Another Feast Day: Richard Hooker

Today is the feast day of Richard Hooker, Anglican priest and theologian. The readings for his day include one of my most favorite Psalms, which says the law of the Lord is more desirable than gold and sweeter than honey. We hear, too, from 1 Corinthians, where Paul says they speak wisdom—“not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age”, but rather “God's wisdom, secret and hidden, which God decreed before the ages for our glory.”

Both of these readings speak of a love of truth and rightness as revealed to us by God in the law and in our hearts—a perfect fit for Richard Hooker.

He was born in 1553. In 1594-7 he wrote what Lesser Feasts and Fasts calls “a comprehensive defense of the Reformation settlement under Queen Elizabeth the First. This work, his masterpiece, was entitled Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.” This included one of the earliest defenses of The Book of Common Prayer. The prayer for Hooker says he defended Anglicanism “with sound reasoning and great charity,” and asks that we maintain this “middle way” of our church—which is both catholic and reformed—“not as a compromise for the sake of peace, but as a comprehension for the sake of truth.”

I’ve loved Hooker since I first heard of him during my freshman year at Princeton. I was in the (speedy) process of falling in love with the Anglican tradition, and so was bombarding our Episcopal chaplain, Steve White, with every question I could think of. (E.g., What is the purpose of living? Why do you wear robes? Why do people suffer?)

In one of his responses, Steve explained to me the idea of the three-legged stool, an image taken from part of Hooker’s Laws. He said that the three legs upon which we stand are Scripture, reason, and tradition (in particular, the traditions of the Christian church). Archbishop Rowan Williams, in a 2005 speech, explains Hooker’s overall argument thus:

“Put very plainly, the Bible does not give us an alibi for the use of common sense, ordinary discretion, imagination, willingness to learn from experience and whatever else belongs to mature human reflection on behaviour. The 'sufficiency' or perfection of Scripture, argues Hooker, is a matter of its perfect capacity to do what it is meant to do. . . . [I]f we suggest, for example, that nothing except what is commanded in the Bible can be other than sinful, we paralyse a great deal of ordinary human life.”

            What appealed to me most was that Hooker (as Williams says) was “opposing . . . any picture of these things [law and revelation] that refuses the work of interpretation or that pretends that history has come to a halt.” What an idea!

            In my freshman year, I was stunned that there were not only scholars but also priests and parishioners who held this view—and who still prayed before meals, sang hymns, and meant it when they said “Amen”! Raised in fairly conservative Evangelical churches and schools, I had been taught that there was one obvious way to interpret the Scriptures—i.e. in a mostly literal manner—and that this had always been the way of interpreting them. Furthermore, any alternative was not wholly Christian, but a version watered down by extraneous thinking and weak character. (Perhaps it’s better to say that even if my pastors hadn’t meant to teach me this, it’s certainly what I learned.) As I grew older, I had more and more questions, but those who read the Bible in this way couldn’t answer them; this was the beginning of a longer story which finds its end in the Anglican tradition.

I’ve discovered that there have always been many ways of interpreting the texts and traditions of Christianity. I’ve learned that there are many human fingerprints all over the words and ideas of the Christian churches, and that any way we choose to interact with them is an interpretive choice.

And lo and behold, I am still a Christian! I still lean on the grace of God, and still praise his statutes, his law, and his judgments, which are “sweeter far than honey” and dearer to me than gold. There are many reasons to celebrate Richard Hooker; I celebrate especially his ideas which came across the years and showed me a new way of thinking.

The second image is of a gold coin with Queen Elizabeth’s profile, minted in England between 1597 and 1600; you can find more info on the British Museum’s page.