

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The final example is Hooker’s funeral sermon “A Remedie Against Sorrow and Feare” based on these well-known words of Jesus. Hooker’s sermon to calm fears of death and worries about afflictions is full of scriptural citations and echoes. On the first page alone there are at least twelve citations outright or woven into Hooker’s prose. These are mostly from John 14, where Jesus is addressing his disciples – but he is also addressing the listeners of the sermon. One example (please note the pronouns) will suffice: “Desolate and comfortless I will not leave you, in spirit I am with you to the worlds end, whether I bee present or absent nothing shall ever take you out of these hands, my going is to take possession of that in your names which is not only for me but also for you prepared, where I am, you shalbe.”62 As Jesus speaks to the disciples, the plural “you” (or “your”) appears thirteen times in a brief section. The biblical “let not your heart be troubled” is deliberately changed by Hooker into the plural “hearts” so that the gathered ones (whether in the upper room or the local church building) hear Jesus repeatedly counsel “with chosen sentences of sweet encouragement”63 not to be fearful nor worry that fear is sin. Using binaries in typical fashion, Hooker contrasts the “old” man of scripture who grieves sinfully with the reborn who accept affliction with peace and patience. As encouragement, Hooker gestures towards but does not identify Luke 21:19: “Even learne also patience, o my soule.”64 If “perturbation of the mind” affects those listening – and indeed Hooker lists familiar and often troubled biblical figures like David and Job and Paul – Hooker as a good reformed preacher counsels self-reflection on such frailty. As he clarifies the problem of fear, he does something that Perkins himself would have approved: he explains Hebrews 5:7 in order to avoid confusion in his hearers.65 The sermon ends with a plethora of scriptural allusions, returning to the biblical scene in John’s version of the upper room (the familiar “farewell discourse”). One example will suffice: the master’s promise of a “peace which passeth all understanding, peace that bringeth with it all happiness, peace that continueth for ever and ever with them that have it.”66 At the end those listening are to recall the powerful doctrine of surrender, faith, and grace: “Come my people, saith God, in the Prophet [Isaiah] Enter into thy Chamber, hide thy self.”67 62 63 64 65

FLE 5:367, “A Remedie Against Sorrow and Feare.” FLE 5:367; “Remedie.” FLE 5:372; “Remedie.” Hooker writes: “How cleere is the evidence of the spirit that in the daies of his flesh [Jesus] offered up praiers and supplications with strong cries and teares unto him that was able to save him from death, and was also hearde in that which he feared? Heb.5.7. Whereupon it followeth that feare in its selfe is a thing not sinful” (FLE 5:375; “Remedie.”) 66 FLE 5:377; “Remedie.” 67 FLE 5:377; “Remedie.”

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Concluding Remarks

As his sermons indicate, Richard Hooker is interested in both doctrine and scripture as he composes his sermons following orthodox reformed practices. Although always the aggressive rhetor, he surrenders in a sense to scripture which so often guides the movement of his discourse. His citations are plentiful, as are scriptural echoes throughout his own prose.68 As Perkins recommends, Hooker works through the words and phrases of the sermon’s text which is always kept before the auditors. This performance leads those listeners to an understanding of reformed doctrine, to an effort of perfecting their faith as the elect, and to selfreflection concerning Christian attitudes towards a life often characterized by travail. One could argue that Hooker’s practices and heavy use of scripture are markedly protestant in that they show all the signs of the doctrine of sola scriptura. What is particularly noteworthy is Hooker’s sensitivity, especially in the fragments, to his congregation and his own efforts, surely deliberate and welldesigned, to join with them in understanding doctrine, perfecting faith, and reflecting on his own attitudes and feelings. To become one with his parishioners may be his strategy at masking the human; that is “to make the least ostentation” as Perkins would have it.69 Following Isaiah’s call to “hide thy self,” Hooker displays his reformist desire to hide himself within the text of scripture, believing that through language one can be incorporated into the church through the efficacy of scripture. He produces discourse which gives the impression that the work being done is being done by scripture not by a preacher. Perhaps this is why Hooker, as reported, may have been deliberate in his low voice, without gesture “standing stone-still in the Pulpit.”70 Richard Hooker plays out what Perkins says 68 In this regard, Lee Palmer Wandel’s observation is an important one, that as the preacher read scripture aloud to his congregation he gave a “living human voice” to scripture and that “living human voice” was heard throughout the sermon as scripture after scripture was recited and used to hold the discourse together. Cf. The Reformation: Towards a New History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 81. We can add then that the frequency of scripture through the aural experience in Hooker’s preaching joined hearers and scripture in an intimate way as well as joining Hooker and his congregants in a unique pastoral manner. 69 Perkins, Arte of Prophecying, 133. For all the references Perkins makes to the work of the Holy Spirit in persuading auditors of the bible’s truths, he does conclude in chapter 10 on “uttering” of the sermon and masking the human that the preacher should remember that “also a point of Art [is] to conceal Art.” 70 Thomas Fuller quoted in P.E. Forte, “Richard Hooker as Preacher,” in FLE 5:658. Although Hooker is fundamentally polemical in his attack in V.22 on puritan preaching, he appears genuinely concerned that at the center of the preaching performance might be the preacher rather than the scriptures since sermons can reflect “the witt of man, and therefore they oftentimes accordinglie tast too much of that over corrupt fountaine from which they come” (FLE 2:99; LEP V.12.11). In identifying the various ways the word of God is made known to listeners, Hooker sarcastically defines puritan preaching as when the word of God is “ex-

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about masking the human so that “when as the Minister of the word doth in the time of preaching so behave himselfe, that all […] may judge, that it is not so much hee that speaketh, as the Spirit of God in him and by him.”71

planed by livelie voice and applied to the peoples use as the speaker in his wisdom thinketh meete. For this alone is it which they use to call preaching” (FLE 2:83; LEP V.11.1). 71 Perkins, Arte of Prophecying, 133.

Scott N. Kindred-Barnes

8. “Symbolizing with Idolaters”: George Gillespie’s Critique of Hooker’s “Convenient” Way

8.1

Introduction

From what I am given to understand, Monsiegneur, there are two kinds of rebels who have risen up against the King and the Estates of the Kingdom. The one, a fantastical sort of persons, who, under colour of the Gospel, would put all into confusion. The others are persons who persist in superstitions of the Roman Antichrist. –Letter by John Calvin to Protector Somerset; Geneva, 22 October 1548.1

We begin with a quotation from John Calvin, not because he is the only indicator of Reformed Orthodoxy, but because his letter to Edward Seymour plainly contains a warning for the Lord Protector: all those who support the Reformation cause in England should be wary of two kinds of extreme “rebels.” First, Calvin warns against those characterized as “fantastical,” who in the name of the Gospel, would push order aside in favour of confusion. People in this category clearly stood contrary to something very important to Calvin and, in fact, to others who supported the magisterial Reformation in general: namely, the unity and good order of a Christian society. Second, Calvin warns the Duke of Somerset about “rebels” who would remain resolute in upholding the superstitions of the Roman Antichrist. Both of these extremes would need to be avoided if England was to establish a properly Reformed church. Some 44 years after Calvin penned this letter, when the great French-born reformer had been dead for some 29 years and the reformation cause was still very much debated in England, Richard Hooker would himself commend Calvin, describing him as “the wisest man that ever the french Church did enjoy, since the hour it enjoyed him.”2 While Hooker admired Calvin and granted praise where praise was do, he cautioned his readers against the folly of applying Geneva’s 1 “John Calvin to Protector Somerset; Geneva, 22 October 1548,” in John Calvin: Compiled from Original Manuscripts and Edited with Historical Notes, ed. and trans. Jules Bonnet (Edinburgh: Thomas Constable and Co., 1858), 2:168–184. 2 FLE 1:4–5; LEP Pref. 2.1.

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context to all other ecclesiastical environments. “Calvin,” wrote Hooker, “being admitted one of their [Geneva’s] Preachers, and a divinitie reader amongst them, considered how dangerous it was that the whole estate of that Church should hang still on so slender a thred, as the liking of an ignorant multitude is, if it have power to change whatsoever it selfe listeth.”3 For Hooker, perhaps Calvin’s greatest accomplishment in Geneva was his establishment of reliable order, a principle rather important if not essential to Hooker’s own thinking. Sometime early in 1637, the young and able Scottish Presbyterian, George Gillespie, anonymously published his first major work in the Netherlands entitled A Dispute Against the English Popish Ceremonies. By the summer of the same year the work appeared in Scotland just as the entire kingdom was reacting to the introduction of the new Scottish Book of Common Prayer.4 Gillespie was highly critical of episcopalian so-called “innovations” in worship and especially scathing towards Richard Hooker’s defense of the Church of England’s ceremonies and festivals. By “innovations” Gillespie meant those traditions of men in general that had crept into the Church after the time of the apostles. The Articles of Perth (1618) had crystalized the resistance of Presbyterian Scots, since they epitomized a kind of liturgical uniformity with the English Church that many in Scotland, even before Gillespie, could not accept.5 By the time that Gillespie’s book was printed it caused such an uproar in Scotland that by October of 1637 the Scottish Privy Council ordered all copies of the book to be collected and burnt by the common hangman.6 In A Dispute Gillespie critiqued Hooker and the avant-garde churchmen who used his arguments to support the Church of England’s ceremonies. Gillespie launched his attack on grounds that his opponents used artificial arguments in order to support their ungodly motives. In Gillespie’s Preface, for instance, which was addressed to “All and Every One in the Reformed Churches of Scotland, England, and Ireland, who love the Lord Jesus, and mean to adhere unto the Reformation of Religion,” he distinguished between those who use religion for their own gain and those who truly desire to worship and serve God in spirit and in truth. The “subdubous [sic] Machiavellian,” writes Gillespie, “accounteth the show of religion profitable, but the substance of it troublesome; he studieth not 3 FLE 1:3–4; LEP Pref. 2.1. 4 Joel R. Beeke and Randall J. Pederson, Meet the Puritans (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2006), 699. 5 Crawford Gribben has located the main offense of the Articles of Perth in “the Arminian theology and anglicization the innovations appeared to represent” (The Puritan Millennium: Literature & Theology 1550–1682 [Four Courts Press, 2000], 101.) 6 “Gillespie, George (1613–1648),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: In association with The British Academy from the earliest times to the year 2000, vol. 22: Gibbes-Gospatric, ed. H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 257.

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the oracles of God but the principles of Satanical guile, which be learneth so well that he may go to the devil to be bishopped.”7 Here Gillespie’s description of scholasticism as a kind of “Satanical guile” is based on the assumption that his opponents used compromised biblical interpretations in order to justify an official religion that benefited them both politically and ecclesiastically. Such polemical accusations seem hardly applicable to Hooker, since he was neither consecrated as a bishop nor void of biblical learning.8 Yet the Church of England was a source of social and financial mobility for some and Hooker himself had a reputation among at least some dissenters as one of “the noble Patrons of Pluralities and Nonresidencie.”9 Gillespie thought of Hooker and his followers as certainly no better than Calvin’s second category, that is, those who persist in superstitions of the Antichrist. In fact, he seems to have considered them worse than the earlier idolaters since unlike the papists of Calvin’s era, Hooker and his followers were thought to have departed from the Reformation cause for reasons of hypocrisy and covetousness, stubbornly rebelling against further reform, and upholding the superstitions of Antichrist, all for the sake of personal gain.10 Michael Brydon has demonstrated how Hooker was an important resource for the ceremonial preoccupations of avant-garde churchmen such as William Laud, Lancelot Andrewes and others under Charles I.11 Moreover, as the avant-garde churchmen found in Hooker a convenient ally and selectively marshalled his ideas to support their own Arminian theologies and immutable jure divino ecclesiologies,12 Hooker’s reputation became further estranged from its Reformed roots and the real beginning of the via media notion began to take root. Laud and the avant-garde churchman, however, are not entirely to blame for Hooker’s emerging via media reputation. Hooker’s own ambiguity left him open to a variety of interpretations. My paper will compare Hooker’s “convenient”

7 Preface, A Dispute, vii. 8 In fact, the Lawes attest that Hooker was rigorous in his study of the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures and exceptionally familiar with both Latin and Greek Christian and pagan sources. 9 See Scott Kindred-Barnes, “One of the ‘Learned Tracts published long since’: Henry Jacob’s Contribution to Richard Hooker’s Reputation,” in Richard Hooker: His Life, Work, and Legacy – Essays in Honour of W. David Neelands on his Seventieth Birthday, ed. Daniel F. Graves and Scott Kindred-Barnes (Bradford, ON: St. Osmond Press, 2013), 209–229. 10 As will be shown below, Gillespie did not think of Hooker and avant-garde churchmen as pure papists but rather Nicodemites who compromised the Reformed faith for the purpose of selfish gain. 11 See Michael Brydon, The Evolving Reputation of Richard Hooker: An Examination of Responses 1600–1714 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 45–80. 12 For more on how Hooker understood the episcopacy as a preferred but not immutable form of church governance see Daniel Graves, “Jure Divino? Four Views on the Authority of the Episcopacy in Richard Hooker,” Anglican and Episcopal History 81, no. 1 (March 2012): 47– 60.

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arguments in support of the Church of England to Gillespie’s arguments in favour of liberty of conscience. It is hoped that by the end of the paper a picture will emerge demonstrating that, while both theologians are to be considered part of the Reformed camp, each traveled down different trajectories of this broad tradition. Hooker believed the Reformation had already happened in England, and thus he fully supported the Thirty-Nine-Articles as a standard of Reformation faith. With this Reformed standard and others in mind he sought to defend the ceremonies of the established church against those he regarded as fantastical and misguided extremists, who, under colour of the Gospel, would pull the entire commonwealth into confusion. Gillespie by contrast, like those Reformers before him who resisted various kinds of imposed “popish” religion, held that the Reformed Churches of Scotland, England, and Ireland needed serious reform if the commonwealth would thrive under God. As far as Gillespie was concerned, the Church of England, under the guidance of bishops, had compromised her ceremonies and supported superstition. Moreover, many of her bishops and priests seemed more interested in upholding their own covetousness than offering a faithful Protestant religion. More specifically, Gillespie’s critical view of the ceremonies made him highly suspicious of his opponents whom he described as “Formalists” since their scholastic reasoning defended outward forms of superstitious ceremonies while protecting their hearts from demands of the Holy Spirit. At best, they might be closet papists. At worst, they were compromised Protestants who, for various selfish reasons, persisted in upholding the superstitions of the Antichrist. My argument proceeds in three stages. First, I show how Hooker appropriated Aquinas’s mode of argument ex convenienta in order to defend the Church of England’s ceremonies as historically appropriate and fitting for the time, place and circumstances of the Elizabethan context. Throughout this section Hooker’s position, with its commitment to the magisterial Reformation’s emphasis on good order, is juxtaposed with the Reformed trajectory that interpreted the Church of England’s ceremonies as unlawful according to the patterns of Scripture. Such variance of opinions are particularly relevant to the question of clergy wearing vestments as required by English law and the application of the principle of adiaphora as variously interpreted. Second, I will briefly trace the development of this more radical wing of Reformed thought in England as they interpreted the remnants of Roman ceremonies as inherently evil. Many Reformers from John Knox to Gillespie used the Bible to undermine the spiritual utility and worthiness of the Prayer Booker ceremonies, or, at least in part. This is where different Reformed hermeneutics become clouded in multiple layers of polemic as various Reformed thinkers used and appropriated the ideas of earlier thinkers. If Hooker, for instance, was indebted to Calvin in giving priority to good order in the Reformed commonwealth, Gillespie looked to Calvin to sup-

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port liberty of conscience as it applied to ceremonies that were saturated with superstition. Gillespie, for instance, had no problem applying Calvin’s “Nicodemite” label to Hooker and his followers, since their support of the ceremonies was seen as proof of either misguided popish religion or even hypocrisy. In the final section of the paper, I will examine one of the major grievances of Gillespie and other puritans as they attacked the utility of Christian festivals. Hooker’s defence of the festivals shows how he blended the principles ex convenienta with an Augustinian outlook.

8.2

Hooker’s Arguments ex convenienta

In 2013 Brad Littlejohn reviewed my book, Richard Hooker’s Use of History in his Defense of Public Worship for the Journal of Anglican Studies.13 One of the points that Littlejohn makes in his review, for which I am grateful, is that my study lacked “clarity” when it came to the theme of “conveniency” in Hooker. Littlejohn surmised that what I really meant was: “the principle that the church should always seek that which is best suited to reverence, order and edification in the midst of contingent historical circumstances.”14 There are certainly occasions where this proves true in Hooker. Consider, for instance, his discussion of the puritans’ second and third charges in Books III and IVof the Lawes where he uses examples from the sacred history of Israel, such as the temporal institutions given to Moses and the Israelites, in order to show that polity is determined according to historical circumstances “without holding anie one certayne forme to bee necessarie in them all.”15 But “conveniency” in Hooker is a more pervasive principle tied to the medieval/scholastic idea of convenientia or “fittingness” with regards to the events of salvation history. Some time ago, W. David Neelands, in his discussion of Hooker’s Christology in Book V, rightly linked Hooker’s understanding of the Incarnation as consonant and convenient16 to the influence of medieval thinkers such as Anselm and Aquinas. More recently, F. C. Bauerschmidt, in his book on Aquinas, demonstrates with clarity that Thomas used arguments ex convenientia as a way of displaying the “necessity” and “fitness” of the events of salvation history.17 Ac-

13 Brad Littlejohn, Review of “Richard Hooker’s Use of History in His Defense of Public Worship,” by Scott Kindred-Barnes, Journal of Anglican Studies 12, no. 2 (November 2014): 241–242. 14 Littlejohn, Review of “Richard Hooker’s Use of History,” 242. 15 FLE 1:207.9–10; LEP III.2.1. 16 The Christological context of the word “convenient” is best defined as the “coming together” of God’s purpose in Christ or the “fitting” place of Christ’s role in God’s desired purpose. 17 Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt, Thomas Aquinas: Faith, Reason and Following Christ

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cording to Bauerschmidt, Thomas distinguished between “intrinsic necessity” and “extrinsic necessity.” Intrinsic necessity refers to “anything that of its nature cannot be otherwise,” such as the fact that a triangle has three sides or a human being is a rational animal.18 However, Aquinas used an argument ex convenientia to answer the question “Whether it was Necessary for the Restoration of the Human Race that the Word of God Should Become Incarnate?,” stating: A thing is said to be necessary for a certain end in two ways. First, when the end cannot be without it; as food is necessary for the preservation of human life. Secondly, when the end is attained better and more conveniently, as a horse is necessary for a journey. In the first way it was not necessary that God should become incarnate for the restoration of human nature. For God with his omnipotent power could have restored human nature in many other ways. But in the second way it was necessary that God should become incarnate for the restoration of human nature. Hence Augustine says (De Trin. xii, 10): “We shall also show that other ways were not wanting to God, to Whose power all things are equally subject; but that there was not a more fitting way of healing our misery.19

Extrinsic necessity then, has to do with relative necessity such as when a mother says to her child that he must eat his carrots. The necessity of “must” is not absolute but relative since health is better attained by eating carrots rather than cookies or ice cream. Or, as Bauerschmidt puts it: “Carrots can therefore be judged necessary for health, albeit in an extrinsic, relative way.”20 Hooker’s appropriates this ex convenientia principle from Aquinas in order to defend the good order of the Christian Commonwealth in England from puritan radicalism. Unlike his more radical opponents who tended to see ecclesiastical and ceremonial practice according an intrinsic necessity alone, namely, what they deemed God had revealed and instituted in Christ as the sole means of salvation via the pattern laid down in the New Testament, Hooker knew that Article XXXIV of the Thirty-Nine Articles allowed ceremonies and traditions to be adapted to the English context without necessarily departing from Reformed theology. Likewise, Hooker’s view of Church governance and ceremonies encouraged, or so he thought, both the salvation of souls and the overall stability of the commonwealth. Thus, over and over again in the Lawes, conveniency shapes Hooker’s understanding of the Church’s role in the greater story of salvation history as well as how he explains the practical utility of contemporary Church ceremonies. In order to demonstrate how this principle functions in Hooker I have contextualized a few of his ideas in light of some of the main critiques

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 67, 161–165. I want to thank Brad Littlejohn for bringing this book to my attention. 18 Bauerschmidt, Thomas Aquinas, 162. 19 ST III q. 46 a. 1. 20 Bauerschmidt, Thomas Aquinas, 163.

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launched against him by Gillespie who accused Hooker and his followers of “Symbolizing with Idolaters.” For Gillespie, Hooker was an obvious polemical target since Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity was a work admired by the former’s opponents. In a chapter that boldly sought to refute all those who justified the Church of England’s ceremonies against the charge of scandal, Gillespie presents Hooker as a source of corruption. Writes Gillespie, when challenging the “innovations” imposed by Charles I upon the Scottish kirk, and those divines such Lancelot Andrewes, William Laud, John Burgess, Joseph Hall and others who supported them: “These Formalists who acknowledge the inconveniency of the Ceremonies in respect of Scandal, and yet conform themselves to the same, are brought in by Hooker, making their Apology on the wise, Touching the offense of the weak, we must adventure it, if they perish they perish, &c. Our pastoral charge is Gods absolute commandment, rather than that shall be taken from us, &c.”21 This was hardly the first time Hooker was accused of compromising the Reformed platform and leading others astray; the anonymous authors of A Christian Letter and Henry Jacob come to mind.22 The latter half of Gillespie’s quotation above comes from Hooker’s own summary paraphrase of Thomas Cartwright’s perspective on the question of wearing vestments.23 The original quotation from Hooker is found in Book V of the Lawes, Chapter 29 where he addresses the puritan charge “Wee thinke the surplice especially unmeete for a minister of the Gospel to weare.” Hooker’s original paraphrase is a clever piece of rhetorical prose aimed at exposing the inconsistency in his puritan opponents on their protest against using of the vestments in worship. Yet, the chapter in question also demonstrates elements of Hooker the pastor as he sought to offer counsel to those he regarded 21 George Gillespie, A Dispute against the English-Popish Ceremonies Obtruded upon the Church of Scotland in The Works of Mr. George Gillespie, Minister of Edinburgh: One of the Commissioners from Scotland to the Westminster Assembly, 1644, ed. W. M. Hetherington (Edinburgh: Robert Ogle and Oliver and Boyd, 1816), 1:46. While the first edition was published anonymously in 1637, A Dispute was published again in 1660 when Presbyterians still held significant support in all three kingdoms. 22 For more on Henry Jacob’s critique, see my two recent articles: Scott Kindred-Barnes, “One of the ‘Learned Tracts published long since’: Henry Jacob’s Contribution to Richard Hooker’s Reputation,” in Richard Hooker: His Life, Work, and Legacy – Essays in Honour of W. David Neelands on his Seventieth Birthday, ed. Daniel F. Graves and Scott Kindred-Barnes (Toronto: St. Osmund Press, 2013), 209–224; Scott N. Kindred-Barnes, “Another Look at the ‘learned Tracts published long since’: more on Richard Hooker’s early reputation,” in Reformation & Renaissance Review 16, no. 1 (April 2014): 83–93. 23 The so-called Vestiarian controversy began in the reign of Edward VI and came to a head in the 1560s after the 1559 Book of Common Prayer Ornaments Rubric order by the authority of Parliament that those vestments from the second year of King Edward VI’s reign be used. The use of vestments continued to bother some puritans throughout the Elizabethan era and well into the seventeenth century when Gillespie was writing.

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as misguided by zeal. In Chapter 29 Hooker contextualizes some of Cartwright’s references to Jerome and Chrysostom showing that vestments have a long and useful history in both the Western and Eastern branches of the Church. Hooker shows that since vestments are neither commanded nor condemned by Scripture, the Church is at liberty to use or reject them according to context. As mentioned above, this was consistent with Article XXXIV of the Thirty-Nine Articles and Hooker’s position was likely informed by earlier Reformed perspectives. Hooker was, for instance, undoubtedly aware of the long history of controversy surrounding the question of wearing vestments. Scholars of Elizabethan puritanism have long pointed out the fact that many Protestants in the early years of Elizabeth’s reign had reservations about wearing of vestments since they were thought to be residue from the Church of Rome, and they were particularly associated with the infamous Marian regime that had persecuted Protestants. Particular attention has been focused on the year 1566 when Archbishop Matthew Parker interpreted the Ornaments Rubric of the 1559 Book of Common Prayer to mean the use of copes and surplices in cathedral and collegiate churches and “a comely surplice with sleeves” in all parish churches.24 The question of wearing vestments then had been a pressing concern for Hooker’s own patron, John Jewel, long before Hooker began to write his magnum opus. On September 2, 1571, Jerome Zanchi was compelled by some of his Reformed brethren and his own sovereign leader to write from Heidelberg to Jewel who was then Bishop of Salisbury. In this letter, Zanchi offered respectful counsel to Jewel on how best to handle those inclined to leave their pastoral offices over forced use of the vestments. This letter followed an earlier letter to Queen Elizabeth herself, where Zanchi expresses his preference for liberty on such matters. In his letter to Jewel, Zanchi clearly promotes the importance of maintaining good order in the Church. For Zanchi, as long as pastors are free to teach and administer the sacraments according to the Word of God, there is no lawful reason for them to forsake their flocks “provided only that they are not such as are intrinsically and of their own nature sinful.”25 Should the latter circumstance come about then believers must obey God over Caesar. Yet, for Zanchi, the priority of upholding good order in church and society, combined with the indifferent nature of the vestments, made the discernment of a faithful response rather clear: “For a lawful and necessary calling is never to be deserted for the sake of things which are in 24 Richard Hooker Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: Introductions; Commentary Books V– VIII, ed. W. Speed Hill and Egil Grislis (Binghamton, New York: Medieval & Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1993), 693. 25 “Hierome Zanchius to Bishop Jewel, dated at Heidelberg, Sept. 2, 1571,” in The Zurich Letters Comprising Correspondence of Several English Bishops and Others with Some of the Helvetian Reformers during the Reign of Queen Elizabeth I, ed. and trans. Hastings Robinston, Second Series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1845), 187. Italics mine.

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their own nature indifferent.”26 Hooker too, stood firmly within this trajectory of Reformed thought when he affirmed that on matters indifferent Christians are obligated to obey the authority that God ordained: “wee thinke not our selves the holier because we use it [the surplice], so neither should they with whome no such thinge is in use thinke us therefore unholie, because we submitt our selves unto that, which in a matter so indifferent the wisdom of authoritie and lawe have thought comlie.”27 For Hooker, here is the bottom line; wearing vestments was a matter indifferent and yet the God ordained authorities had required clergy to wear them, therefore, they were not to be rejected. Further, Hooker maintained that his opponents had fixated on such a trivial issues as to make a mountain out of molehill, and in the process missed the general utility in wearing vestments; a sentiment made evident by the following rhetorical question and quotation: Were it not better that the love which men beare to God should make the least thinges that are imployed in his service amiable, then that thiere over scrupulous dislike of so meane a thinge as a vestment should from the verie service of God withdrawe theire hartes and affections? I tearme it the rather meane thinge, a thinge not much to be respected, because even they so accompt now of it, whose first disputations against it were such as if religion had scarcely any thinge of greater waight.28

While Hooker considered the surplice to be a matter adiaphora, he was puzzled by the inconsistency of his puritan opponents. If the surplice was really an “abominable” abuse of the “papists,” that is, something intrinsically sinful, why were they willing “to take this filth and to put it on,” all for the sake a preaching? Moreover, given his opponent’s inconsistency how could they make such claims as: “Touchinge thoffense of the weake therefore, we must adventure it. If they perish, they perish. Our pasterall charge is Gods absolute commandement.” Gillespie’s paraphrase of this very line from Hooker, which itself is quote from the latter’s puritan opponents, has the word “&c.” inserted twice into the original text. Such insertions show that Gillespie was not interested in presenting a detailed analysis of Hooker’s work; rather, he holds Hooker responsible for the current controversy stating that “These Formalists who acknowledge the inconveniency of the Ceremonies in respect of Scandal, and yet conform themselves to the same, are brought in by Hooker.” Prior to this reference to Hooker, Gillespie had already expounded on what he calls the “Formalists” controversy in Chapter 1 of A Dispute and in a footnote just a line after his paraphrase of Hooker he refers readers back to that chapter for details. In Chapter 1, we see that Gillespie charged Dr. John Burgess for inconsistency, stating: “Dr. Burgess confesseth, that some of his side think and believe, that the 26 “Hierome Zanchius to Bishop Jewel,” 188. 27 FLE 2:123.14–18; LEP V. 29.1. 28 FLE 2:125–126; LEP V. 29.4.

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ceremonies are inconvenient, and yet to be observed for peace and the gospel’s sake.”29 To support this assertion, Gillespie cites from A Fresh Suit Against Human Ceremonies in God’s Worship (1633) where William Ames had already pointed out the inconsistency of Burgess on the question of the ceremonies. Yet, for our purposes it is also necessary to highlight that Ames had also alluded to Hooker as the one responsible for the “misguided” perspectives of Burgess and others. What is more, Ames drew attention to Hooker’s charge that Cartwright wavered inconsistently on the ceremonies: “Mr. Hooker […] observeth, that the first pleadings of T.C. against other Cerem: either inferred unlawfulness, or nothing.” But Ames went on to defend Cartwright from Hooker’s charge of inconsistency stating: “The last rules, and resolutions of T.C. doe evidently speake, of unlawfulness, of all significant ceremonies.”30 Gillespie then seems to be reiterating Ames’ earlier critique of Hooker in A Dispute. While Ames and later Gillespie undoubtedly saw Hooker’s influence in a negative light – especially as he encouraged acceptance of what they thought were compromised, even intrinsically sinful ceremonies – they inadvertently demonstrated that Hooker’s view on the ceremonies was consistent with the Magisterial Reformed emphasis on upholding good order, so long as we keep in mind that Hooker viewed things like vestments to be indifferent by nature.

8.3

Protestant Faith and the Charge of Nicodemism

On October 7, 1552 Archbishop Thomas Cranmer wrote to the Privy Council regarding a matter that was causing a stir among some of King Edward VI’s advisors. Apparently, some close to the King, who desired further reformation of the English Church, had been moved by the preaching of John Knox. Through the influence of the Duke of Northumberland, Knox had been commissioned to preach a sermon before the King and Privy Council “in which he inveighed with great freedom against kneeling at the Lord’s Supper.”31 Without Cranmer present, Knox’s preaching influenced the Privy Council to write to the evangelical printer Richard Grafton, who had been commissioned to print the Prayer Book, and ordered him to stop the press. A few days later the Council informed the

29 A Dispute, 24. 30 Williams Ames, A Fresh Suit Against Human Ceremonies in God’s Worship, (n.p., 1633). 31 This was reported in “John Utenhove to Henry Bullinger Dated London Oct. 12, 1552,” in Zurich Letters: Original Letters Relative to the English Reformation Written During the Reigns of King Henry VIII, Edward VI and Queen Mary: Chiefly from the (Second Series) Comprising Correspondence of Several English Bishops and Others with Some of the Helvetian Reformers during the Reign of Queen Elizabeth I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1845), 591.

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Archbishop of what they had done with the advice that he seek further consultation about revising the Book.32 Cranmer was obviously irritated and his response sought in part to remind the Council that he had already consulted many bishops and the “best learned” in the realm about revising the Prayer Book.33 Furthermore, Cranmer outlines rather clearly the problems with the Council’s request. Not only had the Book been read and approved by the whole state of realm in the High Court of Parliament with the royal assent of the King, but like Calvin, in his letter to Protector Somerset four years earlier, the Archbishop reminded the Council that there are always those who would “make trouble and disquietness when things be most quiet and in good order.”34 Further, Cranmer went on to summarize what he understood to be the main flaw behind the arguments of Knox and those likeminded: “But, say they, it is not commanded in Scripture to kneel, and whatever is not commanded in the Scripture is against the Scripture, and utterly unlawful and ungodly.”35 “If this saying be true,” stated Cranmer, “then take away the whole Book of Service. For what should men travail to set an order in the form of service, if no order can be set but that [which] is already prescribed by the Scripture.” Not only was this thinking the chief foundation of the error of the Anabaptists, but, for Cranmer, it was clearly “subversive” of all order; a way for “seditious” subjects to bridle obedience and loose themselves from the “bond of all princes’ laws.” Moreover, it was also theologically misguided. True, the Scriptures do not say whether Christ administered the bread and wine to kneeling or sitting apostles. Yet, if one follows the plain words of the Scriptures in the ridiculous manner that Knox suggested, “we shall rather receive it lying down on the ground, as the custom of the world at the time [was] almost everywhere, and as the Tartar and Turks use yet at this day to eat their meat lying upon the ground.”36 While Cranmer’s statement is a pointed piece of invective, his letter to the Privy Council raises issues that would remain points of contention into the Elizabethan era and beyond among reformers. All reformers, be they Calvinists, Lutherans, Zwinglians et al, acknowledged the authority of Scripture. Yet, what this meant for a Reformed church in England would remain a disputed matter. From the days of King Edward’s reign reformers could be identified as both those 32 The context of this development is explained in greater detail by Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 524–28. 33 This referred to a previous meeting at Windsor with a number of learned divines including Dr. Richard Cox who had previously clashed with Knox over liturgical practices in Frankfurt while living as exiles under the reign of Queen Mary. 34 The letter is found in Peter Lormier, John Knox and the Church of England (London: H.S. King & Co., 1875), 103–105. 35 Lormier, John Knox, 104. 36 Lormier, John Knox, 104.

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who supported the worship prescribed in Prayer Book and those who, in the name of further reform, rejected the official ceremonies according the authority of Scripture. Cranmer’s stress on the order and obedience of all subjects shows his clear affinity with the magisterial reformation and his kinship with Cox over Knox would indicate that there were different trajectories that reformers could follow when it came to interpreting the ceremonies. It will not do to draw a simple distinction between conformist and radical, Anglican and puritan, since Cranmer’s stress on the order and obedience would itself be challenged under Mary Tudor’s reign when he became a martyr over and against obedience to Rome. Yet, there was a Reformed trajectory that preferred a primitivistic reading of the Scriptures and that was not so easily reconciled with scholastic theology and reasoning. This trajectory can be witnessed in Knox’s statement that “No mane, as we suppose, of holy judgment will denye, but knelying in the action of the Lord’s Table proceded from a fals and erronious opinion.”37 And to those who would argue that Kneeling at the Lord’s Supper is a matter indifferent, Knox shared a perspective that would remain with many Reformers into Hooker’s era and beyond: Pawle commanded all thynges of themselves indefferent to be done in the Church to edyfication, and so to be measured by the rewle of charytie that in doying therof offence neyther be geven to Jew, to Gentile, not to the Churche of God; but knelying is this mysticall Supper among such varietie in opyniones edyfieth no man but offereth occasion of slander and offence to many.38

Knox’s assumption that certain practices in the Prayer Book were inherently evil since they had come from the idolatrous hearts of men rather than the commands of Scripture would be picked up by the Admonitioners, Thomas Cartwright and later Gillespie, in their critique of the English “popish” ceremonies laid out in the Book of Common Prayer. Insofar as Hooker’s own ideas could be appropriated and used to support the positions of avant-garde churchmen and others, he often became guilty by association in the eyes of Reformers who came after him.39 In fact, Gillespie had little respect for a man whose greatest work was considered by many to be the chief defence of a Prayer Book which the former considered saturated with superstition and idolatry. Yet, it is only part of the story to say that later admirers 37 Lormier, John Knox, 268. 38 Lormier, John Knox, 268. This quotation comes from an unnamed paper written by Knox and perhaps a few others. It critiques the practice of kneeling at the Lord’s Supper. 39 Henry Jacob, who argued in print against the Doctors at Oxford in 1604, was also forced to critique Hooker on grounds that he became an important influence and hero of the latter’s opponents. See Scott N. Kindred-Barnes, “Another Look at the ‘learned Tracts published long since’: more on Richard Hooker’s early reputation,” in Reformation & Renaissance Review 16, no. 1 (April 2014): 83–93.

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of Hooker simply appropriated him for their own purposes. Hooker, as one who is now increasing understood as a “Reformed catholic” thinker, presented a “convenient” theology that stood in tension, even conflict, with other streams of Reformed thought in England in the forty years after his death in 1600 – especially with those Protestants inclined to see the church ceremonies as misguided or even intrinsically evil. Damian Nussbaum has shown that Foxe’s Actes & Monuments became an important source of inspiration to a generation of religious dissidents from William Prynne to George Foxe.40 This meant that these later Protestants could readily appropriate the resistance of earlier martyrs without necessarily embracing the theological and ecclesiological perspectives of the heroes who inspired them. As early as the 1570s, in the Second Admonition to Parliament, for instance, the writers acknowledged certain “Ecclesiasticall histories” which proved that many “false brethren” had persecuted the saints since the days of the apostles.41 Such appropriations carried over into the seventeenth century as radical puritans and separatists, influenced heavily by the apocalyptic writings of Thomas Brightman and John Napier, embraced a doctrine of “further light.” Through an apocalyptic lens, radicals in the seventeenth century were able to overlook the theological and ecclesiological differences they had with earlier Protestants because they measured earlier struggles against Antichrist according to the lesser light available to these earlier evangelicals.42 Since the days of Wycliffe, Huss and Luther had long since passed and more light was now available to expose the deceptions of Antichrist to the godly, excuses for idolatry and error in the seventeenth century could no longer be tolerated, or so the logic went. Thus, since the status quo became increasing suspect in the eyes of many puritans, it is not surprising that apocalyptic thinkers like Gillespie would appropriate the cause of earlier Protestant resistance against episcopal conformists like Hooker and those whom the latter influenced. Gillespie’s belief that Hooker and his followers had compromised the Reformed faith led him to describe his opponents as “Nicodemites.” During the 40 Damian Nussbaum, “Appropriating Martyrdom: Fears of Renewed Persecution and the 1632 Edition of Acts and Monuments,” in John Foxe and the English Reformation, ed. David Loades (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997), 178. He then poses an excellent question: “But how did a book cherished by the supreme governor of the English church come to be equally popular with those who opposed the church which Elizabeth had headed?” The answer I think has to do with appropriating the past in order to support one’s own protestant resistance. 41 A Second Admonition to Parliament in Puritan Manifestoes: A Study of Origin of the Puritan Revolt, ed. W. H. Frere & C. E. Douglas (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1907), 88. 42 Stephen Brachlow does a fine job of mapping this development. in The Communion of Saints: Radical Puritan and Separatist Ecclesiology 1570–1625 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 77–113.

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Reformation period when civil magistrates saw it as their God-given duty to protect confessional orthodoxy, religious dissenters, be they Roman Catholic, Protestant or Anabaptist, could find themselves under persecution for making known their convictions publicly. Likewise, early evangelicals, both Lutheran and Reformed, required considerable courage, if not political protection, if they wanted to express their faith publically. The temptation to outwardly conform to Catholic ceremonies while remaining inwardly a protestant was a rather widespread challenge faced by the evangelical movement. This was a serious matter, and Reformers like Knox stressed the dangers of conforming to external practices that promoted idolatry: “Men may flatter and desave themselves, but if externally we do the self-same thinge in the action of idolatrie that idolatours dowe, our awin [own] conscience, convick by Godde’s word, shall condemp ourselves.”43 Thus, the label “Nicodemite” was a term of abuse applied to those who held evangelical religious convictions but who kept them secret for fear of persecution. Like Nicodemus in John 3, who went to Jesus at night to prevent from being seen by his fellow-Pharisees, the person labeled a “Nicodemite” during the Reformation era could often be associated with cowardice and hypocrisy.44 This was not entirely fair to Nicodemus since he later appeared in John 19 with Joseph of Arimathea to claim the body of Jesus when all the disciples had deserted. Nonetheless, the term “Nicodemite” became specifically associated with those who lacked the courage of the martyrs and exiles during the days when the Protestant faith was threatened by serious persecution. The first known use of the term “Nicodemite” is found in a letter by Frederik Hondebeke to his friend Caspar Hedio in 1522 when the former comments disapprovingly of Desiderius Erasmus’s failure to offer Luther open support after first expressing his cautious approval of the evangelical movement. Not only was Hondebeke “annoyed” with Erasmus’s show but the former accused the great Christian humanists of being filled with “childish fear.” In Erasmus’s cowardly behaviour, Hondebeke identified a greater respect for the approval of men than the glory of God, yet regretfully conceded that “such Nicodemites among us are

43 Lormier, John Knox, 270. 44 There is considerable irony in the fact the Nicodemist underground support under Queen Mary I and Queen Elizabeth I was in fact as important as that offered by the exiles. Brett Usher has argued, “The dynamics of Protestantism in the 1560s owe quite as much to the Nicodemist as to the Exile tradition and the story of the Foxe circle leads us back time and again to the London congregation in general and to the friends and associates of Thomas Bentham and Henry Bull in particular. When Foxe returned from the Continent he rediscovered a Protestant coterie which was very much Magdalen-oriented and perhaps Bentham-dominated” (“Backing Protestantism: The London Godly, the Exchequer and the Foxe Circle,” in John Foxe: An Historical Perspective, 124).

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in great number.”45 It would seem that Erasmus’s caution was wiser than Hondebeke had assumed, since on 1 July of the next year two Augustinian monks from the house of Antwerp, Hendric Voes and Johann van der Esschen, were burned at the stake for heresy in Brussels for their evangelical views.46 By 1543, when many other evangelical witnesses had met similar fates, the term “Nicodemite” had become a more popular polemical weapon largely through the writings of John Calvin.47 It was Calvin who so ardently rebuked those who secretly harboured Protestant sympathies but engaged in Catholic activities for fear of persecution. He wrote: “I am not unaware of the excuse employed by some to spare the weakness of the flesh, and by others to cloak their cowardice!”48 Though Calvin was firm in his stance against Nicodemism, both Pierre Viret and Martin Bucer thought his position to be unrealistic. However, with the support of other notable Reformers such as Heinrich Bullinger, Guillaume Farel, and Peter Martyr Vermigli, all of whom tackled the issue directly, and for the most part, offered uncompromising support of Calvin’s position, his Anti-Nicodemite stance gained wide appeal.49 Thus, throughout the Elizabethan and Stuart eras there was considerable respect and admiration in England among Protestants of all temperatures as they looked back on the Marian martyrs and exiles who had chosen one of Calvin’s two faithful options. In all likelihood, however, the largest portion of Protestants under Mary I had chosen the Nicodemist option, outwardly conforming yet inwardly hoping and praying for better times. This arguably included William Cecil, Matthew Parker, above all even Lady Elizabeth herself. Regardless, Gillespie, in using this term of abuse against his “compromised” opponents, stood in line with a solid trajectory of Reformation thinking that could be traced to Reformers such as Calvin, Bullinger and Vermigli themselves, even though the grievances of Gillespie were not the specific targets of these earlier thinkers. Furthermore, Hooker’s compromise had led many into the folly of Nicodemism or so claimed Gillespie; for only “the lapped[sic] Nicodemite holds it enough to yield some secret assent to the truth, though neither his profession nor his

45 A Portion of the letter in English translation is found in Andrew Pettegree, Marian Protestantism: Six Studies (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997), 89–90. 46 Brad Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2001), 139. 47 Andrew Pettegree, Marian Protestantism: Six Studies (Aldershot, Hants, England: Scolar Press, 1996), 90n16, follows Carlos M. N. Erie, “Calvin and Nicodemism: a reappraisal,” Sixteenth Century Journal 10 (1979): 46–47, in pointing out that Calvin cites this term in number of uses between 1529 and 1535. 48 John Calvin, On Shunning the Unlawful Rites of the Ungodly, in vol. 3 of Tracts by John Calvin, ed. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1851) 3:401. 49 Pettegree, Marian Protestantism, 91.

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practice testify so much.”50 While Gillespie’s opponents were supporting and maintaining different theologies than Calvin’s Roman adversaries, the former’s polemic bears a striking resemblance to that of the great reformer of Geneva: “So the pseudo-Nicodemites [the Formalists] allege for their abstaining from the flesh upon the days forbidden by the church, that this they do for shunning a greater evil, which is the scandal of Papists.”51 The arguments of both Calvin and Knox informed Gillespie’s critique of the Formalists, something evident in the logic of the following quotation which summarizes the folly of his opponents: Our opposites here tell us of two things necessary to the making up of idolatry, neither of which is found in kneeling. First, they say, except there be an intention in the worshiper to adore the creature which is before his eyes, his kneeling before it is no idolatry […]. The other thing which kneeling require to the making up of idolatry is that the creature before which we adore be a passive object of the adoration: whereas say they, the sacramental elements are “no manner of way the passive object of our adoration, but the active only of that adoration which, at the sacrament, is given to Christ; that is, such an object and sign as moves us upon the sight, or by the signification thereof, to lift up our hearts and adore the only object of our faith, the Lord Jesus;52

In Calvin’s On Shunning the Unlawful Rites of the Ungodly, he discussed the importance of resisting the forbidden practice of showing reverence to idols. Using examples from the sacred history of Israel, Calvin utilizes both narratives and images from Scripture to demonstrate why faithful Christians must not bow before images as was the practice of some sixteenth-century Roman Catholics. From 1 Kings 19:18 Calvin points to where God tells Elisha that he will spare the seven thousand people in Israel who did not bow to Baal. Further, the Isaiah 45:23 text, “Every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue shall swear by my name,” implies that an image receives worship due to God when reverence is expressed bodily. Thus, the faithful are to avoid such practices that revere objects in the place of God. Further, Calvin looks to the example of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in Daniel 3 who faithfully resisted Nebuchadnezzar’s order to kneel before the golden image on the plain of Dura: Accordingly, the three companions of Daniel have taught us what estimate to form of this dissimulation. (Dan. iii) To them it seemed easier to allow their bodies to be cruelly consumed by the flames of a fiery furnace than to please the king’s eye, by bending their thighs for a little before his statue! Let us either deride their infatuation in inflaming the anger of a mighty king against them, to the danger of their lives, and for a thing of no

50 Preface, A Dispute, vii. 51 A Dispute, 30. 52 A Dispute, 95.

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moment, or let us learn by their examples, that to perform any act of idolatry, in order to gain the favour of man, is more to be shunned than death in its most fearful form.53

Gillespie borrows the arguments of Knox and cites Calvin’s work at length in his own refutation with the Formalists. With specific reference to the same story from Daniel, Gillespie writes: “Nay, then, the three children should not have been idolaters, if they had kneeled before Nebuchadnezzar’s image, intending their worship to God only, and not to the image. Our opposites here take the Nicodemites by the hand.”54 Gillespie’s sarcasm is clear here. Unlike the three heroes from Daniel 3, who did not compromise their faith by kneeling before the king’s statue, Gillespie’s opponents take the easy way out. Had the three heroes followed the logic of the Formalists, so Gillespie maintained, they would have bowed down and then defended their idolatry with fanciful scholastic arguments.

8.4

Hooker’s Debt to Augustine

Gillespie charged Hooker and his followers on grounds that they placed “operative virtue” in the ceremonies; that is, the ceremonies themselves were thought to aid participants in avoiding sin and temptation. Gillespie was particularly critical of Hooker’s view of confirmation since the latter used the scholastic language of “hability” in defending this practice.55 Gillespie critiqued what appears to be Hooker’s application of the Aristotelian idea of habitus as applied to the baptised and confirmed person who is freed from the bondage of natural desires by mere virtue of the rite in order to help one follow the inclination of one’s professed Christian belief. The concept that faith as a habit of the intellect brings about a Christian awareness is prevalent in Aquinas,56 yet it also seems compatible with the idea of inherent righteousness held by some Reformers including Martin Bucer, Peter Martyr Vermigli and Girolamo Zanchi.57 Fur-

53 Calvin, On Shunning the Unlawful Rites of the Ungodly, 370. 54 A Dispute, 95. 55 Gillespie, A Dispute, 91, writes, “Moreover, whilst [Hooker] is a-showing why this ceremony of confirmation was separated from baptism, having been long joined with it, one of his reasons which he giveth for the separation is, that sometimes the parties who received baptism were infants, at which age they might well be admitted to live in the family, but to fight in the army of God, to bring forth the fruits, and to do the works of the Holy Ghost, their time of hability was not yet come; which implieth, that by the confirmation men receive this hability, or else there is no sense in that which he saith.” 56 Nigel Voak, Richard Hooker and Reformed Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 193–196. 57 See Luca Baschera’s essay “Imputed and Inherent: Hooker’s soteriology in the context of the 16th century continental Reformed theology” in this volume.

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thermore, missing from Gillespie’s critique of Hooker is an awareness of Augustine’s influence upon the latter. A generation ago, Jaroslav Pelikan affirmed that nothing seems more “Augustinian” than “introspective meditation upon the meaning of sin and repentance,” and yet ironically, the feelings of humility and contrition promoted by such introspection, led many late medieval Christians to embrace a doctrine of Justification that was essentially Pelagian.58 As one who shared the Reformation suspicion of works righteousness, Hooker carefully sought to avoid this pitfall. Augustine, over and against Pelagius, asserted that true grace is the gift of the Holy Spirit: We […] affirm that the human will is so divinely aided in the pursuit of righteousness, that (in addition to the fact of man’s being created with a free will, and besides the doctrine by which he is instructed how he ought to live) he receives the Holy Ghost, by whose gift there springs up in his mind a delight in, and a love of, that supreme and unchangeable good which is God, even in the present state, while he still “walks by faith” and not yet “by sight;” in order that by this gift to him of the earnest, as it were, of the free gift, he may conceive an ardent desire to cleave to his Maker, and burn to approach to a participation in that true light, that it may go well with him from Him to whom he owes all that he is.59

Here we see Augustine’s insistence that the Grace of the Spirit is necessary to initiate and sustain the happiness and delight that the human heart desires. Further, man’s free will is prone to nothing but sin, “if he know not the way of truth; and even after his duty and his proper aim shall begin to become known to him, unless he take delight and feel a love therein, he neither does his duty, nor sets about it, nor effects a righteous life.”60 Hence, it is our dependence on Christ, and God’s free gift of grace mediated through him, that redeems our fallen nature, and enables the Christian to live for Christ. And yet, while one’s desire to commune with one’s Creator is a sure sign that God’s grace has been has been realized, the Christian’s cooperation with grace does not mean he saves himself. Rather, such longings affirm the old fallen will has been redeemed and redirected back to its ultimate fulfillment. Hooker too, as early as Book I of the Lawes, demonstrates his debt to Augustine, and the importance of Augustinian introspection when he affirms that human happiness depends on God as our ultimate source of goodness and truth:

58 Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine: Volume 1: The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600) (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1971), 330–331. Here Pelikan follows Hieko Oberman. 59 Augustine, On the Spirit and the Letter in The Anti-Pelagain Works of Saint Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, trans. Peter Holmes (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1872), 160. 60 Augustine, On the Spirit and the Letter, 160.

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If the soule of man did serve oneleye to geve him beinge in this life, then thinges appertayning unto this life woulde content him, as wee see they doe other creatures […]. With us it is otherwise. For although the beuties, riches, honors, sciences, virtues, and perfections of all men living were in the present possession of one: yet somwhat beyond and above all this there would still be sought and earnestly thirsted for. So that nature even in this life doth plainly claime and call for more divine perfection, then eyther of these two that have bene mentioned.61

There is a pastoral side to Hooker’s argument here as he follows Augustine in asserting God’s grace is needed to redeem our fallen nature. Yet, because the supreme end of life is communion with God himself, and because God is a perfection beyond us, the redeemed Christian will inevitably long and thirst for more of God’s perfection in his life; even though it is Christ and not one’s participation with God that redeems. Hooker’s theology of worship flows out of this Augustinian longing for God: In the powers and faculties of our soules God requireth the uttermost which our unfained affection towardes him is able to yeeld. So that if we affecte him not farre above all thinges, our religion hath not that inward perfection which it should have, neither doe we indeed worship him as our God. That which inwardlie each man should be, the Church outwardlie ought to testifie.62

Public worship, as he goes on to elaborate throughout Book V, is thus the outward testification of this inward “unfained affection.” Toward the end of his life, when Hooker was accused by the authors of A Christian Letter of holding heretical views inconsistent with the Thirty-Nine Articles, he defended himself by asking a rhetorical question: “Butt must the will cease to be itselfe because the grace of God helpeth it?”63 Hooker follows Augustine in the Dublin Fragments in order to make an important distinction between “aptnes” and “ableness”:64 “You peradventure thinck aptnes and ableness all one, whereas the trueth is, that had wee kept our first ablenes grace should not neede, and had apnes beene alsoe lost, it is not grace that could work in us more then it doeth in brute creatures.”65 In other words, Hooker is consistent with the Reformed orthodoxy in maintaining that our ability to achieve righteousness on our own has been destroyed by the Fall. However, our “aptness,” or, our human ability to recognize and appropriate grace, has not been obliterated. 61 62 63 64

LEP I.11.4; FLE 1:115.13–25. LEP V.6.1–2; FLE 2:33.21–27. FLE 4:101.4–7; Dublin Fragments, 1. Ranall Ingalls, “Sin and Grace,” in Companion, 162–176 has found this distinction to be important for Hooker’s theological concerns since it allowed him to assent to Augustine’s anti-Pelagian arguments and the reformers doctrine of grace. 65 FLE 4:101.10–18; Dublin Fragments, 1.

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To put it another way, for Hooker the imago dei is damaged but not destroyed. As Ranall Ingalls has rightly argued, Hooker’s Augustinian understanding of the ‘aptness’ of the will, has clear implications for his Chalcedonian Christological defence of the Sacraments.66 Yet, to push Ingalls’s argument further, Hooker’s Augustinian distinction between “aptness” and “ableness” is assumed throughout the whole of Book V as he defends the authorized ceremonies and festivals as convenient for their intended purposes of leading the people of England to participation with God in Christ and His eternal happiness. In one sense Hooker believed that righteousness is imputed to believers, since the Fall rendered humanity unable help themselves: “Wee are by nature the Sonnes of Adam. When God created Adam he created us, and as manie as are descended from Adam have in them selves the roote out of which they springe. The sonnes of God wee neither are all nor anie one of us otherwise then onlie by grace and favor.”67 Yet, we find our union and participation with God through the Father’s union with Christ who brings both the human and divine together: “Participation is that muttuall inward hold which Christ hath of us and wee of him, in such sort that ech possesseth other by waie of special interest propertie and inherent copulation.”68 Our cooperation, then, through what might be called “Augustinian introspection” and a longing for God’s perfections, is to be expected in believers as an indication of grace but not a replacement for grace: “Thus wee participate [in] Christ partelie by imputation, as when those thinges which he did and suffered for us are imputed unto us for righteousness.”69 Yet, as believers, whose “aptness” is not extinguished but redeemed, we long for God’s perfections and participate in them, “partlie by habituall and reall infusion, as when grace is inwardlie bestowed while wee are on earth and afterwards more fullie both our soules and bodies made like unto his in glorie.”70 The Augustinian distinction between “aptness” and “ableness” promoted introspection in the Christian believer while avoiding Pelagianism. Further, this distinction assisted Hooker when defending the ceremonies and festivals as both convenient and edifying for believers. Hence, Augustinian introspection had for Hooker a pastoral, or, to use a more modern parlance, even “psychological,” utility for believers who directed their worship toward a living God.

66 67 68 69 70

Ranall Ingalls, “Sin and Grace,” in Companion, 174–175. FLE 2:237.28–32; LEP V.56.6. FLE 2:234.29–31; LEP V.56.1. FLE 2:243.4–6; LEP V.56.10. FLE 2:243.6–9; LEP V.56.11. Notice that it is Christ himself that is habit forming not necessarily the actions themselves.

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195

The Convenient Utility of Holy Days?

Gillespie continues his assault on Hooker in Part Three of A Dispute, where he argues that the Church of England’s ceremonies are “unlawful,” because they are “Superstitious.”71 Gillespie has already established that Hooker is the leading proponent of misunderstanding regarding the ceremonies, stating: “Hooker tells us, those things that the Law of God leaves arbitrary and at liberty, are subject to the positive ordinances of men. This (I must say) is strange divinity, for if this were true, then might the Laws of men prohibite Marriage, because it is less arbitrary.”72 Gillespie distrusts Hooker’s conveniency since God’s laws cannot be broken just because the customs of a given era have changed. Therefore, Gillespie was not afraid to mock Hooker’s convenient way, saying: The ceremonies “are yet more Superstitious, that they are not only used in Gods worship unnecessarily and unprofitably” they “hinder other necessary duties.” A lengthy quote from Gillespie, where he summarizes the perceived errors of Hooker, will help to further illustrate Hooker’s arguments ex convenientia: Worship is placed in the Ceremonies; therefore they are most superstitious. To make good what I say, Holiness and necessity are placed in the Ceremonies, Ergo, worship. And 1. Holiness is placed in them. (n) Hooker thinks Festival days clothed with out ward robes of holiness; nay he saith (o) plainly, No doubts as Gods extraordinary presence hath hallowed & sanctified certain places, so they are his extraordinary works that have truly and worthily advanced certain times for which cause they ought to be with all men that honour God, more holy than other days (p) He calleth also the Cross an holy sign. (q) 73

Each line in the above quotation is accompanied by a marginal note corresponding to a specific page reference in Hooker’s Lawes. A detailed explanation of each marginal note is beyond the scope of this short paper. However, for the purpose of further contextualization let us look at those lines explicitly relevant to Hooker’s arguments ex convenientia. The marginal note above marked “(o)” refers to the Lawes, Book V, Chapter 69 where Hooker explores the topic “Of Festival dayes and the natural causes of theire convenient institution.” Here Gillespie paraphrases Hooker original saying from chapter 69:3: “No doubts as Gods extraordinary presence hath hallowed & sanctified certain places, so they are his extraordinary works that have truly and worthily advanced certain times for which cause they ought to be with all men that honour God, more holy than other 71 A Dispute, 115. 72 A Dispute, 42. 73 Here I am using the seventeenth century manuscript of A Dispute, 117 since it indicates the marginal notes. This same passage can be found in the more modern spelling in Gillespie, A Dispute against the English-Popish Ceremonies Obtruded upon the Church of Scotland in The Works of Mr. George Gillespie, 1:59.

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days.”74 While this line captures the essence of Hooker’s original statement, Gillespie nonetheless appears unaware of how Hooker blends a sense of Augustinian introspection with Thomas’s argument ex convenientia. Hooker demonstrates what we might call the “intrinsic necessity” when he highlights that the human species is time bound since “only God hath true immortality or eternitie, that is to saie continuance wherein there groweth no difference by addition of hereafter unto now.”75 Humans by contrast are subject to time and change: “As the time of a man is a mans continuance from the instant of his first breath till the instant of his last gasp.”76 From there Hooker reasons that some days ought to be set aside as especially holy; not that he was endorsing unholy living during ordinary time, but that “All thinges whatsoever having theire time, the workes of God have allwayes that time which is seasonablest and fittest for them.” Here Hooker may have had the language of The Second Helvetic Confession (1566) in mind which begins the topic “Of Holy Days, Fasts, and the Choice of Meats” in Chapter 24 with the following discussion of time: Although religion is not tied unto time, yet it cannot be planted and exercised without a due dividing and allotting out of time unto it. Every church, therefore, chooses unto itself a certain time for public prayers, and for preaching of the gospel, and for the celebration of the sacraments: and it is not lawful for everyone to overthrow this appointment of the church at his own pleasure. For except some due time and leisure were allotted to the outward exercise of religion, without doubt men would be quite drawn from it by their own affairs.77

Notice this Confession assumes the lawfulness of setting aside certain times for worship. Moreover, it is the Church’s duty to set appointed times for the outward exercise of religion since such times assist people in putting aside their own personal pursuits which, if left undirected, could distract people from seeking God as their ultimate pursuit. With God as the end in mind, Bullinger grants that every Church chooses unto itself a certain time for public prayer, and that it is unlawful for individuals to ignore the Church’s appointed times. He clearly wants to safeguard from the abuses of the Church of Rome when he promoted the utility of Holy Days. Nonetheless, he understood that when kept free of idolatrous perversions, Holy days can in fact help to tell the Christ story to the edification of the godly: “if the churches do religiously celebrate the memory of the Lord’s nativity, circumcision, passion, resurrection, and of His ascension into heaven, and sending the Holy Ghost upon His disciples, according to Christian 74 75 76 77

For Hooker’s original statement see FLE 2:362.11–17; LEP V.69.3. FLE 2:360.2–4; LEP V.69.2. FLE 2:360.17–19; LEP V.69.2. “The Second Helvetic Confession (1566),” in Reformed Confessions of the 16th and 17th centuries in English Translation, compiled and with an introduction by James T. Dennison, Jr. (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2010), 2:872.

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liberty, we do very well approve of it.”78 For Bullinger the appropriateness of such holy days depends on their consistency with the Christ story as revealed in the Bible. For this reason, he has no place for such festivals that promote the “superstitions” of Rome. Moreover, if promoting and celebrating the important aspects of the Christ story, festival days could be approved.79 Hooker too, understood that without appointed times for worship the daily grind of life would rob people of their greatest desire; communion with God: so there is in this greate varietie of duties which belonge to men that dependencie and order, by meanes whereof the lower sustaining alwaies the more excellent, and the higher perfecting the more base, they are in theire times and seasons continued with most exquisite correspondence, labors of bodilie and dailie purchase freedom for actions of religious joy, which benefit these actions requite with the guift of desired rest: a thinge most natural and fit to accompanie the solemne festival duties of honor which are done to God.80

Bullinger would undoubtedly agree with Hooker that God is to be the end of all appointed times of worship and festivals, however, the former wants to preserve, though very carefully, Christian freedom which could be violated if ungodly and misdirected worship is allowed to confuse the people. We know Hooker cited the Second Helvetic Confession in Book V, 58.2, along with the Belgic Confession and the Bohemian Confession, in his discussion of the substance of baptism (FLE 2:248–49). It seems reasonable that he might have had the former confession in mind when he penned his own defence of the festivals stating that “the daies which are chosen out to serve as publique memorials of such his mercies ought to be clothed with those outward robes of holiness whereby theire difference from other dayes maie be made sensible.” For certain, Hooker wants to distinguish certain days as holy or set apart from more common times because he thinks such days foster three main benefits worthy of a Christian Commonwealth: praise, bounty and rest. In typical Augustinian fashion, Hooker explains how the benefit of rest enabled by the festivals helps to encourage faithfulness by redirecting human desires to God as the ultimate end and source of human happiness:

78 “The Second Helvetic Confession (1566),” in Reformed Confessions of the 16th and 17th centuries in English Translation, compiled and with an introduction by James T. Dennison, Jr. (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2010), 2:872. 79 But as for festival days ordained to men or departed saints, we cannot allow them. For indeed such feasts must be referred to the first table of the Law and belong peculiarly unto God. To conclude, these festival days, which are appointed to saints and abrogated of us, have in them many gross things, unprofitable and not to be tolerated. In the meantime, we confess that the remembrance of saints in due time and place may be to good use and profit commended unto the people in sermons, and the holy examples of holy men set before their eyes to be imitated of all. 80 FLE 2:364–365; LEP V.70.4.

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For if those principall workes of God, the memorie whereof wee use to celebrate at such times be but certaine tastes and saies as it were of that final benefit wherein our perfect felicitie and blisse lyeth folded up, seing that the presence of the one doth direct our cogitations thoughtes and desires towards the other, it giveth surelie a kind of life and addeth inwardlie so small delight to those so comfortable expectations, when the very outward countenance of that wee presentlie doe representeth after a sorte that also whereunto we tend, as festivall rest doth that coelestiall estate.81

The distinctions that Hooker’s draws above between what might be called “the inward” life and “outward countenance” will make him suspect in the eyes of later puritan Reformers such as Ames and Gillespie. Yet, Hooker, with the suggestion that certain days should be set apart and considered more holy than others, was not inconsistent with Reformed theology. Rather, for Hooker, the inner life can benefit and grow in both faithfulness and happiness through the public participation in religious festivals since they promote praise, freedom and rest. We have already seen how Hooker, following Aquinas, distinguished between what has been identified as “intrinsic” and “extrinsic” necessity. How might these scholastic constructs apply to the controversial question of Christian festivals? For Hooker, it was a given that Christians should desire God as their ultimate end. In this assumption he is very much in line with Augustinian thought. Human beings then, are by “intrinsic necessity,” or by their very nature, creatures who long to find their fulfilment in God. Festivals, while not necessary in the same intrinsic way, nonetheless remind Christians of the reality of what God has achieved in Christ, while at the same time, anticipating the joy that awaits believers in God. A quotation that Hooker translated from Augustine’s De Civitate Dei, Book 10, Chapter 382 makes this clear: “By festivall solemnities and set daies wee dedicate and sanctifie to God the memorie of his benefits, least unthankfull forgetfulness thereof should creep upon us in corse of time.”83 Festivals then, might be considered necessary, albeit in an extrinsic, relative way, since Christian growth is better achieved by participating in them. In other words, Festivals are extrinsically necessary since they tell the Christian story and encourage people to embrace God as their ultimate pursuit rather than filling their time with more worldly activities.

81 FLE 2:365; LEP V.70.4. 82 Hooker’s 1597 edition of the Laws mistakes the source as De Civitate Dei, Book 10, Chapter 4. In actual fact, the quotation comes from Book 10, Chapter 3, something caught in John Keble’s edition but not by the editors of the Folger Library Edition. 83 FLE 2:367; LEP V.70.6.

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Conclusion

We began this paper with a quotation by John Calvin as he wrote to Protector Somerset from Geneva on 22 October 1548. In that letter, Calvin urged the Lord Protector to safeguard the realm from two kinds of rebels who have risen up against the King and the Estates of the Kingdom. The first were the fantastical sort of persons, who, under colour of the Gospel, would put all into confusion. The others are people who persist in the superstitions of the Roman Antichrist: Satan never ceases to upheave new conflicts, and that it is a thing in itself so difficult that nothing can be more so, to cause the truth of God to have peaceable dominion among men, who by nature are most prone to falsehood; while on the other hand, there are so many circumstances which prevent its having free causes; and most of all, that the superstitions of Antichrist, having taken root for so long time, cannot be easily uprooted from men’s hearts.84

In other words, upholding a proper Reformed Church in England would require godly order in the commonwealth and Reformed worship over and against the superstitious worship of Rome. In what has been presented above we have seen that Calvin’s two suggestions were not always easy to reconcile since what constituted a properly Reformed church was interpreted broadly according various trajectories of Reformed thought. What is more, the evil forces that Calvin describes above were interpreted differently throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries according to context. While Gillespie undoubtedly saw Hooker’s influence in a negative light – especially as the latter encouraged acceptance of what Gillespie considered compromised, even intrinsically sinful, ceremonies – the Scottish puritan inadvertently demonstrated that Hooker’s view on the ceremonies was consistent with the magisterial Reformed emphasis on upholding good order, so long as we keep in mind that Hooker viewed things like vestments to be indifferent by nature. By labeling Hooker and his followers as “Nicodemites,” Gillespie sought to portray them as compromisers and cowards, who had departed from the Reformed faith for reasons of personal gain. For Gillespie, the act of Kneeling at the Lord’s Supper proved his case in point since it implied a compromise of true religion. If genuine faith shows itself through the external rejection of idolatry, how could anyone defend ceremonies that resemble the folly of Rome? This is an argument that had commanding sway over the thinking of some Marian exiled Reformers like Knox many decades earlier: “for looke, as the treue faythe within the heart is requesyte the confession of the mouth, so to the knowlede and hatred of some idolatries is also required the external avoyding thereof; as 84 John Calvin: Compiled from Original Manuscripts, 170.

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wytnesseth Daniel and the Three Children against the lawes of Darius and Nebuchadnezar.”85 Such logic, however, was difficult to reconcile with the convenient theology of Hooker, who like Cranmer before him under Edward VI saw obedience to an authorized Protestant Settlement as the faithful requirement of law-abiding citizens of the realm. That some would jeopardize the good order for matters indifferent was intolerable and dangerous. For this reason, Hooker also viewed festivals as convenient for their intended purpose, and in order to demonstrate that they were not contrary to the Protestant faith, he used the categories ex convenientia of Aquinas. Further still, his analysis was shaped by Augustinian introspection that saw the coming together of time, place and circumstances as essential to the ultimate goal of Christian communion with God. While many of Hooker’s later critics would misunderstand and misrepresent his position, his ideas are consonant with Bullinger’s point of caution as stated in the Second Helvetic Confession and the authorized confessional standards in England. Take for instance Articles XXII and XXXV of the Thirty-Nine Articles. The former rejected the Romish doctrines of adoration of images and relics, and the invocation of saints, while the latter promoted the understanding of certain days via the reading of the Edwardian Book of Homilies. All of these observances, while not necessarily identical to the practices of other Reformed nations were nonetheless deemed convenient for the reformation context of Elizabethan England. Thus, Hooker could write in good Reformed conscience: “Of festival dayes and the natural causes of theire convenient institution.”86

85 Lormier, John Knox, 270. 86 FLE 2:359.Title; LEP V:69.

Part III: Richard Hooker in the Context of Reformed Orthodoxy

Andrew A. Fulford

9.

“A Truth Infallible”: Richard Hooker and Reformed Orthodoxy on Autopistos

Although recent decades have brought vigorous discussion about Richard Hooker’s coordination of reason and scripture, disagreement persists as to whether his view counts as Reformed. My goal in this essay is twofold. First, I aim to raise and tentatively resolve some questions surrounding Hooker’s Reformed bona fides. Second, I will present a brief outline of what I take to be Hooker’s view on the subject of the self-authentication of scripture, and suggest that he should be considered Reformed on this issue specifically.

9.1

Is Hooker’s Position Reformed?

Nigel Voak’s provocative article, “Richard Hooker and the principle of Sola Scriptura,” provides a useful starting point for the present discussion. In it, he highlights five principles that express the Reformed doctrine of the authority of Scripture: 1. The need for divine revelation. 2. Holy Scripture is not authenticated by the Church. 3. The operation of the Holy Spirit is essential for a true and saving belief that Holy Scripture is the Word of God. […] 4. Reason is necessary to elicit certain doctrines by consequence from Holy Scripture, and is also necessary for theological enquiry and debate. […] 5. How Holy Scripture is authenticated, and the role assigned to reason.1

1 Nigel Voak, “Richard Hooker and the principle of Sola Scriptura,” Journal of Theological Studies 59, no. 1 (2008): 100–101.

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Voak’s concludes that article with the following judgment about Hooker: [D]espite basic agreement over the first four principles, Hooker’s views on the vital fifth principle of how Scripture is authenticated took him decisively outside the Reformed tradition over the issue of religious authority.2

When all the relevant comments from Hooker’s corpus receive adequate attention, his position on the authentication of scripture seems to be as follows. First, God reveals himself directly to prophets and apostles. Second, he confirms this revelation by means of miracles, from which third parties can deduce God’s affirmation of the prophetic messages. Third, these miracles themselves are found within scripture, and thus scripture provides a witness to its own divine authority. Fourth, nevertheless, those who believe in scripture do not come to this position based on circular argument; rather, marks of divinity beyond mere statements from human authors justify belief in the divinity of scripture. As the survey below of Calvin’s position in particular will show, this is somewhat different from other models of autopistos. The Genevan Reformer stressed that Christians come to believe scripture not fundamentally based on an argument like the one intimated above, but rather on a direct experience of divine power when reading the text. However, the burden of the present essay will be to demonstrate that though there is a real difference here, it does not push Hooker beyond the pale of the Reformed tradition. With this goal in mind, the question of method becomes unavoidable. Resolving that problem might seem a simple matter, but it is not. For it requires that we first answer several subsidiary questions. First, how do we as students of history determine what counts as Reformed? Second, did Hooker claim to be Reformed? Third, did he do so sincerely? Fourth, if he did, did he do so reasonably in his own context? We will address these in sequence.

9.1.1 How Do We Determine What Counts as Reformed? So then, how might we determine what counts as Reformed? Traditions are social constructs, and the Reformed tradition is no exception. Yet while social constructs are initially dependent upon human decision, once they are constructed, they acquire a reality of their own. This allows for historians to make objective judgments about our kind of question. At the same time, people are capable of departing from their traditions, even unknowingly. For this reason it is conceivable that adherents to a tradition might misjudge its character. This means 2 Voak, “Richard Hooker,” 137.

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that historians cannot regard even majorities of adherents as infallible arbiters of what counts as traditional. Ultimately what must determine a question like ours are the artefacts of the tradition that existed prior to the time Hooker wrote, and not necessarily the opinions of his contemporaries. But which artefacts should we count as determinative? One intuitive possibility would be the confessions that existed prior to Hooker’s writing: Zwingli’s Sixtyseven Articles (1523), the Ten Conclusions of Berne (1528), the First Helvetic Confession (1536), the French Confession of Faith (1559), the Scots Confession of Faith (1560), the Belgic Confession of Faith (1561), the Second Helvetic Confession (1566), the 39 Articles (1571), and the Second Scots Confession (1581). Insofar as these were meant to express Reformed orthodoxy, they are a useful standard of measurement for Hooker’s position. If we take this option, what would we have to conclude about him? While my examination has not been exhaustive, it appears to me that none of these documents include a formula that would exclude Hooker’s position as I will expound it later in this essay. Interestingly, Peter A. Lillback and Richard B. Gaffin note that the French Confession originally included a comment from Calvin to the effect that “it is something beyond all human senses to discern that God himself speaks” in the scriptures, but that this comment did not appear in the version published by the Synod of Paris.3 Further, Article 5 of the Belgic Confession contains this notable juxtaposition: We receive all these books, and these only, as holy and canonical […] especially because the Holy Ghost witnesseth in our hearts that they are from God, whereof they carry the evidence in themselves. For the very blind are able to perceive that the things foretold in them are fulfilling.4

In this case, the Confession appears to affirm that the fulfillment of prophecy in scripture is compelling evidence within scripture for its divine authorship, even without the internal witness of the Holy Ghost, the sort of claim that Voak finds un-Reformed in Hooker. Perhaps we might wish to argue for a narrower criterion. That is, perhaps we should judge as Reformed only those ideas which find precedent in other unimpeachably Reformed figures (i. e., Calvin, Bullinger, Vermigli, Ursinus, etc.). If we wish to follow this path, we must face squarely the variety found within the tradition. On this criterion, I will argue that Hooker does depart from Calvin but not necessarily from all his other leading predecessors; therefore, he should still be considered Reformed.

3 Peter A. Lillback and Richard B. Gaffin, eds., Thy Word Is Still Truth: Essential Writings on the Doctrine of Scripture from the Reformation to Today (Phillipsburg, New Jersey: P & R Publishing, 2013), 111n2. 4 Lillback and Gaffin, Thy Word Is Still Truth, 126.

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Finally, one other rule could serve as a reasonable measure for membership in the Reformed family. If other thinkers within the broad period of Reformed orthodoxy held to Hooker’s position but are considered unimpeachably Reformed, we have good circumstantial evidence that the tradition as a whole would probably not wish to exclude him from its bounds. Taking this approach, I will contend that Francis Turretin, a certainly Reformed thinker writing within about a hundred years after Hooker, held substantially the same position as he did on the autopistos of scripture.

9.1.2 Did Hooker Claim to Be Reformed? The second question we asked above was whether Hooker himself claims to be Reformed. In this case our task is relatively easy, for as both Voak5 and Neelands6 have noted, Hooker seems to suggest he agrees with Calvin on this very matter. Hooker writes: Neither can I thinke that when grave and learned men do sometime hold, that of this principle there is no proofe but by the testimony of the Spirit, which assureth our harts therein, it is their meaning to exclude utterly all force which any kind of reason may have in that behalf.7

Neelands’s recent article suggests plausibly that “grave and learned” might actually be a coded reference to Calvin by Hooker,8 and I think he is correct in this. However, whatever else this comment means, Hooker seems to claim Calvin as his ally on this subject. This obviously entails a claim to be Reformed. We need not resort to mere entailment to establish Hooker’s self-conception, however. It is evident enough in various parts of his corpus. For example, after briefly recounting the roles of Henry VIII and Edward VI, he turns to Mary and Elizabeth: That worke, which the one in such sort had begun, and the other so farre proceeded in, was in short space so overthrown, as if almost it had never bene: till such time as that God, whose propertie is to shew his mercies then greatest when they are nearest to be utterlie despaired of, caused in the depth of discomfort and darknes a most glorious starre to arise, and on hir head settled the Crowne, whome him selfe had kept as a lambe from the slaughter of those bloudie times, that the experience of his goodness in hir owne deliverance might cause hir mercifull disposition to take so much more delight in saving others, whome the like necessitie should presse […]. That which especially concerneth our selves, in the present matter we treate of, is the state of reformed 5 Voak, “Richard Hooker,” 124. 6 W. David Neelands, “The Use and Abuse of John Calvin in Richard Hooker’s Defense of the English Church,” Perichoresis 10, no. 1 (2012), 16–17. 7 FLE 1:232.16–20; LEP III.8.15. 8 Neelands, “The Use and Abuse of John Calvin,” 11n41.

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religion, a thing at hir coming to the Crowne even raysed as it were by miracle from the dead; a thing which we so little hoped to see, that even they which beheld it done, scarcely believed their own senses at the first beholding.9

Hooker’s own identification with the reformed religion is hard to deny when he ascribes its resurrection in the reign of Elizabeth to a miracle from God, given to demonstrate the property of his mercy, an act so beyond what was hoped that it was hard to believe when it came to pass.

9.1.3 Was Hooker’s Claim Sincere? Yet even if Hooker claimed to be so, it is not beyond question that he was sincere. Voak thus suggests that Hooker might be deliberately misconstruing Calvin at this point.10 It seems to me that one’s judgment on this question will be largely determined by a judgment on a prior question: is there a broader pattern of Hookerian sleight of hand towards the Reformed tradition? Suffice it to say that if we just take some of the most recently alleged cases of Hookerian duplicity, some plausible rebuttals provide strong reason to accept Hooker’s general sincerity. For example, see Ranall Ingalls’s essay on ‘Sin and Grace’,11 as well as David Neelands’s chapter on Hooker’s Paul’s Cross sermon on predestination,12 and his recent article on “The Use and Abuse of John Calvin,”13 all of which have shown plausible interpretations of Hooker’s doctrinal formulations that do not require recourse to a charge of duplicity. Other essays within the present volume only serve to further confirm this point. These all thus provide additional reason to follow the more basic principle of charity in interpreting Hooker’s words.

9.1.4 Was His Claim Reasonable? The Cases of Calvin and Bullinger Granting that his claim to be Reformed was sincere, was it a reasonable one for him to make at his time? This question of course forces us back to our initial question – was he in fact Reformed on these points? On the confessional criterion suggested above, we already noted that Hooker appears to pass the test, and I will 9 FLE 1:343.23–344.9; LEP IV.14.7. 10 Voak, “Richard Hooker,” 124. 11 Randall Ingalls, “Sin and Grace,” in A Companion to Richard Hooker, ed. Torrance Kirby (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 151–83. 12 W. David Neelands, “Richard Hooker’s Paul’s Cross Sermon,” in Paul’s Cross and the Culture of Persuasion in England, 1520–1640, ed. Torrance Kirby and P.G. Stanwood (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014), 245–61. 13 Neelands, “The Use and Abuse of John Calvin,” 3–22.

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attempt to support this further in the full reading of Hooker’s argument below. If we take the second suggested criterion above, that of precedent in other unimpeachably Reformed thinkers, a comparison with Calvin and Heinrich Bullinger can start to point us in the right direction. On the Genevan Reformer it seems clear that Voak is correct. There is a real disagreement between Hooker and Calvin on this point, despite Hooker’s suggestion to the contrary. The passages Voak cites are quite probative, especially Institutes I.7.5: Let it therefore be held as fixed […] that Scripture, carrying its own evidence along with it, deigns not to submit to proofs and arguments, but owes the full conviction with which we ought to receive it to the testimony of the Spirit […]. We ask not for proofs or probabilities on which to rest our Judgment, but we subject our intellect and Judgment to it as too transcendent for us to estimate.

Voak sums it up well: “Scripture can only be truly authenticated by a process which is quite distinct from a ratiocinative analysis of the marks of Scripture.”14 Yet it is possible for thinkers to be blissfully inconsistent, and Calvin is no exception. Indeed, it appears that other statements by the Reformer might lead one to question whether he provides a self-consistent model of the psychology involved in coming to regard Scripture as divine. For example, in one place he writes: Therefore, illumined by his power, we believe neither by our own nor by anyone else’s judgment that Scripture is from God; but above human judgment we affirm with utter certainty ( just as if we were gazing upon the majesty of God himself) that it has flowed to us from the very mouth of God by the ministry of men.15

This text is much like the previous one, but includes a reference to a “utter certainty.” Yet soon after the Reformer states: Conversely, once we have embraced it devoutly as its dignity deserves, and have recognized it to be above the common sort of things, those arguments—not strong enough before to engraft and fix the certainty of Scripture in our minds—become very useful aids. What wonderful confirmation ensues when, with keener study, we ponder the economy of the divine wisdom, so well ordered and disposed; the completely heavenly character of its doctrine, savoring of nothing earthly; the beautiful agreement of all the parts with one another—as well as such other qualities as can gain majesty for the writings.16

14 Voak, “Richard Hooker,” 108. 15 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill and trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1960), 1:80 [I.7.5]. 16 Calvin, Institutes, 1:82 [I.8.1].

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It seems difficult to imagine how a “full conviction” could be “helped” or “confirmed” further by arguments. If assurance is already total, how could it be added to by anything else? There is no clear explanation forthcoming from the Reformer here. Another, similar case may be illuminating for the larger point here. Henk van den Belt has recently argued that in 1571 Bullinger made affirmations in De Scripturae Sanctae praestantia dissertatio, a work he claimed not to have written but only to have edited, that are directly dependent on Calvin’s Institutes.17 Belt notes one such affirmation: “Therefore, being illuminated by the vertue of the spirit, we doe not now beleeue either through our own iudgment, or through the iudgment of other, that the Scripture is of God.”18 However, as with Calvin, in other places Bullinger makes statements that seem difficult to square with such an affirmation. For example, he argues that God authenticated the writings of Moses,19 the prophets,20 and the apostles through miracles. As an example of these arguments, regarding the apostles he writes: And the Lord by their ministry wrought great miracles, thereby to garnish the ministry of them, and to commend their doctrine unto us […]. Although […] the apostles were men, yet their doctrine, first of all taught by a lively expressed voice, and after that set down in writing with pen and ink, is the doctrine of God and the very true word of God.21

In all three cases it is clear that God performs the miracles precisely so that we will know the doctrine of these men to be divinely authoritative. This naturally suggests ratiocination in our coming to know the scriptures as authenticated. Elsewhere, Bullinger contends that God uses means to bring about faith,22 and appears to provide examples of people coming to faith because of reasoning on the basis of miracles. In one instance, regarding the believing Centurion, he writes: “For he understood how great and mighty things he promised to them that believe. He gathered also by the works of Christ, that it was an easy matter for him to restore his servant to health again. Therefore he cometh to the Lord.”23

17 Henk van den Belt, “Heinrich Bullinger and Jean Calvin on the Authority of Scripture (1538– 1571),” Journal of Reformed Theology 5 (2011): 322. 18 Heinrich Bullinger, A Most Godly and Learned Discourse of the Woorthynesse, Authoritie, and Sufficiencie of the Holy Scripture, trans. John Tomkys, (London: William Ponnsonby, 1579), 45. Cf. van den Belt, “Heinrich Bullinger,” 322. 19 Heinrich Bullinger, Decades, ed. Thomas Harding (Cambridge: University Press for the Parker Society, 1849), 1:45–46 (Serm. I.1). 20 Bullinger, Decades, 1:50 (I.1). 21 Bullinger, Decades, 1:53 (I.1) 22 Bullinger, Decades, 1:84–85 [Serm. 1.4: ]. 23 Bullinger, Decades, 1:91 [1.4].

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Finally, he also summarizes his position in contrast to the Roman Catholic one as follows: [M]en h[e]ard the veritie of the woorde of God, and bycause they judged it autentike, they beleued it, and by this meanes were made the churche of Christe. And hereof followeth that they did not then onely make it autentike when they came togyther into the societie of the church, forasmuch as before, they iudged it woorthy of credit.24

In sum, he says that God provided miracles to commend prophetic and apostolic doctrine to us, that the Centurion came to faith through a process of reasoning, and that Christians believed the word of God because of their judgment. But how is this consistent with a statement that “we do not now believe […] through our own judgment”? If our question is whether Hooker could be right in claiming his position was Reformed, and if our (second) test for detecting the answer to this question is agreement with other unquestioned Reformed doctors, what can we say if their positions have apparent inconsistencies? In his excellent study of the Reformed doctrine of scripture in this era, Belt argued that Reformed orthodoxy as a whole had a tension on these issues: Reformed orthodoxy appreciates reason as the main faculty of the soul, but at the same time depreciates reason as a potential enemy of faith and an instrument of human hubris. Reason is not a guide to the truth, but a guide from the truth of Scripture to Christian doctrine and practice. The notae of Scripture are rejected as the foundation of faith, but accepted as conclusive for unbelievers and as the means by which the Spirit convinces believers. There is an inherent tension in Reformed theology at this point.25

He gives as examples of this tension the differences within William Whitaker’s26 and Franciscus Junius’ works,27 and between those two and Anthonius Walaeus.28 24 Bullinger, Commonplaces of Christian Religion (London: Bishop, 1572), 12. 25 Henk van den Belt, The Authority of Scripture in Reformed Theology: Truth and Trust (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 176–77. 26 “Unlike Calvin, Whitaker connected the evidences to the testimonium that gave power to them. In the Duplicatio he even went a step further, stating that the [autopistia] of the Scriptures could be demonstrated. In fact this was a contradiction in terms, for demonstranda and [autopistia] exclude each other” (Van den Belt, The Authority of Scripture, 133). 27 Belt explains: “In the thesis De Sacra Scriptura it seemed as if the testimonium of the Spirit was the primus inter pares of the evidences, but here [in De Authoritate Sacrae Scripturae] the testimonium of the Spirit is closely related to the testimonium of Scripture. Both are kept separate from the intrinsic and extrinsic arguments for Scripture and from the ministerial testimonium of the church” (The Authority of Scripture, 139). A little later he adds: “The relationship between the evidences and the testimonium is explained in various ways; apparently the issue was not yet settled” (142). 28 “The last clause is of importance for the relation between the testimonium and the evidences. Whitaker said that the testimonium gives power (vis) to the evidences and Junius saw the testimonium as one of the evidences, though greater than the others. Walaeus says that the Spirit works faith through the divine notae of Scripture. There seems to have been a deve-

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If he is correct, the survey above would confirm his judgment, and suggest the tension goes back to Calvin himself, if not earlier. Yet if the tradition as a whole considered diachronically lacks a consistent viewpoint, and some of its major proponents participate in that division of opinion, can we accuse Hooker of departing from a tradition by attempting to make it consistent, even while he expressly states his intention to be part of that tradition? The charitable answer would seem to be no. Of course, it is always possible that the apparent contradiction is merely an illusion, and that he is in fact departing from a wholly coherent and uniform heritage; nevertheless, that possibility does not seem probable given the historical evidence. But what was Hooker’s position, exactly? To this question we now turn.

9.2

Unpacking Hooker’s Argument

9.2.1 Some Hookerian Epistemological Premises One of Hooker’s most basic epistemological principles is this: “Now it is not required or can be exacted at our hands, that we should yeeld unto any thing other assent, than such as doth answere the evidence which is to be had of that we assent unto.”29 This strong commitment to a philosophical evidentialism provides the key to his thought. The kinds of evidence Hooker discusses vary in type; we can mention a few here. First, Hooker considers the basic principles of reason to be “in themselves apparent.”30 Second, he regards deductive proofs as compelling evidence.31 Third, he contends that human testimony, while defeasible, is a generally trustworthy kind of evidence.32 Fourth, he recognizes a category of evidence we can summarize as “divine.” In the experience of prophets, this includes immediate communication, or as he terms it, “intuitive revelation, wherein there was no possibilitie of error.”33 Third parties receive confirmation of this revelation with another kind of divine evidence, viz. miracles. In the course of explaining why St. Paul emphasized the miraculous authorization of his teaching, Hooker writes: How then is the speech of men made perswasive? Surely there can be but two waies to bring this to passe, the one humaine, the other divine. Either S. Paul did onely by arte

29 30 31 32 33

lopment in Reformed orthodoxy at this point.” (Van den Belt, The Authority of Scripture, 151). FLE 1:179.25–27; LEP II.7.5. FLE 1:85.6–7; LEP I.8.5. FLE 1:179.25–27; LEP II.7.5. FLE 1:177.15–18; LEP II.7.3. FLE 1:31.12–13; LEP Pref. 6.3.

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and naturall industrie cause his owne speech to be credited; or else God by myracle did authorize it, and so bring credit thereunto, as to the speech of the rest of the Apostles.34

Thus Hooker regards evidence as the bedrock of warranted Christian belief, and appeals to many kinds of evidence for the content of his teaching. With this summary in place, we can move on to the more particular question of the authentication of the scriptures.

9.2.2 Hooker on How We Come to Believe in Scripture David Neelands summarizes well the theological orientation that pervades Hooker’s Lawes: “For Hooker, as for Thomas, grace not only perfects nature, it presupposes nature, and Scripture presupposes reason.”35 This orientation produces its logical consequence in the discussion of how Christians come to know the divinity of scripture, as Neelands also notes: “Hooker has clearly identified the acceptance of the authority of Scripture […] as taking place within the otherwise natural process of coming to conviction or belief.”36 Hooker details this natural process in various places during his argument. Arguably the most important passage in Hooker’s corpus on this subject appears in Book III of the Lawes, when he writes: And by experience we all know, that the first outward motive leading men so to esteeme of the Scripture is the authority of Gods Church […]. Afterwards the more we bestow our labor in reading or hearing the misteries thereof, the more we find that the thing it selfe doth answer our received opinion concerning it. So that the former inducement prevailing somewhat with us before, doth now much more prevaile, when the very thing hath ministered farther reason. If Infidels or Atheists chance at any time to call it in question, this giveth us occasion to sift what reason there is, whereby the testimony of the Church concerning Scripture, and our own perswasion which Scripture it selfe hath confirmed, may be proved a truth infallible.37

This passage recounts a psychological process with three steps. The first step happens when an individual accepts the testimony of the church regarding the Scriptures. The second point in the process happens when the Bible itself “doth answer our received opinion concerning it” and ministers “farther reason” for our persuasion. Hooker does not elaborate on what it is about scripture that 34 FLE 1:228.18–23; LEP III.8.10 (italics in original). 35 W. David Neelands, “Scripture, Reason, and ‘Tradition,’” in Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community, ed. Arthur S. McGrade (Tempe: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1997), 85. 36 Neelands, “Scripture, Reason, and ‘Tradition,’” 86. 37 FLE 1:231.20–232.1; LEP III.8.14.

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provides reason for belief in it. We will return to this point momentarily. Finally, the third part of the process occurs when others challenge our belief in scripture. This gives us the occasion to examine how our view can “be proved a truth infallible.” As with the previous point, Hooker does not actually provide the reasons he is thinking of in this place. However, it seems likely that Nigel Voak’s suggestion is correct, that he has in mind an argument using the marks of scripture.38 I suggest we can go further, and make a reasonable conjecture as to what marks Hooker might have had in mind. In III.8.12, almost immediately before the passage we are discussing, Hooker recounts St. Paul’s argument before King Agrippa in Acts 26, where he contends that he preaches nothing except what the prophets foretold, which prophets Agrippa already believed. Similarly, as noted before, in Lawes III.8.10 Hooker argues that God provided miraculous confirmation of the authority of apostolic speech.39 Also suggestive of this conjecture is Hooker’s allusion to the arguments of the church fathers: In which case the ancient Fathers being often constreined to shew, what warrant they had so much to relie upon the Scriptures, endevored still to maintein the autority of the books of God by arguments such as unbeleevers themselves must needs think reasonable, if they judged thereof as they should.40

In the Folger commentary on this text William Haugaard suggests that Hooker might have had in mind examples like Justin Martyr, as he quotes the latter’s Apology on a number of occasions.41 But among the arguments Justin used for Christianity was precisely the argument from the fulfillment of predictive prophecy.42 Thus while Hooker’s laconic comments make certainty impossible, it seems likely that he had in mind reasons such as these: evidences internal to Scripture, which proved the divinity of its message by the records of fulfilled prophecies and miraculous works within it.

38 39 40 41 42

Voak, “Richard Hooker,” 131. FLE 1:228.20–24; LEP III.8.10. FLE 1:232.1–6; LEP III.8.14. FLE 6(1):579–80; Commentary.. Justin Martyr, The First and Second Apologies, trans. Leslie William Barnard (New York: Paulist Press, 1997), 43–61.

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9.2.3 The Tension in Hooker’s Logic It would be tempting to conclude discussion of Hooker’s position on the authentication of scripture here. However another set of comments in his writings deserve mention, and have received some in recent articles by Nigel Voak,43 Torrance Kirby,44 and David Neelands.45 One of the most succinct examples of this set appears in the immediate context of the passage we have been discussing: “Scripture teacheth us that saving truth which God hath discovered unto the world by revelation, and it presumeth us taught otherwise that it self is divine and sacred.”46 This conclusion, that evidences external to Scripture lead us to believe it, stands in some tension with the theme we have already explored, which suggested that it was evidences internal to Scripture that were decisive. A charitable interpretation of Hooker would seek to resolve this tension, even if he does not do it for us. Given Hooker’s principles, how could this be done? The resolution to Hooker’s dilemma could proceed as follows. At the second stage in the epistemic process described above, the individual has an unreflective belief in scripture, while in the third stage the challenge of “infidels” forces one to reflect upon what is persuasive of his belief, and how he can prove it to others. But in both cases the reason for his belief could be found in scripture. If the arguments for scripture that Hooker had in mind were those from miraculous and prophetic confirmation, this would seem to confirm this hypothesis. Insofar as both the miracles and the predictions are found in the Bible, it would be natural to judge them as scriptural reasons to believe scripture. Further, some Reformed contemporaries quite explicitly regarded the miracles and fulfilled prophecies of holy writ as intrinsic marks of its divinity, which confirms that this judgment is a natural one.47 Insofar as these are the evidences Hooker speaks about elsewhere in his corpus, Ockham’s razor would seem to confirm that we should supply them here. The foregoing can explain how scripture might provide the reason for belief in itself, yet it does not explain how we should understand the other half of Hooker’s antinomy. In what sense is scripture not the basis for belief in its divinity? In the discussion of Francis Turretin below, we will see a direct attempt to distinguish 43 Voak, “Richard Hooker,” 128. 44 Torrance Kirby, “Sundrie Waies of Wisdom,” in Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Bible, ed. Kevin Killeen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 332–333. 45 Neelands, “The Use and Abuse,” 13–19. 46 FLE 1:231.12–15; LEP III.8.13. u E. g. Robert Rollock, Select Works of Robert Rollock, ed. William M. Gunn (Edinburgh: Wodrow Society, 1849), 1:70. Richard A. Muller also mentions Benedict Pictet in this regard in Holy Scripture: The Cognitive Foundation of Theology, vol. 2 of Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, ca. 1520 to ca. 1725, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 270.

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between two senses in which the marks are related to scripture, one wherein the marks are distinguished from it, and one wherein they are considered as a part of it. According to Turretin, it is in the former sense that the marks justify belief in the authority of scripture. Thus, for Hooker to implicitly give two senses to this relation will not be unique in the Reformed tradition. If Turretin could devise such a distinction, it seems possible that Hooker could have been working with it as well, even if only inchoately. And so perhaps Hooker’s denial that scripture is the basis for belief in its divinity amounts to this: scripture qua human text, in abstraction from the marks of divinity provided within it, does not compel us to regard it as divinely authored. To put it plainly, the mere fact that some human beings wrote some books does not give us reason to regard them as divine books. If we believe them to be divine, we do not do so based on mere human assertion. Rather, it is only when we inspect them further, and find within them marks of a further, divine author that we become rational in believing the books to be divine on the basis of their contents. Now admittedly this is a speculative harmonization of Hooker’s dilemma; yet insofar as the dilemma is really present, and Hooker does not resolve it for us, any resolution must be speculative. I confess that I cannot see a superior alternative, and the only remaining option, that of imputing incoherency to Hooker, is less charitable to a writer of an otherwise highly systematic bent.

9.3

Francis Turretin on the Self-Authentication of Scripture

The third criterion we looked at above for determining whether Hooker was Reformed, is whether his views find an appearance in the thought of later clearly Reformed thinkers. Following the lead of comments Belt has made,48 I will argue that Francis Turretin holds the same position as Hooker on this doctrine. In his magnum opus, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, Turretin contends that theology is neither built upon nor resolvable into reason,49 but also insists that atheists can be converted by reason through arguments founded on scripture or 48 Van den Belt writes: “Turretin gives some examples of the autopistia of Scripture; as light is immediately known by its brightness, food by its peculiar sweetness, and an odor by its fragrance, so Scripture can be easily distinguished through faith. These analogies remind us of Calvin’s Institutes, but there is a shift of emphasis. For Calvin, Scripture can be proved by its evidences to unbelievers, but believers accept it as [autopistos] (independent of proofs and demonstrations) through the testimonium of the Spirit. For Turretin believers accept Scripture because it proves itself to be divine by its own notae and the Spirit is the efficient cause of this faith that rests upon the marks of Scripture.” The Authority of Scripture, 157–158. 49 Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, trans. George M. Giger, ed. James T. Dennison, Jr. (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R Publishing, 1994), 1:27 [1.8.17].

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philosophical arguments.50 He argues further that the principles from reason or philosophy also belong to natural theology, which should come before revealed theology.51 Philosophy thus serves as a means of convincing the Gentiles and preparing them for the Christian faith. It also can furnish and prepare the mind as an inferior science for a higher science, which “higher science” seems in context to be theology.52 At the same time, he notes the dangers philosophy can pose. Among these, he writes that it is an abuse when truths about nature given by philosophy are used to rule out as impossible things that scripture tells us came about supernaturally; similarly, he condemns the Socinians when they try to make philosophy a master in articles of faith, rejecting doctrines like the Trinity because they do not seem to be in accordance with the principles of philosophy.53 When he turns to the question of biblical authority (for which he here uses the term autopistos), he teaches that the scriptures are authoritative because they are from God. In response to this teaching, he explains that there arise two questions: with atheists and others who grant the scriptures no divine authority, and with other Christians who want to make the scriptures’ authority depend on the church’s.54 On the first question, he explains the Bible proves its own divinity in a twofold way: The Bible proves itself divine, not only authoritatively and in the manner of an artless argument or testimony, when it proclaims itself God-inspired (theopneuston). Although this may be well used against those Christians who profess to believe it, yet it cannot be employed against others who reject it. The Bible also proves itself divine ratiocinatively by an argument artfully made (artificiali) from the marks which God has impressed upon the Scriptures and which furnish indubitable proof of divinity. For as the works of God exhibit visibly to our eyes by certain marks the incomparable excellence of the artificer himself and as the sun makes himself known by his own light, so he wished in the Bible (which is the emanation […] from the Father of lights and the Sun of righteousness) to send forth different rays of divinity by which he might make himself known.55

It is significant to note that when Turretin speaks of how the Bible testifies to its own divinity, he picks out the term theopneuston. This is a direct quote from 2 Timothy 3:16. What this strongly suggests is that the mode of self-witness here is direct and verbal, in the form of 2 Timothy’s proposition about scripture, rather

50 51 52 53 54 55

Turretin, Institutes 1:28 [1.8.23]. Turretin, Institutes 1:32 [1.9.18]; cf. [1.3.10]. Turretin, Institutes, 1:45 [1.13.5]. Turretin, Institutes, 1:45 [1.13.6]. Turretin, Institutes, 1:62 [2.4.1]. Turretin, Institutes, 1:63 [2.4.6].

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than something like the experience of “power” that Calvin described in his Institutes.56 We will return to the significance of this point momentarily. Like Hooker, Turretin puts among the ‘marks’ of divinity in scripture, which he also calls ‘criteria’, the prophecies of scripture.57 After discussing the various marks in detail, he returns to the role of testimony: Although faith may be founded upon the authority of testimony and not upon scientific demonstration, it does not follow that it cannot be assisted by artificial arguments, especially in erecting the principles of faith. For before faith can believe, it must have the divinity of the witness to whom faith is to be given clearly established and certain true marks apprehended in it, otherwise it cannot believe. For where suitable reasons of believing anyone are lacking, the testimony of such a witness cannot be worthy of credence (axiopiston).58

After the above section, Turretin gives an extended rational defense of the historical reliability of the apostles and Moses,59 beginning with the statement: “The testimony of the prophets and apostles is unexceptionable and cannot reasonably be called in question by anyone.”60 In context, we must read this section as the provision of some of the same “suitable reasons” that he just alluded to, which seem to be equivalent with marks that establish the divinity of the witness that faith rests upon. When dialoguing with the Catholic position, he says the question is “what argument does the Holy Spirit principally use to convince us of the inspiration of the Scriptures? The testimony and voice of the church, or the marks impressed upon Scripture itself ? Our opponents assert the former; we the latter.”61 Turretin quite obviously imagines a scenario where the Spirit uses our reasoning on the basis of the marks (or notes, or criteria, or reasons) to convince us of the divinity of the Bible. Turretin also argues that theological certainty is distinct from metaphysical certainty, which is given by conclusions demonstrated from self-evident principles, and moral certainty, which persuade by means of testimony that a sensible man could not reasonably doubt. Theological certainty is infallible, based as it is on divine revelation.62 This may seem to contradict Turretin’s own approach, which gave historical arguments for the reliability of the scriptural writers. Yet, the point is that the writers of scripture testify to the inspiration of their writings, 56 As Calvin puts it, “we feel the undoubted power of his divine majesty lives and breathes there.” Institutes, 1:80 [I.7.5]. 57 Turretin, Institutes, 1:64 [2.4.9]. 58 Turretin, Institutes, 1:64–65 [2.4.13]. 59 Turretin, Institutes, 1:65–68 [2.4.14–20]. 60 Turretin, Institutes, 1:65 [2.4.14]. 61 Turretin, Institutes, 1:88 [2.6.9]. 62 Turretin, Institutes, 1:68–67 [2.4.22].

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and given their reliability, this scriptural testimony to scripture functions as a self-authentication. Finally, Turretin addresses the charge that the self-authentication of scripture is strange, or else a circular argument: Therefore since the Bible is the first principle and the primary and infallible truth, is it strange to say that it can be proved by itself ? The Bible can prove itself either one part or another when all parts are not equally called into doubt (as when we convince the Jews from the Old Testament); or the whole proving the whole, not by a direct argument of testimony (because it declares itself divine), but by that made artfully (artificiali) and ratiocinative (because in it are discovered divine marks which are not found in the writings of men). Nor is this a begging of the question because these criteria are something distinct from the Scriptures; if not materially, yet formally as adjuncts and properties which are demonstrated with regard to the subject. Nor is one thing proved by another equally unknown because they are better known by us; as we properly prove a cause from its effects, a subject by its properties.63

This passage provides a remarkable similarity with Hooker’s thought. Turretin has already said that the Spirit uses arguments from the notae to prove the scriptures’ inspiration to us; now he says that this is not a circular argument because the criteria are “something distinct from the scriptures” formally speaking, though he acknowledges they are materially a part of scripture. This is basically an exact parallel to the tension we saw in Hooker, who both said that scripture gives us reason to believe in itself, and yet insisted we must know that scripture is divine from something besides scripture. It is thus difficult to find any real difference between Hooker’s view and Turretin’s. If in the later seventeenth century an unquestionably Reformed writer like Turretin could present this position and receive no censure for it, it seems difficult to see how Hooker could be excluded from the same theological family.

9.4

Conclusion

Hooker’s relation to the Reformed tradition on the matter of scripture’s autopistic quality is not simple. A large number of Reformed confessions say nothing that would adjudicate between the various models of the doctrine we have here discussed, and so say nothing that would exclude Hooker from the Reformed tradition. When major Reformation theologians like Calvin and Bullinger do discuss the matter in detail, they appear to teach forms of the doctrine that have questionable coherence; at least, it is not difficult to see why the later tradition struggled with consistency on this point. Hooker’s own view needs to be re63 Turretin, Institutes, 1:91 [2.6.18].

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constructed with care, as at times he seems to be in tension with himself. Nevertheless, a charitable reading of Hooker suggests he taught believers knew the inspiration of the scriptures by means of arguments from marks of divinity within them, perhaps such as fulfilled prophecies. It turns out that a significant representative of high Reformed orthodoxy, Francis Turretin, taught substantially the same position. Hooker thus stands out as a clarifier of the earlier tradition, and an early representative of a significant position represented in later Reformed orthodoxy.

Bradford Littlejohn

10. Cutting Through the Fog in the Channel: Hooker, Junius, and a Reformed Theology of Law

10.1 Introduction In 1593, while the thirty-nine year-old Richard Hooker was in London, finally bringing to press the weighty first four books of his Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie, another Reformed theologian a few years his senior, just across the English Channel, was rushing to completion his own treatise on law. This was Franciscus Junius the Elder, the newly-minted Professor of Theology at Leiden University. After an illustrious and colorful career of close scrapes with Catholic authorities and memorable contributions to scholarship across France, Belgium, and Germany, Junius, during a diplomatic visit to Leiden, found himself implored by the city magistrates to take up a chair at the Reformed university there.1 He consented, and as his first assignment, was called upon to address the place of the Mosaic law in a Reformed polity; certain agitators, it would seem, had been stressing the need for a truly reformed polity to adopt the laws of Scripture as its laws, including the civil laws of Exodus through Deuteronomy. The city councillors, eager to hear a respected theologian’s verdict, asked Junius to weigh in. He worked with remarkable speed, and produced as his answer the treatise De Politiae Mosis Observatione, a gem of Reformed theological jurisprudence that drew upon classical authorities, scholastics (especially Aquinas), jurists, and Scripture to present a systematic taxonomy of laws, within which the Christian magistrate could grasp the proper place of the Mosaic civil laws.2 The coincidence is striking on first glance, and considerably more so when we consider the typical historiography on Hooker. For although Hooker’s chief 1 For background on the life of Junius, see his own autobiographical The Life of the Noble and Learned Franciscus Junius, which appears in A Treatise on True Theology, with The Life of Franciscus Junius, trans. and ed. David C. Noe (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2014), 2–78. 2 See Todd Rester’s introduction to his translation of this work, The Mosaic Polity, (Grand Rapids: Christian’s Liberty Press, 2015), xxvi–xxviii, for the little we know of the context for this work.

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concern was ecclesiastical law, not civil, the basic question at hand was not all that different: is the Christian polity still bound by every positive law in Scripture? Both men were facing a similar specter of hyper-Protestantism that in its haste to exalt Biblical authority, would “cleane abrogate” the law of nature, and with it the human laws derived therefrom. Their solution was likewise similar: both, in seeking to redress what they perceived as an imbalanced Protestantism, started at the foundations, drawing on the theology of Thomas Aquinas and his successors to sketch the outlines of a Reformed Protestant jurisprudence, or “meta-jurisprudence” we might rather say. Of course, the contrasts are striking as well. Although Junius would earn lasting (though now almost entirely faded) fame as a great architect of an irenical early Reformed scholasticism,3 the book in question would not rank among his most lasting accomplishments. Hooker, on the other hand, would gain for his book an immortality which has lost little luster even more than four centuries later, but with it, a reputation for being rather less than Reformed, for being, on the contrary, the great representative or even originator of a via media, a Protestant Catholicism perched midway between Rome and Geneva. Although that reputation is slowly changing, one point where scholars still like to point to his departure from the Reformed fold is in his unconcealed debt to Aristotle and Aquinas, particularly in Book I of the Lawes where he states his overarching theory of law. It used to be standard for writers on Hooker to draw a firm contrast between Hooker’s optimism about reason and philosophy and the radical pessimism that we were supposed to find among the continental Reformers.4 H.C. Porter spoke for many in an influential 1972 essay when he said, “Hooker’s conception of the Deity was overtly uncalvinist […]. Furthermore […] the Deity has endowed his creatures with ‘sense’ and ‘reason’ (xv.4), neither of them meant to fust in us unused […]. And the whole of Hooker’s work, as his critics perceived, was a celebration of ‘our natural faculty of reason’ (vii.5).”5 The situation has improved, but only partially; in her recent Richard Hooker and 3 See Tobias Sarx, Franciscus Junius d.A¨ . (1545–1602): ein reformierter Theologe im Spannungsfeld zwischen spa¨thumanistischer Irenik und reformierter Konfessionalisierung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2007), for an overview of Junius’s work and its importance. See Willem J. van Asselt, “The Fundamental Meaning of Theology: Archetypal and Ectypal Theology in Seventeenth-Century Reformed Thought” WTJ 64 (2002): 319–35, for an example of Junius’s importance in the development of Reformed orthodox theological method. 4 See for instance John F.H. New, Anglicans and Puritans: The Basis of Their Opposition, 1558– 1640 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964); John S. Marshall, Hooker and the Anglican Tradition: An Historical and Theological Study of Hooker’s Polity (Sewanee, TN: University of Sewanee Press, 1963). 5 H.C. Porter, “Hooker, the Tudor Constitution, and the Via Media,” in Studies in Richard Hooker: Essays Preliminary to an Edition of His Works, ed. W. Speed Hill (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University, 1972), 103.

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Anglican Moral Theology, A.J. Joyce lays repeated stress on Hooker’s Thomism in her ongoing polemic against interpreters who seek to establish his magisterial Protestant credentials, apparently deeming the two commitments to be mutually exclusive.6 She does try at some points to get a bit more specific, suggesting, following Lee Gibbs, that it is not Hooker’s appeal to reason or natural law per se that sets him in contrast to the Reformers, but his Thomistic allegiance to a rationalist, rather than voluntarist, conception of what this natural law looked like. “In other words, as Gibbs puts it, Hooker defined law as ‘a rule or measure guiding an action to its appropriate end’, rather than as a ‘command coercively imposed by a sovereign’, and upon this fundamental issue he parted company with the reformers.”7 Of course, the idea that the Reformers were uniformly voluntarists is an old one, and despite the steady assaults of contrary evidence over the past four decades, old myths die hard.8 Thankfully, there is a very easy way to test any of these theses – that Hooker’s concept of natural law, or Thomist-Aristotelianism, or celebration of reason, or anti-voluntarism, set him at odds with the tradition of the Reformers and the emerging Reformed tradition. Why not simply compare his work to equivalent treatises on law that had appeared and were appearing among Continental theologians of this era? The question appears so obvious that most outside the world of Hooker scholarship would probably think it impertinent – presumably plenty of such comparisons have been written already? It would appear not. Perhaps Hooker’s achievement towers so high above its immediate English context that interpreters have assumed it was simply sui generis in its age. Without taking away from the greatness of the achievement, though, this is not at all the case. By the time Hooker took up his pen in the late 1580s, the task of re-integrating Protestant theology with the heritage of classical and scholastic philosophy and jurisprudence was not a new idea, but an enterprise some five decades old. Already by the 1530s, the Lutherans were undertaking the task of a systematic Protestant jurisprudence, with the writings of Johannes Eisermann and Johann

6 See for instance A.J. Joyce, Richard Hooker and Anglican Moral Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 72–74, 81, 85–87, 153–55. 7 Joyce, Richard Hooker and Anglican Moral Theology, 156, following Lee Gibbs, “Introduction to Book I,” in FLE 6:88. See also Alexander S. Rosenthal, Crown Under Law: Richard Hooker, John Locke, and the Ascent of Modern Constitutionalism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008), 61–72. 8 See for instance John Patrick Donnelly, S.J., Calvinism and Scholasticism in Vermigli’s Doctrine of Man and Grace (Leiden: Brill, 1976); “Calvinist Thomism,” Viator 7 (1976): 441–55. More recently, see E.J. Hutchinson and Korey D. Maas’s introduction to “On the Law of Nature in the Three States of Life,” by Niels Hemmingsen, Journal of Markets and Morality 17, no. 2 (2014): 599–602.

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Oldendorp marking a particularly impressive achievement.9 Melanchthon himself, a devoted Aristotelian, made some initial forays in this direction, but the main work was done by his student, the Danish theologian Niels Hemmingsen, whose De Lege Naturae Apodicta Methodus of 1562 wielded wide influence as a synthesis of Scripture, natural law, and civil law, within a scholastic tradition of reasoning, peppered with classsical authorities. In their introduction to the first English translation of this work, Eric Hutchinson and Korey Maas highlight the same issues that confront us regularly in Hooker scholarship: we are told that Protestants were legal positivists; Hemmingsen didn’t think so. We are told they simply absorbed natural law into Scripture, rendering other sources for it irrelevant; Hemmingsen didn’t think so. We are told they were voluntarists; Hemmingsen didn’t think so.10 It did not take long for the Reformed to catch up. In 1576, Jerome Zanchi at Heidelberg penned a treatise De Lege in Genere, offering a basically Thomistic taxonomy of law. The work was not published until 1597, appearing as part of his Opus solidum primam tractatus de Redemptione partem continens,11 when it would wield a deep influence on the thought of the great Dutch Reformed jurist Johannes Althusius, especially in his Dicaeologica of 1617. Althusius, though, also drew upon the somewhat different (and in fact, even more Thomistic) treatment of Junius in the De Politiae of 1592. Again, we would tend to assume that Hooker scholars, attempting to get a sense for the distinctives of his work, would have compared it to these very similar works of his Reformed contemporaries just across the Channel, but none have yet done so. This essay is an initial contribution to that much larger task. The following argument shall comprise three parts. First we will survey the basic structure of both Hooker and Junius’s taxonomies of law in order to compare them to one another and to Aquinas, who appears to have been a key mutual source. Second, we will draw attention to some key ways in which both Hooker and Junius constructed their arguments in order to rebut the challenge of biblicism or “theonomy,” resulting in some emphases not found in Aquinas. Third, we will consider an interesting terminological distinction in Hooker’s work, that between the “first” and “second” eternal laws, which although apparently unique to him, nonetheless appears to have important parallels in the thought of Junius and Reformed orthodoxy generally.

9 See John E. Witte, Jr., Law and Protestantism: The Legal Teachings of the Lutheran Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 119–76. 10 Hutchinson and Maas, 597–603. 11 Neustadt: Harnisius. It subsequently appeared in vol. 4 of his collected Operum Theologicorum (Geneva: Samuel Crispin, 1617).

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10.2 General Similarities Any reader of these two works, published almost contemporaneously just two hundred miles apart, can hardly fail to be struck by their similarities. To be sure, the style differs widely, and Junius’s exposition is far more compressed; the entire text of the De Politiae could fit within Book I of Hooker’s Lawes, and the portion that particularly interests us here comprises only forty-six octavo pages. But the themes, arguments, definitions, and distinctions overlap remarkably. Of course, it should be noted up front that these similarities are unlikely to owe anything to any direct intellectual influence between these two thinkers. As noted above, they were being prepared for publication at the very same time, and Junius’s work in particular appears to have been composed rather quickly, so that even if it had circulated in manuscript form prior to publication and somehow come to Hooker’s attention (there being lively comings and goings between Leiden and southeast England at this time), it would not have done so in time to inform the main composition of Book I of the Lawes, since we know Books I–IV to have been essentially finished by 1592.12 Conversely, Hooker’s work could scarcely have come to Junius’s attention, given that we have no evidence for the manuscript circulating widely, and in any case, few on the Continent could read English.13 It is quite possible that Junius at least was aware of Zanchi’s unpublished treatise on law, but less likely that Hooker would have been,14 and by far the likeliest explanation for their similarities is simply a mutual debt to Thomas Aquinas and other scholastic commentators. Such a conclusion no doubt holds rather less excitement for the historian than the discovery of some heretofore-hidden evidence for direct influence, but it is nonetheless a significant point for our purposes. If it is true that an impeccably Reformed continental theologian and an English conformist apologist, confronted with similar challenges, both turned to the Thomist tradition of reflection on law for illumination, then to this extent many naïve observations about Hooker’s idiosyn12 See Speed Hill, “The Evolution of Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity,” in Studies in Richard Hooker, ed. Hill, 117–58 for the best reconstruction of the timetable of Hooker’s writing. 13 Hugo Grotius, perhaps the greatest of Reformed (or mostly-Reformed) jurists, was one generation later to lament in a letter to Meric Casaubon that his lack of knowledge of English made him unable to read Hooker. (See A.S. McGrade, “Introduction,” to Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling [Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2013], 1:ci fn82). 14 Although perhaps not impossible; we do, for instance, find Hooker quoting from another unpublished manuscript of Zanchi’s a few years before in his Temple sermons on justification. (FLE 5:148.10–20; A Learned Discourse on Justification, 27; Hooker quotes from Zanchi’s as-yet-unpublished De Religione Christianae Fides/Confession of the Christian Religion, ed. Luca Baschera and Christian Moser [Leiden: Brill, 2007], 56–57.)

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crasy are discredited. In fact, as we shall see, Junius is if anything more explicitly Thomistic than Hooker. This becomes evident right from the beginning of Junius’s treatise, where he lays out his overarching hermeneutical principles for understanding the manifold forms of law by which God governs his world. We are, says Junius, subject to the laws of God both as we are homines, “participants in social life and communication according to nature,” but also inasmuch as we are Christiani, “admitted to the communion and possession of heavenly life according to grace.”15 This matches Hooker’s approach throughout the Lawes; the church must be considered both as it is a “societie,” defined, like other societies, by “the naturall inclination which all men have unto sociable life, and consent to some certaine bond of association,” and as it is a “societie supernaturall,” in which “they to whom we bee joyned […] are God, Angels, and holie men.”16 The Reformers generally have often been accused of either collapsing the natural law, along with natural reason and secular institutions generally, into the law of grace, in a biblicistic fashion, or, on the other hand, of proposing a bifurcated moral order, in which the natural law, unilluminated by Scripture governs a secular order untouched by grace.17 Both Hooker and Junius clearly avoid the first charge, distinguishing between the secular and spiritual identities of the Christian in this life (his Christ-person and Welt-person in Luther’s terminology),18 and structuring their treatises so as to highlight the diverse forms of law that govern both identities. Junius elaborates clearly enough: “For to the extent that we may be Christians, we do not cease being humans, but we are Christian human beings. So also we must state that therefore we are bound by Christian laws, not that we are consequently released from human ones.”19 But do they avoid the second danger? Many Hooker scholars have at least noted that Hooker himself seems to avoid this danger. “Nature hath need of grace,” he argues, seeking a supernatural end beyond natural capacity, but at the same time “grace hath use of nature,” with spiritual truth drawing upon and perfect our natural capacities, instead of bypassing them.20 In his depiction of the intimate coinherence of reason and faith in the life of the believer,21 the intimate coinherence of divine and human in the life 15 De Politiae Mosis Observatione, 2nd ed. (Lugduni Batavorum: Christopher Guyot, 1602), 12; The Mosaic Polity: Sources in Early Modern Economics, Ethics, and Law, trans. Todd M. Rester, and ed. Andrew M. McGinnis (Grand Rapids: Christian’s Library Press, 2015), 38. 16 FLE 1:131.13–14, 9–10; LEP I.15.2. 17 See the discussion in Hutchinson and Maas, 601–603. 18 This terminology appears in his Commentary on the Sermon on the Mount (WA 32:316, 390; LW 21:23, 109); see Paul Althaus, The Ethics of Martin Luther, translated by Robert C. Schultz (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972) for a full exposition. 19 De Politiae 12; Mosaic Polity 38. 20 FLE 1:223; LEP III.8.6. 21 FLE 1:220–235; LEP III.8.

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of Christ,22 and the intimate coinherence of church and civil society in the life of the commonwealth,23 Hooker consistently applies the famous Thomistic dictum, gratia non tollit naturam, sed perficit – “grace does not destroy (or take away) nature, but perfects it.”24 But although it was not uncommon in older Hooker scholarship to meet the suggestion that this theme in Hooker represented something of a Thomistic turn away from the Reformed tradition, Junius’s exposition clearly shows otherwise. Just after the passage quoted above, Junius continues, admirably encapsulating the Thomistic principle, as well as the logic of Hooker’s Laws “For grace perfects nature, grace does not however abolish it. And therefore with respect to the laws by which nature itself is preserved and renewed, grace restores those that have been lost, renews those that have been corrupted, and teaches those that are unknown.”25 In other words, the task of special revelation is not merely to teach those things that are altogether beyond nature, nor is it simply to clarify the natural moral knowledge that has been corrupted or lost through sin: it is to do both at the same time, simultaneously renewing and elevating our natural reason and will. Junius’s explicit echoes of Aquinas continue when he offers his initial definition of law: Lex est rationis ordinatio ad bonum commune ab eo qui curam communitatis habet, instituta (“The law is the ordering of reason to the common good, by the one who has care of the community, established.”) 26 This definition is quite simply an unacknowledged quotation27 of Thomas’s famous definition in the Prima secundae Q. 90; the only difference from Aquinas’s wording is the word instituta, rather than solemniter promulgata, but Junius’s exposition of this process of institution is essentially the same. One thing notable about this definition, given our earlier remarks about supposed Reformed “voluntarism,” is how neatly this definition combines both rationalistic and voluntaristic elements: law is first and foremost an ordering of reason toward the good, and yet it must be intentionally promulgated or instituted by an authority in order to have the character of law, rather than mere right reason. Hooker’s own attempt at a 22 FLE 2:209–234; LEP V.51–55. 23 FLE 3:315–31; LEP VIII.1. 24 See W. David Neelands, “Hooker on Scripture, Reason, and Tradition,” in Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community, ed. A.S. McGrade (Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1997), 76–87 for an exposition of this theme in Hooker. 25 De Politiae 12; Mosaic Polity 38. Cf. especially FLE 1:110–122; LEP I.11–12. 26 De Politiae, 1; Mosaic Polity, 29. 27 This could in theory be because Junius wants to hide his dependence on Aquinas, but it seems rather more likely that it is quite the opposite, because he simply assumes that his readers will recognize the allusion. (This reading was suggested by Todd Rester in private correspondence.) If so, it is a marvel how much times have changed; in his discussion of the De Politiae in his recent work on Junius, Tobias Sarx seems oblivious to the Aquinas quotation here, suggesting that Junius takes his definition from Stoic sources (Franciscus Junius, 141).

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pithy definition captures the same basic emphasis: “A law therefore generally taken, is a directive rule unto goodness of operation.”28 The key word here, “directive,” does away with the idea that law is merely a rational measure of the good; no, it enjoins it: “Laws do not only teach what is good, but they enjoin it, they have in them a certain constraining force.”29 Accordingly, all law is imposed by a superior on an inferior, to order that inferior toward its proper good.30 The only exception to this relationship of superiority is the eternal law, the law in which God’s own action is bound to his eternal nature. Both Junius and Hooker begin, like Aquinas, with a treatment of this eternal law, and all three discussions have much in common; a key difference will occupy our attention at the end of this essay, so we will postpone further discussion until then. Suffice to say here that, as Junius puts it, this eternal law is “the universal principle and exemplar of all other rules,”31 that in which all the other forms of law are contained, and from which they proceed. Next in exposition, as in Aquinas, is the natural law or law of nature, though Hooker uses a somewhat different terminology here. For Hooker, it is worthwhile to distinguish a “law of nature” which governs the actions of irrational creatures by instinct, and a “law of reason” by which human beings only explicitly reflect on their natural good and consciously feel impelled to pursue it. His reasoning here is thoroughly Aristotelian, and certainly implicit in the way that Aquinas approaches the natural law, so there appears to be little difference of substance here; for Aquinas too, there is a sense in which irrational animals participate in the eternal law as well, but human participation in the natural law is only by the faculty of reason. Junius’s definition also highlights this fact: “Natural law is that which is innate to creatures endowed with reason and informs them with common notions of nature, that is, with principles and conclusions adumbrating the eternal law by some sort of participation.”32 All three theologians proceed to elaborate by drawing the traditional Aristotelian threefold distinction of precepts that direct us simply to self-preservation (shared in common with all living things), precepts that direct us to propagation of offspring (shared in common with animals), and precepts unique to our higher rational nature. Aside from putting a distinction between the “law of nature” and the “law of reason” (though Hooker will use the language of “natural law” for both), Hooker also pauses to highlight a distinct category of law that governs celestial beings, the 28 29 30 31 32

FLE 1:84.16–17; LEP I.8.4. FLE 1:102.12; LEP I.10.7. FLE 1:58; LEP I.2.1. De Politiae, 17; Mosaic Polity, 43. De Politiae, 1; Mosaic Polity, 29. The echo of Aquinas is again not hard to spot: “It is therefore evident that the natural law is nothing else than the rational creature’s participation of the eternal law” (ST IaIIae Q. 91 a. 2 resp.)

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angels. Again, this category is not present in Aquinas’s (or Junius’s) exposition, but is certainly consistent with their metaphysics, since every creature is said to participate in the eternal law according to its own nature and capacity, so presumably there is a distinct mode of angelic participation in eternal law. After treating the natural law, there is a difference of order, as Junius moves straight to discuss the divine law while both Aquinas and Hooker pause to treat human law in some depth first. This difference of ordering might appear at first glance to spell a difference of substance. After all, both Aquinas and Hooker treat the human law as the specification and application of the natural law under the conditions of human society. Junius, however, gives it a twofold source: “For the proximate rule of human law is twofold: one innate, which we call natural law, the other inspired, which we call divine law.”33 Does this suggest that for Junius, the divine law of Scripture can prescribe unchangeable norms for the framing of human laws in church and state, over and above the prudential dictates of the natural law? After all, this had been the contention of many radical reformers from the 1520s on, and Hooker had taken up his pen to refute just such a conviction among some of the English puritans. This question calls for a closer comparison of Hooker and Junius on the matter of the relation of divine and human law.

10.3 Hooker, Junius, and the Threat of Biblicism The preface to Junius’s De Politiae reveals that, far from sharing the theonomic aspirations of the radical puritans, Junius was in fact concerned to refute a similar error. Not all those who were studious of this salvific and heavenly teaching learned in this matter to skillfully hold the rudder straight as if on that open sea. Indeed, some people concluded that since the whole rationale of the Law is divine, each and every member of that law is catholic (καθολικα) that is, every law applies universally and commonly to all persons, matters, times, places, and other circumstances as if only that which is of a general character exists in the law.34

Although he aims also to correct those who might deny the relevance of the Mosaic law altogether, Junius’s main concern seems to be to counter zealous reformers who wanted to see the civil laws of Moses revived as the norm for a Reformed commonwealth.35 33 De Politiae, 31; Mosaic Polity, 55. 34 De Politiae, ix; Mosaic Polity, 9. 35 Unfortunately neither Rester nor Sarx, the only two scholars I know of to have researched the background of the De Politiae, have turned up any details on whom these agitators were,

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Strange as this aspiration might seem to us today, Paul Avis has noted that it was not uncommon in the sixteenth century. After all, the watchword of the Reformation was sola Scriptura, and it seemed natural to many to apply this as well to the reformation of politics, drawing especially on those portions of Scripture that dealt most extensively with civil law – the texts of the Mosaic covenant. However, argues Avis, the leading Reformers generally resisted this urge, arguing that such laws bound Christian commonwealths only insofar as they reflected enduring principles of natural law that would still apply in the very changed circumstances of sixteenth-century Europe.36 The texts of Hooker and Junius offer important corroborating evidence for Avis’s argument. Their polemical agenda demonstrates that there was in fact a widespread interest, among Reformed churches on both sides of the Channel, for the revival of the Mosaic law (although Hooker’s immediate object in the Lawes was to oppose a hyperactive biblicism in the matter of ecclesiastical laws, he constructed his argument so that it applied a fortiori to similar biblicism in the matter of civil laws).37 At the same time, their shared critique of this movement, drawing upon the medieval natural law traditions, suggests that mainstream Protestant orthodoxy had resources for confronting such biblicism (and considered Aquinas to be one of them). The argument required some careful distinctions, which although implicit in Aquinas’s treatment of law, are highlighted by both Hooker and Junius to address their polemical context. The challenge they confronted was an obvious one. As neat and tidy as it might be to divide the field between natural laws, knowable by reason and governing earthly life, and divine laws, knowable by revelation and governing the life to come, Scripture itself did not fit such a neat schema. It contained any number of precepts relating to the conduct of our earthly lives, including precepts that would seem to cover the ground of human law – laws governing rulers and ruled, social and economic relations, and prescribing the civil penalties for any violations. If God himself had commanded such things, who were we to ever change them, or substitute other human laws where divine law had spoken? The answers of both Junius and Hooker are complex, but we may single out two key distinctions that helped ground their response. The first is an over-arching distinction between natural laws and positive laws. Although from one standpoint the most fundamental distinction would seem to be between natural law (with human law nested underneath) and supernatural (i. e., divine) law, this is not how Junius approaches the subject. After defining law in general in his first thesis, and treating the eternal law in his second, he though it is certainly tempting to surmise that some might have been English radicals in exile in Leiden, of which there were a steady stream in this period. 36 P.D.L. Avis, “Moses and the Magistrate: a Study in the rise of Protestant Legalism,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 26, no. 2 (Apr. 1975): 152–65. 37 See FLE 1:41; LEP Pref.8.4 for Hooker’s concern on this score.

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draws a distinction between lex naturalis and lex adveniens naturae.38 The word “adveniens” can mean a number of things, including “arriving” and “arising”; Junius has both in mind, as he clarifies further in thesis 5: “that which advenes to nature arises to it spontaneously or is infused; we call the latter a divine law and the former a human one.”39 In other words, whereas the natural law is co–created with the human race, as the fundamental law of our being, both human law and divine law arise in time, either as something emerging from the natural law (as human law) or as something externally added thereto (as divine law). Although this way of framing the matter seems logical enough, it is intriguing from the historical point of view, as it is not found either in Aquinas, whom Junius is mainly following here, or in Junius’s older contemporary Zanchi. It does, however, appear in Hooker. Hooker uses the more familiar English language of “laws natural” and “laws positive,” explaining that “laws natural do always bind; laws positive not so, but only after they have been expressly and wittingly imposed,”40 and showing how supernatural laws are in fact a paradigmatic case of positive law.41 This crucial move establishes the priority of the natural law as that which binds humans simply inasmuch as they are human, and thus stands for all time; divine law, on the other hand, despite being in some sense the highest of all laws, shares with the lowest, human law, the character of contingency, which requires us to deliberate rationally on when and where it applies. As Hooker says, “Whether God or man be the maker of them, alteration they so far forth admit, as the matter doth exact.”42 Although we have thus far used the terms “divine law” and “supernatural law” interchangeably, another important contribution of both Hooker and Junius is a careful distinction within this terminology. Both men took pains to distinguish “divine law” in the proper sense, which is to say “supernatural law,” the law guiding fallen man toward salvation and union with God, from “divine law” in the general sense of Holy Scripture. The latter, they noted, contained restatements of natural law (such as the Decalogue), revelations of the divine, supernatural law (such as, in the form of an anticipatory type, the Mosaic ceremonial law), and human laws (such as the Mosaic civil code).43 In other words, both men 38 39 40 41 42 43

De Politiae, 1. De Politiae, 2; Mosaic Polity, 30. FLE 1:130.15–17; LEP I.15.1. FLE 1:130–31; LEP I.15.2. FLE 1:130.28–29; LEP I.15.1. See De Politiae, 35–37; Mosaic Polity, 60–63. Cf. Hooker, “Although the scripture of God therefore be stored with infinite varietie of matter in all kinds, although it abound with all sorts of lawes, yet the principal intent of scripture is to deliver the lawes of duties supernaturall” (FLE 1:124.29–32; LEP I.14.1). I.12.1 notes the presence of natural laws in Scripture, and I.15.1 of positive laws.

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recognized that we must beware of equivocation and distinguish between that which is supernatural in respect of origin versus that which is supernatural in respect of its object. Such a distinction, to be sure, is consistent with Aquinas’s treatment of the divine law. It is necessary, he says, for four reasons: (1) to direct man to eternal happiness, rather than mere earthly happiness; (2) to resolve disagreements in the understanding and application of the natural law; (3) to regulate attitudes of the heart which lie beyond the reach of human law; (4) to comprehensively address all sinful acts, which human law cannot do.44 It is evident from this that there are really two very different kinds or functions of divine law: with respect to the first reason, divine law is of a wholly different order than natural law, taking us quite beyond it to a supernatural end; with respect to the latter three reasons, divine law stands in parallel to human law, applying and specifying the natural law for the sake of good living (only more clearly and comprehensively than human law could do). Junius, however, makes this twofold distinction explicit. Properly speaking, the divine law is “that which has been inspired by God, infused in rational creatures, and informs them with common and individual notions beyond nature for the purpose of transmitting them to a supernatural end by a supernatural leading”45 – in other words, what Aquinas designates as the first purpose of the divine law. Given this definition, we must not confuse everything that is written in Holy Scripture with the “divine law” in this proper sense: “Although with respect to its principle and origin this part of the Mosaic law is, in fact, plainly divine – and for this reason it simply obtained its divine authority among the Jews – yet because God conformed part of the law to human laws and in a human mode, they have acted unjustly who have contended that this judicial law of Moses is divine in all respects because it is divine in its origin.”46 Such laws, although divine “in origin,” are in themselves, by virtue of their “matter,” “according to the nature of other human laws.”47 This way of framing the matter corresponds exactly to the terminology adopted by Hooker in Book I of the Laws. First he treats of laws that “are supernatural, both in respect of the manner of delivering them, which is divine; and also in regard of the things delivered, which are such as have not in nature any cause from which they flow.”48 These, he says, comprise the chief and unique purpose of Holy Scripture. Yet, he goes on to say, Scripture is at the same time “fraught with the laws of Nature,” clarifying and applying the natural law for us, 44 45 46 47 48

ST IaIIae Q. 91 a. 4 resp. De Politiae, 24; Mosaic Polity, 49. De Politiae, 45; Mosaic Polity, 69. De Politiae, 45, 46; Mosaic Polity, 69. FLE 1:119.18–21; LEP I.11.6.

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and contains in addition many positive laws, laws governing human societies, which, although “divine” with respect to origin, are potentially mutable by virtue of their “matter.”49 Hooker’s here is in fact working with a threefold distinction: not only between origin and matter, but between end and matter, which enables him to highlight the mutability of certain Biblical laws. Laws that concern our supernatural destiny are unchanging not because of their divine origin per se, but because both their end (communion with God) and their matter (our unchanging spiritual nature) are permanent. Likewise, natural laws, that govern human nature, or Scriptural laws that are restatements of natural law, are unchanging inasmuch as human nature is taken to be unchanging. But those Scriptural laws which partake of the character of human law, governing as they do the constantly-changing circumstances of human society, cannot be imagined as timeless despite the immutability of their divine author, nor the immutability of their end. Thus the title of Book III, chapter 10 of the Lawes, “That neither God’s being the author of laws, nor his committing them to Scripture, nor the continuance of the end for which they were instituted, is any reason sufficient to prove that they are unchangeable.” Clearly, he says, even things commanded by God may be changed if their end is mutable, like the ceremonial laws of Moses, which came to fulfillment in Christ and then became obsolete. But the judicial laws, despite having an immutable end (the basic norms of justice that they seek to apply), are nonetheless mutable by virtue of their matter.50 It is this the matter that determines their fundamental character: “laws are instruments to rule by, and that instruments are not only to be framed according unto the general end for which they are provided, but even according unto that very particular, which riseth out of the matter whereon they have to work.”51 The threefold distinction used by Hooker is in fact the same that Junius adopts in the same context, using the language of origin, object, and end: “the origin, or foundation, is that from which the law flows as from its own proper source. The object is that which the law regulates, such as the matter of justice that the law addresses. Finally, the end is that which has the law as its cause.”52 Accordingly, he says, all human laws, including the Mosaic laws, “have their own immutable part and a mutable part; the former always obligates, whereas the latter obligates according to the persons, matters, and circumstances of those who live under them.”53 The result of this mutability is that it is not merely unnecessary to continue to observe all the Mosaic laws in their original form, but it may even 49 50 51 52 53

FLE 1:130–132; LEP I.15.1–3. FLE 1:247–249; LEP III.11.2–5. FLE 1:242.913; LEP III.10.3. De Politiae, 51; Mosaic Polity, 74. De Politiae, 69; Mosaic Polity, 87 (see also pp. 68–70).

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prove harmful,54 since these laws were intended for circumstances different than those that now obtain. Hooker sounds a similar warning in the Lawes: when a thing doth cease to be available unto the end which gave it being, the continuance of it must then of necessity appear superfluous. And of this we cannot be ignorant, how sometimes that hath done great good, which afterwards, when time hath changed the ancient course of things, doth grow to be either very hurtful, or not so greatly profitable and necessary.”55

Of course, it is important to add that whereas Hooker is quite clear that laws of ecclesiastical polity have such a condition of mutability, Junius does not treat this subject here at all. A much more extensive study of Junius’s work would be necessary to determine how fully his principles here determine his view of church polity, though it appears likely, given Junius’s irenical ecclesiology, that he would shared at least many of Hooker’s convictions here. Christiaan de Jonge notes, “the distinction between ecclesia invisibilis and visibilis, the Church as God intended it, and its realization on earth, which he related to the Aristotelian distinction between forma interna and forma externa, gave him the opportunity to make a plea on behalf of eirenicism [sic].”56 Torrance Kirby has argued that a very similar conception undergirds Hooker’s ecclesiology.57

10.4 The Second Eternal Law and the Secret Things of God As we have noted, both Hooker and Junius largely follow Thomas Aquinas’s treatise of the various divisions of law in the Summa, and even their lengthy development of the mutability of certain biblical laws, which we have just surveyed, although going beyond Aquinas’s treatment of the subject, is congruent with it. There is one point in Hooker’s taxonomy of laws, however, where he departs quite noticeably from Aquinas – noticeable in part because it comes right at the beginning of the schema. This is his definition of the “eternal law,” what Aquinas calls “the type of Divine Wisdom, as directing all actions and movements.”58 Hooker’s initial definition seems quite similar: “that order which God before all ages hath set down with himself, for himself to do all things by.”59 However, Hooker notes that most other writers actually define it not as the order 54 Sarx, Franciscus Junius, 149, 160. 55 FLE 1:240.18–24; LEP III.10.1. 56 Christiaan De Jonge, De irenische ecclesiologie van Franciscus Junius (1545–1602) (Nieuwkoop: De Graaf, 1980), 187. 57 W. J. Torrance Kirby, Richard Hooker’s Doctrine of the Royal Supremacy (Leiden: Brill, 1990), 30–58. 58 ST,IaIIae 93 a. 1. 59 FLE 1:62.32–33; LEP I.2.6.

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“which God hath eternally purposed himself in all his works to observe, but rather that which with himself he hath set down as expedient to be kept by all his creatures, according to the several conditions wherewith he hath endued them.” It is not clear whom Hooker might have in mind here, but it is notable that Zanchi’s treatment certainly fits this description.60 In other words, such writers understand the eternal law not to be the rule of God’s providence, whereby he determines how he himself will act with respect to all his creatures, but the rule by which he has determined from all eternity they ought to be obliged to act toward one another and him, for their own good and that of creation as a whole. Now Hooker does not actually intend to dissent from this basic emphasis, as we shall see in mind in a moment. This is what Aquinas has in mind too, as the eternal law, for both him and Hooker, serves as the form and pattern for the natural law. Hooker simply seems concerned that if this is all we mean by the eternal law, we are in too much danger of voluntarism, “apply[ing] the name of Law unto that only rule of working which superior authority imposeth” and implying that the eternal decrees of God’s will are not themselves law-bound, in the sense of conforming to a “kind of rule or canon, whereby actions are framed.”61 Presumably, this is why Aquinas himself does not draw any such distinction between the providential will of God and his preceptive will in describing the eternal law; indeed, he quite clearly expounds it in terms of God’s providential government in the world, then moves seamlessly into a treatment of the natural law as a creaturely participation in it. Hooker, although Thomistic enough to make sure that divine providence is understood as part of the eternal law, would seem to have misgivings about this lack of distinction. Accordingly, he designates all the laws of creaturely well-doing as a participation in the “second law eternal,” while God’s own providential government belongs to a distinct “first law eternal”: All things therefore, which are as they ought to be, are conformed unto this second law eternal; and even those things which to this eternal law are not conformable are notwithstanding in some sort ordered by the first eternal law. For what good or evil is there under the sun, what action correspondent or repugnant unto the law which God hath imposed upon his creatures, but in or upon it God doth work according to the law which himself hath eternally purposed to keep; that is to say, the first law eternal? So that a twofold law eternal being thus made, it is not hard to conceive how they both take place in all things.62

60 “The law is the divine and eternal revelation of God’s will, through which he teaches what he wishes human beings to do and avoid” (Thesis 5; Girolamo Zanchi, “On the Law in General,” trans. Jeffrey J. Veenstra, Journal of Markets and Morality 6, no. 1 [Spring 2003]: 321). 61 FLE 1:63.14; LEP I.3.1. 62 FLE 1:63.26–64.3; LEP I.3.1.

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Why exactly does Hooker feel the need to go beyond Aquinas here? Most Hooker scholars seem agreed that it is at least a novel distinction, even if they cannot agree on its purpose. Torrance Kirby notes that this “introduces something quite distinctive, unusual, and unexpected from the standpoint of the tradition of Christian legal theory.”63 It may, to be sure, simply be Hooker’s passion for synthesis: if Aquinas described the eternal law largely in terms of providence, and other writers in terms of precept, the best thing to do, perhaps Hooker reasoned, the best way to reconcile these was to keep the name “eternal law” for both, while distinguishing two forms of it, in good scholastic fashion. It is, in any case, an important distinction. If we want to say that all of God’s actions are rational and lawbound, then, without such a distinction, it would seem that anything that happens within history that would be immoral for a human being to do could not be attributed to God, since his decrees would have to strictly match his precepts. As Lee Gibbs notes, this allows Hooker to “show that contingent natural events and human sin when they occur are somehow ordered within the first eternal law even though they are not conformable to the second.”64 But if we totally separate the decrees from the precepts, we risk making the divine will arbitrary; hence Hooker’s insistence on holding these two eternal laws together as expressions of the perfect divine wisdom. Nonetheless, it seems clear that like many other concepts in Hooker’s thought, this pair must be held apart even while being held together. God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, and while we know that all things that lie outside that eternal law which God has actually mediated to creatures are still conformed to law, all we can say is that they are “in some sort ordered” by it; we cannot presume to know how. Kirby’s remarks on the distinction draw attention to this point. The effect of it, he says, is “to diminish the overall significance of the hierarchical dispositio as the primary mode of mediation between the divine source of law and the finite, created order of law”65; it is the means by which Hooker nuances a neo-Platonic account of participatory mediation between God and nature with an Augustinian disjunction between the two. Another 63 W. J. Torrance Kirby, “From ‘Generall Meditations’ to ‘Particular Decisions’: The Augustinian Coherence of Richard Hooker’s Political Theology,” in Law and Sovereignty in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Robert S. Sturges, Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance 28 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 51. 64 FLE 6:98n30. A.J. Joyce, one of the few scholars to draw attention to the two eternal laws distinction, oddly glosses this quote from Gibbs, “In other words, by using this framework, Hooker sets up a dialectic between things as they might have been and things as they actually are, which corresponds to the scholastic distinction between God’s absolute power (potentia absoluta) and his ordained power (potentia ordinata)” (Anglican Moral Theology, 152). As the scholastic potentia absoluta described divine power that lay quite outside the divine will, it is difficult to understand how Joyce sees this as part of what Hooker calls “that order which God before all ages hath set down with himself, for himself to do all things by.” 65 “Generall Meditations,” 51.

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way of putting this is simply to say that here Hooker is seeking to maintain a typically Reformed insistence on the “Creator/creature distinction” over against a Thomistic account of the hierarchy of being which risks subjecting God’s reason to ours (a common, if perhaps misguided, modern Reformed critique of Thomas, it should be added). Note that this is not to say that the two modes of eternal law differ ontologically, as if God were at odds with himself, but only epistemically; because we differ ontologically from God, the eternal law as knowable to us appears discontinuous from that which guides his own action. The natural law of right human reason is a participation in the eternal law of the divine reason, to be sure, but Hooker insists that there is a part of the divine will that, although conformable to the divine reason, remains inscrutable to us66 – indeed, Hooker will have no more to say on the subject, treating all other laws as enclosed within the second eternal law. Now, we will naturally want to see if Junius approaches the subject of the eternal law in the same way Hooker does, in the course of his taxonomy. He does not do so explicitly; the terminology of “first law eternal” and “second law eternal” remains distinctive to Hooker. But he does see the need to draw attention to the same distinction within the eternal wisdom of God that Hooker has highlighted. His basic definition of the eternal law runs as follows: “the immutable concept and form of reason in God, the master of the universe, existing before all time, without a doubt for the common good […] as its conjoined and proximate end.” We see here, perhaps even more than Hooker and Aquinas, an intellectualist rather than voluntarist emphasis: the eternal law is a matter of the divine reason, not naked will. But the eternal law that he will go on to speak of, that rule which serves as “the universal principle and exemplar of all other rules,” is more specific: Moreover, when we say that form of reason has been conceived by God and in God for the common good, we manifestly distinguish the eternal law of God from the rest of the reason of the divine wisdom that acts and occupies itself with created things. For the reason of that divine wisdom, which is prominent in acting, moving, and sustaining created things, is occupied with all things all the time.

But there is also “that reason of the divine wisdom, which he established for human beings endowed with reason for the perception of that wisdom.”67 In other words, there is a divine reason that is involved in providentially decreeing whatsoever comes to pass, which it is neither necessary for us to understand or participate in to properly fulfill our creaturely vocations; the eternal law that has been established as the norm for realizing each creature’s common good, on the

66 FLE 1:62–63; LEP I.2.5. 67 De Politiae, 16–17; Mosaic Polity, 42.

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other hand, obviously must be conveyed to us in some form. This latter one is the law by which Junius’s other classes of law are ruled and in which they participate; the former is God’s alone. And yet there is no suggestion that the divine reason is in fact at odds with itself, even if its coherence is not fully clear to us. Given that Junius was, at the time of writing the De Politiae, likely already formulating his great treatise De Vera Theologia, which would be published in 1594, it is not difficult to discern in this distinction something analogous to the influential distinction he was there to draw between archetypal and ectypal theology. Archetypal theology refers to God’s knowledge of Godself, ectypal theology to the knowledge of God that is appropriate to and attainable by creatures. The former, being infinite, can only be spoken of by a via negativa, whereas the latter is subject to various further distinctions and elucidations according to its modes and grades. The distinction of the forms of theology is of course ordered toward contemplation, rather than, like the distinction of forms of law, toward action, but the basic logic appears to be the same, and indeed the subject of both discussions is the same: what Junius designates “the divine wisdom.” Just as there is, in the De Politiae, a “reason of the divine wisdom” that is in rebus omnibus omni tempore occupatur “is engaged in all things at every time,” without distinction, so in the De Vera, the ectypal theology is that which “extends to all things both generally and particularly […] in all aspects simultaneously present.”68 And just as there is in the De Politiae another “reason of the divine wisdom” which God “established human beings endowed with reason to perceive it,” so in the De Vera, it is the essence of ectypal theology that it is “communicable with what has been created.”69 Finally, just as even the eternal law that is designed to regulate and be known by human creatures must still be mediated into an actually known form, either natural law or divine law, so in the De Vera, even ectypal theologia in se must be mediated into an ectypal theologia secundum quid or “relational theology,”70 which will take the forms of natural and revealed theology. Given these parallels, it may not be going too far to gloss Hooker’s “first law eternal” and “second law eternal” as the archetypal eternal law and ectypal eternal law. In these subtle distinctions, both Junius and Hooker can be seen manifesting the distinctive early Reformed orthodox pattern of ad intra-ad extra language about God. Richard Muller has described this pattern, which corresponds to the archetypal/ectypal distinction, as “arguably a fundamental architectonic device in the older Reformed theology […] intended to differentiate 68 A Treatise on True Theology, 110. 69 A Treatise on True Theology, 116. 70 A Treatise on True Theology; 116–18; Van Asselt, “Fundamental Meaning,” 329–30. Cf. De Politiae, 26: “haec regula est hominum, secundum modulum nostrum quodam modo, cui modulo revelationes et communicationes suas contemperavit Deus.”

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between the ad intra absolute and necessary knowledge concerning creation, providence, and salvation that God alone can know and the relative and accommodated ad extra knowledge of those divine works that is accessible to creatures.” But just as Hooker stresses the unity of the eternal law even amidst its differentiation, Muller notes that this architectonic device seeks to unify that which it distinguishes, “establish[ing] a fundamental and positive relation between what is ad intra and what is ad extra.”71 Hooker’s treatment of the eternal law, then, suggests that not only is there nothing notably un-Reformed about Hooker’s leaning on Aquinas, but that even where he departs from Aquinas, it is often in fidelity to particularly Reformed concerns that were to define the shape of Reformed orthodoxy for many decades.

10.5 Conclusion I hope that in this paper, I have made convincingly made the case that the coincidental publication of Junius’s De Politiae and the first four books of Hooker’s Lawes in 1593 is more than a historical curiosity. The two works share not merely similar subject matter, but also similar sources, organization, distinctions, polemical targets, and specific terminology. The fact that two such obvious candidates for careful comparison have to date not even received a scholarly mention in the same breath (so far as I am aware) is eloquent testimony to the need for further research in Hooker studies in particular, and research on Reformed theological jurisprudence in general. My survey here has really only scratched the surface in terms of investigating what we can learn from a close comparative reading of these two texts, but three points in particular stand out from this preliminary study. First, it should be evident that substantial reliance on both pagan philosophers and on the synthesis of Thomas Aquinas was hardly an oddity in late sixteenthcentury Reformed theological jurisprudence. On the contrary, it seems to have been a rather natural move. In light of this evidence, the common claim that the philosophical theology in Book I of Hooker’s Lawes casts doubt on his Reformed credentials is becoming increasingly unsustainable. Second, when compared to Junius, Hooker’s polemic against radical puritan biblicism comes into clearer focus as part of a magisterial Protestant consensus in favor of carefully distinguishing between the permanent and changeable elements of biblical law. It 71 Richard A. Muller, “God as Absolute and Relative, Necessary, Free, and Contingent: The Ad Intra-Ad Extra Movement of Seventeenth-Century Reformed Language about God,” in R. Scott Clark and Joel E. Kim, eds., Always Reformed: Essays in Honor of W. Robert Godfrey (Escondido, CA: Westminster Seminary California, 2010), 57.

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remains too fashionable to project a wooden, comprehensive biblicism onto the Protestant Reformers, and to imagine that modern enlightened criticism was necessary before anyone could learn to distinguish between the different ways different Scriptures do and do not continue to bind us. Hooker and Junius show otherwise. Third, perhaps the most intriguing finding of this paper, though the one that needs the most further study, is the evidence that both Hooker and Junius were well aware of need to qualify the Thomistic heritage in light of their Reformed commitments, and subtly altered their formulations accordingly. While Aquinas himself may have been careful to guard against the implication that human knowledge of God and his will could ever grasp the divine essence, it is surely the case that the Protestant Reformers and their heirs were even more concerned on this score. Calvinism’s insistence on a radical divide between the Creator and his creatures did sit in some tension with a Thomistic graduated hierarchy of being. For just this reason, though, it is instructive to see both Junius and Hooker working so carefully to synthesize both poles of this tension, retaining the Thomistic account of the eternal law while at the same time veiling the secret counsel of God’s will from human knowledge. This observation fits in well with the rich new picture of early Reformed orthodoxy that has been emerging in recent decades thanks to the researches of Richard Muller, Willem van Asselt, and others. We have now begun to appreciate the extent to which the theologians of this era aspired, by means of careful argumentation and distinctions, to do justice to the legacy of all their forebears: the patristic, especially Augustinian heritage, the intricate philosophical theology of the scholastics and Aquinas in particular, and the hard-won gains of the Reformation. It is high time that we begin to appreciate how well the thought of Richard Hooker fits into this dynamic “Reformed catholic” context.

Luca Baschera

11. Righteousness Imputed and Inherent: Hooker’s soteriology in the context of 16th century continental Reformed theology

If the overall question addressed in this volume concerns the relationship between Hooker’s theology and that of his contemporary Reformed theologians, few issues are more pertinent to that larger question than our interpretation of his soteriology. Ever since the publication of John Henry Newman’s Lectures on the Doctrine of Justification (1838), Hooker’s views on grace and salvation have been regarded as the touchstone for determining his general theological position as well as for assessing the continuity or discontinuity with the so-called magisterial Reformation.1 The scholarly studies on Hooker’s doctrine of salvation published over the past thirty years can be divided into roughly two groups.2 On one hand there are the defenders of what can be called the “traditional approach.” According to this view, Hooker’s stance in matters of soteriology represents a sort of via media between both extremes of Calvinist/Puritan and Roman doctrine.3 On the other hand there are the “revisionists.” In their opinion the traditional approach suffers of a basic anachronism, inasmuch as it tends to see in Hooker a precursor of “Anglicanism” and of the “Tractarians” of the nineteenth century. Hence, the revisionists endeavor to analyze Hooker’s theology without the peculiar interpretation which later Anglicans or the Tractarians gave thereof. As a result, they come to the conclusion that there was in fact a basic continuity between Hooker’s theological stance and that of Magisterial Reformers such as Calvin, Vermigli and Bullinger.4 1 Cf. Torrance Kirby, Richard Hooker’s Doctrine of the Royal Supremacy (Leiden: Brill, 1990), 36ff. 2 Cf. Martin Foord, “Richard Hooker’s Doctrine of Justification,” Churchman 114 (2000): 316ff. 3 This view has been notably endorsed by Lee W. Gibbs in his seminal article “Richard Hooker’s Via Media Doctrine of Justification,” The Harvard Theological Review 74 (1981): 211–20. See also Gibbs’s recent restatement of his position: “Richard Hooker’s ‘Discourse on Justification’ and his Via Media Theology,” Perichoresis 7, no. 2 (2009): 131–48. 4 The most prolific advocate of the “revisionist” position is certainly Torrance Kirby. See his Richard Hooker’s Doctrine of the Royal Supremacy, 41–53; The Theology of Richard Hooker in the Context of the Magisterial Reformation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Theological Seminary,

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Of course, as Ranall Ingalls justly remarks, these diverging opinions are shaped not only by different readings of Hooker, but equally “by assumptions about the character of Reformed thought.”5 Our assessment of what counts as “Reformed” and what does not will necessarily affect our judgment of Hooker’s position. This becomes quite evident when Hooker’s theological terminology is taken into consideration. For Hooker did use terms and categories such as inherent righteousness, which are quite reminiscent of Aristotelian philosophy and are not to be found in the writings of, say, John Calvin. How is this finding to be evaluated? In recent contributions connected with the “traditional approach,” there is a tendency to view Hooker’s use of Aristotelian terms and categories as an implicit confirmation of the distance existing between him and the Reformed.6 It is the purpose of this essay to scrutinise this assumption by comparing the terminology used by Hooker in his A Learned Discourse of Justification with the writings of Reformed theologians from the continent.7 Does the distinction between imputed and inherent righteousness, which lies at the center of Hooker’s account of soteriology, as well as the way in which Hooker defined those terms, have equivalents in the writings of continental Reformed theologians? Or is there in fact a fundamental difference between Hooker and his Reformed contemporaries at this point? However, before we proceed tackling these questions, it might be useful to recall briefly how Hooker presented his doctrine of justification in A Learned Discourse.

2000), 1–22; Richard Hooker, Reformer and Platonist (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 57–78; The Zurich Connection and Tudor Political Theology (Leiden, Brill: 2007), 5–12. Kirby’s theses are endorsed also by Nigel Atkinson, Richard Hooker and the Authority of Scripture, Tradition and Reason: Reformed Theologian of the Church of England? (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 1997), and Corneliu C. Simut¸, Richard Hooker and his Early Doctrine of Justification: A Study of his “Discourse of Justification” (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). 5 Ranall Ingalls, “Sin and Grace,” in A Companion to Richard Hooker, ed. Torrance Kirby (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 159. 6 Cf. Nigel Voak, Richard Hooker and Reformed Theology: A Study of Reason, Will, and Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 213; Gibbs, “Richard Hooker’s ‘Discourse on Justification’,” 147. 7 Cf. on this theme: Simut¸, Richard Hooker and his early doctrine of Justification. However, Simut¸ contents himself with the general remark that Hooker’s way of expressing the “synthesis between justification and sanctification” seems “to be due to the influence of Martin Bucer and his theory of double justification” (104).

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11.1 An outline of Hooker’s doctrine of justification Although A Learned Discourse of Justification, Workes, and How the Foundation of Faith is Overthrowne was first published in 1612, the sermons upon which it is based were delivered by Hooker in the early months of 1586, while he was Master of the Temple Church in London. The first eight paragraphs of the treatise summarize the Protestant doctrine of justification in contrast to the views of Rome on that matter. This constitutes the background for the subsequent deliberation of two questions: “[W]hether our fathers infected with popishe errours and supersticions mighte be saved” and “whether theire ignoraunce be a resonnable inducemente to make us thinck that they mighte.”8 It was precisely the way in which Hooker reasoned upon these issues that caused the indignant reaction of his colleague Walter Travers as well as the following dispute between the two. On the contrary, Travers did not take exception to Hooker’s views on justification as such.9 In his Discourse, Hooker identifies the essential difference in matters of soteriology between the Roman and the Reformed view as one pertaining to the definition of the believers’ righteousness before God. According to Roman Catholic doctrine the believer is called righteous because of a new quality which is infused into the soul by grace and can be increased by performing good works: When they are required to shewe, what the righteousnes is whereby a christian man is justefied, they aunswere, that it is a devyne spirituall qualitie, which […] maketh the soule gratious and amiable in the sighte of god, in regard whereof it is termed grace […]: This grace they will have to be applied by infusion, […] which grace they make capable of increase; […] the augmentacion whereof is merited by good workes, as good workes are made meritorious by it, wherefore the firste receipte of grace is in theire divinitye the first justification, the increase thereof the seconde justification.10

Roman Catholics distinguish indeed between a first and a second justification or – in other terms – between justification proper and sanctification, but the “essence” of both is for them one and the same: “a devine qualitie inherent,” i. e. a “righteousnes which is in us.”11

8 FLE 5:118.15–18; A Learned Discourse of Justification, Workes, and How the Foundation of Faith is Overtrhrowne, 9. 9 Cf. FLE 5:643; Egil Grislis’s Introduction to Hooker’s Commentary. 10 FLE 5:110.11–111.7; Justification, 5. The definition of justification as infusion of God’s righteousness as well as the distinction between a justification by grace and a second one resting on the good works performed by the regenerate are to be found in the Decree on Justification of the Council of Trent, ch. 16 and can. 32 (Denzinger, no. 1547, 1582). Cf. Also the editors’ commentary in FLE 5:713–719. 11 FLE 5:112.18–19; Justification, 6.

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Protestants, Hooker continues, regard justification and sanctification instead as being grounded in different kinds of righteousness. Of these only the righteousness of sanctification is “inherente” in the soul,12 whereas that of justification remains “without us,” so that we gain it only “by imputacion” of Christ’s merits to us.13 Both are bestowed on the believer at one and the same time, “the one by accepting us for rightuous in Christe, the other by workinge christian rightuousnes in us,”14 but differ essentially as to their perfection. For inherent righteousness – other than the perfect righteousness of Christ – remains during earthly life inchoate and is to be made perfect only at the end of times: There is a glorifyinge righteousnes of men in the Worlde to comme, and there is a justefying and a sanctifyinge righteousnes here. The righteousnes wherewith we shalbe clothed in the world to comme, is both perfect and inherente: that whereby here we are justefied is perfecte but not inherente, that whereby we are sanctified, inherent but not perfecte.15

We see, then, how the distinction between imputed and inherent righteousness as the two grounds of justification and sanctification is central to Hooker’s account of the Protestant doctrine of salvation. The question that will occupy us in the following is: should the use of this distinction be considered peculiar to Hooker’s theology, or are equivalents of it to be found in the writings of other contemporary Reformed theologians?

11.2 “Inherent Righteousness” in Continental Refomed Theology, ca. 1540–1600 11.2.1 Martin Bucer and the “Regensburg Book” The term “inherent righteousness” used as a designation of the ground or essence of sanctification was introduced into Reformed theological discourse most probably by Martin Bucer (1491–1551).16 Bucer had participated in the Regensburg Colloquy in 1541 and co-authored the so-called Regensburg Book, a collection of articles on different controversial issues signed by all the participants of the Colloquy. Article 517 discussed the doctrine of justification, stating that “the 12 13 14 15 16

FLE 5:113.17; Justification, 6. FLE 5:129.3; Justification, 21. FLE 5:129.8–9; Justification, 21. FLE 5:109.6–11; Justification, 3. For a comprehensive account of Bucer’s views on soteriology see Brian Lugioyo, Martin Bucer’s Doctrine of Justification: Reformation Theology and Early Modern Irenicism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 17 Article 5 of the Regensburg Book is quoted hereafter according to Anthony Lane’s translation,

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sinner is justified by living and efficacious faith.”18 Justifying faith is a “living” faith in the sense that into those who “truly recognize that they have received the remission of sins and reconciliation on account of the merits of Christ,” also “love is infused which heals the will so that the healed will may begin to fulfil the law.”19 Therefore according to the Regensburg Book salvation encompasses two aspects: on one hand forensic justification, which happens by faith “inasmuch as it appropriates the mercy and righteousness that is imputed to us on account of Christ and his merit;”20 on the other hand, justification is accompanied by real renewal, because “the one who is justified […] through Christ also has inherent righteousness,” on account of which “we are said to be righteous, because the works which we perform are righteous.”21 One year after the Colloquy, Bucer wrote a treatise in which he defended the consensus grounded upon Article 5 of the Regensburg Book.22 He quoted extensively from it and, most importantly, borrowed the distinction between imputed and inherent righteousness as the two formal causes of justification and sanctification. In fact, in the distinction between those two kinds of righteousness he saw an efficacious means to avoid both perils to which any doctrine of salvation was exposed, namely either to regard the virtues as causes of salvation or to proclaim them as utterly unnecessary. Against both of these extremes Bucer invoked the language of the Regensburg Book, maintaining that “this inherent righteousness is indeed necessary for salvation, but only through Christ and ensuing from the first justification, whithout which – as the [fifth] Article piously confirms – no righteousness whatsoever can exist, be it received or possessed.”23 However, in his apology Bucer did not give any formal definition of “inherent righteousness,” nor stated clearly whether this should be considered as an infused or as an acquired quality. Instead, he contented himself with the rather general remark that “our renewal as well as the inchoate, inherent righteousness

18 19 20 21 22 23

published as an appendix to: Anthony N.S. Lane, “Twofold Righteousness: A Key to the Doctrine of Justification? Reflections on Article 5 of the Regensburg Colloquy (1541),” in Justification. What’s at Stake in the Current Debates, ed. Mark Husbands and Daniel J. Treier (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2004), 221–24. The Latin text is edited in vol. 6 of Reformationis Catholicae Ecclesiam Germaniae concernentia, ed. Georg Pfeilschifter (Regensburg: Pustet, 1974), 52–54. Lane, “Twofold Righteousness,” 222. Lane, “Twofold Righteousness,” 222. Lane, “Twofold Righteousness,” 222. Lane, “Twofold Righteousness,” 223. Cf. Martin Bucer, De vera ecclesiarum in doctrina, ceremoniis et disciplina reconciliatione et compositione (Strasbourg: Rihel, 1542). Martin Bucer, De vera ecclesiarum in doctrina, fol. 179v: “Et simul quoque communiter tenebitur et docebitur hanc ipsam inhaerentem iustitiam necessariam quidem esse ad salutem, at non nisi per Christum et ex prima iustificatione, sine qua, ut Articulus pie confirmat, nulla omnino iustitia esse potest, percipi eam haberique posse.”

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consists of and expresses itself in love and the other virtues.”24 The task of reflecting closer on the nature of “inherent righteousness” was therefore to be addressed in the following decades by others.

11.2.2 Peter Martyr Vermigli and Girolamo Zanchi We can find further evidence of this distinction between imputed and inherent righteousness, as well as more specific meditation on the nature of the latter, in the writings of several prominent Reformed theologians of the second half of the sixteenth century. This is the case, first of all, with Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499– 1562) and Girolamo Zanchi (1516–1590).25 The two Italians knew each other personally, and shared a common background as well as a deep appreciation of Martin Bucer’s theology. The similarity existing between their accounts of justification and sanctification comes therefore as no surprise at all. As far as Vermigli is concerned, we see that he relied on the distinction between imputed and inherent righteousness whenever he wrote extensively and systematically on soteriological matters. This is the case in his commentaries on Genesis, as well as in those on First Corinthians and Romans.26 However, he not only relied on the same terminology as Bucer and the Regensburg Book, but he also specified it. For, according to Vermigli, iustitia inhaerens is to be considered as a habit (habitus) in the specifically Aristotelian sense of the word, namely as an inner quality inclining those who have it to act in a particular way; in the case of inherent righteousness, this means that it inclines the regenerate believer to act in conformity with God’s will. A particularly interesting feature of Vermigli’s account is his classification of inherent righteousness as an acquired habit. For example, in his Commentary on 24 Ibid., fol. 189v: “Ad secundam autem iustificationem, id est nostri innovationem, ita pertinet dilectio et reliquae virtutes ut facultates, quibus ipsa nostri innovatio et inchoata in nobis iustitia maxime consistit et explicatur.” 25 For a comprehensive presentation of Vermigli’s life, thought and influence, see Torrance Kirby et al., eds., A Companion to Peter Martyr Vermigli (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 16. On Zanchi see Stefan Lindholm, Jerome Zanchi and the Analysis of Reformed Scholastic Christology (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016); Benjamin R. Merkle, Defending the Trinity in the Reformed Palatinate: The Elohistae (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 68–117. 26 Cf. Peter Martyr Vermigli, In primum librum Mosis, qui vulgo Genesis dicitur, commentarii doctissimi (Zurich: Froschauer, 1569), fol. 59r; id., In selectissimam S[ancti] Pauli priorem ad Corinth[ios] epistolam […] commentarii doctissimi (Zurich: Froschauer, 1551), fol. 29v; id., In epistolam S[ancti] Pauli ad Romanos […] commentarii doctissimi (Basel: Petrus Perna, 1558), 578. See also the detailed analysis of Vermigli’s commentaries in Luca Baschera, Tugend und Rechtfertigung: Peter Martyr Vermiglis Kommentar zur Nikomachischen Ethik im Spannungsfeld von Philosophie und Theologie (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich 2008), 157–75.

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Genesis, having described the nature of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness and the inner regeneration which accompanies it, Vermigli continues: “By frequent performance of holy deeds several very noble habits are acquired and finally also a certain righteousness inherent in us and agreeable to God.”27 Similar remarks are to be found in his commentary on Romans: Second, when he [God] has fashioned and renewed them in this way he gives right and holy works, and by their frequent and continuing use there is born in our minds a quality or (as they call it) a “habit” by which we are inclined to right and holy living.28

Since the “holy deeds” which lead to the emergence of inherent righteousness are made possible only on account of the divinely effected regeneration of the human soul, inherent righteousness is in itself also to be regarded as a gift of God. And nonetheless this gift is not bestowed on human beings immediately, but originates gradually, as any habit does according to Aristotle.29 It was precisely this definition of iustitia inhaerens as an acquired habit that enabled Vermigli in his Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics to see it as the connecting element between Christian soteriology and Aristotelian ethics.30 For, although the Aristotelian principle according to which “we become just by doing just things”31 does not apply to justification – as it happens exclusively by imputation of Christ’s righteousness – the same principle does apply in fact to sanctification, which consists in nothing else than the gradual emergence of a specific habit: inherent righteousness.32 Such a consistent view of inherent righteousness as an acquired habit was to remain peculiar to Vermigli. Among the other continental Reformed authors who used the same terminology, there was rather a tendency to see that new quality as an infused one. This is true, for instance, of Girolamo Zanchi, fellow-countryman of Vermigli and his colleague in Strasbourg between 1553 and 1556. Zanchi never specified whether inherent righteousness should be regarded as a habit in the technical sense of the word. However, he makes clear that it represents a new quality of the human soul, which the Holy Spirit bestows on it at the moment of inner regeneration. In Zanchi’s Commentary on Ephesians we read: 27 Vermigli, Commentarii in Genesin (Tiguri: Froschauer, 1579), fol. 59r. 28 Vermigli, In Romanos, p. 517; quoted according to Frank James III, ed., Predestination and Justification. Two Theological Loci (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2003), 87. 29 Cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 2.1, 1103b 21. 30 Cf. Baschera, Tugend und Rechtfertigung, 151–55; 172–75. 31 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 2.1, 1103a 34–1103b 1. 32 Petrus Martyr Vermigli, Kommentar zur Nikomachischen Ethik des Aristoteles, ed. Luca Baschera and Christian Moser (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 436.6–8: “Iusta faciendo iusti efficimur. Sed hoc non nisi de iustitia civili dabitur et inhaerente, at de iustitia, qua iustificamur, longe aliter sentiendum est.”

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The formal cause, i. e. the righteousness on account of which we are justified, is twofold: on one hand there is the righteousness because of which we are regarded as truly and perfectly just before God, namely in Christ. […] On the other hand there is the righteousness which is granted to us by the Holy Spirit and inheres really [reapse] in us; this latter righteousness expresses itself in outward deeds, so that we may be considered just before our fellow men.33

Similarly, in his Confession of Christian Religion Zanchi states: We believe also that he who through Christ […] is reputed just and is truly just, […] the same man immediately receives the gift of inherent righteousness, so that he is not only perfectly and fully just in Christ his head, but has also in himself true justice, whereby he is indeed made conformable unto Christ.34

As we see, Zanchi was anxious to emphasize that inner renewal as well as the bestowing of the new quality of inherent righteousness were inseparable from forensic justification, and occured at the same time as the latter. In Zanchi’s writings there are indeed passages in which he acknowledges the possibility for inherent righteousness to be increased by the iterated performance of good deeds.35 In principle, however, inherent righteousness should be regarded in his opinion as a quality divinely infused into the soul at the very moment of regeneration.

11.2.3 Theodore Beza and Lambert Daneau The Genevan theologians Theodore Beza (1519–1605) 36 and Lambert Daneau (1530–1595) 37 also drew on the distinction between imputed and inherent righteousness in their doctrine of salvation, and their views about the latter resemble closely those of Vermigli and Zanchi on the same matter. 33 Girolamo Zanchi, Commentarius in epistolam sancti Pauli ad Ephesios, ed. A.H. de Hartog (Amsterdam: Wormser, 1888), 1:242. 34 Girolamo Zanchi, De religione christiana fides – Confession of Christian Religion, ed. Luca Baschera and Christian Moser (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 19,II (335.22–337.1). 35 Girolamo Zanchi, De religione, 19,X (347.10–14): “Although [inherent righteousness] be not due nor begun by our good works that went before […], yet wee confesse that by these following good works and exercises of godlinesse it is much preserved, set forward and increased.” Cf. Girolamo Zanchi, Epistola […] theologicae facultatis academiae Heidelbergensis doctoribus et professoribus, vol. 8(2) of Opera theologica (Geneva: Crespin, 1619), 96a: “[Iustitia inhaerens], licet ex gratia, non autem opera donetur, per opera tamen incrementum accipit et perficitur.” 36 On Beza see Alain Dufour, Théodore de Bèze, poète et théologien, Titre courant, 40 (Geneva: Droz, 2009); Irena Backus, ed., Théodore de Bèze (1519–1605): Actes du colloque de Genève (2005), Travaux d’humanisme et Renaissance, 424 (Geneva: Droz, 2007). 37 On Daneau see Christoph Strohm, Ethik im frühen Calvinismus: Humanistische Einflüsse, philosophische, juristische und theologische Argumentationen sowie mentalitätsgeschichtliche

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For Beza, the emergence of an inherent righteousness or – as he at times writes – an “inherent sanctification”38 in the justified soul is a necessary aspect in the process of salvation. This inherent righteousness Beza regards as an infused property. As far as the nature of this property is concerned he did not exclude the possibility to define it as “habit,”39 although he could also content himself with the more general connotation of “quality.”40 The clear distinction between imputed and inherent righteousness, whereby only the latter represents a new quality of the regenerated human soul, proved to be also a powerful weapon in refuting the heterodox views of Claude Aubery (1545–1596), a former pupil of Beza’s who from 1576 taught philosophy in Lausanne.41 Aubery’s thoughts about justification, as he presented them in his Orationes de fide catholica (1587), are in fact very similar to Andreas Osiander’s position,42 but are expressed using a much more philosophical jargon. Relying on Aristotelian terminology, he interpreted the “reckoning as righteousness” of Abraham’s faith (Rom 4:3) as the transformation of faith into righteousness, i. e., the transformation of an affection (πάθος) into an affective quality (παθητικὴ ποιότης).43 In this way, however, he ended up considering justifying righteousness as an inherent quality of the human soul. In response to Aubery, Beza maintained

38 39 40

41 42

43

Aspekte am Beispiel des Calvin-Schülers Lambertus Danaeus, Arbeiten zur Kirchengeschichte, 65 (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 1996); Olivier Fatio, Méthode et théologie: Lambert Daneau et les débuts de la scolastique réformée, Travaux d’humanisme et Renaissance, 147 (Geneva: Droz, 1976). Theodore Beza, Quaestionum et responsionum christianarum libellus (London: George Bishop, 1577), 71: “Haec inhaerens nobis sanctificatio.” Theodore Beza, Quaestionum, 70: “Hanc posteriorem sanctificationem […] novum esse habitum vere nobis insitum et inhaerentem, ex Patris caelestis mera gratia et sancti Spiritus virtute nobis in Christo collatum” (emphasis added). Theodore Beza, Apologia pro iustificatione ex sola fide (Geneva: Ioannes Le Preux, 1592), 270: “Quod iustificatio illa sit extra nos et per solam imputationem nostra; sanctificatio vero sit donum internum et qualitas nova intra nos ipsos credentes per Sp[iritum] sanctum creata” (emphasis added). On Aubery and the controversy in which he was involved cf. Henri Meylan, Claude Aubery: L’affaire des Orationes (Lausanne: La Concorde, 1937). The German Lutheran theologian and professor in Königsberg Andreas Osiander (1498– 1552) held that the sinner is justified not by imputation, but because of the essential indwelling of Christ’s righteousness in the soul, cf. Alister E. McGrath, Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 213– 14. Claude Aubery, De fide catholica apostolica Romana […] orationes apodicticae VI (Lausanne: Joannes Chiquellaeus, 1587), 74: “Deus autem perficit, ut πάθος illud, mepe ipsum credere Abrahami, in παθητικὴν ποιότητα, id est in patibilem qualitatem, nempe in iustitiam, transiret.” Aristotle (Categories 8, 8b 35–9a 7) described this class of qualities as follows: “The term ‘affective quality’ is not used as indicating that those things which admit these qualities are affected in any way. […] What is meant is that these said qualities are capable of producing an ‘affection’ in the way of perception. For sweetness has the power of affecting the sense of taste; heat, that of touch; and so it is with the rest of these qualities.”

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that there is indeed a kind of righteousness which is inherent in the human soul and which derives from regeneration. However, for Beza it is crucial to distinguish this iustitia inhaerens from justifying righteousness, which indwells only Christ and never becomes a quality of the regenerate.44 Lambert Daneau – who was Beza’s colleague at the Genevan Academy from 1573 through 1581 – applied for his part the distinction between imputed and inherent righteousness whenever he wrote extensively about the doctrine of salvation. In general, Daneau remained – no less than Beza and Zanchi – true to the overall definition of inherent righteousness as a property infused into the soul at the moment of regeneration. However, peculiar to his view is the tendency to even identify inherent righteousness with regeneration, instead of regarding it as a mere result of the latter: “Regeneration is the creation and the conferral of a new, good and holy quality, bestowed or rather infused into us by God through his Holy Spirit. Therefore, this our regeneration is a quality and it is righteousness inherent in us.”45 Another characteristic of Daneau’s treatment of inherent righteousness – at least in his manual of Christian ethics (Ethices christianae libri tres, 1577) – is his choice to subsume the new infused quality under the Aristotelian category of “disposition” (διάθεσις) instead of “habit” (ἕξις):46 “This is the disposition [διάθεσις] and form which enables our souls to conceive and bring forth truly good works: that inner renewal of ours as well as the receiving and

44 Theodore Beza to Claude Aubery, May 21, 1587 in Correspondance de Théodore de Bèze, ed. Alain Dufour, vol. 28 (Geneva: Droz, 2006), 57–58: “Hanc autem justitiam a superiore illa imputata multis modis distinguimus, communi omnium Ecclesiarum aetate nostra instauratarum consensu. […] Illa quidem in alio subjecto inest et permanet, nempe Christo, sicut antea diximus, ista vero ets realis qualitas intra nos effusa. […] Illa est perfectissima, ideoque sola conscientias nostras plene pacificat, ista tantum est arrhabo et testis quod filii Dei simus, ideoque nulla sit in nobis condemnatio.” 45 Lambert Daneau, Isagoges christianae pars quarta, quae est de salutaribus Dei donis erga ecclesiam (Geneva: Eustace Vignon, 1586), 354. 46 Both “habit” and “disposition” are according to Aristotle’s Categories different species of “quality:” “Quality is a term that is used in many senses. One sort of quality let us call ‘habit’ or ‘disposition’. Habit differs from disposition in being more lasting and more firmly established. The various kinds of knowledge and of virtue are habits, for knowledge, even when acquired only in a moderate degree, is, it is agreed, abiding in its character and difficult to displace, unless some great mental upheaval takes place, through disease or any such cause. The virtues, also, such as justice, self-restraint, and so on, are not easily dislodged or dismissed, so as to give place to vice. By a disposition, on the other hand, we mean a condition that is easily changed and quickly gives place to its opposite. Thus, heat, cold, disease, health, and so on are dispositions. For a man is disposed in one way or another with reference to these, but quickly changes, becoming cold instead of warm, ill instead of well. So it is with all other dispositions also, unless through lapse of time a disposition has itself become inveterate and almost impossible to dislodge: in which case we should perhaps go so far as to call it a habit” (Aristotle, Categories 8, 8b 25–9a 4).

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putting on of the new man, which consists of righteousness, holiness and innocence.”47 By contrast with the more consistent ἕξις, διάθεσις represents according to Aristotle a “comparatively unstable state.”48 That Daneau chose to define inherent righteousness as “disposition” resonates, therefore, with his considering Christian virtue as – at best – a sort of “continence” (ἐγκράτεια) and as always imperfect, because of the enduring influence of sin even upon the regenerate.49 It is perhaps no coincidence, but rather an evidence of the attention with which Beza read the writings of his collegue Daneau, that three years after the publication of Daneau’s Ethics the definition of inherent righteousness as “disposition” turns up in a work of Beza. However, Beza adopted this terminology for very different reasons than Daneau’s. In fact, in his polemical treatise De coena Domini (1580), Beza explains that inherent righteousness is better to be regarded as a “disposition” than as a “habit” because it represents the condition of possibility for good deeds and not the result of their performance. In other words, inherent righteousness is a “disposition,” because it precedes and makes possible those godly deeds by the iteration of which only corresponding “habits” can emerge: In human beings, as they are conceived after the fall, the disposition [διάθεσις] conferred by God’s grace must come first, in order for a habit [ἕξις] to come out of it by frequent exercises. […] And this [disposition] is a form of righteousness, i. e. a new quality created in us merely by grace and inherent in our soul as in its subject.50

47 Cf. Lambert Daneau, Ethices christianae libri tres, in Opuscula omnia theologica (Geneva: Eustace Vignon, 1583), 81b [1.18]: “Haec est vera animorum nostrorum opera non civiliter, sed vere bona, parturientium et cogitantium diathesis et forma, nimirum interna illa nostri renovatio sive novi hominis indutio et receptio, quae iustitia et sanctitate vel potius sanctimonia constat.” Cf. Ibid., 83a: “Illa sanctitas et iustitia, per quam hic bene operamur, illa certe in nobis inest atque etiam inhaerens, non autem extra nos neque tantum nobis opinione quadam imputata et affixa.” 48 H. H. Joachim, Aristotle – The Nicomachean Ethics: A Commentary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 85n1. 49 On Daneau’s theory of Christian “weak” virtue, cf. Risto Saarinen, Weakness of Will in Renaissance and Reformation Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 188–200. 50 Theodore Beza, De coena Domini adversus Iodochi Harchii Montensis dogmata, in Volumen tertium tractationum theologicarum (Geneva: Eustace Vignon, 1582), 176–77.

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11.3 Infused or acquired? Hooker’s view of “inherent righteousness” Our tour d’horizon has made sufficiently clear that when Hooker spoke in 1586 of “inherent righteousness” as the essence of sanctification, distinguishing it from “imputed righteousness” as the formal cause of justification, he was not relying on some strange and unprecendented distinction. Rather, he was making use of a terminology well established within Reformed circles. A terminology, by the way, which was about to become part of the theological koine, seeing that several decades later another English theologian of a very different cast than Hooker, John Owen, could remark: “We grant an inherent righteousness in all that believe […]. This being the constant doctrine of all the Reformed churches and divines, it is an open calumny whereby the contrary is ascribed unto them, […] there is no one of them by whom either the thing itself or the necessity of it is denied.”51 At the same time our review has also shown that there could be slight differences in the way in which single theologians articulated their reflection upon the nature of inherent righteousness. Therefore, in conclusion, the question arises: how did Hooker position himself within the theological discourse of his time? Was inherent righteousness for him a habit and, if so, was it infused or acquired? Firstly, there can be no doubt that Hooker conceived inherent righteousness, as the majority of his Reformed contemporaries did, as an infused quality. “Reall infusion” is in fact besides imputation – as he remarks in the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Polity – the other way in which human beings come by grace to “participate Christ.”52 For the same God who justifies the sinner by imputing Christ’s righteousness to him, also “works Christian righteousness” in him by infusing into his soul those “virtues proper and particular unto saintes, which the spirite in that very momente when firste it is gyven of god bringeth with it.”53 Secondly, it is equally clear that Hooker was inclined to apply to this sort of infused, inherent quality the notion of “habit.” Drawing implicitly both on the definition of habit as the condition of possibility of behaving in a certain way and on the traditional definition of the Christian virtues of faith, love and hope as “infused virtues,”54 he describes inherent righteousness as a kind of “habituall 51 John Owen, The Doctrine of Justification by Faith, in The Works of John Owen, ed. William H. Goold, vol. 5 (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1998), 230–31. 52 FLE 2:243.4–7; LEP V.56.10. 53 FLE 5:129.9–15; Hooker, Justification 21. 54 Cf. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica IaIIae q. 62 a. 1. co.: “Oportet quod superaddantur homini divinitus aliqua principia, per quae ita ordinetur ad beatitudinem supernaturalem, sicut per principia naturalia ordinatur ad finem connaturalem, non tamen absque adiutorio divino. Et huiusmodi principia virtutes dicuntur theologicae, tum quia habent Deum pro

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holynes.”55 Further, because of its essentially habitual character, inherent righteousness is to be distinguished from “actual holyness,”56 the latter being the sum of all the godly deeds the believer is able to perform because of the presence of the habit of inherent righteousness in him. Although both habitual and actual righteousness – which represent as it were the two sides of sanctification – remain inchoate and imperfect in this life, the latter is capable of increase and should, in fact, grow larger and larger. However, to full perfection it will come only “in the Worlde to comme,”57 when “both our soules and bodies [will be] made like unto [Christ’s] in glorie.”58

11.4. Concluding Remarks Is Hooker to be considered as a representative of Reformed theology or not? It is apparent that such a question cannot receive a definite answer, for the simple reason that “Reformed” was always a contested term. What counted as Reformed in matters of ecclesiastical polity, e. g., among the Non-Conformists in Elizabethan England, might coincide with the views of most Reformed theologians in France, but bore little resemblance to those of the Zurichers. The latters’ opinions were instead very similar to those of Whitgift and Hooker.59 However, something incontrovertible has indeed emerged from our study of the way in which Hooker and several among his Reformed contemporaries articulated their views on salvation: Hooker’s terminology – i. e. his use of the category of “habit” as well as his distinction between and definition of imputed and inherent righteousness – cannot be considered as implicit evidence of any discontinuity existing between him and the Reformed theologians of his days. This does not in itself mean that Hooker’s views were identical with those of other Reformed theologians. Between Hooker and the Reformed from the continent, exactly as among continental Reformed theologians themselves, there were indeed differences, both on the level of terminology and on that of content.

55 56 57 58 59

obiecto, inquantum per eas recte ordinamur in Deum; tum quia a solo Deo nobis infunduntur; tum quia sola divina revelatione, in sacra Scriptura, huiusmodi virtutes traduntur.” FLE 5:129.19; Justification, 21. FLE 5:129.21; Justification, 21. FLE 5:109.6f; Justification, 3. FLE 2:243.8–9; LEP V.56.10. Cf. Helmut Kressner, Schweizer Ursprünge des anglikanischen Staatskirchentums (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1953), especially 73–98; Kirby, Zurich Connection, especially 25–41; 203–220; Diarmaid MacCulloch, “Heinrich Bullinger and the English-speaking world,” in Heinrich Bullinger: Life, Thought, Influence, ed. Emidio Campi and Peter Opitz (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 2007), 2:929–31.

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This should not cause any surprise, since Reformed confessional identity was not based on a set of clearly defined theologumena, but rather on “a loosely related set of national and regional confessions and catechisms.”60 These documents marked indeed clear boundaries, but were at the same time characterized by a peculiar “breadth,” which remained open for different interpretations as far as the details were concerned.61 Terminological choices pertained precisely to this realm of diversity. Not all Reformed theologians chose to make use of the distinction between imputed and inherent righteousness, nor to define the latter by appealing to Aristotelian categories. However, some of them did, and so did Hooker too. Thus, far from being an implicit proof of discontinuity, the fact that Hooker used such terminology and definitions rather bears witness to his acquaintance with the Reformed theological literature of his day in all its variety.

60 Richard A. Muller, Calvin and the Reformed Tradition: On the Work of Christ and the Order of Salvation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012), 44. 61 Richard A. Muller, Calvin and the Reformed Tradition, 44.

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12. Richard Hooker and John Owen on Union with Christ

12.1 Introduction Despite the conclusions of revisionist scholars, the via media thesis continues to have a prominent influence on current Hooker scholarship.1 Scholarly consensus places the origins of the via media thesis during the Oxford Movement (1833–45), primarily through John Keble’s (1792–1866) edition of Hooker’s works and John Henry Newman’s (1801–1890) Lectures on Justification.2 In short, nineteenthcentury Tractarians of the Oxford Movement were hostile to the Reformed doctrine of justification and thus presented Hooker as a forerunner of their own via media between the Reformation and Roman Catholicism.3 More recently others have countered that the via media thesis inadequately explains Hooker’s relationship to the Reformed tradition largely because it is anachronistic and owes its origins to theology of John Henry Newman rather than the theology presented in Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, his chief work.4

1 Cf. John Henry Newman, “Via Media – no. 1,” and “Via Media – no. 2,” in Tracts for the Times, vol. 1: 1833–4 (London: J. G. & F. Rivington, 1839); Philip B. Secor, Richard Hooker and the Via Media (Bloomington: Author House, 2006), 71–74; Lee W. Gibbs, “Life of Hooker,” in A Companion to Richard Hooker, ed. Torrance Kirby (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 1. 2 Ranall Ingalls, “Sin and Grace,” in A Companion to Richard Hooker, ed. Torrance Kirby (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 152–53; cf. Peter B. Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship, 1760–1857 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); C. Brad Faught, The Oxford Movement: A Thematic History of the Tractarians and Their Times (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004). For an overview of the Nineteenth-century reception of Hooker and the via media thesis see Michael Brydon, The Evolving Reputation of Richard Hooker: An Examination of Responses 1600–1714 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1–20. 3 Ingalls, “Sin and Grace,” 153. 4 W. J. Torrance Kirby, Richard Hooker, Reformer and Platonist (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005), 11–12; cf., e. g., John Henry Newman, Lectures on the Doctrine of Justification, 3rd ed. (1874; Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2001), 342–404; Nigel Atkinson, Richard Hooker and the Authority of Scripture, Tradition and Reason (Carlisle, UK: Paternoster Press, 1997).

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Testing the validity of the via media thesis would require a comprehensive survey of Hooker’s doctrine. But we can examine Hooker’s doctrines of union and communion to determine whether they truly occupy a via media between the Reformation and Roman Catholicism. This essay defends the thesis that Hooker’s doctrines of union and communion do not fit the via media thesis. Rather, Hooker’s doctrines lie within the mainstream of Reformation views.5 Evidence that challenges the suitability of the via media thesis resides in two areas. First, key elements of Hooker’s doctrines of union and communion do not occupy a middle ground between Roman Catholicism and Reformed theology, especially his doctrines of justification and the sacraments. Second, further evidence appears in the positive reception of Hooker’s doctrine. In a little-known corner of theological history, John Owen (1616–1683), an icon of Reformed Orthodoxy, appealed to Hooker’s doctrine of union with Christ in the midst of the 1674–75 Communion Controversy. Owen came under contemptuous criticism from William Sherlock (ca. 1641–1707), a bishop in the Church of England, for his doctrine of union with Christ. Sherlock claimed that Owen’s views were novel and aligned with Quaker mysticism rather than Anglican orthodoxy.6 Owen responded to Sherlock and appealed to Hooker’s doctrine of union with Christ. Owen employed Hooker, arguably a theological lodestar for the Church of England, to prove that his own doctrine of union with Christ was quite similar.7 Owen’s appeal to Hooker is significant and presents important evidence that challenges the via media thesis. If Hooker were not aligned with Reformed doctrine, then Owen’s appeal to him would be strategically ineffective. Owen’s 5 Other treatments of Hooker’s doctrines of union and communion include, David Neelands, “Hooker on Divinization: Our Participation of Christ,” in From Logos to Christos: Essays on Christology in Honour of Joanne McWilliams, ed. Ellen M. Leonard and Kate Merriman (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2010), 137–50; John E. Booty, “The Spirituality of Participation in Richard Hooker,” Sewanee Theological Review 38, no. 1 (1994): 9–20; Edmund Newey, “The Form of Reason: Participation in the Work of Richard Hooker, Benjamin Whichcote, Ralph Cudworth and Jeremy Taylor,” in Modern Theology 18, no. 1 (2002): 1–26; A. M. Allchin, Participation in God: A Forgotten Strand in Anglican Tradition (London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1988), 7–23; André A. Gazal, “‘By Force of Participation and Conjunction in Him’: John Jewel and Richard Hooker on Union with Christ,” Perichoresis 12, no. 1 (2014): 39–56; Charles W. Irish, “‘Participation of God Himselfe:’ Law, the mediation of Christ, and sacramental participation in the thought of Richard Hooker,” in Richard Hooker and the English Reformation, ed. W. J. Torrance Kirby (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003), 165–84. I am grateful to Brad Littlejohn for alerting me to many of these sources. 6 William Sherlock, A Discourse Concerning the Knowledge of Jesus Christ, and Our Union and Communion with Him (London: Walter Kettilby, 1674). 7 John Owen, A Vindication of Some Passages in a Discourse Concerning Communion with God, in The Works of John Owen, ed. William H. Goold (1965; Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1997) 2:275–364. By this point in English history, Hooker was an icon of Anglicanism (Brydon, Reputation of Richard Hooker, 21–149, especially 55–57, 69, 72, 78–80, 96–98, 122–24, 126–27, 143).

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appeal to Hooker represents a stamp of approval by one of Reformed Orthodoxy’s greatest theologians. However, Owen’s use of Hooker likely goes deeper than orthodox cover for his own doctrine. There are points at which Hooker’s doctrines of union and communion anticipate Owen’s views. Owen not only appealed to Hooker but was likely influenced by his views. Hence, to shed further light on Hooker’s Reformed doctrines of union and communion, this essay begins by presenting a broad overview of Hooker’s doctrines. Second, it surveys Owen’s appeal to Hooker in his defense against Sherlock’s accusations, but also presents the similarities between Hooker and Owen. The essay then concludes with some observations about why the via media thesis fails to explain the Hooker’s relationship to the Reformed tradition.

12.2 Hooker on Union and Communion 12.2.1 Law Before we proceed it is necessary to summarize Hooker’s rather detailed understanding of law since his doctrines of union and communion are grounded in his broader understanding of the nature of law, particularly the manner by which God governs the creation.8 Hooker defines law as that which ensures and guarantees that an object can obtain its intended goal or purpose.9 Everything, including God himself, functions according to his own established laws.10 Kirby, while challenging the traditional via media interpretation of Hooker, has persuasively demonstrated that the latter’s understanding of law bears the fingerprints of Thomas Aquinas’s (1225–1274) Neo-Platonic twofold movement of procession and return to its original eternal source.11 This is important since Hooker understood that the concept of law ultimately involves a process of participation, or union.12 If Kirby is correct, Hooker echoes Aquinas’s NeoPlatonic process of emanation and return, one regulated by divine laws, which means that God’s creatures were designed to go out and ultimately return to him.13 Thus, law is a means by which God allows creatures to participate in the 8 9 10 11

Irish, “Participation in God,” 165–69. FLE 1:58; LEP I.2.1. Kirby, Richard Hooker, Reformer and Platonist, 3. Kirby, Richard Hooker, Reformer and Platonist, 3–4; cf. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 5 vols. (1948; Allen: Christian Classics, 1981), Ia IIae qq. 90–97. 12 Irish, “Participation of God,” 165. 13 Irish, “Participation of God,” 166; W. J. Torrance Kirby, The Theology of Richard Hooker in the Context of the Magisterial Reformation (Princeton: Princeton Theological Seminary, 2000), 23–39.

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divine.14 God employs law as an instrument by which to govern nature, the angels, and humanity.15 In fact, by following God’s laws humanity frames “themselves according to the paterne of the father of spirits.”16 By framing our lives according to God’s laws, “we live as it were the life of God.”17 Conversely, if one fails to live life in accordance with God’s laws he no longer participates in God’s life.18 These elements in Hooker’s doctrine reflect its catholicity, concerns and characteristics that other Reformed Orthodox theologians shared and exhibited as will be evident below.

12.2.2 Participation Like other sixteenth-century reformers Hooker assumed that humanity’s fallen condition places them in an exilic existence away from participation with God. However, the Christian Gospel asserts that God has intervened thus making possible humanity’s union, participation, and communion with the living God: “God hath revealed a way mysticall and supernaturall, a way directing unto the same ende of life by a course which groundeth it selfe upon the guiltiness of sinne, and through sinne desert of condemnation and death.”19 Hooker’s all-encompassing remedy rests upon the doctrine of union with Christ, one that begins with predestination, leads to the incarnation, embraces the sacraments, involves the redemption of sinners, and concludes with their glorification. Hooker presents this union-oriented superstructure throughout Book V of his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.20 In this vein, Hooker defines mystical union in the following manner: “Participation is that mutuall inward hold which Christ hath of us and wee of him, in such sort that ech [sic] possesseth other by waie of special interest propertie and inherent copulation.”21 Humanity’s redemptive participation begins with God’s election of sinners, but Hooker specifies that union with Christ by eternal foreknowledge requires 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

FLE 1:68; LEP I.3.4. FLE 1:69–74; LEP I.3.5; I.4.1–3, I.5.1–3. FLE 1:74; LEP I.3.5. FLE 1:112; LEP I.11.2. FLE 1:80; LEP I.7.7. FLE 1:118; LEP I.11.6. Kirby, Richard Hooker, Reformer and Platonist, 104; cf. Egil Grislis, “Jesus Christ—the Centre of Theology in Richard Hooker’s Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity, Book V,” Journal of Anglican Studies 5, no. 2 (2007): 227–51. 21 FLE 2:234; LEP V.56.1. Earlier Reformed theologians, such as Heinrich Bullinger, characterized union as the copulative bond between bride and bridegroom. Cf. Heinrich Bullinger, The Decades of Henry Bullinger, 2 vols. (1849–52; Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2004), 2:309 [3.9].

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our actual adoption into the fellowship of saints in the present world. Election must have its temporal counterpart in being united to Christ through incorporation into the church, the fellowship of the saints, Christ’s body.22 But the intermediate, necessary, and even foundational step in God’s unfolding participatory plan is the Incarnation – the hypostatic union between the divine and human natures of Christ. Hooker writes: A kinde of mutuall commutation there is whereby those concrete names God and Man when wee speake of Christ doe take interchangablie on an others roome, so that for truth of speech it skillet not whether wee saie that the Sonne of God hathe created the world and the Sonne of man by his death hath saved it, or els [sic] that the Sonne of man did create and the Sonne of God die to save the world.23

Participation, therefore, cannot occur apart from the Son’s intervention and mediation: For as our natural life consisteth in the union of the bodie with the soule; so our life supernaturall in the union of the soule with God. And for as much as there is no union of God with man without that meane betwene both which is both, it seemeth requisite that wee first consider how God is in Christ, then how Christ is in us, and how the sacraments doe serve to make us pertakers of Christ.24 In a sense, the incarnation foreshadows humanity’s ultimate redemption and participation in the divine.25

For Hooker, believers participate in the divine in a manner analogous to the intra-trinitarian divine life. Each member of the trinity remains within one another, but at the same time this circumincession does not obliterate their own unique personhood.26 In a similar fashion, believers participate in the divine through their redemption. Hooker comments upon 2 Peter 1:4, where the apostle states that believers become “partakers of the divine nature.” Hooker writes: “Finalie sith [sic] God hath deified our nature, though not by turning it into him selfe, yeat [sic] by making it his own inseparable habitation, wee cannot now conieve how God should without man either exercise divine power or receive the glorie of divine praise. For man is in both an associate of Deitie.”27 God indwells 22 23 24 25

FLE 2:238; LEP V.56.7. FLE 2:219; LEP V.53.4. FLE 2:208–209; LEP V.51.3. FLE 2:240–41; LEP V.56.9. Other Reformed theologians, such as Peter Martyr Vermigli and Girolamo Zanchi spoke in terms of an incarnational union, categories that Hooker echoes (see Peter Martyr Vermigli, “Vermigli to Beza,” in Common Places, trans. Anthony Marten (London: Henry Denham et al., 1583), 105–106; idem, Loci Communes (London: 1583), 1108; Girolamo Zanchi, De Religione Christiana Fides – Confession of Christian Religion, ed. Luca Baschera and Christian Moser (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 1:236–37 [XII.vii]). 26 FLE II:235–36; LEP V.56.2. 27 FLE 2:224; LEP V.54.5; Booty, “Spirituality of Participation,” 16.

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believers through the Holy Spirit, and this is the manner by which they enter into union and participation with him. But this divine indwelling does not mean that believers immediately receive all of Christ. Or in other terms, divine indwelling and union do not mean believers are immediately glorified.

12.2.3 Degrees of Union A common theme among Reformed theologians of the period was to discuss salvation in terms of degrees or steps of union with Christ. Theodore Beza (1519– 1605), Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499–1562), and William Perkins (1558–1602) all shared the same broad understanding of the order of salvation and union with Christ. Even though their historical contexts varied, their respective writings show agreement on these matters, evident by the common use of the degrees or steps of union with Christ. For instance, Beza writes: “Unless something prevents them, they should begin at the lowest degrees and so ascend up to the highest (as Paul in his epistle to the Romans which is the right order and way to proceed in matters of theology, from the law to the remission of sins, and then by degrees as he gradually progresses to the highest degree).”28 Perkins explains there are three elements of God’s decree that pertain to salvation: “First, the foundation. Secondly, the meanes. Thirdly, the degrees.”29 In his explanation of Paul’s famous golden chain of salvation (Rom. 8:30), Vermigli explains that Paul unfolds the catena (“chain”) or gradation.30 Echoing this common theme, Hooker repeatedly mentions receiving Christ by degrees.31 Though Hooker does not invoke the specific text, his use of the term degrees likely refers to Romans 8:29–30 and the degrees, or steps, of Paul’s sorites – the golden chain: those who have been predestined have been called, and those called have been justified, and those justified have been glorified.32 Hooker 28 Theodore Beza, Summa Totius Christianismi, sive Descriptio et Distributio Causarum Salutis Electorum, & Exitii Reproborum, ex Sacris Literis Collecta (Geneva: Iohannis Crispini, 1570), §VII; idem, A Brief Declaration of the Cheife Poyntes of Christian Religion Set Forth in a Table (London: n.p., n.d.). Translation updated in comparison with Latin original. 29 William Perkins, A Golden Chaine: Or, The Description of Theologie, Containing the Order of the Causes of Salvation and Damnation, in The Workes of that Famous Minister of Christ, in the Universitie of Cambridge, Mr. William Perkins (London: John Legatt, 1616), 23. 30 Peter Martyr Vermigli, In Epistolam S. Pauli Apostoli ad Romanos (Tiguri: n.p., 1559), 539 [comm. Rom. 8:30]; idem, The Most Learned and Fruitful Commentaries of D. Peter Martir Vermilius (London: John Daye, 1568), 226 [comm. Rom. 8:30]. 31 FLE 2:240–44; LEP V.56.8, 10, 12; see also, Irish, “Participation in God,” 175; Neelands, “Hooker on Divinization,” 138; Allchin, Participation in God, 26. 32 For primary sources and analysis of the early modern use of Romans 8:29–30 and the rhetorical category of sorites, see J. V. Fesko, “Romans 8.29–30 and the Question of the Ordo Salutis,” Journal of Reformed Theology 8 (2014): 35–60.

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identifies three degrees of union with Christ. The first degree of union requires participation in the Spirit, the germanissimam societam, which he terms the “highest and truest socieite that can be bewtene [sic] man and him which is both God and man in one.33 The Spirit’s indwelling does not involve a mixture of his substance with ours, but there is nevertheless a “mysticall conjunction” between Christ and the believer. Hooker draws upon the Johanine imagery of Christ as the vine and believers as the branches to support his claim.34 The next degree of union with Christ brings in addition to Christ’s presence and indwelling through the Spirit the influence of grace and participation in his godliness, one derived from both of his natures, the divine and the human.35 Hooker explains that there are three aspects of this degree of participation: imputation, infusion, and glorification. But Hooker stipulates that though we participate in Christ by degrees, that these degrees do not apply to two things: Christ’s indwelling presence and his imputed righteousness.36 In other words, believers receive all of Christ through the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit, and they receive all of his imputed obedience through faith, but they receive Christ’s infused righteousness by degrees: “So that degrees beinge neither in the personal presence of Christ, nor in the participation of those effects which are oures by imputation onlie, it resteth that wee wholly applie them to the participation of Christes infused grace, although even in this kinde also the first beginning of life, the seede of God, the first fruites of Christes Spirit be without latitutde.”37 Hooker’s broader point is that there are degrees of our union with Christ, but that some elements, such as the initial indwelling and imputation, are complete, and others, such as infused righteousness, progress incrementally.

12.2.4 Communion Hooker summarizes his understanding of union and its relationship to communion with the triune God when he writes: Thus therefore wee see how the father is in the Sonne and the Sonne in the father, how they both are in all thinges and all thinges in them, what communion Christ hath with his Church, how his Church and everie member thereof is in him by originall derivation, and the personallie in them by way of mystical association wrought through the guift of the holie Ghost, which they that are his receive from him, and together with the same what benefit soever the vitall force of his bodie and blood may yield, yea by steppes and 33 34 35 36 37

FLE 2:240; LEP V.56.8. FLE 2:240–41; LEP V.56.9. FLE 2:242–43; LEP V.56.10. FLE 2:243–44; LEP V.56.12. FLE 2:244; LEP V.56.13.

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degrees they receave the complete measure of all such divine grace, as doth sanctifie and save throughout, till the daie of their final exaltation to a state of fellowship in glorie, with him whose pertakers they are now in those thinges that tende to glorie.38

In contemporary nomenclature, believers have communion with the triune God by virtue of their union with Christ, a union that begins in effectual calling, brings about their justification by an alien righteousness, which is complete, and leads to the progressive transformation of their sanctification, a journey that concludes with their glorification.39

12.2.5 Church and Sacraments In Hooker’s construction, the church is a vital element within his doctrine of union, because the church is the institution that administers the sacraments – the instruments by which God makes believers partakers of Christ.40 Hooker rejected the idea that the sacraments were merely scripturally sanctioned educational tools: “It greatlie offendenth, that some, when they labor to show the use of the holie Sacramentes, assigne unto them no ende but only to teach the minde, by other senses, that which the worde doth teach by hearinge.”41 Hooker might have a Zwinglian memorialist view in mind with this comment.42 Echoing the language of the Thirty-Nine Articles (1571), Hooker maintains that the sacraments serve as instruments by which believers enter into and continually sustain their union with Christ. Article XXVII on Baptism, for example, states: “Baptism is not only a sign of profession and mark of difference whereby Christian men are discerned from other that be not christened, but is also a sign of regeneration or new birth, whereby, as by an instrument, they that receive baptism rightly are grafted into the Church.”43 Hooker continued in this trajectory of identifying the sacraments as God’s instruments of bringing about and nurturing the believer’s union with Christ. Hooker maintained that recipients received Christ once through baptism, and then through continual degrees in the eucharist.44 Hooker based his understanding of the function of the sacraments upon two things: his exegesis of 38 39 40 41 42

FLE 2:244; LEP V.56.13. FLE 5:109, 112–13; Justification, 3, 6; Kirby, Richard Hooker, Reformer and Platonist, 89. FLE 2:227; LEP V.55.1. FLE 2:244; LEP V.57.1. For Zwingli’s views, see Ulrich Zwingli, “An Exposition of the Faith,” in Zwingli and Bullinger, ed. G. W. Bromiley (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1953), 254–62. 43 Jaroslav Pelikan and Valerie Hotchkiss, eds., Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 2:535, emphasis added. 44 FLE 2:247–48; LEP V.57.6; cf. Grislis, “Jesus Christ—the Centre of Theology,” 249.

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Scripture and the Reformed tradition’s definitions. Citing Titus 3:5, which speaks of baptism as the “washing of regeneration,” Hooker takes these words at face value. Baptism, in his view, is not merely a sign or token but is an instrument or meane whereby wee receive grace, because baptisme is a sacrament which God hath instituted in his Church to the ende that they which receave the same might thereby be incorporated into Christ and so through his most pretious [sic] merit obteine as well that saving grace of imputation which taketh away all former guiltiness, as also that infused divine virtue of the holie Ghost which giveth to the powers of the soule theire first disposition towards future newness of life.45

Hooker draws this point from his understanding of Scripture, chiefly Titus 3:5, but he also appeals to earlier catholic thinkers without neglecting key Reformed confessions of faith. For instance, he believed that the substance of the sacraments was not merely the outward visible sign but also the “secret grace which they signifie and exhibit.”46 To support his claim Hooker appeals to common definitions: Isidore of Seville (ca. 560–636), Gregory the Great (ca. 540–604), William of Ockham (ca. 1287–1347), Thomas Aquinas, the Belgic Confession (1561), the Bohemian Confession (1575), and Second Helvetic Confession (1566). Particularly noteworthy is Hooker’s appeal to the Second Helvetic Confession, written largely by Heinrich Bullinger (1504–1575), which states: “The sacraments consist of the word, the sign, and the thing signified” (XIX). Hooker, therefore, believed he was in line with teaching of the Reformed churches, and at least in his mind, the mixed citation to both Catholic and Reformed authorities meant that Hooker believed that there was broad agreement between the two camps on this point. Hooker’s understanding of the eucharist plays an important role in his doctrine of union with Christ. Like baptism, the eucharist conveys grace to the recipient but is a sacrament of continuation, not initiation. Sinners initially receive baptism and then throughout their life rely upon the grace of the eucharist as they repeatedly receive it.47 But like baptism, the eucharist was another means by which believers participate in Christ.48 Hooker believed that Protestants in general agreed that the eucharist entailed “the reall participation of Christe and of life in his bodie and bloode by meanes of this sacrament.”49 For Hooker, the sacraments were a means by which God incorporated people into Christ: “This sacrament is a true and reall participation of Christ, who thereby imparteth

45 46 47 48

FLE 2:254–55; LEP V.40.2. FLE 2:248–49; LEP V.58.2. FLE 2:330; LEP V.47.1. W. David Neelands, “Christology and the Sacraments,” in A Companion to Richard Hooker, ed. Torrance Kirby (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 369, 389–93. 49 FLE 2:331; LEP V.47.2.

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him self even his whole intire Person as a mysticall head unto everie soule that receiveth him, and that everie such receiver doth thereby incorporate or unite him self unto Christ as a mystical member of him.”50 In line with his broader understanding of the sacraments, Hooker maintains that the bread and cup are “causes instrumentall upon the receipt whereof the participation of his boodie [sic] and bloode ensueth.”51 But Hooker stipulates in contradistinction to Lutheran and Roman Catholic views on the real presence of Christ, that he is not in the elements but “in the worthie receiver of the sacrament.” In a move that distinguishes his doctrine of the sacraments from a Roman Catholic view, Hooker explains: As for the sacraments they reallie exhibit, but for ought wee can gather out of that which is written of them they are not reallie nor do reallie conteine in them selves that grace which with them or by them it pleaseth God to bestowe. If on all sides it be confest [sic] that the grace of baptisme is powred into the soule of man, that by water wee receive it although it be neither seated in the water nor the water changed into it, what should induce men to thinke that the grace of the Eucharist must needs be in the Eucharist before it can be in us that receive it? The fruite of the Eucharist is the participation of the bodie and blood of Christ.52

Hooker clearly links Christ and his grace with the sacraments and rejects the Roman Catholic position. In fact, Hooker explicitly precluded Roman and Lutheran views. Hooker believed that all sides taught that the eucharist was a real participation in Christ, the mystical head of every soul that receives him, and that by such participation those united to him received salvation – the Spirit wrought communication of Christ’s merit and the translation of the soul from a state of sin to righteousness.53 But Hooker stipulates that Christ is personally present but corporally absent. Given this absence, Hooker explains by what means Christ employs the eucharist: That Christ assisting this heavenlie banquet with his personal and true presence doeth by his owne divine power ad to the natural substance thereof supernaturall efficacie, which addition to the nature of those consecrated elements changeth them and maket them that unto us which otherwise they could not be; that to us they are thereby made such instruments as mysticallie yeat trulie, invisiblie yeat reallie worke our communion or fellowship with the person of Jesus Christ as well in that he is man as God, our participation also in the fruit grace and efficacie of his bodie and blood, whereupon there ensueth a kind of transubstantiation in us, a true change both of soule and bodie, an alteration from death to life.54 50 51 52 53 54

FLE 2:335–36; LEP V.47.7; Neelands, “Christology and the Sacraments,” 390. FLE 2:334; LEP V.47.6. FLE 2:335; LEP V.47.6. FLE 2:335–36; LEP V.47.7. FLE 2:339–40; LEP V.47.11.

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Unlike Rome, which locates Christ in the elements by transubstantiation, Hooker places a “kind of transubstantiation” in the recipient. Hooker believed that this construction was in greater alignment with Patristic views because, in his mind, no church father ever taught transubstantiation of the elements. Rather, argues Hooker, the elements functioned within the broader context of the believer’s mystical union with Christ.55 Hooker was explicit on this point and outright dismissed Lutheran and “Popish” interpretations of the phrase, “This is my body.” Rather than holding to the positions we now describe as consubstantiation or transubstantiation, he believed that his own view affirmed what the others intended without the specific erroneous Roman or Lutheran mechanisms for Christ’s presence.56

12.3 Owen’s Appeal to Hooker 12.3.1 Background On the one hand, historians can examine Hooker’s views and make a determination as to where, precisely, he fits within the continuum between the Reformation and Roman Catholicism. On the other hand, a more theologically and historically nuanced approach seeks to locate the place of Hooker’s doctrine by its reception in its proximate historical context. In other words, how did subsequent Reformed Orthodox theologians treat his doctrine? Did they treat it as a via media between Rome and the Reformation, or did they see it as genuine expression of Reformed theology? As noted in the introduction of this essay, one of the best places to find answers to these questions comes from the 1674–75 Communion Controversy between William Sherlock and John Owen.

12.3.2 Sherlock’s Assessment William Sherlock, a minister in the Church of England, wrote a scathing treatise against a number of non-conformist theologians, including John Owen. Sherlock particularly targeted Owen’s treatise, Communion with God, and his doctrine of mystical union. Sherlock accused Owen of mysticism and setting forth theological novelty. He believed that any view that argued that Christ indwelled believers was akin to mysticism, or Quakerism, and that such views were novel and unbiblical. He also rejected Owen’s doctrine of imputation. Sherlock opted 55 FLE 2:340; LEP V.47.11. 56 FLE 2:340–41; LEP V.47.12.

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for a view that maintained a political union between Christ and the believer. A political union was like that between a king and his subjects, but was neither federal nor mystical. Hence, Sherlock had no need for imputation (federal) or divine indwelling (mystical). Rather, the believer assented to Christ’s rule and vowed to live his life in conformity to Christ’s law.57 Sherlock’s attack upon Owen was not purely theological, as there were also likely political factors involved. Charles II (1630–85) had recently assumed the throne in 1661 and shortly thereafter enacted the Act of Uniformity in 1662. During the twenty years (1642–62) of the so-called Puritan revolution – 2,780 ministers, among others, were forced to leave their pulpits as a result.58 Sherlock despised the non-conformists and therefore sought to isolate them by any means available. Hence, he wrote against Owen’s Communion with God even though his critique appeared seventeen years after Owen’s book was published.59

12.3.3 Owen’s Response Owen was quick to publish a reply entitled, A Vindication of Some Passages in a Discourse Concerning Communion with God (1675). In his response Owen sought to demonstrate the antiquity and catholicity of his doctrine of union with Christ. He pursued his goal by appealing to, among many other authorities, Richard Hooker. On one level, Owen’s appeal is most certainly good strategy. If Sherlock were a minister in the Church of England, then appealing to one of her greatest theologians would carry great weight. By this point in history, Hooker was considered by many to be a paradigmatic Anglican.60 And, if Owen could appeal to Hooker to show that his own doctrine was aligned with his, then it would also defang and declaw Sherlock’s accusations of novelty and mysticism. With Hooker’s doctrine of union on the bow, Owen could crash through the waves of Sherlock’s criticisms. Moreover, there would be the greater irony, one perhaps that would bear significant rhetorical power, namely, that Owen, a non-conformist and so-called Puritan, would appeal to Hooker who wrote his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity to refute Puritan elements within the Church of England.61 If 57 Sherlock, Discourse, 119–20, 98, 106, 146–48, 150, 174, 207, 211. 58 John Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558–1689 (New York: Routledge, 2013), 140; see also Alan P. F. Sell, “The Dissenting Witness: Yesterday and Today,” in Testimony and Tradition: Studies in Reformed and Dissenting Thought (2005; repr., Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2012), 258. 59 For a brief survey of the controversy, see Paul C. H. Lim, Mystery Unveiled: The Crisis of the Trinity in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 204–15. 60 Diarmaid MacColloch, “Richard Hooker’s Reputation,” in A Companion to Richard Hooker, ed. Torrance Kirby (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 578–79, 588. 61 FLE 1:36–51; LEP Preface 8.1–14; John Everitt Booty, “Richard Hooker,” in William J. Wolf,

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Owen’s appeal to Hooker, however, were merely a facile attempt to cover his own reputation with a blanket of respectability, then his readers would easily recognize it as such. Hence, Owen’s citation is more than political but also theological. Owen appealed to the substance of Hooker’s doctrine of union with Christ. He very quickly draws attention to chapter 56 of Book V in Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. In many respects, this chapter constitutes the heart of Hooker’s doctrine of union with Christ. If, as some have contended, that union with Christ undergirds the whole structure of Book V, then chapter 56 is its heart and nerve center. In terms of Owen’s reception, he positively cites Hooker’s initial definition of union: “Participation is that mutual inward hold which Christ hath of us, and we of him, in such sort that each possesseth other by way of special interest, property, and inherent copulation.”62 Owen then skips over the material presented in the next five paragraphs; he does this, not because he disagrees with Hooker, but because he wants to get to the specific issue under contention, namely, union with Christ.63 Owen then proceeds to quote the rest of the entire chapter – paragraphs 6–13, which occupies roughly five pages in the Goold edition of Owen’s works.64 Theologically, Owen appealed to this portion of Hooker’s Laws because it directly addressed some of Sherlock’s specific criticisms. Sherlock argued that idea of divine indwelling was absurd, to speak of a mystical and thus mysterious union was incorrect, and that the doctrine of imputation was a significant error.65 In this quoted section, Hooker for example, promotes the doctrine of mystical union: For in him we actuallie are by our actuall incorporation into that societie which hath him for theire head and doth make together with him one bodie (he and they in that respect having one name) for which cause by virtue of this mysticall conjunction we are of him and in him even as though our verie flesh and bones should be made contintuate with his.66

Despite Sherlock’s ridicule of the concept of mystical indwelling, Hooker explicitly affirms it both in this statement and elsewhere: “Christ is in us as a quickninge Spirite.”67 In this cited passage Owen also finds the affirmation of the doctrine of imputation wrapped in union with Christ:

62 63 64 65 66 67

John Everitt Booty, and Owen C. Thomas, The Spirit of Anglicanism: Hooker, Maurice, Temple (Wilton, CT: Morehouse-Barlow 1979), 6. Owen, Vindication, 281; cf. FLE 2:234; LEP V.46.1. Owen, Vindication, 281. Owen, Vindication, 281–85; cf. FLE 2:237–44; LEP V.46.6–13. See, for example, Sherlock, Discourse, 87, 174, 182, 207, 211. Owen, Vindication, 281; cf. FLE 2:239; LEP V.46.7. Owen, Vindication, 283; cf. FLE 2:240; LEP V.46.8.

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Thus we participate Christ partelie by imputation, as when those thinges which he did and suffered for us are imputed unto us for righteousness; partlie by habitual and reall infusion, as when grace is inwardlie bestowed while wee are on earth and afterwards more fullie both our soules and bodies made like unto his in glory.68

Owen found a doctrinal ally and could prove to Sherlock that his views were not unique but had precedent in the Anglican Church. Chapter 56, then, served as a shield against Sherlock’s fiery arrows, as Hooker discusses mystical union by divine indwelling, and also invokes the doctrine of imputation.69 Moreover, Owen’s appeal to this section also accomplished another important goal, namely, it proved the antiquity of his doctrine of union, as Hooker positively cites Cyprian (ca. 200–58), Cyril (ca. 376–444), and Augustine (354–430).70 Far from novel, the roots of Owen’s doctrine of union ran deep into the early church, which he proved through this lengthy quotation from Hooker. Owen concluded his quotation from Hooker by writing: “And what themselves so severely charge on us in point of discipline, that nothing be spoken about it until all is answered that is written by Mr Hooker in its defence, may, I hope, not immodestly be so far returned, as to desire them that in point of doctrine they will grant us truce, until they have moved out of the way what is written to the same purpose by Mr Hooker.”71 In other words, if Owen was guilty of novelty and mysticism, so was Hooker, a conclusion no sane Church of England minister would want to defend.72 In fact, later in his treatise Owen comments that among the famous theologians in the Church of England, which according to Owen includes Hooker, “Had this man [Sherlock], in their days, treated this doctrine with his present scoffing petulancy, he had scarce been rector of St George, Botolph Lane, much less filled with such hopes and expectations of future advancements, as it is not impossible that he is now possessed with, upon his memorable achievements.”73 The other Church of England theologians Owen lists includes: John Jewell (1522–71), John Whitgift (ca. 1530–1604), James Ussher (1581–1656), Joseph Hall (1574–1656), John Davenant (1572–1641), William Whitaker (1548–95), and John Rainolds (1549–1607).74 In other words, Owen believed that Hooker’s doctrine was commonplace for the Church of England. In short, Owen approved of Hooker’s doctrine of union and its constituent elements and believed they were in line with his own Reformed theological convictions.

68 69 70 71 72 73 74

Owen, Vindication, 284; cf. FLE 2:243; LEP V.46.11. Owen, Vindication, 281, 282, 284–85; cf. FLE 2:238, 240, 243–44; LEP V.46.7, 11. Owen, Vindication, 283, 284; cf. FLE 2:240, 242; LEP V.46.8, 10. Owen, Vindication, 285. Lim, Mystery Unveiled, 209–10. Owen, Vindication, 320. Owen, Vindication, 304.

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12.3.4 Owen’s doctrines of union and communion Beyond approval and endorsement, Owen’s quotation of Hooker raises the question of influence and reception. To what extent were Hooker’s doctrines of union and communion influential upon the development and articulation of Owen’s theology? There are several pieces of evidence that suggest the possibility that Owen gleaned elements of Hooker’s doctrines for his own formulations. First, Owen had access to Hooker’s work, evident by his citation of chapter 56. The sale catalog from Owen’s library indicates that he was in possession of the 1659 edition of Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.75 Owen was obviously influenced by Hooker’s work in that he owned and used a copy Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity and had read enough of it by 1674 to use it in his own polemical battles with Sherlock. It is therefore not an overstatement to assert that Owen was indeed indebted to the theology of Richard Hooker. Second, there are substantive similarities between Owen’s and Hooker’s respective doctrines of union and communion. Owen, for example, contends that union with Christ is the foundation of communion and fellowship with the triune God, but then he adds: “Our communion, then, with God consisteth in his communication of himself unto us, with our returnal unto him of that which he requireth and accepteth, flowing from that union which in Jesus Christ we have with him.” This parallels Hooker’s own construction, especially with the invocation of the Neoplatonic theme of exit and return.76 And like Hooker, Owen characterizes this union as both perfect and complete and initial and incomplete.77 But important to note in Owen’s description of union and communion is the citation to Cyprian. Owen cites a treatise allegedly written by Cyprian, De Coena Domini (“On the Lord’s Supper”), to the effect that the communion is not a mixture of persons or substances, but an affection of spirit and will. Interestingly enough, this is the same treatise that Hooker cites when he calls the believer’s participation a germanissimam societatem, “a most genuine fellowship.”78 The problem with this citation is, however, that Cyprian did not write the treatise. Some, such as Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536) and Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560) attributed the work to Cyprian. Others, such as Johannes Oeco75 Edward Millington, Bibliotheca Oweniana sive Catalogus Librorum . . . Rev. Doct. Vir. D. Joan. Oweni (London: Francis Hicks, 1684), 1. Pagination goes from pages 1–32, and then restarts at 1. This reference is to the second page 1. 76 For other Thomist themes in Owen, see Christopher Cleveland, Thomism in John Owen (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013). 77 Owen, Communion with God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, in The Works of John Owen, ed. William H. Goold (1965; Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1997), 2:8–9. 78 FLE 2:240; LEP V.56.8.

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lampadius (1482–1531), questioned its authenticity. Contemporary scholarship has identified the work as originating from Ernaldus Bonaevallis, and his work De Cardinalibus Christi Operibus (1156).79 Both Owen and Hooker appeal to the same treatise incorrectly attributed to Cyprian. While they possibly appealed to this work independently and coincidentally, another likely scenario is that Owen learned of the treatise from Hooker and therefore quoted the misidentified text to support his own doctrine of union. Other substantive similarities appear between Hooker and Owen in the way that both explain the union-communion dynamic. Both Hooker and Owen describe union and communion in fully trinitarian terms: Thus therefore wee see how the father is in the sonne and the Sonne in the father, how they both are in all thinges and all thinges in them, what communion Christ hath with his Church, how his Church and everie member thereof is in him by original derivation, and he personallie in them by way of mysticall association wrought through the guift of the holie Ghost, which they that are his receive from him.

But Hooker quickly stipulates that, though believers partake of the divine nature, “As for anie mixture of the substance of his flesh with oures, the participation which wee have of Christ includeth no such kinde of grosse surmise.”80 Father, Son, and Holy Spirit embrace the believer through union and thus enter into communion with him. Owen stresses this same point: “There is a concurrence of the actings and operations of the whole Deity in that dispensation, wherein each person concurs to the work of our salvation, unto every act of our communion with each singular person.”81 For both theologians, union and communion were fully trinitarian doctrines. These similarities do not mean that Owen slavishly followed Hooker, but there is evidence to suggest that he was familiar with Hooker’s exposition. At times, Owen also employs similar nomenclature for union in other works, namely, the term mystical conjunction, a term commonly used among various Reformed theologians such as Perkins, Giovani Diodati (1576–1649), William Ames (1576–1633), and Thomas Cartwright (1535–1603).82 79 Nicholas Thompson, Eucharistic Sacrifice and Patristic Tradition in the Theology of Martin Bucer 1534–46 (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 76n14. Cf. Ernaldus Bonaevallis, De Cardinalibus Christi Operibus, vol. 189 of Patrologia Latina, ed. Jaques Paul Migne (Paris: n.p., 1854), 1609–1678. 80 FLE 2:244; LEP V.56.13. 81 Owen, Communion with God the Father, 18, cf. 22, 40, 183. 82 Cf., e. g., John Owen, Meditations On the Glory of Christ (London: A. M., 1684), 135–41; FLE 2:240–41; LEP V.56.9. Cf. William Perkins, “A Salve for a Sicke Man,” in The Workes of that Famous and Worthy Minister of Christ . . . Mr. William Perkins (London: John Legatt, 1616), 504; Giovanni Diodati, Pious and Learned Annotations Upon the Holy Bible (London: Nicolas Fussell, 1651), comm. Phil. 1:11; William Ames, The Marrow of Sacred Divinity (London: Henry Overton, 1642), 137 [I.xxviii.14]; Thomas Cartwright, A Confutation of the Rhemists Translation, Glosses and Annotations On the New Testament (Leiden: William Brewster, 1618), 223 [comm. John 6:53].

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The suggested similarities between Hooker and Owen mentioned above do not mean imply that they were in full agreement on all theological and ecclesiological questions. Owen, for instance, arguably places greater emphasis upon preaching than does Hooker; conversely, Hooker places more emphasis upon the sacraments.83 Nevertheless, maximally, Owen gleaned elements of his own doctrine from Hooker. Minimally, Hooker and Owen gleaned from the same sources and came to very similar conclusions. These facts point away from the via media thesis, namely, that Hooker was neither Roman Catholic nor Reformed but rather Anglican. In fact, at least given Owen’s citation of Hooker, Owen believed that Hooker’s doctrines of union and communion were orthodox and Reformed.

83 There is debate concerning the nature of Hooker’s doctrine of justification and its relationship to the sacrament of baptism. Cf., e. g., Lee W. Gibbs, “Richard Hooker’s Via Media Doctrine of Justification,” Harvard Theological Review 74, no. 2 (1981): 211–20; Nigel Voak, Richard Hooker and Reformed Theology: A Study of Reason, Will, and Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 167–93. Scholars disagree on how to explain Hooker’s affirmation of sola fide while at the same time affirming that the sacraments are instruments of grace. Opinions were not uniform on this subject, as some noted Reformed theologians, such as John Calvin (1509–1564) called the sacraments instruments (see, for example, John Calvin, “Letter CCXXIV—to Henry Bullinger,” in Tracts and Letters, vol. 5 of Selected Works of John Calvin, ed. Jules Bonnet [1858; Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2009], 168–73, esp. 169). This same language appears in art. XIII of the Consensus Tigurinus (1549) (Ian Bunting, “The Consensus Tigurinus,” Journal of Presbyterian History 44, no. 1 [1966]: 50–58). Others, such as noted non-conformist, Samuel Ward (1577–1640), taught baptismal regeneration. Note the correspondence between Ward and James Ussher (Samuel Ward, “Letter CLXX,” in The Whole Works of the Most Rev. James Ussher [Dublin: Hodges and Smith, 1864], 5:499–508, esp. 504ff). This correspondence dealt with, among other things, the proper interpretation of the Thirty-Nine Articles, invokes the usage of instrumentality for the sacraments, and even echoes the language cited by Hooker, namely, that the sacraments confer the grace exhibited. Ward even explicitly mentions Hooker in this letter: “Mr. Hooker saith as we say, touching the efficacy of baptism in infants, and yet holdeth the doctrine de perseverantia fidelium, as well as we do” (Ward, “Letter CLXX,” 506–507). Contemporary analysis often assumes a hard line of division between Roman Catholic and Reformed views and fails to account for divergence and complexities. John Davenant (1572–1641), Bishop of Salisbury and English delegate to the Synod of Dort, a notoriously Reformed event, held to baptismal regeneration (John Davenant, Baptism Regeneration and the Final Perseverance of the Saints: A Letter of the Right Rev. John Davenant . . . to Samuel Ward, trans. Josiah Allport [London: William Macintosh, 1864]). Even some of the Westminster divines, authors of the unquestionably Reformed Westminster Standards, held to baptismal regeneration (see, for example, Cornelius Burgess, Baptismal Regeneration of Elect Infants, Professed by the Church of England [Oxford: Henry Curteyn, 1629]).

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12.4 Conclusion The via media thesis employs a false dichotomy to explain the relationship between Roman Catholic and Reformed traditions. While a binary construction neatly answers some theological questions, it inadequately explains complex subjects such as the doctrines of union and communion. The Reformation was not a wholesale break with the Roman Catholic Church – it was a reform movement. The reformers modified elements of common Catholic doctrine, such as election, soteriology ( justification and sanctification), and ecclesiology. There were many elements of their theological systems, however, that remained untouched and intact – they were still tethered to their medieval and patristic anchors. Such is the nature of Owen and Hooker’s doctrines of union and communion. They both cited medieval and patristic sources to support their respective formulations. In this respect, Owen and Hooker undoubtedly saw themselves as Reformed Catholics.84 They were not sectarians. The via media thesis, therefore, fails to recognize that there are different types of Reformed theology that belong to the same theological tradition exemplified by Hooker and Owen’s agreement on many issues but also their disagreement on others. Hence, while this study has only examined one slender element within Hooker’s theology, it nevertheless showcases the inadequacy of the via media thesis. Hooker is not a halfway house between Rome and Geneva but was a Reformed theologian. This conclusion does not mean that Hooker and Owen were clones. After all, each man lived and wrote in different historical contexts. Hooker certainly has unique emphases and differences in comparison with other expressions of Reformed theology. One need only invoke the raison d’être of Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity – his vigorous opposition of non-conformity. Conversely, Owen was not reticent in expressing his disagreement with Hooker’s polity.85 But both adhered to Reformed confessions, Hooker to the Thirty-Nine Articles and Owen to the Savoy Declaration (1659). Disagreements over polity notwithstanding, Owen believed that his own views were similar to Hooker’s on the doctrines of union and communion. And there is evidence that points in the direction that Hooker was a source for Owen’s doctrine of union and communion. Far from being a tertium quid, Owen’s positive reception of Hooker’s doctrines of union and communion add greater weight to claim that Hooker was a Reformed theologian. 84 See, for example, William Perkins, A Reformed Catholike: or, A Declaration Shewing How Neere We may Come to the Present Church of Rome in Sundrie Points of Religion: and Whereine We Must For Ever Depart From Them (Cambridge: John Legat, 1598). 85 See, for instance, John Owen, Vindicae Evangeliicae, in The Works of John Owen, ed. William H. Goold (1965; Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1997), 12:399; John Owen, The Duty of Pastors and People Distinguished, in volume 13 of Works, 484; cf. Kirby, Richard Hooker, Reformer and Platonist, 36.

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13. Richard Hooker and the Development of English Hypothetical Universalism

13.1 Introduction The heated debate on Richard Hooker’s relationship with late sixteenth-century Reformed theology depends largely on how one defines “Reformed theology” in this period.1 For example, if the Reformed theology of the Westminster Confession of Faith (1647) or the Reformed theology of the Helvetic Consensus (1675) is the barometer of orthodoxy, then obviously Hooker’s relationship with Reformed theology will be found suspect. On the other hand, if one grants that the Thirty-Nine Articles are consistent with continental Reformed theology, and if one is willing to allow varieties of church polities to stand within the pale of Reformed orthodoxy, then a reasonable case can be made that Hooker was as fully Reformed as any theologian given his sixteenth-century English context.2 Put simply, where scholars place Richard Hooker vis-à-vis Reformed orthodoxy is chiefly contingent on how broadly or narrowly Reformed orthodoxy is defined.

1 This point has been ably made by Daniel Eppley, review of Richard Hooker and Reformed Theology: A Study of Reason, Will, and Grace, by Nigel Voak, Renaissance Quarterly 57, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 1496–1498, 1497: “A problem endemic to efforts of this type is the difficulty of identifying a standard of Reformed orthodoxy.” Cf. Daniel Eppley, “Richard Hooker on the Unconditionality of Predestination,” in Richard Hooker and the English Reformation, ed. W.J. Torrance Kirby, 63–77 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2003), 64. 2 Cf. some of the recent attempts to categorize Hooker as Reformed: W.J. Torrance Kirby, Richard Hooker, Reformer and Platonist (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); Corneliu C. Simut, Richard Hooker and His Early Doctrine of Justification: A Study of His Discourse of Justification (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); Nigel Atkinson, Richard Hooker and the Authority of Scripture, Tradition and Reason: Reformed Theologian of the Church of England? (Carlisle: Paternoster, 1997). The diversity of Reformed polities among the Reformed orthodox has yet to be fully explored, but note two recent works: Hunter Powell, The crisis of British Protestantism: Church power in the Puritan Revolution, 1638–44 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015); Ted G. Van Raalte, “The French Reformed Synods of the Seventeenth Century,” in The Theology of the French Reformed Churches: From Henry IV to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, ed. Martin I. Klauber (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage, 2014), 57–97.

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With the overthrow of the so-called Calvin-versus-the-Calvinists thesis (a thesis that read later Reformed orthodoxy primarily in light of John Calvin), historians such as Richard Muller have demonstrated just how diverse Reformed orthodoxy was in early modern Europe—especially when confessional documents are used as the gauge of what constitutes Reformed orthodoxy.3 For example, the Canons of Dort, often portrayed as nothing more than a boundary statement against Remonstrant theology, is now acknowledged as a consensus document allowing for a wide range of Reformed opinions, simultaneously excluding Remonstrant theology.4 When Reformed orthodoxy is judged by its confessional documents and the plethora of Reformed theologians rather than merely one or two figures taken to be representative, a larger and more diverse picture of Reformed orthodoxy is painted. Some otherwise fine studies on the theology of Richard Hooker, accordingly, have suffered from the tendency to cast Reformed orthodoxy too narrowly, often by way of contrasting one well-known Reformed theologian with Hooker. For example, while it is instructive to compare Hooker to an important Reformed theologian such as William Perkins—as Michael Malone’s influential essay does —it is not appropriate to then criticize Hooker’s orthodoxy on the mere basis of his apparent or real differences with Perkins.5 Perkins, however influential he was for subsequent Reformed theology, was not and is not the standard of Reformed orthodoxy. Making the theology of Calvin, Beza, Perkins, or a critic of Hooker (such as the author of the Christian Letter) normative for Reformed orthodoxy 3 On the Calvin versus the Calvinists paradigm, see: Richard A. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, Ca. 1520 to Ca. 1725, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academics, 2003), esp., 1:37–42; Richard A. Muller, The Unaccommodated Calvin: Studies in the Foundation of a Theological Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Richard A. Muller, After Calvin: Studies in the Development of a Theological Tradition, Oxford Studies in Historical Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). On the diversity of Reformed orthodoxy in the early modern period, see e. g., Jonathan D. Moore, English Hypothetical Universalism: John Preston and the Softening of Reformed Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), 224–225; Richard A. Muller, “Diversity in the Reformed Tradition: A Historiographical Introduction,” in Drawn into Controversie: Reformed Theological Diversity and Debates Within Seventeenth-Century British Puritanism, ed. Mark Jones and Michael A. Haykin (Oakville, CT: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), 11–30; J. V. Fesko, The Theology of the Westminster Standards: Historical Context and Theological Insights (Wheaton: Crossway, 2014). 4 See e. g., J. V. Fesko, “Lapsarian Diversity at the Synod of Dort,” in Drawn into Controversie, 99–123; Lee Gatiss, “The Synod of Dort and Definite Atonement,” in From Heaven He Came and Sought Her: Definite Atonement in Historical, Biblical, Theological, and Pastoral Perspective, ed. Jonathan Gibson and David Gibson (Wheaton: Crossway, 2013), 143–163. 5 Michael T. Malone, “The Doctrine of Predestination in the Thought of William Perkins and Richard Hooker,” Anglican Theological Review 52 (1970): 103–117; Dewey D. Wallace Jr., Puritans and Predestination: Grace in English Protestant Theology, 1525–1695 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 76–78, 219.

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does not sufficiently account for the diversity of opinion within Reformed orthodoxy at the turn of the seventeenth century.6 Hooker’s theology has often been described as proto-Arminian or antiCalvinist.7 It might very well prove that at certain points Hooker’s theology fails to fit within the boundaries of Reformed orthodoxy on matters related to predestination; however, in at least two key areas of supposed unorthodoxy, this essay will challenge such claims. First, we will examine the implications of Hooker’s assertion that God desires the salvation of all. Nigel Voak, on this basis, describes Hooker’s God as “a reactive God conditioned by the contingent causes of his creation […] a far cry from the entirely sovereign God of Reformed orthodoxy.”8 Hooker is, in Voak’s estimation, “guilty of supposing unfulfilled desires in God,” and so outside the pale of Reformed orthodoxy at this point.9 Second, and related to the first point, this essay will examine Hooker’s claim that Christ died for all human beings, a doctrine often considered non-Reformed or associated with proto-Arminianism.10 Although certain scholars have argued that these doctrines “softened” the Reformed tradition and “Elizabethan Reformed soteriology,” this cannot be sustained.11 On the contrary, as I hope to demonstrate, Hooker’s two positions – i. e., that Christ died for all human beings and that God wills the salvation of all human beings – fall unambiguously within the boundaries of Reformed orthodoxy. To be precise, these two doctrines characterize a trajectory of Reformed theology often identified as hypothetical universalism.12 On the two 6 E. g., Deborah K. Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 74ff. compares Hooker to the Calvinism of Calvin and Beza. 7 See Corneliu C. Simut, “Pigeonholing Richard Hooker: A Selective Study of Relevant Secondary Sources,” Perichoresis 3, no. 1 (2005): 99–112. 8 Nigel Voak, “English Molinism in the Late 1590’s: Richard Hooker on Free Will, Predestination, and Divine Foreknowledge,” Journal of Theological Studies 60, no. 1 (2009): 130–177, 157. 9 Voak, “English Molinism,” 158. 10 E. g., this seems to be an assumption in O.T. Hargrave, “The Doctrine of Predestination in the English Reformation” (PhD Diss., University of Cambridge, 2004), 226–234; Malone, “The Doctrine of Predestination,” 114, 117; Peter Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), 183–186. 11 Voak, “English Molinism,” 143; Jonathan D. Moore, English Hypothetical Universalism, esp., 202–213, 225–227. Cf. Richard A. Muller, review of English Hypothetical Universalism: John Preston and the Softening of Reformed Theology, by Jonathan D. Moore, Calvin Theological Journal 43, no. 1 (2008): 149–150. Michael Horton, The Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims On the Way (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011), 517, represents the popular approach to so-called Reformed hypothetical universalism when he claims that it is a “mediating position” between the “orthodox Calvinism defined by the Synod of Dort” and Arminianism. 12 On early modern hypothetical universalism see esp. Moore, English Hypothetical Universalism; Muller, Calvin and the Reformed Tradition, 126–160; Albert Gootjes, “John Cameron (ca. 1579–1625) and the French Universalist Tradition,” in The Theology of the French Re-

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aforementioned points, Hooker represents a substantial tradition within Christian orthodoxy, including much of the Reformed tradition. In support of such a position, at least two studies connect Hooker with hypothetical universalism. Voak, although doubting the orthodoxy of Hooker, recognizes that hypothetical universalism creates “difficulty with evaluating” the orthodoxy of Hooker’s distinction between God’s conditional will and absolute will.13 Richard Snoddy’s recent work on Bishop James Ussher’s soteriology, on the other hand, is unambiguous in linking Hooker to hypothetical universalism, noting substantial agreement between Ussher and Hooker on God’s will and the extent of Christ’s satisfaction, and even concluding that “in Hooker, one finds a well-developed system of hypothetical universalism.”14 In order to place Hooker’s views regarding God’s will for the salvation of all and Christ’s death for all within this broad Reformed tradition, it is necessary first to paint a picture of hypothetical universalism as it progressed from its early advocates into the seventeenth century. Only then can it be shown that Hooker does not transgress the hypothetical universalist trajectory, but instead typifies that tradition quite well.

13.2 Early Modern Hypothetical Universalism 13.2.1 The Term “Hypothetical Universalism” The first thing to realize is that the term “hypothetical universalism” is not one normally finds in early modern literature. The term likely originated sometime around the mid-seventeenth century during the debates among the French Reformed Churches, and it appears to exclusively denote the controversial theological doctrines regarding universal grace promoted at the Academy of Saumur by John Cameron and his students, most notably Moïse Amyraut and Louis Cappel.15 It is also probable that the term was originally a term of derision as were formed Churches, 169–196; Aaron Clay Denlinger, “Scottish Hypothetical Universalism: Robert Baron (c. 1596–1639) on God’s Love and Christ’s Death for All,” in Reformed Orthodoxy in Scotland: Essays on Scottish Theology 1560–1775, ed. Aaron Clay Denlinger (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 83–102. 13 Voak, “English Molinism,” 142. 14 Richard Snoddy, The Soteriology of James Ussher: The Act and Object of Saving Faith, Oxford Studies in Historical Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 71. 15 On the probable origin of the term “hypothetical universalism” see, Frans Pieter van Stam, The controversy over the theology of Saumur, 1635–1650: Disrupting debates among the Huguenots in complicated circumstances (Amsterdam: Academic Publishers Press–Holland University Press, 1988), 277–278.

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many “-isms” and “-ists” of the period, including the term “Calvinist.”16 Given the provenance of the term, there is good reason to carefully distinguish the “Amyraldianism” or French hypothetical universalism found among the students of Cameron at Saumur from the “hypothetical universalism” of other Reformed theologians not directly connected to the French Reformed debate.17 Versions of the non-Cameronian/Amyraldian hypothetical universalism can be found much earlier than Cameron, and one can even find hypothetical universalistic elements among some of the critics of the French version.18 Two examples of such complexity will suffice. First, as Richard Muller has recently demonstrated, when Bishop John Davenant, the preeminent English hypothetical universalist, was asked by the French Reformed Churches to give his judgment on Cameron’s version of hypothetical universalism, Davenant was, at best, suspicious of Cameron’s doctrine.19 The second, even more curious, hypothetical universalist is Andre Rivet. Rivet was one of the chief antagonists of Amyraut and his doctrine of universal grace. Even more, Rivet is quite possibly one of the initial theologians to coin the derisive term “les hypothétiques” [the hypothetical ones].20 Nevertheless, Rivet, after having read two letters written by the Reformed English theologians Bishop Joseph Hall and Davenant to the Reformed Bremen Minister Herman Hildebrand (who argued in thirteen theses for a version of hypothetical universalism, and with whom Davenant and Hall give their hearty approval), unequivocally writes that he cannot disagree with Davenant and Hall’s judgment.21 In short, the theological category of “hypothetical universalism” is a 16 Van Stam, Controversy over the theology of Saumur, 277. 17 Moore, English Hypothetical Universalism, 217–220. This point was already made in the seventeenth century by Richard Baxter, who was, in his judgment, wrongly identified as a follower of Amyraut. See Richard Baxter, Certain Disputations of Right to Sacraments and the True Nature of Visible Christianity, Defending them against several sorts of Opponents, especially against the second assault by that Pious, Reverend and Dear Brother Mr. Thomas Blake (London: William DuGard, 1657), B1r C2v. Cf. also George Smeaton, The Doctrine of the Atonement, as Taught by the Apostles: Or, the Sayings of the Apostles Exegetically Expounded. With Historical Appendix (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1870), 540–543, esp. 542–543. 18 Muller, review of English Hypothetical Universalism, by Jonathan D. Moore, 150: “Clear statements of non-speculative hypothetical universalism can be found (as [John] Davenant recognized) in Heinrich Bullinger’s Decades and commentary on the Apocalypse, in Wolfgang Musculus’ Loci communes, in Ursinus’ catechetical lectures, and in Zanchi’s Tractatus de praedestinatione sanctorum, among other places.” 19 Richard A. Muller, Calvin and the Reformed Tradition: On the Work of Christ and the Order of Salvation (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2012), 127–144. Cf. Richard A. Muller, “Dating John Davenant’s De Gallicana controversia sententia in the Context of Debate over John Cameron: A Correction,” Calvin Theological Journal 50, no. 1 (2015): 10–22. 20 Van Stam, Controversy over the theology of Saumur, 277. 21 Rivet’s letter can be found in Herman Hildebrand, Orthodoxa Declaratio Articulorum Trium, De Mortis Christi Sufficientia et Efficacia, Reprobationis Causa Meritoria, Privata Denique

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very flexible term in modern scholarship, denoting a variety of different instantiations of Reformed theology, though the term had a much narrower function in the early modern period. Although the term “hypothetical universalism” was most probably unknown to theologians during Hooker’s time, there are two terms that were regularly used to identify a position much like hypothetical universalism among the early English Reformed theologians: “universal redemption” and “the middle way.” These terms often denoted a theology that taught a conditional or hypothetical decree; thus, “universal redemption” taught that Christ died for all human beings in such a way that if all believed, all would be saved. Many Reformed authors, including both continental and English Reformed theologians, used the label “universal redemption” in their theological systems. For example, Wolfgang Musculus, Jacob Kimedoncius, and other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Reformed theologians argued for a form of “universal redemption,” which Musculus glossed as: “[the death of Christ] is so appoynted unto al men, that without it no man is, nor can be redeemed.”22 By the middle of the seventeenth century the term became commonplace among Arminian, Reformed, Lutheran and other theologians who claimed that Christ made a satisfaction for sin on behalf of all human beings such that if all believed, all would be saved.23

Communione … et Postmodum Judiciis Theologorum clarissimorum, in Anglia Reverendiss. Johannis Davenantii Sarisburiensis et Josephi Halli Exoniensis Episcoporum, in Germania Brandenburgensium Hassiacorum et Bremensium comprobata … (Bremen: Bertholdus Villierianus, 1642), Judicia 39; Davenant’s letter can be found in Judicia 27–33. Hall’s letter is found in both the “Judicia” of Hildebrand, Orthodoxa Declaratio Articulorum Trium as well as (in English and Latin) in Joseph Hall, The Works of Joseph Hall, D.D., new revised and corrected edition (Oxford: D. A. Talboys, 1839): 11:451–463. Rivet writes: “Declarationem trium articulorum, de morte Christi, de Reprobatione, et privata communione, mihi exhibitam, cum judiciis R. R. virorum Josephi Halli et J. Davenantii, legi et perpendi in timore Domini. Nec video cur mihi sit discedendum aut dissidendum a judicio duorum illorum episcoporum, in duobus prioribus articulis” (Judicia, 39). 22 Wolfgang Musculus, Common Places of Christian Religion (London: Henry Bynneman, 1578), 305; cf. the whole chapter: “Of the Redemption of Mankinde,”; Jacob Kimedoncius, Of The Redemption of Mankind Three Bookes: Wherein the controversie of the universalitie of Redemption and grace by Christ, and his death for all men, is largely handled (London: Felix Kingston, 1598), esp. chp. XI–XIII. 23 So, note the title of Richard Baxter’s work published posthumously, entitled Universal Redemption of Mankind by the Lord Jesus Christ (London: John Salusbury, 1694). Cf. Robert Jenison, Two treatises: the first concerning Gods Certaine performance of his conditional Promises, as touching the Elect, or, A Treatise of Gods most free and powerfull Grace. … The second, Concerning the extent of Christs death and love, now added to the former. With an Additionall thereunto (London: [Edward Griffin], 1642), 216: “Our Church [viz., the Church of England] then doth not deny universal redemption: for we truly say with it and with Scripture, Christ died for all.”

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The other designation, “the middle way,” was often used as a synonym for universal redemption.24 When Reformed theologians used this term, it highlighted the distinctiveness of their approach to the thorny question of the extent of Christ’s satisfaction from other approaches to the doctrine. In the latter part of sixteenth century – with the rise of what the Reformed deemed as unorthodox Lutheran views (such as the teachings of Samuel Huber) and what might be called proto-Remonstrant opinions – certain Reformed theologians were interested in preserving what they (at least) perceived to be the status quo: the catholic and Reformed doctrine of universal redemption.25 The use of the term “middle-way” coincides with the increase of Reformed theologians who denied that Christ was appointed as mediator for both elect and non-elect, often explicitly teaching that Christ died for the elect alone. Reformed advocates of universal redemption (such as Ussher, Davenant, and Richard Baxter) juxtaposed their position with those who claimed that Christ died equally for all human beings (often understood to be the Arminian position), and also those who confessed that Christ’s redemptive work was accomplished on behalf of the elect alone (understood as the extreme Reformed position).26 Hence, Davenant explicitly describes his approach as a middle way between those theologians who affirmed the proposition that “Christ died for the elect alone” and those who argued, “Christ offered himself to God the Father to redeem all individuals equally.”27 In this sense, at least, the advocates of English hypothetical universalism cast their views as a via media. Nevertheless, this is not to be thought of as the nineteenth-century Anglican via media of John Henry Newman, but the via media (as they saw it) of true Reformed Augustinianism over and against aberrations. This is one reason why these “middle-way” Re24 Note, e. g., the use of the two terms in: Nathanael Homes, The Works of Dr. Nathanael Homes (London: [J. Legate], 1652), 12–16; Richard Baxter, Plain Scripture Proof of Infants Church– Membership and Baptism (London: T. Underhill, and F. Tyton, 1656), 275–276. 25 E. g., Hall, Works, 11:450–459. 26 Richard Baxter, Rich. Baxter’s Confession of his Faith: Especially concerning the Interest of Repentance and sincere Obedience to Christ, in our Justification & Salvation (London: Robert White, 1655), 21; James Ussher, The Whole Works of the Most Rev. James Ussher, D.D., Lord Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of all Ireland (Dublin: Hodges, Smith, and Co., 1864), 12:553–554. “Both extremities [regarding “the true intent and extent of Christ’s death and satisfaction”] then, drawing with them unavoidable absurdities: the word of God (by hearing whereof, faith is begotten) must be sought unto by a middle course, to avoid these extremities” (Ussher, 554). Cf. the Scottish Aberdeen Doctor, Robert Baron, in Denlinger, “Scottish Hypothetical Universalism,” in Reformed Orthodoxy in Scotland, 87–99. 27 John Davenant, A Dissertation on the Death of Christ, as to its Extent and special Benefits: containing a short History of Pelagianism, and shewing the Agreement of the Doctrines of the Church of England on general Redemption, Election, and Predestination, with the Primitive Fathers of the Christian Church, and above all, with the Holy Scriptures, in An Exposition of the Epistle of St. Paul to the Colossians, trans. Josiah Allport (London: Hamilton, Adams and Co., 1832), 2:339.

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formed theologians so often appealed not just to the earlier Reformed tradition, but also to the scholastic and patristic tradition in support of their doctrine. They judged their via media as not only biblical, but catholic.28 In summary, the various designations of the Reformed version of universal redemption are fluid, both in the early modern period and in modern scholarship. Nevertheless, there is a central core to what scholars often call hypothetical universalism. It is to this central core that we turn.

13.2.2 Hypothetical Universalism in the Early Modern Period There are two main components of most forms of hypothetical universalism. First, one will often find a strong affirmation of God’s universal will or desire for the salvation of all human beings, in accordance with Scripture texts such as Ezekiel 18:23, 1 Timothy 2:4, and 2 Peter 3:9.29 All Reformed theologians agreed that, according to the decree of election, God infallibly predestined certain people to receive the gifts of saving faith and perseverance according to God’s will of 28 Cf. John Davenant, “Dr. John Davenant on the atonement,” in The British Delegation and the Synod of Dort (1618–1619), ed. Anthony Milton (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2005), 219: “We make no doubt, but this Doctrine of the Extent of Christ’s Redemption is the undoubted Doctrine of the holy Scriptures, and most consonant to Antiquity, Fathers and Councils, to whom our Church will have all Preachers to have special respect in doctrinal points, lib. quorund. Canon. Discip. Eccles. Anglic. Edit. 1571. cap. de Concionatoribus.” So, Henry Gee and William John Hardy, eds., Documents Illustrative of English Church History (New York: Macmillan, 1896): 476: The Canons of 1571 declare, “But especially shall [preachers] see to it that they teach nothing in the way of a sermon, which they would have religiously held and believed by the people, save what is agreeable to the teaching of the Old or New Testament, and what the Catholic fathers and ancient bishops have collected from this selfsame doctrine.” 29 These biblical texts, and texts like them, have a rich history of interpretation from the patristic period onward. Note the extended discussion of the variety of scholastic distinctions diversely employed to interpret the notion that God wills all to be saved in Didacus Ruiz de Montoya, Commentaria, Ac Disputationes in primam partem sancti Thomae De Voluntate Dei, Et Propriis Actibus Eius (Lyon: Prost, 1630), 192–242 [Disp. XIX–XXI]; Cf. Peter Martyr Vermigli, Predestination and Justification: Two Theological Loci, trans. and ed. Frank A. James III, vol. 8 in The Peter Martyr Library (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2003), 62–67: “God universally invites all men, that the Prophets were sent indiscriminately to all, and that the Scriptures are given to all …. We also grant that [God] stands at the door and knocks, and indeed will enter if any man will let him” (Vermigli, Predestination and Justification, 66); Zachary Ursinus, The Summe of Christian Religion, trans. Henry Parry (London: James Young, 1654), 102, 352, 353. Cf. Martin Foord, “John Owen’s Gospel Offer: Well–Meant or Not?” in The Ashgate Research Companion to John Owen’s Theology, ed. Kelly M. Kapic and Mark Jones (Burlington, VA.: Ashgate, 2012), 283–295; Martin Foord, “God Wills All People to Be Saved—Or Does He? Calvin’s Reading of 1 Timothy 2:4,” in Engaging with Calvin: Aspects of the Reformer’s Legacy for Today, ed. Mark D. Thompson (Nottingham, UK: Apollos, 2009), 179–203.

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good pleasure (voluntas beneplaciti).30 God’s will of good pleasure is both absolute (voluntas absoluta) and efficacious (voluntas efficax).31 Reformed theologians also often affirmed a will, decree, or ordination of God that was ineffectual (inefficax), sometimes identified as an antecedent will (voluntas antecedens), conditional will (voluntas conditionata), signified will (voluntas signi), or will of simple complacency (voluntas simplicis complacentiae).32 Davenant explains that God, according to this ineffectual or conditional will, is said to “aim-at or to will and desire the conversion, justification and salvation of those who never shall be converted, justified, or saved.”33 God’s will or desire for the salvation of all is distinguished from – though without contradiction – God’s will to predestine and reprobate according to his will of good pleasure.34 God absolutely wills the salvation of the elect; nevertheless he conditionally wills the salvation of all. In sum, the suggestion found in H.C. Porter’s very influential Reformation and Reaction in Tudor Cambridge, that Calvinists thought Aquinas’s distinction between God’s antecedent and consequent will “anathema” is

30 John Davenant, Animadversions Written by the Right Reverend Father in God John, Lord Bishop of Sarisbury, upon a Treatise intitled Gods love to Mankind (Cambridge: Roger Daniel, 1641), 8: “Predestination is an eternal decree or purpose of God, in time causing effectuall grace in all those whom he hath chosen, and by this effectuall grace bringing them infallibly to glory.” Cf. Augustine, A Treatise on the Predestination of the Saints, vol. 5 of Nicene and PostNicene Fathers of the Christian Church, ed. Philip Schaff, 1st ser. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1886–1900), 10 [ch. 19]; Cf. also, Art. 6 and 7 of the first head of the Canons of Dort. 31 Cf. the Roman Catholic scholastic, Ruiz de Montoya, Commentaria, Ac Disputationes, 185 [XVIII.4]: “Sola voluntas absoluta simpliciter amplectitur obiectum: et ideo sola simpliciter et absolute meretur nomen voluntatis beneplaciti” [“Only the absolute will simply embraces its object, and therefore it only, simply and absolutely, deserves the name: ‘will of goodpleasure’”]. 32 Musculus, Common Places, 932–934; Girolamo Zanchi, De Natura Dei, Seu de Divinis Attributis, Libri V (Heidelberg: Iacobus Mylius, 1577), 307–316 [3.4.3]; Daniel Chamier, Panstratiae Catholicae, Tomus Tertius, De Homine Corrupto et Instaurato (Geneva: Roverianis, 1626), 208–210 [3.7.6]; Amandus Polanus, Syntagma Theologiae Christianae (Hanau: Wechelianis, 1615), 160–162 [2.XIX]; Paul Testard, Eiphnikon Seu Synopsis Doctrinae de Natura et Gratia (Blois: Martin Huissens, 1633), 257–259 [CCXCVIII–CCXCIX] ; Davenant, Animadversions, 211ff, 390ff; Cf. Denlinger, “Scottish Hypothetical Universalism: Robert Baron,” 87–94, esp., 92–94. 33 John Davenant, Animadversions, 392. 34 Ursinus, The Summe of Christian Religion, 353; Polanus, Syntagma Theologiae Christianae, 161 [2.XIX, Quaer. I]; Davenant, Animadversions, 220: “These two may well stand together; Deus vult ut omnes credant et salvi fiant, voluntate Complacentiae; Deus vult et decrevit permittere ut quidam increduli maneant, et salvi non fiant sed pereant, voluntate Absoluta. [God wills that all believe and be saved, by his will of complacency; God wills and has decreed to permit that certain people remain unbelieving, and not be saved, but perish, by his absolute will].” Cf. Ruiz de Montoya, Commentaria, A Disputationes, 214–217 [XX].

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unsustainable in light of the use of the distinction among such theologians as Vermigli, Zanchi, Polanus, and others.35 The second component in hypothetical universalism is the affirmation that Christ died for, and was the mediator on behalf of, all human beings. In light of God’s will for the salvation of all, God ordained the death of Christ to be a universal cause of salvation such that if all were to believe, all would be saved.36 This component – what Davenant terms “ordained sufficiency” – is the distinctive element in all forms of hypothetical universalism.37 Over and above a “mere sufficiency,” which indicates that Christ’s death was of equal value to forgive the sins of all human beings, hypothetical universalism stressed that God willed, intended, or ordained the death of Christ to be the means of salvation for all on condition of faith. To understand Davenant’s distinction between “mere” and “ordained” sufficiency, one must acknowledge the opposing Reformed position prevalent during the period. While the vast majority of Reformed theologians readily affirmed that Christ’s death was of a sufficient value to save all human beings, some Reformed theologians denied that God ordained Christ’s death as on behalf of all human beings. By the turn of the seventeenth century, an ever-increasing contingent of Reformed theologians argued that Christ died for the elect alone.38 In light of this increasing diversity among the Reformed, Davenant’s doctrine of ordained sufficiency emphasized not only the equality of Christ’s satisfaction to the sin of all (mere sufficiency), but also included “some wish to offer or actual offering” of Christ for the redemption of all (ordained sufficiency).39 The Reformed advocates of universal redemption read the so-called Lombardian formula (sufficient for all; efficient for the elect) as teaching an ordained sufficiency.40 According to Davenant and other hypothetical universalists, “it

35 H. C. Porter, Reformation and Reaction in Tudor Cambridge (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1972), 286. 36 Davenant, Dissertation, in Colossians, 2:401–439; Cf. Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, 4.55: “Mors enim Christi est quasi quaedam universalis causa salutis”; SCG, 4.56; ST, IIIa Q.49 a.1, Ad Quartum: “quia passio Christi praecessit ut causa quaedam universalis remissionis peccatorum”; De Veritate, Q. 29 a.7. 37 Cf. Denlinger, “Scottish Hypothetical Universalism: Robert Baron,” 94–99. 38 Théodore de Bèze, Ad Acta Colloquii Montisbelgardensis Tubingae Edita, Theodori Bezae Responsionis, Pars Altera, 3rd ed. (Geneva: Ioannes le Preux, 1589), 215–221; Johann Piscator, Ad Conradi Vorstii, S. Theol. D. Parasceuen Responsio apologetica Johan. Piscatoris (Herborn: n.p. 1613), 93–104 [I.7]. 39 Davenant, Dissertation, in Colossians, 2:403. 40 While the substance of the Lombardian formula can be found well before Peter Lombard (cf. Heinrich Alting, Scriptorum Theologicorum Heidelbergensium [Amsterdam: John Jansson, 1646], 3:174), its scholastic form is especially known by means of Peter Lombard, The Sentences Book 3: On the Incarnation of the Word, trans. Giulio Silano, ed. Joseph Goering and

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never occurred to the Schoolmen to defend [a mere sufficiency] only, and to deny absolutely that Christ died for all.”41 While only the surface of early modern hypothetical universalism has been scratched, it should be clear that the key elements of hypothetical universalism had a substantial Reformed pedigree before, during, and after Hooker’s time.

13.3 Hooker and Hypothetical Universalism 13.3.1 God’s Will for the Salvation of All Shortly after the publication of Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1594; 1597), an anonymous work entitled A Christian Letter was published in response (1599).42 The author of the Christian Letter, often identified (but probably mistakenly so) as Andrew Willet, assesses Hooker’s doctrine in The Laws as unorthodox at numerous points, including Hooker’s claim that God wills the salvation of all.43 As Voak and others have observed, the point at issue with regard to predestination among the two theologians stems from Hooker’s distinction between God’s antecedent and consequent will, a distinction Hooker had utilized as early as the 1580’s.44 The portion of The Laws that caused such consternation for the author of the Christian Letter was Hooker’s claim that the prayers offered to God for the salvation of all men “God accepteth in that they are conformeable

41 42 43

44

Giulio Silano, Medieval Sources in Translation 45 (Ontario: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2008), 86 [3.20.5.1]. Davenant, Dissertation, in Colossians, 2:378, 409. A Christian Letter of certain English Protestants, unfained favourers of the present state of Religion, authorised and professed in England … ([Middelburg: Printed by Richard Schilders], 1599). Also found in FLE 4:1–79. Pace John E. Booty, “Introduction,” in FLE, 4:xixxxv, it seems doubtful that Willet was the author of the Christian Letter for at least three reasons. First, the author of the Christian Letter seems to unequivocally deny that God wills the salvation of all in any sense (Christian Letter, 16). Yet, Willet seems to grant a sense in which God wills the salvation of all (viz., Synopsis Papismi [London: Felix Kyngston, 1600], 782: “offering to all the outward meanes of salvation, as his word and Sacraments”). Second, while the author of the Christian Letter seems to disapprove of the scholastic manner of Hooker’s Laws (Christian Letter, 42ff), Willet does not seem averse to scholastic distinctions as seen throughout his Synopsis Papismi. Third, Willet explicitly denies having either written the Christian Letter or knowing its author(s) (Loidoromastix: That is, A Scourge for a Rayler … [Cambridge: Cantrell Legge, 1607], 4r). On the fascinating history of Hooker’s mysterious Paul’s Cross sermon in which he (apparently) spoke of these two wills in God, see David Neelands, “Richard Hooker’s Paul’s Cross Sermon,” in Paul’s Cross and the Culture of Persuasion in England, 1520–1640, ed. Torrance Kirby and P.G. Stanwood (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 245–261; W. David Neelands, “Richard Hooker and the Debates about Predestination, 1580–1600,” in Richard Hooker and the English Reformation, 43–61, 43–48.

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unto his generall inclynation which is that all men might be saved, yeat alwaies he graunteth them not for as much as there is in God somtimes a more private occasioned will which determineth the contrarie.”45 According to the author of the Christian Letter, this occasioned will or consequent will of “the wittie schoolmen” called into question God’s immutability and omnipotence.46 Further, it suggested that Hooker presupposed a doctrine of predestination on the basis of foreseen human merit. It is unclear whether the author of the Christian Letter knew the plethora of Reformed theologians who also argued for “an occasioned will.” Regardless, it is clear that the author of the Christian Letter rejected Hooker’s description of God as having an unfulfilled “desire” or “inclination” to save all human beings. It is evident from his manuscript notes on predestination that Hooker wanted to defend his notion that such prayers for the salvation of all “concurre with Gods own desire” against the anonymous author of the Christian Letter.47 This defense is found in a fragment on predestination located in the so-called Dublin Fragments, unpublished material written in response to the Christian Letter.48 In order to establish his contention that God has a general inclination for the salvation of all, Hooker had to explain why it is that ultimately all human beings are not saved and how this general inclination fits within a Reformed understanding of predestination as found in Article 17 of the Thirty-Nine Articles. Hooker lays out a few preliminary points which facilitate his understanding of God’s will for the salvation of all. First, and consistent with classic Christian orthodoxy, Hooker stresses that God, according to his “infinite goodness,” “delighteth only in good things.”49 God’s “natural inclination” for the good does not necessitate any particular effects, unless God so determines those effects.50 Second, provided the first point, every effect that God chooses to actualize is restrained by this general inclination 45 46 47 48

FLE 2:204.28–32; LEP V.49.3. A Christian Letter, 1617. FLE 4:83; Notes toward a Fragment on Predestination. Given space limitations, we will not summarize the whole of the Dublin Fragments’ section on predestination. A generally reliable summary of the contents of this fragment on predestination can be found in W. David Neelands, “Predestination,” in A Companion to Richard Hooker, ed. Torrance Kirby (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 185–219. Cf. Neelands, “Richard Hooker and the Debates about Predestination,” in Richard Hooker and the English Reformation. 49 FLE 4:131; Dublin Fragments, 25. Cf. Peter Lombard, The Sentences Book 1: The Mystery of the Trinity (Ontario: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2007), 199–200 [1.36.2]. 50 FLE 4:131, 132; Dublin Fragments, 25. Accordingly, God’s delight in the good does not necessitate creation, as Jonathan Edwards would seem to argue in the eighteenth century. Cf. Oliver Crisp, Jonathan Edwards on God and Creation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 57–76. Davenant employs Hooker’s point to argue that while God desires the good of all human beings, he is not necessitated by that desire to free all human beings from sin or give faith to all human beings (Animadversions, 212).

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towards the good. As Hooker says, “Butt unpossible it is that God should will anye thing unjust, or unreasonable, any thing against those verie rules whereby himselfe hath taught us to judge what equitie requireth. For out of all peradventure there are noe antinomies with God.”51 Accordingly, Hooker grants that God could have kept the fall from occurring, but “he neither coveteth nor appointeth it.”52 Third, Hooker links God’s own wisdom and general inclination towards the good with the “laws of action” expressed in God’s revealed law for mankind. God’s voluntas signi and his general inclination towards the good are “not repugnant to the other.”53 To illustrate Hooker’s point, we might say that God prohibits murder by law (voluntas signi) because he hates murder (natural inclination). Voak rightly summarizes the relationship between God’s natural inclination and the voluntas signi, describing the latter as the “manifestation” of the former.54 Because of the fall and the entrance of sin into the world, Hooker distinguishes between God’s prelapsarian and postlapsarian providence.55 He defines God’s laws of providence as “such generall rules, as it pleaseth God to follow in governing the severall kinds of things, and especially in conducting reasonable creatures unto the end for which they were made.”56 This definition is consistent with Aquinas’s definition of providence as a general appointment of a thing towards an end (universaliter ordinationem in finem).57 As providence respects God’s unfallen reasonable creatures, God created the angels and humanity with an attainable end (i. e., eternal life), a duty required, and the necessary gifts to attain such end.58 God’s providence involving creatures endowed with a free will does not necessitate that the ordained end be realized. As Aquinas says regarding God’s providence, “not everything that is ordained to an end reaches that end.”59 51 FLE 4:131; Dublin Fragments, 25. 52 FLE 4:138; Dublin Fragments, 29. The point Hooker seems to make is that God wills to permit the fall, but does not simply will the fall. Note also that this will or decree to permit sin is antecedent to the punishment of sin. Cf. FLE 4:88; “Notes on Predestination”: An act of God’s governing will towards prelapsarian creation was “to wish not to hinder sin”; Lombard, The Sentences: The Mystery of the Trinity, 250 [1.46.3.11]; Davenant, Animadversions, 165ff. 53 FLE 4:132; Dublin Fragments, 26. 54 Voak, “English Molinism,” 151. 55 FLE 4:135; Dublin Fragments, 27: “The worke of creation itselfe therefore, and the government of all things simply according to the state wherein they were made, must be distinguished from that which sinne arising afterwards, addeth unto the government of God, least wee runne into their error, whoe blende even with Gods verie purpos of creation a reference to eternall damnation and death.” 56 FLE 4:139; Dublin Fragments, 30. 57 Thomas Aquinas, De Veritate, Q. 6, a. 2, resp. 58 FLE 4:135–136; Dublin Fragments, 28. 59 Aquinas, De Veritate, Q. 6, a. 2, resp. Cf. Davenant, Dissertation, in Colossians, 2:369–370, 390– 392; John Davenant, “On the Controversy among the French Divines of the Reformed Church Concerning the Gracious and Saving Will of God Towards Sinful Men,” in Colossians, 2:561–

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God gave Adam “sufficient abilitie” to attain happiness, though Adam failed to achieve the end for which he was originally created.60 In light of the fall, Hooker acknowledged that a distinction is to be made between God’s prelapsarian and postlapsarian providence. On account of sin, there is now a specific ordination to punish sin: “The first rule therefore of providence now, is that Sinne doe not goe altogether unpunished in any Creature.”61 Fittingly, all sinful human beings are justly under God’s punishment for sin. Therefore, although “God to his owne glorie did ordaine our happines” as our creator, yet, on account of sin, “he did ordaine to his glorie our punishment” as our judge and ruler.62 However, the relationship between these two ordinations is not strictly coordinate; the former ordination to happiness is an antecedent will consistent with God’s general inclination towards the good, while the latter ordination to punishment is “consequent of ensuing sinne.”63 The former is God’s “principall desire”; the latter is not.64 All of God’s promises, precepts, prohibitions, and warnings against sin are expressions of God’s principal will for the good and salvation of humanity. Accordingly, Hooker interprets biblical texts such as Ezekiel 18:23 and 1 Timothy 2:4 as expressions of God’s signified will.65 Likewise, Calvin reads these texts as asserting “what God is prepared to do for all brought to faith and repentance.”66 Again, for Hooker, this will is not “allwayes satisfyed” because God’s “will of his generall providence” “oftentymes succeedeth not.”67 As Peter Lake and other scholars have recognized, some Reformed theologians – especially with the rise of Arminianism – disliked the scholastic distinction between God’s antecedent and consequent will.68 For example, the famous Polish Reformed delegate to Dort, Johannes Maccovius, called the distinction “useless”

60 61 62 63 64

65 66 67 68

569, 564–565. See also the discussion of this type of intentionality in Muller, Calvin and the Reformed Tradition, 139ff. FLE 4:135; Dublin Fragments, 28. FLE 4:139; Dublin Fragments, 30. FLE 4:142, 134; Dublin Fragments, 32, 27. FLE 4:142, 141; Dublin Fragments, 32, 31. FLE 4:143; Dublin Fragments, 32. Cf. John of Damascus, Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, trans. S.D.F. Salmond, in A Select Library of Nicene and Post–Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, ed. Phillip Schaff and Henry Wace, Second Series (repr.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1955), 9:42 [2.29]. Note that the Greek term προηγούμενον translated as “antecedent” in Salmond’s translation can also be translated as “principal.” Thus, Hooker’s use of the term “principal” regarding John of Damascus’s terminology. FLE 4:143; Dublin Fragments, 32. John Calvin, De Aeterna Dei Praedestinatione in Opuscula omnia in unum volumen collecta (Geneva: Jean Crespin, 1552), 908: “Quid omnibus ad fidem et poenitentiam adductis facere paratus sit.” FLE 4:145; Dublin Fragments, 34. Lake, Anglicans and Puritans, 186; Muller, Post–Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, 3:465ff; Voak, “English Molinism,” 150.

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(vana) because it “places mutability in God” (in Deo ponit mutabilitatem).69 Yet, there is nothing exceptional about Hooker’s doctrine of God’s will for the salvation of all when read in light of the Reformed theologians noted previously.70 Voak correctly acknowledges that Reformed theologians such as Peter Martyr Vermigli affirmed God possessed an antecedent will desirous of the salvation of all. However, Voak then attempts to drive a wedge between Vermigli’s construction of God’s antecedent will and Hooker’s. According to Voak, Vermigli appropriates the distinction as a “purely extrinsic distinction, and does not reflect God’s actual will or desire for the salvation of mankind […]. At no point is it God’s actual will or desire that all individual members of mankind should be saved.”71 Voak, however, fails to adequately appreciate Vermigli’s language regarding God’s will for the salvation of all.72 Indeed, Vermigli even speaks at times of God’s frustrated or unfulfilled wishes.73 More importantly, even if Voak were right about Vermigli, other Reformed theologians clearly affirmed a willingness in God for the salvation of all. Calvin, for example, unambiguously acknowledged that, on account of God’s general love for all humanity and by means of Christ’s work of redemption for all, Christ “reacheth out his armes to call and allure all men both great and small and to win them to him.”74 Voak implies, based on his contrast between the Reformed orthodox and Hooker, that standard or classic Reformed orthodoxy denies any “wish” or “desire” in God that his commands be obeyed – that, somehow, God’s voluntas signi signifies nothing about God’s actual nature or character. Calvin again, however, explicitly rejected such 69 Johannes Maccovius, Distinctiones et regulae theologicae ac philosophicae (Franeker: Johannes Archerius, 1653), 50. Cf. Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, trans. George M. Giger, ed. James T. Dennison, Jr. (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1994), 1:226–231 [1.3.16]. 70 Cf. Donald John Maclean’s recent work, James Durham (1622–1658) and the Gospel Offer in its Seventeenth-Century Context (Bristol, CT: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015), esp. 19–62. 71 Voak, “English Molinism,” 150–151. 72 Note, e. g., Vermigli’s language concerning God’s longsuffering in Most learned and fruitful Commentaries of D. Peter Martir Vermilius Florentine, Professor of Divinity in he School of Tigure, upon the Epistle of S. Paul to the Romans (London: John Daye, 1558), 38. 73 Pace Voak, “English Molinism,” 151; Peter Martyr Vermigli, “Commentary on 2 Samuel 16: Whether God is the Author of Sin,” in Philosophical Works, trans. and ed. Joseph P. McLelland, in The Peter Martyr Library (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 1996), 4:217: “God is denied to be the author of sin so much that he declares that he wished that things were different. Hence the cause must not be ascribed to God. ‘He sent his prophets to them persistently,’ it says, ‘but they hardened their heart’ (2 Chron. 36:15ff.). Christ wept over the city of Jerusalem; he was sorry for its overthrow (Matt. 23:37). If the effect displeased him, much more the cause; he wept because they sinned and so deserved utter destruction. If Christ mourned, being not only human but also truly divine, he was displeased with its sins; therefore God is not the author of sin.” 74 John Calvin, The Sermons of M. Iohn Calvin Vpon the Fifth Booke of Moses Called Deuteronomie, trans. Arthur Golding (London: Henry Middleton, 1583), 167.

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thinking: “God commands nothing in pretense, but seriously exhibits what he wills and approves of.”75 Voak’s second argument for Hooker’s departure from Reformed orthodoxy – because Hooker held to a consequent will of God to reprobate or damn on account of human actions (i. e., sin) – is equally tenuous.76 Reformed theologians often distinguished between God’s decree of negative reprobation (sometimes also called non-election or preterition) and God’s decree of damnation.77 When Hooker speaks of sin as the antecedent cause of consequent punishment, he is not thinking of negative reprobation, but has in mind the decree of condemnation, or what is sometimes called positive reprobation. Hooker is thus referring to the decree of condemnation when he claims that the “antecedent evil in the damned is the cause of damnation” (antecedit mali in perditis est causa perditionis).78 Damnation or positive reprobation, for both Hooker and the majority of Reformed theologians, is an occasioned work of God’s conditional will to damn all those who remain impenitent on account of their sin.79 Negative reprobation, as distinct from positive reprobation or damnation, is simply the other side of predestination and, hence, is absolute and 75 John Calvin, Calumniae nebulonis cuiusdam, quibus odio et invidia gravare conatus est doctrinam Joh. Calvini de occulta Dei providentia. Johannis Calvini ad easdem responsio, ([Geneva]: [Conrad Badius], 1558), 86: “Etsi enim nihil ficte praecipit Deus, sed serio quae vult et probat ostendit […].” Cf. Polanus, Syntagma Theologiae Christianae, 161 [2.XIX, Quaer. II] on whether God mocks the reprobate in his conditional will to save them. Polanus emphatically states that God mocks no one, but seriously (serio) wills to save the reprobate, if they would believe in Christ. Moreover, God seriously wishes them to come (illos serio voluit Deus venire). The early English Reformer, Hugh Latimer, to use the language of Voak, moves from the external to the internal. Sermons and Remains of Hugh Latimer (Cambridge: The University Press, 1845), 205: “Now seeing that the gospel is universal, it appeareth that [God] would have all mankind saved.” 76 So Voak, “English Molinism,” 156: “The language that he uses to describe the occasion of God’s privative occasioned will is remarkably reactive and causative.” Voak’s suggestion that Hooker may hold to a form of middle-knowledge is interesting. While Hooker does believe that God has knowledge of future contingencies (as Reformed theologians more generally), it remains uncertain if that divine knowledge of future contingencies is something other than necessary and voluntary. 77 Davenant, Animadversions, 4. Donald W. Sinnema, “The Issue of Reprobation at the Synod of Dort (1618–19) in Light of the History of this Doctrine,” (PhD diss., St Michael’s College, 1985),” 5: “The terms “damnation” or “condemnation” refer to God’s final judgment of the wicked at the end of history. Damnation must not be confused with reprobation, a divine act often thought to take place before the beginning of history.” 78 FLE 4:95; Notes toward a Fragment on Predestination, 8. Cf. Davenant, Animadversions, 137: “The eternall decree of Judas his damnation, or of the very devils, was never in voluntate Divina without the prevision of their sinnes, nor determined to be executed otherwise then for and upon their own misdeserts.” 79 Davenant, Animadversions, 287: “Vindictive justice, it may be called a strange work, because it is opus occasionatum by mans transgression.” Hooker agrees. Cf. FLE 4:139ff; Dublin Fragments, 30.

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unconditional.80 If predestination is God’s absolute will to supply effectual saving grace to some, reprobation is his will to “pass over” or his will to not supply effectual, inward, and saving grace to some. The substance of both ideas can be found in Hooker. Hooker approvingly cites Augustine: “for some the will is prepared by the Lord, for others it is not prepared; we must certainly distinguish what comes from God’s mercy and what comes from his justice.”81 Neelands is correct to identify Hooker’s doctrine of predestination as unconditional, and even acknowledges Donald Sinnema’s distinction between positive and negative reprobation, though his reading of Hooker in relation to Dortian orthodoxy requires more nuance.82 Neelands surmises that because Hooker spoke of reprobation as conditional, his view of reprobation was not aligned with Dortian orthodoxy.83 Yet, it is clear that for Hooker the differentiating factor between those sinners whom God has determined to give effectual inward saving grace, and those whom he has chosen to pass over (i. e., negative reprobation) is nothing other than God’s will of good pleasure. As Hooker makes clear: “[God’s] mercies are his owne, to bestowe wheresoever himselfe will.”84 There is no reason to think that Hooker disagrees with his own summation of Augustine’s later judgment on predestination, viz., that the whole body of mankind in the view of Gods eternall knowledge, lay universally polluted with sinne, worthy of condemnation and death, that over the masse of corruption, there passed twoe Acts of the will of God. An act of favor, liberalitie and grace, choosing part to be made partakers of everlasting glorie; and an Act of Justice, forsaking the rest and adjudging them to endlesse perdition, these vessels of wrath […].85

Nothing at Dort excludes such a view of predestination and reprobation (both negative and positive).

80 Davenant, Animadversions, 4. 81 FLE 4:160; Dublin Fragments, 42: “Cum aliis praeparetur voluntas a Domino, aliis non praeparetur, discernendum est utique quid veniat de misericordia, quid de judicio.” (Augustine, Predestination of the Saints, 11 [ch. 6]). Cf. FLE 4:165; Dublin Fragments, 46: “Wee are sick as others, yet others not cured as wee are. Is the cause in ourselves? Noe more then the cause of health is in them which would recover health, being restored thereunto by practise of art offered voluntarily, and neyther sought for nor desired.” Cf. also, FLE 4:167; Dublin Fragments, 46: “That inward grace whereby to be saved, is deservedly not given unto all men.” This latter claim corresponds entirely with standard Reformed expositions of negative reprobation and avoids the eighth rejection of error in the first article at Dort. 82 Neelands, “Ricahrd Hooker and the Debates about Predestination,” in Richard Hooker and the English Reformation, 43–61. Sinnema, “The Issue of Reprobation at the Synod of Dort,” 401ff. 83 Neelands, “Richard Hooker and the Debates about Predestination,” in Richard Hooker and the English Reformation, 59–61. 84 FLE 4:161; Dublin Fragments, 43. 85 FLE 4:148; Dublin Fragments, 36.

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In summary, Voak’s criticism of Hooker’s orthodoxy following the criticism offered by the author of The Christian Letter must be interpreted in light of a broader framework of what often passes for “Calvinism” or Reformed orthodoxy. Hooker’s exposition of God’s will for the salvation of all human beings stands definitively within a trajectory of Reformed teaching and the broader Augustinian tradition. That Reformed theologians formulated conditional decrees that were, in Voak’s words, “conditional[ly] dependent on free will,” such as the decree to condemn, is sufficient evidence to dismiss Voak’s generalization about the Reformed orthodox.86 The other conditional decree – God’s willingness to save all men on condition of belief – brings us to the final aspect of Hooker’s hypothetical universalism.

13.3.2 Christ’s Death for All As noted earlier in the second section, most hypothetical universalists explicitly link God’s will for the salvation of all with the sufficiency of Christ’s satisfaction for sin. God’s desire for the salvation of both elect and non-elect gives added meaning to Christ’s redeeming work on behalf of all. Hooker clearly connects the two ideas; he writes, “[Because] hee who willeth the ende, must needes will alsoe the meanes wherby we are brought unto [salvation],” so “the meanes now which serve as causes effectuall by their own worth to procure us eternall life, are only the merits of Jesus Christ.”87 A fuller quotation from Hooker further illustrates this: God being desirous of all mens salvation, according to his owne principall or naturall inclination, hath in token thereof for their sakes whom he loved, bestowed his beloved Sonne. The selfe same affection was in Christ himselfe, to whome the wicked att the day of their last doome will never dare to alleage for their owne excuse, that he which offered himselfe as a Sacrifice to redeeme some, did exclude the rest, and soe made the waye of their salvation impossible. He payed a ransome for the whole world, on him the iniquities of all were laied, and as St. Peeter plainly wittnesseth, he bought them which denye him, and which perish because they denie him. As in verie truth, whether wee respect the power, and sufficiencie of the price given: or the spreading of that infection, for remedie whereof the same was necessarie; or the largenes of his desier which gave it; we have noe reason butt to acknowledge with joy and comfort, that he tasted death for all men, as the Apostle to the Hebrewes noteth.88

86 Voak, “English Molinism,” 158. 87 FLE 4:143; Dublin Fragments, 33. 88 FLE 4:144; Dublin Fragments, 33.

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Hooker’s view regarding the extent of Christ’s work in the Dublin Fragments is consonant with what one finds elsewhere in his works. Hooker affirms, to use the language of Davenant, an ordained sufficiency for all in the work of Christ. Not only is the death of Christ a sufficient price for the sins of all, but in accordance with his general love for all, God ordained Christ to make satisfaction for the sins of all people.89 Hooker utilizes the language of the Lombardian formula to distinguish between the sufficiency of Christ’s satisfaction for all and its saving efficacy limited to the elect, while also employing another medieval distinction of delineating between general and special providence: Soe Christ the principall matter therein conteyned and taught, must needes likewise have beene instituted by the selfe same generall providence to serve for a most sufficient remedie for the sinne of mankind, although to ordaine in whome particularly it shall be forcible and effectuall be an act of speciall personall providence.”90

In other words, predestination (or special providence) gives particularity to the work of Christ. The remedy is universal, but God’s will to savingly apply the death of Christ is particular to the elect alone. Hooker, like other hypothetical universalists, also describes Christ’s passion as a universal medicinal remedy making a way for the salvation of all possible: “Christ in himselfe hath that cup of life, which is able to doe all men good. Sed si non bibitur, non medetur, saith Prosper, If wee taste not, it heales not.”91 Thus, Hooker understands Christ’s death to be one that makes an opportunity for any and all to be forgiven, making all human beings redeemable. Consistent with the British delegates at Dort and other Reformed theologians, Hooker further argues that Christ’s death is actually applied to some reprobate insofar as God’s inward grace is granted to some within whom that grace does not eventually lead to eternal life.92 Yet, “perpetuitie of inward grace,” or the grace of 89 FLE 2:202.25–26; LEP V.49.1: “[Christ] who gave him selfe to be the price of redemption for all.” 90 FLE 4:144; Dublin Fragments, 33. 91 FLE 4:153; Dublin Fragments, 40. Cf. FLE 2:182; 5:110; LEP V.45; FLE 5:109; A Learned Discourse of Justification, 4; John Preston, The Breast-Plate of Faith and Love (London: William Iones, 1630), 51; Ussher, Works, 12:570–571. 92 Neelands, “Predestination,” 206. Cf. John Davenant, “John Davenant on the atonement,” 219: “we hold, that there are sundry initial preparations tending to Conversion, merited by Christ, and dispensed in the preaching of the Gospel, and wrought by the Holy Ghost in the hearts of many that never attain to the Regeneration or Justification, such are Illuminatio, & Notitia dogmatum fidei, Fides dogmatica, Sensus peccati, Timor poenae, Cogitatio de liberatione, Spes veniae, &c. An evident example whereof may be seen in them that sin against the Holy Ghost, Heb. VI & X. And consequently we hold, that the whole merit of Christ is not confined to the Elect only, as some here do hold, and was held in Colloq. Hag. by the ContraRemonstrants.” Cf. the first orthodox opinion on the extent of Christ’s merit in Gisbertus Voetius, Selectae Disputationes Theologicae (Utrecht: Johannes à Waesberge, 1648–1669), 2:252: “[Conrad Bergius and Ludovicus Crocius] defendunt per sufficientiam meriti Christi non denotari

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perseverance, “belongeth unto none butt eternallie foreseene elect.”93 God’s inward grace is granted to some reprobate; but persevering or saving inward grace to the elect alone. In light of the above, it is not difficult to see why the early eighteenth-century English historian John Strype would characterize Hooker as “for universal redemption” contrasted with Walter Travers’s “more rigid way.”94 Hooker’s teaching on the extent of Christ’s death was, after all, something of a middle way between those like Travers who limited Christ’s death to the elect alone and others who grounded the efficacy of Christ’s death solely on the exercise of human freedom. Bishop John Overall, who is often – though inaccurately95 – characterized as advocating Remonstrant theology, made a strong case that the Church of England confessed universal redemption.96 Nothing Hooker taught respecting the sufficiency and efficacy of Christ’s death appears to challenge the Thirty-Nine Articles, which themselves teach: “the offering of Christ once made is the perfect redemption, propitiation, and satisfaction for all the sins of the whole world” (Art. 31).97 Arguably, it is those theologians who would deny universal redemption, such as William Ames, who were out of accord with the original intent of the English liturgy and Thirty-Nine Articles.98 Hooker’s hypothetical universalism is further evidence against Jonathan Moore’s claim that seventeenth-century English hypothetical universalism was a “softening” of the earlier Reformed tradition.

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nude pretiositatem & valorem infinitum in se, sed & dilectionem quandam erga universum mundum, & beneficium aliquod actuale ex illa procedens.” FLE 4:163, 165; Dublin Fragments, 45. John Strype, The Life and Acts of John Whitgift, D.D. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1822), 1:448. On the central question separating the Remonstrants from the Contra-Remonstrants (i. e., the question of conditional predestination to effectual grace), Overall clearly affirms absolute predestination not on the basis of foreseen merits. Cf. John Overall, “On the Five Articles disputed in the Low Countries,” in The British Delegation and the Synod of Dort, 64–70, 67: “Nostra Ecclesia mediam viam insistens conjungit particulare decretum absolutum, non ex praescientia humanae fidei aut voluntatis, sed ex proposito divinae voluntatis et Gratiae, de his quos Deus elegit in Christo liberandis et salvandis.” Overall, “On the Five Articles,” 68–69; John Overall, “The judgement of the Church of England concerning divine predestination,” in The British Delegation and the Synod of Dort, 74–84, 77–80. Clear statements of universal redemption can be found in e. g., Thomas Cranmer and Hugh Latimer. Thomas Cranmer, Writings and Disputations of Thomas Cranmer … Relative to the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper (Cambridge: The University Press, 1844) 346: “For by his own oblation he satisfied his Father for all men’s sins, and reconciled mankind unto his grace and favour”; Hugh Latimer, Sermons by Hugh Latimer (Cambridge: The University Press, 1844), 7: “at the Father’s will, Christ took on him human nature, being willing to deliver man out of this miserable way, and was content to suffer cruel passion in shedding his blood for all mankind.” Davenant insinuates this in his Dissertation, in Colossians, 416–417. Cf. William Ames, Coronis ad Collationem Hagienem (London: [John Legate], 1632), 116–217.

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13.4 Summary As was demonstrated in this essay, Hooker’s theology is best understood in light of a broad reading of Reformed orthodoxy during the early modern period. When that is done, at least on the two doctrines surveyed, Hooker stands very comfortably inside Reformed orthodox theology. The various scholastic distinctions employed by Hooker in the service of his hypothetical universalism are not nearly as novel or anti-Calvinist as scholars have suggested. In fact, while I am here unable to investigate later expressions of Reformed orthodoxy, the views of theologians such as Bishop Joseph Hall, Richard Baxter, William Twisse, and John Howe are also suggestive of Hooker’s orthodoxy on the aforementioned doctrines. Historians of the period would do well to acquaint themselves with the complex scholastic categories of conditional decrees and absolute decrees. The use of such oftentimes-complicated predestination language explains and justifies Hooker’s use of certain scholastic distinctions such as God’s antecedent and consequent will. Although the author of the Christian Letter represents an everincreasing and formidable strand of Reformed orthodoxy that was suspicious of Hooker’s distinctions regarding God’s (conditional) willing, it cannot be assumed that the author of the Christian Letter represents the whole of that tradition. Hence, due attention to the broader tradition is imperative. In short, the simple juxtaposition of Calvinist versus anti-Calvinist theology does not adequately express the theological complexity of the period. Hooker’s teaching that Christ died for all with a general intention to save all on condition of faith is not sufficient warrant to question his orthodoxy vis-à-vis Reformed theology. His doctrine at these two points is based on and consistent with a broad consensus of Reformed theologians, identified as hypothetical universalists, not to mention the broader Augustinian tradition. One significant aspect, then, of Hooker’s theological legacy is his hypothetical universalism. His thought represents one additional link between the early hypothetical universalism of Reformed theologians (as found in, for example, Wolfgang Musculus and Zachary Ursinus) and those hypothetical universalists found in England during the seventeenth century, most notably John Davenant and Bishop Ussher.99

99 Thanks to those who provided comments on earlier drafts of this essay.

Andrew J. Martin

14. Richard Hooker and Reformed Sacramental Theology1

14.1 Introduction The nature of the relationship between Richard Hooker’s sacramental theology and that of Reformed Orthodoxy is a complicated subject. It is complicated not only because the sources and substance of his sacramental thought are a contested subject in and of themselves, but also because of the complex relationship between Hooker and Reformed theology in general. Whereas previous interpretations of Hooker’s relationship to the Reformation identified him as the systematic codifier of the Elizabethan Establishment’s (supposed) via media between Rome and Geneva, more recent scholarship has discredited this view as more or less an anachronistic attempt to read some version of Anglicanism back into the sixteenth century English Church.2 This newfound recognition of what Hooker was not doing has opened the door for radically divergent accounts of what he was doing. Theological interpreters have spanned a spectrum framed on the one hand by those who claim that Hooker’s thought was merely a development of the broadly Reformed consensus of the Elizabethan church and on the other hand by those who identify Hooker as the creator of a proto-Laudian perspective that would ultimately develop into a post-Restoration Anglican via media, a perspective functionally similar to the older view but claiming that Hooker did not set out to defend Anglicanism but rather to invent it.3 1 Many thanks are due to those who read and offered suggestions on various drafts of this chapter, including Peter Lake, Paul Lim, Ethan Shagan, and Nicholas Wolterstorff, as well as the editors of this volume and its anonymous reviewers. They all saved me from many missteps, and of course bear no responsibility for those that remain. 2 See Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982); Peter Lake, Anglicans and Puritans?: Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988); Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism, C. 1590–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); W. J. Torrance Kirby, Richard Hooker’s Doctrine of the Royal Supremacy (New York: Brill, 1990). 3 For Hooker as broadly Reformed, see Nigel Atkinson, Richard Hooker and the Authority of

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Of course, the project of locating Hooker in relationship to “Reformed Orthodoxy” is complicated additionally by the lack of standard coordinates for the later Reformed tradition itself as well as the increasingly capacious nature of its treatment in the scholarly literature.4 Furthermore, whereas there is now a significant body of work on the sacramental theology of first generation Reformers and the Reformed confessional symbols of the 1560s, particularly with reference to the question of the points of continuity and discontinuity between the theologies of Zurich, Geneva, and Wittenberg, the same cannot be said for the period of Reformed Orthodoxy.5 The literature that does deal with the theology of the sacraments in Hooker’s own context typically has focused on his specific relationship to English Puritanism rather than Reformed Orthodoxy more generally.6 Consequently, the goals of this present essay are more suggestive of promising paths for future investigation than definitive in scope. Scripture, Tradition and Reason (Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 2005); Kirby, Richard Hooker’s Doctrine of the Royal Supremacy; Alister E. McGrath, Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); W.B. Patterson, William Perkins and the Making of a Protestant England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Corneliu C. Simut, The Doctrine of Salvation in the Sermons of Richard Hooker (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2005); Bryan D. Spinks, Two Faces of Elizabethan Anglican Theology: Sacraments and Salvation in the Thought of William Perkins and Richard Hooker (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1999); Dewey D. Wallace, Puritans and Predestination: Grace in English Prostestant Theology, 1525–1695 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1982). For Hooker as creator of the Anglican via media, see Lake, Anglicans and Puritans?; “Business as Usual? The Immediate Reception of Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity,” The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 52, no. 3 (2001): 456–86; Charles Miller, Richard Hooker and the Vision of God: Exploring the Origins of “Anglicanism” (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2013); Nigel Voak, Richard Hooker and Reformed Theology: A Study of Reason, Will, and Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 4 For an excellent recent taxonomy of approaches to the identity of Reformed Orthodoxy, see H. J. Selderhuis, ed., A Companion to Reformed Orthodoxy (Boston: Brill, 2013). In addition to the useful taxonomy, this introduction also illustrates the increasingly broad approach to Reformed Orthodoxy by offering the following definition: “‘Reformed’ therefore stands for each and every movement, standpoint, or theologian that considers itself Reformed.” (2). 5 For the sacramental theology of the Reformers see Lee Palmer Wandel, The Eucharist in the Reformation: Incarnation and Liturgy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Lee Palmer Wandel, ed., A Companion to the Eucharist in the Reformation (Boston: Brill, 2014); B. A. Gerrish, Grace and Gratitude: The Eucharistic Theology of John Calvin (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993) remains a widely cited source, although Richard Muller has criticized its approach; see Richard A. Muller, “Calvin on Sacramental Presence, in the Shadow of Marburg and Zurich,” Lutheran Quarterly 23, no. 2 (Sum. 2009): 147–67; Richard A. Muller, “From Zürich or from Wittenberg? An Examination of Calvin’s Early Eucharistic Thought,” Calvin Theological Journal 45, no. 2 (November 2010): 243–55. Selderhuis, A Companion to Reformed Orthodoxy contains excellent chapters on Reformed Orthodox views of God, federal theology, scripture, tradition, ethics, predestination, and law, but there is no chapter in the volume on sacramental theology. 6 The best treatment of Puritan sacramental theology is still E. Brooks Holifield, The Covenant Sealed: The Development of Puritan Sacramental Theology in Old and New England, 1570–1720

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When it comes to the more specific question of the sources and substance of Hooker’s sacramental thought, recent scholarship increasingly emphasizes his understanding of sacramental causality. Virtually all agree that Hooker identified the sacraments as “instruments” of grace, but the nature of this instrumentality has proven difficult to pin down. Whereas the older scholarship was comfortable speaking of the efficacy of Hooker’s sacraments rather generally, more recent studies have suggested a series of terms in order to specify more precisely the meaning and function of this sacramental instrumentality, including “occasionalism,” “symbolic instrumentalism,” “instrumental receptionism,” and “moral instruments.”7 The argument of the present essay is that while Hooker frequently appropriated the language of the Reformed tradition to present his sacramental theology, and while he was generally comfortable siding with the Reformers and their heirs against several key components of the Tridentine sacramental system, his particular understanding of sacramental in(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974) although it references Hooker only in passing; Spinks, Two Faces of Elizabethan Anglican Theology offers a helpful comparison of the sacramental theologies of William Perkins and Richard Hooker, but some of its conclusions need to be reconsidered in light of more recent scholarship. Examples of aspects worthy of reconsideration include the unqualified references to a singular Elizabethan “Anglican theology” (8), the static identification of Cranmer’s sacramental theology (11), and the unqualified description of the notorious Peter Baro as a theologian of “Reformed persuasion” (128). Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? remains the standard treatment of Hooker’s relationship to Puritan sacramental theology; although Lake’s picture has been challenged by Arnold Hunt, “The Lord’s Supper in Early Modern England,” Past & Present 161, no. 1 (November 1, 1998): 39–83; see Lake’s more nuanced approach in “Business as Usual?” Other helpful treatments include Diarmaid MacCulloch, “The Latitude of the Church of England,” in Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake, eds., Religious Politics in Post-Reformation England (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2006); and Jean-Louis Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity: The Construction of a Confessional Identity in the 17th Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 7 For the older scholarship that described Hooker’s instrumentality as a general “real participation,” see C. W. Dugmore, Eucharistic Doctrine in England from Hooker to Waterland (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1942); Francis Paget, An Introduction to the Fifth Book of Hooker’s treatise Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1899); John R. Parris, “Hooker’s Doctrine of the Eucharist,” Scottish Journal of Theology 16, no. 2 (June 1, 1963): 151–65. For Hooker’s occasionalism, see Egil Grislis, “Reflections on Richard Hooker’s Understanding of the Eucharist,” in Richard Hooker and the English Reformation, ed. W. J. Torrance Kirby (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2003). For Hooker’s “symbolic instrumentalism” see Spinks, Two Faces of Elizabethan Anglican Theology. For Hooker’s “instrumental receptionism” see David W. Neelands, “Christology and the Sacraments,” in A Companion to Richard Hooker, ed. W. J. Torrance Kirby (Leiden: Brill, 2008); Ronald Vince, “Richard Hooker on the Eucharist: A Commentary on the Laws V.67,” Anglican Theological Review 89, no. 3 (Sum. 2007): 421–42. For Hooker’s “moral instruments” as well as an excellent and thorough discussion of the interpretations of Hooker’s sacramental instrumentality, from which the present essay draws, see T. L. Holtzen, “Sacramental Causality in Hooker’s Eucharistic Theology,” Journal of Theological Studies 62, no. 2 (October 1, 2011): 607–648.

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strumentality precludes a straightforward identification with the Reformed Orthodox. Furthermore if the general consensus is correct that the treatment of rites and ceremonies in Book V of Hooker’s Lawes, and indeed the sacramental theology in chapters 50–68 within it, represents the linchpin of his theological project, then this incongruity must certainly shape interpretations of his relationship to the Reformed tradition accordingly.8 Hooker structured his treatment of the sacraments in an interesting way. In chapter 50 he offered a programmatic introductory consideration of the name, author, and force of the sacraments. This introduction emphasized two themes: participation in Christ and the efficacy of the sacraments as the “powerful instruments” by which recipients receive the eternal life that comes through union of the soul with God through Christ. These themes established the agenda for Hooker’s next two sections, the first (chapters 51–56) a series of Christological reflections culminating in a discussion of the manner in which the sacraments effect this participation, and the second (chapter 57) an extended consideration of the consequent necessity of the sacraments to the same end. Having established the necessity of the sacraments Hooker then turned specifically to baptism (chapters 58–66) and the Eucharist (chapters 67–68), presenting his own views and responding to challenges to those views in each case. The result of this structure is that the themes of mystical participation in Christ according to both his human and divine natures as well as the instrumentality of the sacraments as the effectual means of that participation receive considerable emphasis. Hooker’s third point of emphasis emerges when one considers the structure of his Lawes as a whole, and in particular the function of Book V within that structure. Having laid the foundation for a theological understanding of human participation in God’s eternal law in the first four books, the fifth book establishes the methodology of the “school of virtue” for shaping citizens to properly receive the integrated authority structure of the last three books. In other words, Book V functions as a hinge connecting the foundational theological concerns of Books I–IV with the polemical political concerns of Books VI–VIII. Hooker’s understanding of the relationship between nature and grace as well as his location of the visible church within the realm of nature are extremely important in this regard. Book V of the Lawes opens with the programmatic statement that “True Religion is the roote of all true virtues and the stay of all well ordered

8 For a variety of arguments that Book V represents the theological heart of Hooker’s Lawes see William O. Gregg, “Sacramental Theology in Hooker’s Laws: A Structural Perspective,” Anglican Theological Review 73, no. 2 (March 1, 1991): 155–76; John K. Luoma, “Restitution or Reformation: Cartwright and Hooker on the Elizabethan Church,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 46, no. 1 (March 1, 1977): 85–106; Arthur S. McGrade, “Public and the Religious in Hooker’s Polity,” Church History 37, no. 4 (Dec. 1968): 404–422.

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common-wealthes.”9 Thus in Book V of the Lawes, and indeed in Hooker’s work as a whole, it is clear that the mediation of the visible church is crucial to the proper formation of true religion, that true religion is in turn the foundation of a properly ordered commonwealth, and that one of Hooker’s primary polemical concerns was to point out the deleterious civic ramifications of his opponents’ errors regarding ecclesiology and worship. Therefore, in addition to the themes of mystical participation in Christ and sacramental instrumentality, Hooker’s understanding of the visible church represents a third coordinate crucial to the location of his sacramental theology in relation to Reformed Orthodoxy.

14.2 The Sacraments and Participation in Christ Hooker grounded his view of mystical participation in the Christological account that opens his treatment of the sacraments. At the heart of his Christology lay two statements that straddled the fence dividing John Calvin from the Gnesio-Lutherans on the subject of the post-ascension location of Christ’s human nature. On the one hand, Hooker wrote that, To conclude, wee hold it in regarde of the forealleaged proofes a most infallible truth that Christ as man is not everie where present. There are which think it as infalliblie true that Christ is everie where present as man. Which peradventure in some sense may be well enough graunted. His human substance in it selfe is naturallie absent from the earth, his soule and bodie not on earth but in heaven onlie.10

On the other hand, and in the very next sentence, he continued, Yeat because this substance is inseperablie joined to that personall worde which by his verie divine essence is present with all thinges, the nature which cannot have in it selfe universall presence hath it after a sorte by being no where severed from that which everie where is present. For in as much as that infinite word is not divisible into partes, it could not in parte but must needs be whollie incarnate, and consequentlie wheresoever the word is it hath with it manhood.11

While Hooker on the one hand affirmed the local presence of Christ’s ascended human nature in heaven, on the other hand his fear of a docetic Christology led him to affirm the ubiquity of the same human nature “after a sorte” by virtue of its inseparable union with the divine nature.12 Hooker was almost certainly aware 9 10 11 12

FLE 2:16.1–2; LEP V.1.1. FLE 2:231.18–24; LEP V.55.7. FLE 2:231.24–31; LEP V.55.7; emphasis original. The issue at stake regards the precise nature of Christ’s ubiquity, and whether that ubiquity should be spoken of with reference to his person, with reference to the divine logos, with reference to Christ’s human nature, etc.

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of the potential tension between his words and Calvin’s on this precise issue, for just as Calvin quoted from Augustine’s epistle to Dardanus in his famous controversy with the Lutheran Joachim Westphal and from Matthew 28 in his Institutes in order to affirm Christ’s omnipresence according to his divine nature by virtue of his “majesty” and “power,” Hooker utilized identical language drawn from the same citations in the immediate context of his own work but for a distinctly different purpose.13 Against Westphal, Calvin argued that Augustine’s point was that “the human nature [of Christ] is confined to a certain place.” Hooker argued that Christ’s human nature, while it could not have universal presence “in it self,” could have it “after a sorte” by its union with the divine nature. Of course, Hooker’s understanding of the post-ascension ubiquity of Christ’s human nature by virtue of its inseparable connection to his divine nature not only raises questions for his continuity with Calvin, but with the Reformed confessional symbols of the continent as well as the official doctrine of the Church of England. Article 21 of the Consensus Tigurinus (1549) represented not only Calvin’s view but Heinrich Bullinger’s as well when it warned against “the idea of any local presence” and affirmed that “Christ, regarded as man, must be sought nowhere else than in heaven.”14 Article 25 clarified that “speaking philosophically, there is no place above the skies, yet the body of Christ, bearing the nature and fashion of a human body, is finite and is contained in heaven as in a place.” Therefore, “it is necessary that it be separated from us by such an interval of space, in the same way as the heaven is separated from the earth.”15 Similarly, the Heidelberg Catechism (1563) restricted the local presence of Christ according to his human nature to heaven simply and without qualification.16 The Belgic Confession (1561) acknowledged that when speaking of the sacrament it is not wrong “when we say that what is eaten is Christ’s own natural body and what is drunk is his own blood,” but it quickly went on to clarify that “the manner in which we eat it is not by the mouth but by the spirit, through faith.” Consequently, 13 FLE 2:231.7f.; LEP V.55.7; FLE 2:232.19f.; LEP V.55.8; cf. John Calvin, Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, 1559 Edition (Westminster John Knox Press, 1960), 523 [II.XVI.14]; for Calvin’s controversy with Westphal, including his citation of Augustine’s epistle, see his Ultima admonitio Ioannis Calvini ad Ioachimum Westphalum, in CO 9:173– 252. For the argument that Hooker did simply follow “the Reformed tradition that locates Christ’s resurrected humanity in heaven – through the so-called extra-Calvinisticum” see Barry Rasmussen, “Hooker’s Sacramental Hermeneutic” in Kirby, Richard Hooker and the English Reformation, 151–64; and similarly Spinks, Two Faces of Elizabethan Anglican Theology, 141. 14 Jaroslav Pelikan and Valerie R. Hotchkiss, eds., Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 2:811. 15 Pelikan and Hotchkiss, Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition, 2:812. 16 Heidelberg Catechism, Q. 80, in Pelikan and Hotchkiss, Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition, 2:445.

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“Jesus Christ remains always seated at the right hand of God the father in heaven.”17 Closer to home for Hooker, the Scots Confession (1560) emphasized the “distance between his glorified body in heaven and mortal men on earth,” and it also asserted a strong distinction between “Christ Jesus in his eternal substance and the elements of the sacramental signs.”18 As for the Church of England, the 39 Articles of 1571 (as well as its antecedents) did not distinguish between Christ’s two natures in speaking of the local presence, simply stating that he “ascended into heaven, and there sitteth, until he return to judge all men at the last day.”19 At least upon first glance, Hooker’s willingness to speak of the ubiquity of Christ’s human nature, albeit only “after a sorte” and by virtue of its conjunction with his divine nature, appears to have run against the grain of the Reformed symbols on the continent and in England. Interestingly, Hooker’s apparent divergence on this point was closely related to his ecclesiological differences with Theodore Beza and Thomas Cartwright. Ecclesiologically, Hooker objected to the application of the distinction between Christ’s rule as God and his rule as man, a distinction that he believed Cartwright had borrowed from Beza in order to argue for the separation of civil and ecclesiastical authority.20 In this regard, Hooker acknowledged that it is not necessary that “all thinges spoken of Christ should agree unto him either as God or else as man,” but, “some thinges as he is the consubstantiall word of God, some thinges as he is that word incarnate.”21 The precise language of this statement illustrates Hooker’s preference for speaking of Christ’s attributes and operations after the incarnation according to his person rather than assigning them to one or the other of his natures. Formally speaking, Hooker conceded that certain qualities and capacities could be attributed to Christ as he is God on the one hand and as he is man on the other, but his preference for speaking of the differences according to the person rather than the two natures is significant. Hooker’s tendency to speak of the person increased his freedom to depict the communication of attributes as well as the physical presence of the ascended word incarnate. Neither the attributes nor the operations of the consubstantial word made flesh could be restricted to heaven, and therefore the human nature of Christ could not be restrained there either. Thus Hooker went on to argue of Christ that he “presently doth governe and hereafter shall judg the world intire and whole, therefore his 17 Belgic Confession, Art. 35, in Pelikan and Hotchkiss, Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition, 2:423–4. 18 Scots Confession, Art. 21, in Pelikan and Hotchkiss, Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition, 2:401. 19 Gerald Lewis Bray, ed., Documents of the English Reformation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994), 286 (Article 4). 20 FLE 3:363–369; LEP VIII.4.6. 21 FLE 3:364.23–26; LEP VIII.4.6.

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regall power cannot be with truth restrained unto a portion of the world only.”22 Whereas Calvin considered the ubiquity of Christ’s power according to the divine nature, Hooker considered Christ’s power according to the consubstantial person. Similarly, whereas the symbols of the Reformed tradition typically emphasized the local presence of Christ’s human nature in heaven, Hooker did not deny this presence but nevertheless grounded his discourse of Christ’s “power” and “dominion over the whole universal world,” including the church, on the foundation of Christ’s ubiquity. This ubiquity referred not only to Christ’s divine nature but to his human nature as well due to the communication of attributes achieved by virtue of the inseparability of the divine and human natures of his consubstantial person.23 When Hooker did speak of the presence of Christ’s human nature in heaven, he claimed that “by the Son of man the whole person of Christ must necessarelie be meant, who beinge man upon earth filled heaven with his glorious presence, but not accordinge to that nature for which the title of man is given him.”24 Hooker even emphasized the consubstantial person when he spoke of Christ’s local presence in heaven.25 Hooker’s Christology distanced him not only from the ecclesiological application of the Genevan Reformers and their aspiring heirs in England, but also from its application to contemporary understandings of the eucharistic presence.26 Hooker’s preference for speaking of the person rather than the two natures when discussing the communication of both attributes and operations colored his understanding of the presence of Christ experienced through participation in the sacrament. For Hooker, “Christ is therefore both as God and as man that true vine whereof we both spirituallie and corporallie are branches.” 22 23 24 25

FLE 3:365.8–11; LEP VIII.4.6. FLE 3:364.15; LEP VIII.4.6. FLE 2:220.2–5; LEP V.53.4. In passing, it is worth noting that, formally speaking, Hooker affirmed the typically Reformed communication gratiarum rather than the typically Lutheran genus maiestaticum as his preferred mechanism for speaking of the communication of properties. For example, Hooker wrote “For albeit the naturall properties of deitie be not communicable to mans nature, the supernaturall guiftes graces and effectes thereof are” (LEP V.54.5; FLE 2:223.30–32). The point is not that Hooker appropriated or affirmed a Lutheran understanding of ubiquity, or rather that he explicitly denied the Reformed understanding, but rather that his statements were ambiguous, and this in spite of the fact that he demonstrated a thoroughgoing familiarity with the controversies and the language of each tradition. 26 The discussion here focuses on the legacy of the Genevan Reformers due to the fact that many of the closest antecedents in the Reformed tradition to Hooker’s sacramental language are found in Calvin. The scope of this essay does not allow for a full comparison of Hooker’s Christology and that of the Reformed tradition. More work remains to be done, but the references collected by Heinrich Heppe suggest a similarly tenuous relationship between this aspect of Hooker’s Christology and that of the Reformed Orthodox more generally. See Heinrich Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, ed. Ernst Bizer, trans. G. T. Thompson (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1950), 434f., especially 442–43.

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This participation is not achieved by “mixture of his bodilie substance” but rather by a “mixture of his flesh.”27 Furthermore, Hooker went on to write that recipients not only “participate Christ” by “imputation” but also “partlie by habitual and reall infusion” whereby “grace is inwardlie bestowed.”28 This impartation of grace is received through participation in Christ’s “whole intire person.”29 For Hooker, communion with “the person of Jesus Christ as well in that he is man as God” leads to “a kind of transubstantiation in us, a true change both of soule and bodie.”30 As a point of comparison, Hooker’s contemporary William Perkins also affirmed a true presence of Christ in the sacrament, yet at the same time he more clearly differentiated his own view from anything resembling the Lutheran idea of the ubiquity of Christ’s human nature: we hold and teach that Christs body and blood, are truely present with the bread & wine, being signes in the sacrament: but how? Not in respect of place or coexisence: but by Sacramentall relation on this manner […] at the Lords table bread & wine must not be considered barely, as substances and creatures, but as outward signes in relation to the body and blood of Christ.31

Perkins went on to write that, God the father according to the tenor of the Evangelical covenant, gives Christ in his sacrament as really and truly, as any thing can be given unto man, not by part and peece meale (as we say) but whole Christ God and man, on this sort. In Christ there bee two natures, the Godhead, & manhood. The Godhead is not given in regard of substance, or essence, but only in regard of efficacie, merits, and operation conveied thence to the manhood.32

For Perkins, while recipients do receive the whole Christ, the Godhead is given only in regard of “efficacie, merits and operation” and not corporally. Both Hooker and Perkins were happy to speak of Christ’s “whole” or “entire” person communicated in the sacrament. However, Hooker described the mystical communion and participation in the Eucharist both “corporally and spiritually,” 27 LEP V.56.9 (FLE 2:241.9–18). While here Hooker contrasted the mixture of “bodily substance,” which he denied, with the mixture of Christ’s “flesh,” which he affirmed, in a later place he also combined the terminology and denied any mixture of the “substance” of Christ’s “flesh,” so his precise meaning is again somewhat ambiguous. FLE 2:244.23–35; LEP V.56.13. 28 FLE 2:243.4–9; LEP V.56.11. 29 FLE 2:335.34; LEP V.67.7; see also FLE 2:336.27–9; LEP V.67.8. 30 FLE 2:339.4–8; LEP V.67.11. 31 William Perkins, “A Reformed Catholike,” in The Vvorkes of That Famous and Vvorthy Minister of Christ in the Vniuersitie of Cambridge, Mr. William Perkins. The First Volume: Newly Corrected according to His Owne Copies. With Distinct Chapters, and Contents of Euery Booke, and Two Tables of the Whole: One, of the Matter and Questions, the Other of Choice Places of Scripture (London: 1612), 1:590. A Reformed Catholike was published first in 1597. 32 Perkins, “A Reformed Catholike” in Works, 1:590.

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which thus required a “transubstantiation” or “true change” of the human soul and body. Perkins on the other hand did not see the necessity of such a transformation because of his emphasis on the spiritual rather than the corporal. Perkins summarized his view in the following way: It remaines therefore that Christs presence is not corporall but spirituall. Againe, in the supper of the Lord, every beleever receiveth whole Christ, God & man, though not the Godhead: now by this carnall eating, we receive not whole Christ, but only a part of his manhood: and therefore in the sacrament there is no carnall eating, and consequently no bodily presence.33

The precise relationship between the corporal and the spiritual in the Eucharist marked a subtle but significant difference between the two thinkers, and this difference was related closely to their differences in Christology. Perkins’ sharp distinction between the two natures of Christ and his willingness to ground his understanding of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist represented a careful adherence to the confessional tradition inherited by the Reformed Orthodox. Hooker’s preference to speak of the person of Christ allowed him to deny Lutheran ubiquity on the one hand but at the same time to articulate a position ambiguously related to the confessional boundaries of the Reformed tradition on the other. This conclusion confirms the recent judgment of scholarship that denies that Hooker based his Christology on Luther or the Lutheran scholastic understanding of the communicatio idiomatum. It leaves open the possibility that Hooker’s primary source may have been Aquinas’ distillation of John of Damascus or that it may best be characterized as a “Cyrilline” Christological vision.34 Yet it also suggests that Hooker’s relationship to the Reformed understanding of the local presence of Christ’s human nature was not at all straightforward and is therefore a topic worthy of further study.

14.3 Sacramental Instrumentality As already noted, Hooker’s understanding of sacramental instrumentality has received a good deal of attention in recent studies of his theology.35 For Hooker, sacraments are necessary because “the saving grace which Christ originallie is or hath for the general good of his whole Church, by sacraments he severallie deriveth into everie member thereof.” Hooker conceived of the sacraments as 33 Perkins, “A Reformed Catholike” in Works, 1:592. 34 For Hooker’s “Cyrilline” Christology, see W. David Neelands, “Christology and the Sacraments,” in Kirby, A Companion to Richard Hooker, 371–73. 35 For the best recent treatment of Hooker’s sacramental instrumentality, see Holtzen, “Sacramental Causality in Hooker’s Eucharistic Theology.”

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powerful instruments, and accordingly argued that “wee are not to doubt but that they reallie give what they promise, and are what they signifie.” The sacraments were not “bare resemblances” or “naked signes” of grace already received, but “meanes effectuall” by which God “delivereth into our handes that grace available unto eternall life.”36 These statements suggest that Hooker’s understanding of the means by which the sacraments “confer” grace, his affirmation of the necessity of the sacraments, and his conception of the relationship between the “sign” and the “signified” represent three critical points that highlight the nature of his proximity to the tradition of Reformed Orthodoxy. The question of the sacraments’ instrumentality in conferring grace was always a controversial one in post-Reformation England. Early formulations of sacramental instrumentality were written in conscious response to the scholastic dictum that “sacraments confer grace on those who do not make obstruction.”37 On the continent Calvin and Bullinger explicitly denied this doctrine in Article 17 of the Consensus Tigurinus under the rather blunt title, “Sacraments do not confer grace.”38 In England, opposition to the idea that the sacraments “confer” grace also shaped the formulation of the 39 Articles. When John Hooper was appointed Bishop of Gloucester in 1550, he was asked to subscribe an early version of the Articles affirming that the sacraments confer grace. He requested that the language be changed from “confer” to “seal” or “testify to,” and his request was granted.39 The 42 Articles of 1553 thus avoided the language of conferral and instead affirmed that the sacraments were “sure witnesses” and “effectual signs.” This language subsequently was included in the 38 Articles of 1563 and finally the 39 Articles of 1571.40 In spite of this official rejection of the sacramental conferral of grace, in 1552 Peter Martyr lamented to Bullinger that “many” English Protestants continued to hold that “grace is conferred […] in the sacraments.”41 Hooker’s contemporaries William Whitaker and Andrew Willet, by way of their opposition to the doctrine, further demonstrate the existence of advocates for the view that grace was conferred in the sacraments, and they also represented a moderate expression of the Reformed consensus that preferred to

36 37 38 39

FLE 2:247.5–8, 15–6; LEP V.57.5. Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity, 81f. Pelikan and Hotchkiss, Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition, vol 2., 810. Martin Micronius to Heinrich Bullinger, 28 May 1550, in Epistolae Tigurinae de rebus potissimum ad Ecclesiae Anglicanae reformationem pertinentibus conscriptae A.D. 1531–1558 (Cambridge: Parker Society, 1848), 366. Cited in Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity, 81. 40 Bray, Documents of the English Reformation, 299. 41 Peter Martyr Vermigli to Heinrich Bullinger, 14 June 1852, in An unpublished letter of Peter Martyr… affording additional proof of the meaning of the Articles, ed. W. Goode (London, 1850), 15–16. Cited in Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity, 81.

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speak otherwise.42 Whitaker acknowledged that Augustine taught that “the sacraments of the New Testament give salvation,” but in response he cited Calvin’s argument that Augustine spoke hyperbolically and in a rhetorical context quite different from the debates of the post-Reformation era. Even more explicitly, Willet asserted that for “the Protestants […] the Sacraments have no power to give or conferre graces to the receiver.”43 William Perkins’s willingness to concede that the sacraments could confer grace may offer one possible example of an exception to this consensus, but even then he was careful to say that this conferral must be delimited with careful precision. Speaking of baptism, he wrote that “It conferres grace: because it is a meanes to give and exhibit to the believing minde Christ with his benefits; and this it doth by his signification.” He also went on to clarify that “baptisme may be said to confer grace” because by it “faith is confirmed.” To this clarification he added that, It is not an instrument having the grace of God tyed unto it, or shut up in it: but an instrument to which grace is present by assistence in the right use thereof: because in and with the right use of the sacrament, God conferres grace, and thus is it an instrument, and no otherwise, that is, a moral and not a physical instrument.44

In the same paragraph, Perkins also wrote that sacraments confer grace in the same way that the word does, and in fact that “euery sacrament is the word of God made visible to the eye: the sacrament therefore confers grace by vertue of his signification.” So while Perkins would admit the language of conferral, he defined this conferral as a “signification” of Christ’s benefits and as the “confirmation” of faith. Furthermore, he denied that grace could be found either “shut up in” or “tyed unto” the sacramental elements, and he affirmed that the grace conferred in the sacraments was the same as that conferred by the word.

42 For the characterization of Perkins, Willet and Whitaker as moderate Puritans in the context of a discussion of their relationship to the mainstream of Reformed Protestantism, see Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 129. 43 William Whitaker, Praelectiones de Sacramentis in Genere, et in Specie de SS. Baptismo et Eucharistia (Frankfurt, 1624), 116; See Calvin, Institutes, IV.XIV.26 (1302–3); Andrew Willet, Synopsis Papismi, 3rd ed. (London, 1600), 463; cited in Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity, 82. 44 William Perkins, “An Exposition upon the Five First Chapters of the Epistle to the Galatians; with the Continuation of the Commentary upon the Sixth Chapter” in The Workes of That Famous and Vvorthy Minister of Christ in the Vniversitie of Cambridge, M. VVilliam Perkins. The Second Volume. Newly Corrected according to His Owne Copies. VVith Distinct Chapters, and Contents of Every Booke Prefixed: And Two Tables of the Whole Adjoyned; One of the Matters and Questions, the Other of Choice Places of Scripture (London, 1631), 260. See the helpful discussion of Perkins’s understanding of the grace conferred in baptism in Spinks, Two Faces of Elizabethan Anglican Theology, 73–81.

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These contemporary statements help to contextualize Hooker’s own understanding of sacramental instrumentality as expressed in the Lawes as well as in the Dublin Fragments. Whereas Reformed theologians generally were wary of the language of conferral when speaking of sacramental grace, and whereas when like Perkins they did use it they were careful to clarify that the sacraments conferred grace in the same way that the word did, Hooker not only held that the sacraments did confer grace but he also did not limit that conferral in the manner of his contemporaries. Hooker did deny what he described as the opinion of Thomas Aquinas, which held that the sacraments confer grace physically, whether by their own virtue or by a force given to them.45 Instead, Hooker affirmed what he described as the opinion of Scotus, Ockham, and Petrus Alliacensis, that sacraments are nevertheless occasions for the conferral of grace according to the will of God.46 This preference helps to explain Hooker’s tendency to refer to the sacraments as moral instruments.47 Yet while some Protestant theologians like Perkins utilized the medieval Franciscan language of moral instrumentality in order to deny that the sacraments were a physical cause of grace, Hooker’s use went beyond this by appropriating the dispositional language of contemporary Catholic theologians, most prominently that utilized by Gabriel Vásquez in his famous dispute with Francisco Suarez.48 Hooker, following Vásquez, not only denied that the sacraments were physical instruments but also affirmed that the sacraments were efficacious and infallible causes of grace to those who received them with the requisite dispositions. This contextual background illuminates the significance of Hooker’s exposition of sacramental instrumentality and the necessity of obedience: sacraments serve as instruments the use whereof is in our handes, the effect in his; for the use wee have his expresse commandment, for the effect his conditional promise; so that without our obedience to the one there is of the other no apparent assurance, as contrariwise where the signes and sacraments of his grace are not either through contempt unreceyved, or receyved with contempt, wee are not to doubt but that they reallie give what they promise, and are what they signifie.49

45 FLE 3:83.22–84.7; LEP VI.6.10. 46 “butt Sacraments are therefore said to work or conferre grace, because the will of Almightie God is, although not to give them such efficacie, yet himselfe to be present in the Ministerie of the working that effect, which proceedeth wholy from him, without any reall operation of theirs, such as can enter into mens soules” (FLE 3:84.7–12; LEP VI.6.11). 47 FLE 2:226.28; LEP V.57.4; FLE 2:247.9; LEP V.57.5; FLE 3:87.9; LEP VI.6.10. 48 P. Pourrat, Theology of the Sacraments: A Study in Positive Theology, 3rd ed. (St. Louis: B. Herder, 1910), 165ff., especially 184–96. Note also the sharp differences between Hooker’s understanding of moral instrumentality and the much more carefully circumscribed language of William Perkins, e. g. in Perkins, “An Exposition upon the Five First Chapters of the Epistle to the Galatians,” in Works, 2:260. 49 FLE 2:247.8–16; LEP V.57.5.

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Speaking of baptism, Hooker also wrote that The greatest morall perfection of baptisme consisteth in mens devout obedience to the law of God, which lawe requireth both the outward act or thinge done, and also that religious affection which God doth so much regarde, that without it whatsoever wee doe is hateful in his sight.50

Thus while Hooker did not explicitly articulate the scholastic dictum that “sacraments confer grace on those who do not make obstruction,” his references to the sacraments as conditional promises and his affirmation of the necessity of obedience utilized the Reformed language of “worthy receivers” to communicate something that sounded surprisingly similar to at least one contemporary Catholic understanding of “moral instrumentality.” Therefore it is not surprising that the author(s) of A Christian Letter opened their critique of Hooker’s sacramental views by taking him to task for referring to the sacraments as “morall instruments” and “meanes conditional.”51 In his marginal notes on the Letter Hooker responded to these criticisms by arguing that “if the thing they signify be grace and God the giver of that grace in the ministry of the sacraments then are they ordained to tell us when God giveth grace, yea and further What grace god doth give.”52 After taking the time to develop his response more fully, in the documents collected in the Dublin Fragments, Hooker gave a more expansive definition of his understanding of this sacramental grace: By grace wee allwayes understand as the word of God teacheth, first, his favour and undeserved mercie towards us; Secondlie, the bestowing of his holy spirit which inwardlie worketh; thirdlie, the effects of that Spiritt whatsoever butt especiallie saving vertues, such as are, faith, charitie, and hope, lastly the free and full remission of all our sinnes. This is the grace which Sacraments yield, and whereby wee are all justified.53

Here Hooker clearly expressed his view that the sacraments both signified and caused justifying grace, and furthermore that this justifying grace was in part forensic, including “the free and full remission of all our sinnes,” but also a grace that “inwardlie worketh,” and included the effects of the Holy Spirit which Hooker expressly identified as the “saving vertues” of “faith, charitie, and hope.”54 Whereas like Perkins the Reformed during this period generally were 50 FLE 2:281; LEP V.62.15. 51 Andrew Willett usually is identified as the author of A Christian Letter. For the Letter’s critique of Hooker’s sacramental views, as well as Hooker’s marginal notes in response, see FLE 4:38ff. The mention of “morall instrument” is at FLE 4:40.22 and the references to “meanes conditional” are all found on FLE 4:39–40. 52 FLE 4:39.31–34; Hooker, A Christian Letter with Hooker’s Notes. 53 FLE 4:117.4–10; Dublin Fragments, 16. 54 In “The Lord’s Supper in Early Modern England,” 77, Arnold Hunt has argued that the

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quick to qualify their references to the sacramental conferral of grace with references to the confirming nature of this conferral and with statements aligning it with that of the word preached, Hooker was quite comfortable moving beyond these tendencies.55 When Hooker’s understanding of sacramental necessity is taken into account, it sheds even further light on his understanding of sacramental instrumentality. Hooker, citing the biblical example of Naman the Syrian, wrote that “it is a branch of belief that the sacramentes are in theire place no lesse required then beliefe it self.”56 Hooker did acknowledge that the necessity of the sacraments was not so absolute that failure to receive them precluded the possibility of salvation.57 He also affirmed the standard scholastic position that took a desire for baptism to be sufficient for salvation in cases where circumstances prevented its reception.58 At the same time, the logic of the salvific necessity of baptism was one of the driving forces behind his rather extended discussion of the permissibility of baptism by women in cases of emergency.59 In his affirmation of the necessity of the sacraments, Hooker also wrote that the idea that “nothing but faith is necessarie for thattainement of all grace” moved “verie neere” to the view of the “olde Valentinian heretiques.”60 He also frequently affirmed the necessity

55

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Laudians were “consciously experimenting with new forms of sacramental theology” and he cites as evidence various figures in the 1630s who associated the sacraments with justifying grace. While the sacramental theology espoused by the Laudians in the 1630s was without doubt a source of controversy, it is clear that Hooker already had developed these ideas in his works in the 1590s. The Leiden Synopsis (1625) offers a continental example that parallels Perkins very closely. On the one hand it utilized the language of the conferral of grace: “We agree that the sacrament, like everything else is also exhibitive of the thing promised, in respect that in the lawful and worthy use of this sacrament the things promised are by the H. Spirit not only offered to believers but also actually exhibited and conferred.” On the other hand, the Leiden Synopsis went on to clarify: “The efficacy of baptism we do not tie to the moment at which the body is wet with outward water, but in all who are baptized we require with Scripture faith and repentance, at least according to the judgment of love.” Then it proceeded to clarify further that “as a seed cast upon the ground does not always germinate at the same moment, but when rain and warmth supervene from heaven, so neither word nor sign of sacrament is always effectual at its first moment, but only at the time when the blessing of the H. Spirit is added.” Furthermore, in the same context the Leiden Synopsis also stated explicitly that the communication of grace in the sacrament was the same as that communicated by the word. For the relevant portions of the Leiden Synopsis, including those from which these quotes are taken, see Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, 618–19. See below for discussion of Reformed figures like Samuel Ward, John Davenant, and James Ussher who, beginning in the 1620s, began to use language similar to Hooker’s. FLE 2:257.7–8; LEP V.60.4. For example, see Hooker’s allowance of the distinction between two types of necessity, the one for salvation and the other for comfort, in FLE 2:357.4ff.; LEP V.68.11. FLE 2:259.25–28; LEP V.60.5. For an explicit statement of this logic, see FLE 2:271.20–22; LEP V.62.5. FLE 2:256–7.26f.; LEP V.60.4.

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of the sacraments in order to receive salvation and eternal life.61 On the one hand, Hooker did deny that the sacraments were absolutely necessary to salvation, but on the other hand many of his statements suggested a logic that sounded like they were. Hooker’s understanding of sacramental necessity was founded upon the idea that the sacrament of baptism laid “the first foundation” for the habit of faith.62 According to Hooker, baptism “both declareth and maketh us Christians.” Thus baptism was not a sign of grace already experienced, although perhaps it was a seal of the grace of election, for even “predestination bringeth not to life, without the grace of externall vocation, wherein our baptisme is implied.”63 Here Hooker placed the reception of baptism itself in the ordo salutis by identifying it with effectual calling. Hooker held that “God when wee take the sacramentes delivereth into our handes that grace available unto eternall life.”64 By comparison, Article 19 of the Consensus Tigurinus affirmed that the forgiveness of sins precedes baptism, communion with Christ precedes participation in the Lord’s supper, and therefore that the sacraments are confirming ordinances. Article 20 explicitly denied that the benefits of the sacraments were tied to the moment of their reception.65 Even the Westminster Confession of the 1640s, which contains perhaps the strongest language of sacramental instrumentality of all the Reformed confessions, stopped well short of Hooker’s view that baptism “maketh” Christians. It did affirm of baptism that “the grace promised is not only offered, but really exhibited, and conferred,” but it also emphasized that the “efficacy of baptism is not tied to that moment of time wherein it is administered” and avoided any sense in which baptism could be a logical step in the ordo salutis.66 The relationship between the signs and the realities of the sacraments represents the final interesting point of comparison between Richard Hooker and Reformed Orthodoxy on the matter of sacramental instrumentality. Hooker’s language tended to collapse the distinction between the sign and the signified. For example, he argued that because the sacraments are moral instruments of God, “wee are not to doubt but that they reallie give what they promise, and are what they signifie.”67 By comparison, the Reformed confessions likewise fre61 62 63 64

E. g., FLE 2:246.25; LEP V.57.4; FLE 2:247.5–9; LEP V.57.5; FLE 2:247.25f.; LEP V.57.6. FLE 2:295.20–21; LEP V.64.2. FLE 2:254.22ff.; LEP V.60.2–3. FLE 2:247.20–21; LEP V.57.5. Hooker also wrote that God gave the sacraments as “markes whereby to knowe when God doth imparte the vitall or savinge grace of Christ” and as “notize of the tymes when [Christ and the Holy Spirit] use to make theire accesse” through the sacraments in FLE 2:245f.; LEP V.57.3. 65 Pelikan and Hotchkiss, Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition, 2:810–11. 66 Westminster Confession of Faith, 28.6, in Pelikan and Hotchkiss, Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition, 2:642. 67 FLE 2:247.15–16; LEP V.57.5.

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quently joined the sacramental sign with the grace signified, but they also tended to distinguish more sharply between the two. Speaking of the Lord’s supper, Article 26 of the Consensus Tigurinus, flatly stated that “it is a sign and not the thing in itself.”68 The Belgic Confession acknowledged that “the sacraments and thing signified are joined together,” but qualified that joining with two important distinctions. First, the benefits are received only by the elect and not by the reprobate, and second the spiritual benefits are distinct from the physical benefits.69 The Heidelberg Catechism likewise distinguished between the temporal and the spiritual and referred to the elements as “holy tokens in remembrance of him.”70 The confessional symbols inherited by the Reformed Orthodox tended to distinguish signs and signified, and even when they affirmed the joining of the signed and the signified they consistently qualified that joining in the immediate context of this affirmation. While Hooker elsewhere in his discussion of the sacraments made statements that could plausibly be combined to support his Reformed credentials, he did not do so in this context, and his statement that the sacraments “are what they signifie” was extremely unusual. Hooker identified the sign of baptism with the grace signified in part because of his understanding of the relationship between baptism and God’s covenant. Hooker held that the “fruit of baptisme” depended only upon “the covenant which god hath made.” This covenant required of the “elder sorte” both faith and baptism, but of children “baptisme alone.” Those who receive baptism are “by vertue of his owne covenant and promise clensed from all synne.”71 Hooker offered these statements in direct contradiction to the idea that baptism was only an “effectuall instrument of grace” to the elect.72 He went on to clarify his view at length, writing that baptisme implyeth a covenant or league between God and man, wherein as God doth bestowe presentlie remission of synnes and the holie Ghost, binding also him selfe to add in process of tyme what grace soever shalbe farther necessarie for thattainement of everlastinge life; so everie baptized soule receyvinge the same grace at the handes of God tyeth likewise it selfe for ever to the observation of his lawe no lesse than the Jewes by circumcision bound them selves to the lawe of Moses.73

68 Pelikan and Hotchkiss, Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition, 2:812. 69 Belgic Confession, Art. 35, in Pelikan and Hotchkiss, Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition 2:423–24. 70 Heidelberg Catechism, Q. 79, in Pelikan and Hotchkiss, Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition, 2:444. 71 FLE 2:282.1–9; LEP V.62.15. 72 FLE 2:281.22–282.1; LEP V.62.15. 73 FLE 2:296.28–297.4; LEP V.64.4.

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Hooker thus identified all the benefits of baptism, and explicitly the present forgiveness of sin, with “Christ’s own compact solemnely made with his church.”74 Whereas Hooker collapsed the internal and the external aspects of the covenant and held that all recipients of baptism presently received the forgiveness of sins, Perkins made a distinction between God’s covenant and baptism. For Perkins, the sacrament was a seal that not all recipients of baptism, but rather all members of God’s covenant, would receive its benefits: “Baptisme is appointed by God, to bee no more but a seale annexed unto, and depending upon the covenant: therefore wee must put a difference between it and the covenant.”75 Thus baptism was “only to bee a signe and signification of the purging and cleansing of sinne” and “those that are within the covenant” could receive this forgiveness whether they received the sacrament or not.76 Baptism is a sign that recipients are “externally in the covenant,” which Perkins was careful not to identify with the internal membership in the covenant that he identified with God’s election.77 Whereas Perkins retained the distinction between internal and external covenant membership and affirmed that the sacraments were effectual only to members of the former group, Hooker collapsed the distinction and identified the sacraments as the root of covenant membership itself. Hooker’s discussion of the substance of baptism gives evidence that he was conscious of his divergence from Reformed Orthodox theologians like Perkins as well as the Reformed confessional tradition. Hooker privileged the “inward grace of sacramentes” and argued that grace was “theire true essential forme.” To this true essential form were added the outward aspects of the sacrament, namely the element itself and the word. While Hooker took these three elements of a sacrament from chapter 19 of the Second Helvetic Confession, he reversed their order.78 Not only that, but whereas the Second Helvetic Confession emphasized the addition of the word to the element as the crucial event which made it a sacrament, Hooker’s discussion emphasized that the addition of the word merely completed the sacrament’s “outward forme.” For Hooker, the sacrament’s true essential forme existed prior to the word or even the element itself. Hooker also referred to both the inward and outward aspects of the sacrament with the language of “substance” and conceived of the “elementes as the matter where-

74 FLE 2: 281.22–28; LEP V.62.15. 75 Perkins, “The Whole Treatise of The Cases of Conscience, Distinguished into three Bookes,” in Works, 2:74. 76 Perkins, “Cases of Conscience,” in Works, 2:75. 77 Perkins, “Cases of Conscience,” in Works, 2:76. 78 Pelikan and Hotchkiss, Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition, 505, 506.

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unto [the inward form of grace] doth adjoyne it selfe.”79 These statements offer a striking contrast to the language of the Second Helvetic Confession, which strongly asserted that “The Thing Signified Is Neither Included in or Bound to the Sacraments.”80 Given that Hooker borrowed his three elements from the same chapter, it is extremely unlikely that he was unaware of this context or his divergence from it.81

14.4 The Sacraments and the Visible Church Hooker’s understanding of sacramental instrumentality also grew out of his understanding of the visible church and its relationship with the mystical or invisible church. On the one hand, in Book III of the Lawes Hooker equated the mystical church with the invisible church when he wrote, “so farre forth as the Church is the mystical body of Christ and his invisible spouse, it needeth no external politie.”82 Yet in his discussion of the sacraments, Hooker also grounded membership in the mystical body of Christ “by actual incorporation” into the visible church: Our being in Christ by eternall foreknowledge saveth us not without our actuall and reall adoption into the fellowship of his Sainctes in this present world. For in him wee actuallie are by our actual incorporation into that society which hath in him for theire head and doth make together with him one bodie (he and they in that respect having one name) for which cause by vertue of this mysticall conjunction wee are of him and in him even as though our verie flesh and bones should be made continuate with his. Wee are in Christ because he knoweth and loveth us even as partes of him selfe.83 79 Pelikan and Hotchkiss, Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition, 506–7. Hooker, FLE 2:249.8; LEP V.58.2. 80 Pelikan and Hotchkiss, Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition, 508. This assertion follows the Confession’s exposition of the sacramental union between sign and signified. 81 Because Hooker described both the word and the element as the outward form of the sacrament, which he distinguished from the inward grace that he referred to as the essential form of the sacrament, it is also unlikely that he was merely reiterating Augustine’s dictum that “The word is added to the element, and there results the Sacrament, as if itself also a kind of visible word,” as Neelands argues in “Christology and the Sacraments,” 374, n. 25. Hooker’s reworking of the Second Helvetic Confession is reminiscent of his reworking of the Lambeth Articles in the Dublin Fragments (FLE 4:167.1–12). 82 FLE 1:261.25–27; LEP III.11.14. 83 FLE 2:238.27–239.6; LEP V.56.7. […]. This conclusion may be related to Neelands’s expressed to desire to find in Hooker’s approach what “was, and should be, an important element in Anglican self-understanding” (109). Neelands opens his article by observing that “Hooker took for granted that he spoke for a consensus in the Church of England, a consensus that had grown through debate through thirty or forty years” (100), but he does not address the fact that this debate was an ongoing one. Indeed it is true that Hooker presented himself as if he

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Hooker also frequently wrote of the benefits received by the church without distinguishing whether and by what means those benefits belonged either to the visible, invisible, or mystical church. This is especially true in his chapter on the union or mutual participation between Christ and the church in the present world. For example, in one place he wrote, “Christ is whole with the whole Church, and whole with everie parte of the Church, as touching his person which can no waie devide it selfe or be possest by degrees and portions.” He went on to write that this participation with the whole church (in this world) not only included the presence and “mysticall copulation” of Christ’s person but also the imputation of Christ’s righteousness and the “habitual,” “real,” and “inward” infusion of grace.84 Given Hooker’s notoriously expansive understanding of the membership of the visible church, and that in the Dublin Fragments he identified election with church membership when he wrote that “There is a visible election of people which the world seeth, according whereunto of old the Jewes, and now all the Nations of the world are elect,” his understanding of the benefits of this membership raises a host of questions regarding his relationship to Reformed Orthodoxy.85 represented a “consensus,” but the controversy surrounding his work and its reception demonstrates that if there was such a consensus Hooker was contesting its meaning just like everybody else. As demonstrated above, Hooker’s understanding of the covenant was also different from many of his Reformed contemporaries, another reality that Neelands does not address when he argues that Hooker followed Calvin and the Reformers in their understanding of the covenant and its relation to baptism. Neelands also argues that Hooker held that baptism forgives original sin, but if Hooker did make that argument it would not have helped his Reformed credentials, and at any rate his language was typically ambiguous on this subject (Hooker wrote that baptismal grace is the “welspringe of nue birth wherein originall synne is purged” in FLE 2:296.17–18; LEP V.64.3.) Neelands grounds his interpretation on the assumption that Hooker was responding to a “Calvinist revolution” (106), and even if one does not follow Tyacke’s vision of a “Calvinist consensus,” any argument along these lines would need to address more fully the trajectory of scholarship over the last forty years. At any rate, Neelands does acknowledge that “Hooker did not make the distinction [between the visible and invisible church] a sharp one” (106), that Hooker’s “conclusion is quite different [from Calvin’s] about the penetration of the invisible church into the visible” (108), and that Hooker’s view was strikingly different from that of John Whitgift, who followed Beza in linking the invisible church with the elect (109), which are precisely the points here and in the following argument as well. Neelands argues that Hooker’s position was that “for the moment, the visible church entirely overlaps the invisible” (109), a view rejected by both puritans and many conformists alike. The argument presented here agrees with this aspect of his article wholeheartedly. 84 FLE 2:242.26–243.9; LEP V.56.10–1; cf. Daniel Eppley, “Royal Supremacy,” in Kirby, A Companion to Richard Hooker, 505, n. 11. 85 FLE 4:165; Dublin Fragments, 45. Hooker’s understanding of membership in the visible church became notorious after Walter Travers accused him of teaching that Rome was a true church. Walter Travers, A short note of sundry unsound points of doctrine, at divers times delivered by Mr. Hooker in his public sermons, included in The Works of that Learned and Judicious Divine Mr. Richard Hooker with an Account of His Life and Death by Isaac Walton,

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Hooker’s emphasis on the mystical church and his willingness to associate it with both the visible and invisible church distanced him from both ends of the Reformed ecclesiological spectrum of his contemporaries. On the one hand John Whitgift represented the conformist Calvinist position that the impossibility of discerning the invisible church in this life necessitated the membership of all those who professed the faith in the visible church. On the other hand, Thomas Cartwright sought to limit membership in the visible church to those whose godly life and doctrine indicated the likelihood of their membership in the invisible church. Cartwright sought to narrow the gap between the visible and invisible church. Whitgift left the invisible church in God’s hands while he still argued that ordinarily only its members had the potential to receive the benefits of inward grace. Hooker not only expanded the membership of the visible church but also implied that its members received the benefits of inward grace.86 Both Cartwright and Whitgift utilized Beza’s fourfold typology of membership in the visible and invisible church, but Hooker communicated a simpler picture by grounding membership in the mystical church in incorporation into the visible church.87

14.5 Conclusion The peculiar combination of Hooker’s Christology, his understanding of sacramental instrumentality, and his ecclesiology makes it difficult to locate him straightforwardly within the bounds of the Reformed Confessional symbols of the sixteenth century or the churches that inherited them. Taken individually, it is possible to find analogues for most of Hooker’s views within the tradition, but taken as a whole it is not surprising that his views made him a controversial figure. Whereas the high sacramental views of William Perkins were uncontroversial among the Reformed Orthodox, Hooker’s combination of the doctrine that baptism makes rather than confirms membership in the visible church and his idea that baptism confers the benefits of inward grace as well as participation in the divine and human natures of Christ to all the “visible elect” drew sharp criticism from a wide range of his Reformed contemporaries.

ed. John Keble (Oxford, 1850), 47–49. In his response, in which he distanced himself from the views of Zanchi, Calvin, and Mornay, Hooker did little to assuage his critics. See Keble, Works, 49f. 86 As Peter Lake has argued in “Calvinism and the English Church 1570–1635,” Past & Present, no. 114 (February 1, 1987): 38f. 87 For Whitgift’s use of Beza, see The Works of John Whitgift, ed. J. Ayre (Parker Society: Cambridge, 1858), 3:142–43. Cited in Lake, “Calvinism and the English Church 1570–1635,” 37.

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It is true that beginning in the 1620s several moderate English Reformed figures, in response to the rising prominence of baptist sacramentarians, began to express approval for aspects of Hooker’s sacramental theology, including Hooker’s idea that baptism justifies all infants who receive it. But their views were also different from Hooker’s in significant ways and the response to their writings indicates their idiosyncrasy. For example, in his dispute with Thomas Gataker and in his correspondence with James Ussher, John Davenant, and William Bedell, Samuel Ward articulated the idea that all infants were justified in their baptism and also expressed approval for Hooker’s understanding of the sacraments.88 Yet while Ward found it polemically useful to appeal to Hooker’s understanding of the sacraments, given what he wrote elsewhere in both his letters and his treatises it is unlikely that he would have approved of the broader architecture underlying his thought.89 Furthermore, while John Davenant and (eventually) James Ussher sympathized with Ward’s understanding of the sacraments, their private correspondence illustrates their sensitivity to the marginal and controversial status of their views, with Davenant explicitly instructing Ward to desist from communicating his understanding of baptismal justification in public in order to present a united front against the rising Arminian threat.90 Although the idea that baptism conferred justifying grace failed to gain widespread acceptance among Reformed theologians in the seventeenth century, Cornelius Burges was more successful in his defense of the idea that all elect infants experienced (initial) regeneration at the time of their baptism.91 This view 88 For an excellent discussion of this correspondence and a helpful bibliography, see Holifield, The Covenant Sealed, 78–83. For Ward’s approval of Hooker’s sacramental theology, see his letter to James Ussher in James Ussher, The Whole Work of the Most Rev. James Ussher, D. D. Lord Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, ed. Charles R. Elrington (Dublin: Hodges, Smith, and Co., 1864), 15:506–7. 89 For example, although Ward was a strong proponent of hypothetical universalism, given his vocal opposition to English “Arminianism” in the 1620s it is unlikely he would have approved of Hooker’s modifications to the Lambeth Articles in the Dublin Fragments. See Samuel Ward, Gratia Discriminans Concio Ad Clerum, Habita Cantabrigiae in Ecclesia B. Mariae, Ian. 12. 1625. (London, 1626); see Ward’s comments to Ussher regarding reprobation and the relationship between baptismal justification and perseverance in Ussher, Work, 15:404–5, 504f.; cf. FLE 4:167.1ff; Dublin Fragments, 46. Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, 46–52; Lake, “Calvinism and the English Church 1570–1635,” 63ff.; Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity, 182–4. 90 For Ussher’s early hesitancy, see his comments to Ward in Work, 15:482. Davenant’s instructions to Ward on his public advocacy viz. the grace conferred in baptism were: “Though it be the opinion of antiquity and to me appears more probable than the contrary, yet at this time when the Arminians cleave so close to one another it is not convenient to be at such open controversies among ourselves.” Bodleian Lib., Tanner MS., vol. 71, fo. 26r, Davenant to Ward, 15 Dec. 1629. Cited in Lake, “Calvinism and the English Church 1570–1635,” 66. 91 Cornelius Burges, Baptismall Regeneration of Elect Infants Professed by the Church of England, According to the Scriptures, the Primitiue Church, the Present Reformed Churches, and Many Particular Divines Apart (Oxford, 1629); see Holifield, The Covenant Sealed, 83–7.

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led to significant debate in the Westminster Assembly during the 1640s, and while the Assembly was willing to grant that baptized infants may be presumed regenerate, it carefully circumscribed speculation regarding their actual regeneration at the time of their baptism.92 Thus even these later attempts to articulate sacramental views that reflected certain aspects of Hooker’s thought experienced a difficult reception among both Reformed theologians and churches. Ultimately, Hooker’s relationship to Reformed Orthodoxy is a complicated one. On the one hand, Hooker followed the Reformed tradition by limiting the number of the sacraments to two, by denying Transubstantiation or that the Eucharist was a sacrifice, and by formally denying Lutheran ubiquitarianism. On the other hand, his Christology, his precise understanding of sacramental instrumentality, and his application of these ideas to the visible church, while often utilizing Reformed vocabulary and categories, at the very least pushed against the boundaries of the tradition. Given his resulting restatement of Calvin’s instrumentalism in metaphysical terms, his tendency to speak of the church in incarnational language, and given his resulting doctrine of participation that paralleled eastern notions of theosis, it is not surprising that many contemporary Reformed theologians in England took exception to his work, that those who did not were often enamored of the political application of his doctrines, and that the continental Reformed took little notice of him.93 If Arnold Hunt is right that the sacraments need to be at the center of the history of the English Reformation, surely these idiosyncrasies in Hooker’s thought and the complicated nature of its reception should shape interpretations of his relationship to Reformed Orthodoxy accordingly.94

92 “The efficacy of baptism is not tied to that moment of time wherein it is administered.” Westminster Confession of Faith, 28.6, in Pelikan and Hotchkiss, Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition, 2:642. 93 For Hooker’s restatement of Calvin in metaphysical terms, see Neelands, “Christology and the Sacraments” in Kirby, A Companion to Richard Hooker, 391. For Hooker’s “theosis” and incarnational church, see Gregg, “Sacramental Theology in Hooker’s Laws,” 171, 176. 94 Hunt, “The Lord’s Supper in Early Modern England,” 40.

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W. Bradford Littlejohn, and Scott Kindred-Barnes: Introduction Primary Sources Vermigli, Pietro Martire. A Commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Edited and translated by Emidio Campi and Joseph C. McClelland. The Peter Martyr Library 9. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2006. Zanchi, Jerome. De Religione Christiana Fides—Confession of the Christian Religion. Edited by Luca Baschera and Christian Moser. 2 vols. Leiden: Brill, 2007.

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Rudy Almasy: Richard Hooker, Reformed Sermon Making, and the Use of Scripture Primary Sources Cartwright, Thomas. A commentary upon the epistle of Saint Paule written to the Colossians. Preached by Thomas Cartwright, and now published for the further use of the Church of God. London: Nicholas Okes, 1612. Greenham, Richard, Two Learned and Godly Sermons, Preached by that reverende and zelous man M. Richard Greenham. London: Gabriel Simson and William White, 1595. Hyperius, Andreas. The practice of preaching, otherwise called the Pathway to the Pulpet. Translated by John Ludham. London: Thomas East, 1577. Perkins, William. An Exhortation to Repentance. London: T. Creede, 1605. —. The Arte of Prophecying or A Treatise Concerning the sacred and onely true manner and method of Preaching. First written in Latine by Master William Perkins: and now faithfully translated into English … by Thomas Tuke. London: Felix Kyngston, 1607. Some, Robert. A godly sermon preached in Latin at great S. Maries in Cambridge, in Marche 1580. by Robert Some: and translated by himselfe into English. London: Henrie Middleton, 1580.

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Scott Kindred-Barnes: “Symbolizing with Idolaters”: George Gillespie’s Critique of Hooker’s “Convenient” Way Primary Sources Ames, Williams. A Fresh Suit Against Human Ceremonies in God’s Worship. N.p., 1633. Augustine. On the Spirit and the Letter. In The Anti-Pelagian Works of Saint Augustine, Bishop of Hippo. Translated by Peter Holmes. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1872. Bonnet, Jules, ed. and trans. John Calvin: Compiled from Original Manuscripts and Edited with Historical Notes. Vol. 2. Edinburgh: Thomas Constable and Co., 1858.

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Andrew Fulford: Richard Hooker’s Evidentialist Apologetic: Once More on Autopistos and Reformed Orthodoxy Primary Sources Bullinger, Heinrich. A Most Godly and Learned Discourse of the Woorthynesse, Authoritie, and Sufficiencie of the Holy Scripture. Translated by John Tomkys. London: William Ponnsonby, 1579. —. Commonplaces of Christian Religion. London: Bishop, 1572. —. Decades. Edited by Thomas Harding. Cambridge: University Press for the Parker Society, 1849. Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion. Edited by John T. McNeill. Translated Ford Lewis Battles. 2 vols. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1960. Martyr, Justin. The First and Second Apologies. Translated by Leslie William Barnard. New York: Paulist Press, 1997. Rollock, Robert. Select Works of Robert Rollock. 2 vols. Edited by William M. Gunn. Edinburgh: Wodrow Society, 1849. Turretin, Francis. Institutes of Elenctic Theology. Translated by George M. Giger, and edited by James T. Dennison, Jr. 3 vols. Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 1994.

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Drew Martin: Richard Hooker and Reformed Sacramental Theology Primary Sources Bray, Gerald Lewis, ed. Documents of the English Reformation. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994. Burges, Cornelius. Baptismall Regeneration of Elect Infants Professed by the Church of England, According to the Scriptures, the Primitiue Church, the Present Reformed Churches, and Many Particular Divines Apart. Oxford, 1629. Epistolae Tigurinae de rebus potissimum ad Ecclesiae Anglicanae reformationem pertinentibus conscriptae A.D. 1531–1558. Cambridge: Parker Society, 1848. Calvin, John. Ultima admonitio Ioannis Calvini ad Ioachimum Westphalum. In Ioannis Calvini opera quae supersunt omnia, edited by Johann Wilhelm Baum, August Edward Cunitz, and Eduard Reuss. Vol. 9. Brunswick: C.A. Schwetschke, 1870. Goode, W., ed. An unpublished letter of Peter Martyr… affording additional proof of the meaning of the Articles. London, 1850. Heppe, Heinrich. Reformed Dogmatics. Edited by Ernst Bizer, and translated by G. T. Thompson. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1950. Pelikan, Jaroslav, and Valerie R. Hotchkiss, eds. Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. Perkins, William. The Workes of That Famous and Vvorthy Minister of Christ in the Vniversitie of Cambridge, M. William Perkins. The Second Volume. Newly Corrected according to His Owne Copies. With Distinct Chapters, and Contents of Every Booke Prefixed: And Two Tables of the Whole Adjoyned; One of the Matters and Questions, the Other of Choice Places of Scripture. London, 1631. Travers, Walter. A short note of sundry unsound points of doctrine, at divers times delivered by Mr. Hooker in his public sermons, included in The Works of that Learned and Judicious Divine Mr. Richard Hooker with an Account of His Life and Death by Isaac Walton, edited by John Keble. Oxford, 1850. Ussher, James. The Whole Work of the Most Rev. James Ussher, D. D. Lord Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland. Edited by Charles R. Elrington. Dublin: Hodges, Smith, and Co., 1864. Ward, Samuel. Gratia Discriminans Concio Ad Clerum, Habita Cantabrigiae in Ecclesia B. Mariae, Ian. 12. 1625. London, 1626. Whitaker, William. Praelectiones de Sacramentis in Genere, et in Specie de SS. Baptismo et Eucharistia. Frankfurt, 1624. Whitgift, John. The Works of John Whitgift. Edited by J. Ayre. Parker Society: Cambridge, 1858. Willet, Andrew. Synopsis Papismi. 3rd ed. London, 1600.

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List of Contributors

David Neelands (Th.D, Trinity College and University of Toronto, 1988) is Dean of Divinity and Margaret E. Fleck Professor of Anglican Studies at Trinity College, Toronto. His research has dealt with the reception of Augustine of Hippo, especially in St. Anselm, and on the scholastic theology of Richard Hooker. His recent publications include various articles and chapters on Richard Hooker and his contemporaries in England. W. Brown Patterson is Professor of History (Emeritus) at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, and has written widely on British and European history and religion. His publications include King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge University Press, 1997), which won the Albert C. Outler Prize in ecumenical church history from the American Society of Church History. He is an active member of the Ecclesiastical History Society of Great Britain and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. A. S. McGrade is Professor of Philosophy (Emeritus) at the University of Connecticut and has spent much of his life in the field of Hooker scholarship, as well as late medieval and early modern philosophy and political thought more broadly. He is the editor of Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community (1997) and most recently Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling (2013). Paul Dominiak (Ph.D, University of Durham, 2016) is Dean of Chapel and Director of Studies in Theology at Jesus College in the University of Cambridge. His research interests are in metaphysics, natural law, politics, and doctrine in the medieval and early modern periods. W. J. Torrance Kirby is Professor of Ecclesiastical History at McGill. He received a DPhil degree in Modern History from Oxford University in 1988. He is a life member of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and has been a member of the

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List of Contributors

Princeton Centre of Theological Inquiry since 1996. Recent books include Persuasion and Conversion: Religion, Politics and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (2013), The Zurich Connection and Tudor Political Theology (2007), and Richard Hooker, Reformer and Platonist (2005). He is also the editor of A Companion to Richard Hooker (2008), and co-editor of Paul’s Cross and the Culture of Persuasion, 1520–1640 (2014). He is editor of a volume of selected Sermons at Paul’s Cross currently in press at Oxford University Press. Daniel Eppley (Ph.D., University of Iowa, 2000) is Professor of Religion at Thiel College, Greenville, PA. His research is focused on biblical hermeneutics in the English Reformation with special attention to the thought of Richard Hooker in its polemical context. He is the author of Defending Royal Supremacy and Discerning God’s Will in Tudor England (2007) and Reading the Bible with Richard Hooker (2016). Rudolph P. Almasy (Ph.D, University of Minnesota 1975) is Professor Emeritus of English at West Virginia University. Because he served in many administrative positions during his 46 years at WVU, he retired in 2015 from the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences with the title Dean Emeritus. Having written a dissertation on Richard Hooker’s discursive strategies in the Laws, he has continued an interest in the polemical literature of the English Reformation. In addition to essays on Hooker, he has also published on William Tyndale. John Knox, Johan Bale, Anne Askew, William Shakespeare, and John Donne. He is currently serving on the Administrative Council of the Society for Reformation Research. Scott N. Kindred-Barnes (Ph.D., University of Toronto) is the Minister of the Congregation at First Baptist Church Ottawa, Canada. He is the author of several articles on Richard Hooker and the book Richard Hooker’s Use of History in His Defense of Public Worship: His Anglican Critique of Calvin, Barrow, and the Puritans (2011). Scott serves as the Convenor of the Richard Hooker Society and represents the Canadian Baptists of Ontario and Quebec on the Board of Governors for the Canadian Council of Churches. Andrew Fulford is a Ph.D candidate at McGill University, where he is researching the relationship of Richard Hooker’s thought to narratives of the emergence of secularity in the early modern period. He has previously published an essay on Calvin’s political thought. W. Bradford Littlejohn is President of the Davenant Trust, a nonprofit organization supporting research in early modern Protestantism at the intersection of the church and academy, and Director of its Davenant Latin Institute. He also

List of Contributors

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teaches philosophy at Moody Bible Institute—Spokane. He is the author of Richard Hooker: A Companion to His Life and Work (2015) and The Peril and Promise of Christian Liberty: Richard Hooker, the Puritans, and Protestant Political Theology, as well as numerous articles in the fields of historical theology and theological ethics. Luca Baschera (Ph.D., University of Zurich, 2008) is Research Fellow at the Institut für schweizerische Reformationsgeschichte, University of Zurich. His research in the field of Reformation Studies focuses on prominent figures of the Swiss Reformation, such as Peter Martyr Vermigli and Heinrich Bullinger. His recent publications include critical editions of Bullinger’s Commentaries on the Epistles of the New Testament as well as the volume (co-edited with Bruce Gordon and Christian Moser) Following Zwingli: Applying the Past in Reformation Zurich. J. V. Fesko is Academic Dean and Professor of Systematic and Historical Theology at Westminster Seminary California in Escondido, California. He is an ordained minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and is the author numerous essays and books including, Beyond Calvin: Union with Christ and Justification in Early Modern Reformed Theology (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht), and The Covenant of Redemption: Origins, Development, and Reception (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). Michael J. Lynch is a Ph.D candidate at Calvin Theological Seminary, where he is researching the theology of John Davenant and early modern hypothetical universalism under Richard Muller. He is editing a translation of John Davenant’s De Praedestione et Reprobatione for forthcoming publication, and also serves as an instructor for the Davenant Latin Institute Drew Martin (Ph.D, Vanderbilt University, 2016) is Lecturer in the History of Christianity at Vanderbilt Divinity School. His research focuses on the intersection of theological and political ideas in the social and cultural context of early Modern England, and he is also interested in Reformation and Post-Reformation theology generally as well as the ideological underpinnings of past and present theories of secularization. His dissertation traces the reciprocal relationship between theological and political uses of the covenant with Moses in the years leading up to and during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum, and in addition to preparing it for publication, he also recently has contributed to The Oxford Handbook of Reformed Theology and The Oxford Dictionary of Late Antiquity.