It is a great challenge to respond as a theologian to Professor Doe's magisterial survey in the article published in the previous pages of this Journal.I was asked to respond to the paper upon which that article is based from a theological perspective as part of the Ecclesiastical Law Society's 2022 day conference. Professor Doe demonstrates how, in the years between Hooker and the Church Assembly, ecclesiastical lawyers had recourse to both ethical, natural law arguments and those purely from legal or even positivistic ones. It is significant to see how frequently the Anglican theorist, Richard Hooker, is invoked throughout the article. He dates, of course, from the Reformation period when, as Harold Berman points out, a pre-Enlightenment jurisprudence still obtained which combined all three dimensions of law – the political, the moral, and the historical. In my view, what is important about Hooker is that he makes no separation between the legal and the ethical because law is divine in origin and even in God himself there is a law of his being: ‘the being of God is a kind of law to his working’ in giving his perfection to what he makes and ‘God is a law both to himself and to all other things beside’. Moreover, the ethical is only realised in what we decide to do and the laws we make. Law in Hooker is even Christological because, just as the Father begets the Logos (the Son), so the law proceeds as his continuing work in creation and history. To walk in God's ways and obey his laws is to be in union with Christ. Hooker was, of course, working out the meaning of the emerging Church of England in the Reformation Settlement, but even the pragmatic is itself participatory in the divine law and he appeals back to the natural law tradition for that reason.

Richard Hooker's theology of law was rarely far from pragmatic concerns. He wanted to promote a peaceful and prosperous human community before God while holding that moral right consists in conformity to the divine will. In this paper, we tread a narrow path between Hooker as ‘villain’ because of his role in preparing for the modern separation of ethics from metaphysics and as ‘unqualified hero’ whose ethically substantive and teleological theology of law took inspiration from Holy Scripture and the angels' worship of God. The claim is that Hooker's theology of law still provides a fertile environment in which to think practically today about questions such as: What is the nature of divine authority? What is law for? What should characterize the human exercise of authority?

Richard Hooker (1554–1600), while respected in his own time, has become famous in the twenty-first century. For a generally secular age of postmodernism, Hooker offers a remarkably coherent foundational methodology and presents a vigorous case for conservative Christianity. With central attention to Jesus Christ, he celebrates faith, appreciates tradition, and honours reason. Of course, Hooker wrote for his own times. But he has remained relevant, since he cherished truth that does not age. Of the eight books of his Lawes, in Book V Hooker recorded what may be called the most powerful witness for Evangelical and Catholic Christianity in a profound Anglican formulation. While the central orientation to Christ was characteristic of all of Hooker's works, Book V combined his methodological concerns with such central doctrines as the Church, the definition of prayer, Christology, and the holy sacraments. At the same time Hooker also reflected on the theological dimensions of a great variety of liturgical issues. This brief statement, however, precludes a detailed concern with all that is valuable, and focuses on the major doctrines. Moreover, Book V can also be viewed as a creative celebration and defence of the Book of Common Prayer.