Richard Hooker, Priest and Theologian

1 Corinthians 2: 6-10,13-16
Psalm 37: 3-6,32-33

Normally I break the regular cycle of daily office readings for a “major feast” of the Church; that is one of the New Testament saints who are listed in the Book of Common Prayer.  But we also have a collection of readings and prayers for Lesser Feasts and Fasts, in which we remember famous saints who have lived since the time of the New Testament.  Today, I’m drawing from the second book to remember the most influential theologian in the history of this thing called Anglicanism – Richard Hooker.

Hooker lived in the time of Queen Elizabeth I.  He died on November 3, and when we know the death of a famous saint, we remember them on that date rather than their birth.  In all honesty, I don’t recommend that you run out and buy one of his books.  It is very dense reading, and his principal work, Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, runs at least five volumes.  But of this work, Pope Clement VIII, certainly no religious ally of Hooker, said that Hooker’s writings “had in it such seeds of eternity that it would abide until the last fire shall consume all learning.”  If I may attempt to summarize Hooker’s massive work, he sought to reconcile reason and the Bible in a time when extreme Protestants and extreme Catholics would have made the two irreconcilable.  It is from Hooker that we have derived the image of Anglican theology resting on the three-legged stool of scripture, tradition and reason.  That’s a slight over-simplification.  Hooker himself did not use that image, and he considered scripture to be the paramount authority of what we believe as Christians.
 
But Hooker understood that since Holy Scripture does not actually claim such authority (Think: is there any place in the Bible where it is claimed to be the final authority of our faith?  A hint; the answer is no); then the authority of the Bible must rest on some other authority.  In truth, it was the Bishops of the Church, meeting in 325 AD, who determined those books that belonged in the New Testament and those that did not.  Thus, tradition, that oral teaching and example handed down from the 12 Apostles through their successors the Bishops, becomes a second leg in this stool, which begins with Holy Scripture.

Which brings us to reason.  In Elizabethan England, All English subjects had to be members of the Church of England.  Some Anglicans leaned in a more Catholic direction; others in a more Protestant way.  Hooker found himself in contention with extreme Protestants whose love of the Bible led them to denigrate reason, even to the point of proposing that God was purely will; and that to attribute any reason to God was wrong.  In the spirit of Paul, who says in today’s reading that “we have the mind of Christ,” Hooker insisted that as creatures made in God’s image, then our ability to reason, however compromised by sin, was still a reflection of our Creator’s reason.  In other words, God is not someone who does things that make no sense to us just because he’s God and we’re not.  Reason, and the knowledge it gives us, is God’s gift to us and becomes the 3rd leg of that stool on which stand, with scripture always our surest guide to the truth that saves.

At my seminary in Alexandria, Virginia, there is a seal with its motto: “Seek the truth, Come whence it may, Cost what it will.”  In other words, we seek the truth, first in the Word of God as we find Jesus in the Bible, but also recognizing that God’s truth cannot be contained within human words.  May we always seek that truth in the mind of Christ which we all share.