Smash hit

I shall be arguing that in directing our attention to both contingent history and the present complexity and variety of the believing community, Hooker is in fact making a basic theological point about the priority of divine action; so that, as I’ve hinted, it is the very notions that prompted accusations of Catholic sympathies which are most strongly rooted in the concerns of the magisterial Reformation.

One can see why Hooker’s authority owes not a little to the enthusiasm of Catholic controversialists in the 17th century, who were very ready to appeal to his defence of the traditional or “mythic” as an unexploded papist bomb on Anglican territory. Yet, as I have tried to suggest here, any controversial advantage to be gained from Hooker’s cautious defence of tradition and usage is substantially offset by the genuinely Reformed emphasis that underlies the whole, the appeal to the priority of divine action as the true locus of unity for the Church.

There is some presumption, at least, in favour of received forms of church order; to deny this is both to set up a contemporary theological theory as arbiter of ecclesial acceptability (and thus to take a purely human initiative in determining the boundaries of the Church) and to put into question the incarnational pattern of God’s invisible self-association with the complex interlockings of human experience — God’s working through the links we are hardly aware of, historical and communal, so as to bring us to our perfection. To the Catholic challenge that, on such a basis, there could never be adequate reason to deny the necessity of the papacy, Hooker would reply that the problem comes precisely with a declaration of the necessity of anything beyond the basic grammar of incarnate divine freedom.

That the orthodox faith has been consistently proclaimed in an episcopal church (above all in the formative age of doctrinal statement, the first five centuries) suggests that God’s action is not impeded by this structure; whereas (he would probably argue, like most of his circle) the full-blown development of the papacy does confuse and obscure the central principle.

He might want to say to a good deal of modern theology that its imagination had become weak because it too readily allowed the theological agenda to be set by conflicts over human power, especially the power to determine social boundaries for the Church, and not by the classical Christological formulations.

I want to look at two issues in particular. Both issues are really to do with the undoubtedly odd fact that Hooker uses what is in some ways a potentially radical apologetic in defence of a conservative and perhaps authoritarian position. The first is this: granted the Church’s power to make new ordinances of discipline, how in fact do we know when to make such changes? The second question is one of obvious modern import.

Language just as much as other kinds of practice is judged on its aptness to circumstances: if discipline is mutable, why not doctrine? The community seeking to conserve its conformity to the law of God cannot, in the world of fallen history, remain for ever in a state of political ignorance; it must decide how to enact its aims, and so give up its indeterminate potential.

There is a certain prima facie conservative implication here, which Hooker manifestly exploits; and the emphasis on the sanction that the enforcement of such positive law possesses reminds us unambiguously that part of the polemical purpose of laws was to secure a rationale for legal action against religious dissidents.

The question Hooker poses for the doctrinal revisionist is a serious one, one that needs articulation in our contemporary theological debates.

If we are not somehow bound by what God is and what we are, however stumblingly and inadequately we can speak of these things, what possibility is there of sustaining a belief in the common good of human creatures beyond the terms of a minimalist discourse about survival?

THE FATE OF LIBERAL ANGLICANISM

Brooke Foss Westcott (1825-1901) was a Cambridge professor and liberal theologian asked to resign his canonry at Peterborough after the Revised Version of the Bible, which he was closely involved with, was published. He went on to become Bishop of Durham