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Richard Hooker on the Lawful Ministry of Bishops and Kings

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Arthur Stephen McGrade
Arthur Stephen McGrade*
Affiliation:
University of Connecticut
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Extract

The part of Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity most attractively relevant to the theme of this conference is Book V, the first spiritually constructive exposition of the religion of the Book of Common Prayer. Hooker’s edifying account of the public duties of religion in the first seventy-five chapters of Book V and of the ordained ministry in the concluding six chapters can readily be appreciated today on its merits, leaving aside the fact that the religion of the Prayer Book was legally prescribed for all English Christians when Hooker wrote. It is on this currently unattractive fact of legal prescription that I want to concentrate, however, for it sets the historical context for the public devotional theology of Book V. To understand Hooker’s justificatory account of this fact is to become clearer about an essential difference between what is going on today when people minister and are ministered to in accordance with Anglican religious forms and what Hooker, at least, held to be going on when these forms were used in the sixteenth century.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 26: The Ministry: Clerical and Lay , 1989 , pp. 177 - 184
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1989

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References

1 Cargill Thompson, W. D. J., ‘The Philosopher of the Politic Society: Richard Hooker as a Political Thinker’, in Speed Hill, W., Studies in Richard Hooker, pp. 3–76 Google Scholar; reprinted in Thompson, Cargill, Studies in the Reformation, ed. Dugmore, C. W. (London, 1980)Google Scholar. Eccleshall, Robert, ‘Richard Hooker and the Peculiarities of the English: The Reception of the Ecclesiastical Polity in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, History of Political Thought, 2 (1981), pp. 63—117.Google Scholar

2 Parenthetical references are to the newly discovered autograph notes and to book, chapter, and section of the Laws, followed by volume and page of The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, W. Speed Hill, general editor (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1977—). Where the Folger numbering of sections within chapters differs from Keble's, both numbers are given, Keble’s indicated with a K.

3 Autograph Notes; 3, pp. 463–523. Hooker’s notes for a response to the attack on his position on predestination in the Christian Letter of 1599 are printed on pp. 523–38 and also in 4, pp. 83–97, with commentary at 4, pp. 234–9.

4 Comparatively few studies of Hooker consider him in a narrowly legal context. Exceptions are Paul Forte, ‘Richard Hooker’s Theory of Law’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 12 (1982), pp. 133–53, and McCauliff, C. M. A., ‘Law as a Principle of Reform: Reflections from Sixteenth-Century England’, Rutgers Law Review, 40 (1988), pp. 429–65.Google Scholar

5 Hooker considered this informative title for cap. I in his Autograph Notes, 3, p. 495.

6 See above, p. 179.

7 Sandys was commenting on an early draft of Book VI of the Laws. His and George Cranmer’s comments on this draft are published in vol. 3 of the Folger edition, pp. 107—40. Sandys’s question is at pp. 130–2.