Basically, when I’m talking to Reformed people, I say something like “Think of him as Anglicanism’s John Calvin.” He became within a few decades after his death the preeminent theologian of the tradition that came to call itself “Anglican,” even though Hooker wouldn’t have thought of himself in these terms.”

I’m pleased to host this excellent interview between Mere Fidelity contributor Alastair Roberts and my friend Dr. Brad Littlejohn. Dr. Littlejohn, who did his doctoral work at Edinburgh with Mere O favorite Oliver O’Donovan, has just published a popular level introduction to 16th century English theologian Richard Hooker. If you’re like me, you’ve probably come across Hooker’s name somewhere, but don’t know much about him. His lone major work, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, is hard to track down in an affordable edition. So Hooker is just a name for most of us, like other obscure theologians in the church’s past. Brad’s book will go some way toward addressing this problem. Having read it, I now want to find a way of reading Laws, if only I can find an affordable edition. Enjoy the interview! (Full disclosure, Brad is the president of the Davenant Trust, an organization I’m pleased to serve as a board member. But even if I were not his friend and fellow board member I would be delighted to host this interview here at Mere O.)

Thank you for agreeing to join me to discuss the subject of your new book, Richard Hooker: A Companion to His Life and Work. For the sake of those who may not be familiar with Hooker, can you give a very brief description of who he was?

Sure thing. Basically, when I’m talking to Reformed people, I say something like “Think of him as Anglicanism’s John Calvin.” He became within a few decades after his death the preeminent theologian of the tradition that came to call itself “Anglican,” even though Hooker wouldn’t have thought of himself in these terms, just as Calvin never thought of himself as the first “Calvinist.” His life was comparatively short (1553-1600), almost entirely coinciding with Queen Elizabeth’s long reign (1558-1603), so he is mostly known only for his one great work, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.

As an Anglican, I am familiar with the importance ascribed to Hooker within our tradition. However, your book stands out from a number of treatments of Hooker I have encountered by identifying him strongly as a Protestant and, indeed, as a self-consciously Reformed theologian. Beyond his immediate Anglican context, why and how does Hooker belong to the Reformed tradition?

Well, a lot of it is a matter of reconceiving what it meant to be “Reformed” in that period. Nowadays we often think in terms of the Westminster Confession of Faith, but that was of course still fifty years off when Hooker was writing. Even Dordt, which would try to codify predestinarian orthodoxy for the Reformed churches, wasn’t for another quarter century. The various 16th-century confessions tended to be shorter, focusing on the key points and leaving ample room for debate on lesser points (of course, even Dordt and Westminster were much more like this than they have come to be treated by many of their modern heirs). The mistake of many Anglican writers who distance Hooker from the Reformed tradition is to imagine that Calvin’s own emphases were definitive of what it meant to be Reformed—hardly! Bullinger, equally a father of the Reformed tradition, and more influential on England, talked about predestination, the Eucharist, and the relation of church and state in very different terms than Calvin. Vermigli, who would’ve had the most direct impact on Hooker, made extensive use of scholastic methods and ideas associated with Thomas Aquinas, an approach that many used to suggest was illustrative of Hooker’s break with the Reformed tradition. This kind of diversity was the norm, rather than the exception, well into the 17th century if not later. English Protestants, whether they were puritans or conformists, thought of themselves as part of this international community of Reformed churches of diverse polities and emphases right up through 1630 at least.

It is also the case that it has become increasingly clear that on many particular points where Hooker has always been read as un-Reformed and distinctively “Anglican” in the later sense of that term, such as his treatment of the visible church and the sacraments, these readings have been less driven by what he actually wrote than how he was appropriated by later writers. Hooker is a very precise writer, and has to be read much more carefully than is often done.

I should emphasize, though, that the point of my work is not to “steal” Hooker from the Anglicans and give him to the Reformed, in some zero-sum way. Rather, the point is that this was simply not a meaningful distinction in Hooker’s time, or for several decades after him. Of course Anglicans should take pride in what Hooker contributed to their tradition, but they shouldn’t define their tradition in a way that tries to exclude its Reformed roots.

Reading your book, I was struck by what seemed to be an underlying concern on your part to rediscover the generous bounds of our theological traditions beyond a supposed ‘mainstream’, to reacquaint us with the wealth of their variegated sources, and simultaneously to draw deeply upon yet maintain freedom with regard to their many voices. Both in your description of the richness of his immediate context of theological conversation—an ‘international community of Reformed churches of diverse polities and emphases’—and in your account of the ways in which he related to the voices of the past, Hooker seems to be a very cosmopolitan thinker, operating within a capacious tradition and also drawing upon philosophical and theological minds far beyond Protestant circles. It is hard to imagine a mind and voice like Hooker’s apart from a tradition that is deep, rich, open, and diverse enough to nourish it and expansive enough in scope to accommodate it. It seems to me that the question of whether Hooker is Reformed is a different question from that of whether he was Reformed. In what manner can Hooker still be appropriated as a Reformed voice? Or, approached differently, what sort of tradition do we need to be able to recognize Hooker as one of our own?

I really like how you’ve summarized my objective here—I may have to borrow some of these lines in the future! Another way of saying it is that, rather than recovering Hooker as “Anglican,” or as “Reformed,” my book tries to recover him as a paragon of “mere Protestantism” (it is perhaps no coincidence that he was one of C.S. Lewis’s favorite theologians), jealously safeguarding the central gains of the Reformation by strenuously opposing attempts to turn every doctrinal distinction or polity decision into a hill to die on. But as I argue in the last chapter in particular, such a flexibility has to be arrived at, paradoxically, by anchoring oneself within a tradition and then sorting out its essential and non-essential features, rather than by trying to pre-emptively adopt a vantage point from nowhere, or a least-common-denominator evangelicalism, as so many try to do today. But as you note, not just any conception of a tradition will do.

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