Mtr Kelli Joyce

Dear Friends in Christ,

Today is the Feast of St. Richard Hooker! Hooker was a priest and theologian who lived and wrote during the English Reformation, and who died on this day in the year 1600. He was not a prolific writer, and is primarily known for his multi-volume masterwork, “On the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.”

All of this may sound rather dull or unremarkable, and I will confess that in seminary many of my friends and I were more interested in making jokes about his name and bemoaning his love of run-on sentences than we were in engaging his thought as deeply as it deserves. But now I would argue that Richard Hooker may be the most influential and important theologian of the Anglican Reformation other than perhaps Thomas Cranmer himself.

Hooker’s work spans volumes not only because he never met a dependent clause he didn’t like, but because he was writing to show the deficiencies of not one, but two popular theological schools of thought. Hooker addressed the positions of both Reformed and Roman Catholic thinkers of his day on a wide range of theological questions, and put forth distinctively Anglican answers. Sometimes he rejected both the Reformed and the Roman position in favor of third alternative, while in other cases he saw one side or the other as being largely correct. That is, he would have been happy to say that the Roman Catholics were right about the importance of Bishops, but the Reformed were right to reject papal supremacy. He sought the truth wherever he found it, and worked to base his theology on Scripture, interpreted with the aid of tradition and reason.

The collect for today’s feast is, without exaggeration, one of the most beautiful in our tradition. “O God of truth and peace, who raised up your servant Richard Hooker in a day of bitter controversy to defend with sound reasoning and great charity the catholic and reformed religion: Grant that we may maintain that middle way, not as a compromise for the sake of peace, but as a comprehension for the sake of truth; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.”

The middle way that is spoken of here, as the collect says, is not about compromising the truth or declaring that centrism is always the best way forward. Hooker took clear stances, and rejected alternative positions as false. But he was willing to see goodness and truth wherever they were to be found. His works didn’t consist in splitting the baby by averaging the positions of his various interlocutors together. They involved thoughtful engagement with the questions at hand, and a clear and firm assertion of what God’s truth had to say about the matter.

May we follow his example in our lives and in our communities.

In peace,
Mtr Kelli