Richard Hooker (1553–1600) is known today primarily as the author of the work unpromisingly titled Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, and is often thought of as the father of Anglicanism, forging a middle way between the Reformers and Rome. Convinced that the church today has much to learn from the judicious Hooker, Brad Littlejohn aims to introduce the man and his work to modern audiences, an important part of which includes situating him accurately in his historical context and dispelling the myths that have accumulated around him.
Deeply indebted to the work of Torrance Kirby, Littlejohn argues that Hooker, rather than an Anglican aberration, was representative of the best of Protestant theology and fell squarely within the Reformed tradition. Littlejohn’s book adds to the growing body of work that argues that the Reformed tradition is broader than often thought. The book thus is part of a movement that consciously seeks to recover the diversity of the Reformed movement from a perceived narrowing of that tradition over time.
The book, although poorly edited in parts, is well written and contains lucid expositions of many aspects of Hooker’s views, including those on law, the sacraments, and the church. It is not, however, merely an exposition of Hooker’s views; Hooker is commended to us in almost every chapter. As this review cannot do justice to every aspect of the book, I will confine myself to some of the major themes.
Hooker wrote the Laws during the late 1500s to defend the worship and structure of the English church against its challengers. His chief protagonists were the “precisianist” Puritans, who argued that Christians should derive precise positive guidance from Scripture for every area of their lives, particularly in ecclesiastical matters. The second challenge was Presbyterianism, with its belief in lay elders and the equality of ordained ministers as the necessary biblical form of church government. The Presbyterian insistence on a spiritual government, distinct from the civil magistrate and rightly exercisable only by church officers, also posed a challenge to the unity of the civil and ecclesiastical orders and the authority of the queen.
According to Littlejohn, the primary fault common to both the precisianist Puritans and the Presbyterianism espoused by the likes of Thomas Cartwright was “biblicism,” a term employed to mean something like “the desire to resolve every issue on a particular subject (e.g., morals, polity, worship) by recourse to a scriptural principle.” This was the quest for an illusory certainty. Scripture nowhere promises or delivers such comprehensiveness, and so it was illegitimate to simply interrogate Scripture until it yielded an answer to every question.
Littlejohn argues that the Thomistic dictum “Grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it” was operative throughout Hooker’s work. The Christian religion is not a set of arbitrary beliefs and commands, radically discontinuous with human reason and natural impulses, but it purifies and rightly directs them to their proper ends. Rather than sharply separated and hermetically sealed spheres of “spiritual” (governed by Scripture) and “secular” (governed by reason), Hooker’s approach would perhaps lead to a more unified view of human knowledge, recognizing that in all areas divine certainty is rarely to be had.
This brings us to the key argument of the book—namely, that there is much more uncertainty and contextual variation inherent in human knowledge than we are ordinarily disposed to accept, even in matters of theology, morals, polity, and worship. Prudential wisdom, reason, and natural law ought to be our main guides, with an acceptance of the fallibility of our knowledge. The book is therefore a plea to reclaim large fields of legitimate disagreement and uncertainty from the insistence that every issue must be resolved by appeal to Scripture.
This aspect of the book offers some intriguing parallels. The argument is remarkably similar to the critique of the “quest for illegitimate religious certainty” contained in R. S. Clark’s Recovering the Reformed Confession (P&R Publishing, 2008), which Clark defines as “the pursuit to know God in ways he has not revealed himself and to achieve epistemic and moral certainty on questions where such certainty is neither possible nor desirable” (39). It also recalls Tim Keller’s argument in Center Churchthat decisions about ministry practices—such as how to worship, disciple, and evangelize, which he argues depend (implicitly or explicitly) on a “theological vision” for restating the gospel in the cultural context in which a church is ministering—are more contextual than typically recognized.
The book is likely to surprise at a number of points. Not least is Hooker’s self-presentation as a more faithful exponent of the Reformed tradition than the Puritans and Presbyterians, who were “wayward sons of that tradition” (8, 69). Of course, the best of recent historical scholarship emphasizes the continuity of later Calvinism with its earlier exponents; and if the streams of the Reformed tradition were broad enough to allow even Hooker to sail upon its waters, it would seem strange to insist that the Puritans and Presbyterians were significantly off course.
There are a few exceptions to the careful scholarship otherwise evident throughout the book. Although the author concedes that “it is too easy to draw a careless contrast between the heartless, legalistic Puritan and Hooker as the salver of the tender conscience” (97), the burden of chapter 7 appears to be precisely to draw such a contrast. Littlejohn considers that the heart of the Presbyterian reform agenda was “an aggressive policy of church discipline” consisting entirely, it would seem, of casting out hypocrites from the church (103). At one point, an unnamed Puritan is even made to appear standing, magnifying glass in hand, between heaven and the church, actively searching out imperfections in the parishioner’s life so as to deny assurance—a balm, needless to say, that Hooker is on hand to provide (107). It is not clear whether such a Puritan actually existed, or whether this is a figment of Hooker’s overactive imagination, seeking out the elusive pimpernel of biblicism and its soul-destroying consequences in unlikely places.
Confusion can also arise due to the fact that it is not always clear in the book whether Littlejohn is speaking of the precisianists or the Puritans more generally, the biblicist Presbyterians or other variants of Presbyterianism. It is well to bear in mind that Hooker’s targets were the extreme precisianist wing of the Puritans, and many Reformed thinkers would join in his critique of those views.
The emphasis on biblicism at times obscures the genuinely interesting points of disagreement between Hooker and more typical Reformed views. For example, Littlejohn attributes to Hooker the view—striking to modern Christian ears—that the church as a visible institution partakes of the same earthly character as other human societies. However, rather than drawing out the implications of this, Littlejohn leaps (in my mind at least) to the mundane conclusion that we cannot expect Scripture to set out the details of church polity comprehensively and unchangeably (44–45), reducing the issue to one of biblicism.
The reader may wonder whether Littlejohn has done enough to convince us of Hooker’s importance for today. If Hooker’s singular distinction is to have convincingly demolished a set of rather absurd views, which have been long abandoned by sensible Reformed thinkers, then why is he worthy of such attention? While biblicism is an error that needs constant refutation, it is not so apparent from the book what those of us who are not biblicists ought to learn from Hooker. The mature formulations of Presbyterianism and Reformed ecclesiology were crafted long after Hooker wrote, and are much more nuanced than the views criticized by Hooker, and yet still sharply at odds with Hooker’s views. Being directed to Hooker is thus akin to being directed to the midpoint of the conversation. Bavinck was later to summarize the standard Reformed view: “Scripture itself is not a book of church order, but it does contain the principles of church government that cannot be disregarded without injury to the spiritual life” (Reformed Dogmatics, 4.370). What would Hooker have said about this? It is beyond the scope of the book to address these issues in detail; perhaps, therefore, we can look forward to fuller elaboration in Littlejohn’s forthcoming book.
Contemporary Reformed readers will also likely have concerns about the broader direction of the book. Arguably, Littlejohn is too ready to attribute uncertainty to Scripture. One wonders whether any attempt to claim sanction for an ecclesiological principle from the Bible, or any resistance to the existence of extrascriptural moral principles, would be criticized as biblicism. After all, while it may be readily admitted that Scripture does not deliver a moral code, or the details of church polity comprehensively and unchangeably, it is hardly bereft of principles. And the fact that Scripture does not deliver comprehensive certainty does not mean it does not deliver any certainty at all. Thus, to my mind, uncertainty threatens to substitute one problematic starting point with another. Should we not let Scripture determine the scope of its own perfection?
The book succeeds admirably in providing a reliable and accessible introduction to Hooker. Littlejohn demonstrates an excellent knowledge of Hooker scholarship and the historical context; the book is learned but also accessible to the nonspecialist. It is sure to stimulate thought and challenge contemporary readers.
Cascade Books, 2015, 222 pages (paperback), $25.00
