To understand the theology of Richard Hooker it is important to grasp something about the times and the place in which he lived and something about the church he served with such distinction. Hooker was brought up far from the nation’s capital, in a rather conservative part of England. The West Country of which Exeter was the principle city hadn’t taken to the Reformation with much relish. Cornish and Devon parishioners revolted against the first Prayer Book in English in 1549. Hooker was born a mere four years later during the reign of Queen Mary. His earliest memories of church would have been the restored Latin Mass imposed by that unfortunate Queen.

When Hooker was five, Elizabeth I ascended the throne of a nation of perhaps five million people. She would preside over an extraordinary era. During her reign the English would be described as “a nest of singing birds”, the time of Tallis, Byrd and Merbecke. The Arts flourished. This was the age of Marlowe, Ben Jonson and of course William Shakespeare.

The restoration of an autonomous Church of England in 1558 enabled greater academic freedom in the ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Developments in printing and the availability of books opened a wider readership. All this was funded by a newly emerging middle class, and of merchants whose businesses thrived on the trade and sometimes piracy which was made possible by the “discovery” of the New World, and the establishment of trading posts as far a field as India and the East Indies. This was the age of Raleigh and Drake who in their small boats reaped the rewards of an expanding world.

Yet England was by no means a settled or safe country. Elizabeth’s grandfather Henry VII seized power in a military coup and had little legitimate claim to the throne. His son, Great Harry ruthlessly murdered all rival claimants to the throne and in an act of extraordinary audacity grasped the English Church into his own hands, earning the enmity and hostility of the Roman Catholic monarchs of Europe and of the Papal Establishment. He was succeeded by his boy son Edward VI, a bright consumptive, largely in the power of his rapacious uncles. The dissolution of the monasteries in Henry VIII’s reign deprived the poor of what we would term social services and medicine. Edward’s uncle’s and their cronies proceeded to deprive laborers of much of their traditional common land, upon which they grew their food.

While perhaps the Reformation was popular among the new middle class of literate people, the poor were deprived of the drama of the Mass and pictorial aids now obscured by Reformed whitewash which now covered the wall paintings in the parish church. They were less affected by the rhythm and poetry of the Book of Common Prayer than the literate upper and middle classes. It would take half a century for Cranmer's prose and biblical emphasis to sink into the soul and experience of the English people. That it retained its extraordinary influence on the spirituality and language of so many in England and later abroad, for four hundred years is extraordinary. It did so long after its language was that of the common man. Loss of that influence on the theology and spirituality of contemporary Anglicanism has deprived the church of something which was unique to the apprehension of the Anglican ethos.

During the lifetime of Hooker, England was under threat of invasion from external forces particularly that of Spain whose attempt at invasion was frustrated more by weather than by English resistance. The realm was also under threat from zealots who took the Pope’s excommunication of Elizabeth seriously and thought it a righteous act to assassinate her. Elizabeth’s unhappy cousin, the Catholic Mary of Scotland, more a pawn than a ringleader remained a rallying point for recusants until the reluctant Elizabeth was obliged to have her executed.

During the previous reign of Elizabeth’s sister, Mary, many “reformers” exiled themselves and some settled in the Geneva of John Calvin. There they encountered a church tailor made to Reformed religion, a religion more and more dominated by the teachings and character of one man, a French lay lawyer, Jean Cauvin, John Calvin. Hitherto the reformers of the English Church had been constrained by the religious conservatism of Henry VIII and the short reign of Edward VI gave only five years for them to effect a more thorough reformation. Edward’s reign was succeeded by nearly five years of Catholic restoration in which most of the reforms of the past twenty years were reversed.

When the exiles came home in 1558, “full of Calvin” they were met by a Queen determined to limit the extent of reformation and to incorporate in one church the whole nation. Thus those who wished to remake the English Church on Calvinist lines were constrained by the Queen’s determination to preserve the structure of the English Church in its pre-reformation form, through a succession of diocesan bishops, and the preservation of the parish as the inclusive geographical and territorial unit of church life. If doctrine changed, ecclesiastical form and place, and liturgical discipline formed around the feasts and fasts of the Church Year were to remain. The Queen believed that a single national all-embracing church was necessary for the peace and security of the realm. She dealt swiftly with her second Primate, Grindal, who sympathized with those who would be later styled “Puritans” because they believed in a pure church peopled only by the elect.

Elizabeth's religious views, as far as we can discover them, seem to have been formed in her youth as she worshipped in the Henrican Church of England with its continued use of traditional forms and ceremonies. Her chapel retained the ornaments and some of the ceremonies of her early religious experiences. She famously rebuked a bishop who preached against the crucifix on her altar, stopping the sermon in its tracks with a loud retort. She was in so many ways her father's daughter.

The differences between the Church party and radical "evangelicals",( I use evangelical in the context of the time and not with reference to what the 18th and 19th Century Evangelicals termed "evangelism") were not in their joint abhorrence of the Church of Rome, nor about the substance of Reformed doctrines of Grace, and substantially Predestination and Election. Here we have no struggle between Anglo-Catholics and Evangelicals. The differences were both structural and pastoral: structural as we have noted in the preservation, of a provincial, diocesan and parochial system embracing the entire population and pastoral in that a basic assumption was made that all the baptized, unless excommunicate were "parishioners" to be cared for by the clergy in a patient application of the Christian Faith in the Liturgy and the rhythm of the Christian Year. One sees this temper expressed in the second paragraph of the 17th Article of Religion. One may term this approach as an optimistic application of Calvinism tempered by pastoral ministry.

Archbishop Whitgift, Grindal’s successor was both an able administrator and a foe of extremism. He followed and endorsed Elizabeth’s policy, what would later be termed “comprehension”. The term implies a wide tolerance for those who were willing to adopt the religion of the Prayer Book and the structure of the National Church. He encouraged young scholars, many of whom would go further than he in recapturing the heritage of the past and reject a root and branch separation of the Church of England from its pre-Reformation heritage.

For the later days of Elizabeth’s long reign were threatened not primarily by foreign invasion or Roman Catholic insurrection, but by the advanced “liberal”, that is to say novel teachings of the sectarian Reformed party lead by Cartwright and Walter Travers, a cleric ordained by Presbyterian rite in Holland by Cartwright and who later refused Episcopal ordination. These men and their followers were among those who embraced the teachings of Calvin’s successors and who were faced with the same intrinsic problem. Both Luther and Calvin taught the perspicuity of Holy Scripture, that is that any person of faith who read the Scriptures would be led to right belief by the Spirit. This implied that illiterate folk were as capable of rightly interpreting Scripture as any scholar, or so it was popularly thought. It further taught that any ecclesiastical action unbacked by the authority of Holy Scripture was illicit and “papist.”

Such a view ignored tradition completely and obviously posed the problem of whose interpretation of Scripture was correct. The result of such a theory could and ultimately would lead to a “confusion of the sects” in Cromwellian England a scant fifty years later. Lutheran and Reformed theologians sought to define and limit such freedom by the adoption of theological statements and tests in the form of Confessions and set up “local” authority to replace the determining authority of the papacy. “Sola Scriptura” had to have limits and yet within such limits, Reformed radical scholars and leaders affirmed the right of every ordained minister to preach and teach as he was so moved.

The church authorities attempted to enforce the use of the lessons appointed for the Sundays, feasts and fasts of the Christian Year, the use of the surplice as a minimal vestment and a strict adherence to the Prayer Book. A series of visitations by the Primates in their Provinces were intended to create uniformity and to oblige clergy to keep their ordination vows. Many clergy were trained and ordained under the old system and had not the learning or ability to preach the doctrine of the Reformed Church of England. A series of sermons for the Christian Year, the Homilies were issued. The pupose of the Book of Homilies (appended to the Articles of Religion) was twofold. They were both a standard of permitted doctrine and a practical "sermon service" for ill-trained clergy. The right to compose and preach sermons was restricted by diocesan license.

The “sectaries” as the proto-Puritans were termed at first sought to work illegally within the Established Church by setting up “classes” within the diocesan system. Devout clergy and laity seeking the radical reformation of the church met, prayed, discussed and formed churches within the church. The leaders of the Church and the Queen herself believed these “sectaries” posed a threat to the unity of both church and realm. They implicitly challenged the authority of the Queen as the “Supreme Governor of the Church of England as far as the Laws of Christ allow.” They further threatened the parochial system in which every member of the parish community belonged to the parish church and enjoyed its ministry, liturgy and sacraments. They rejected the constraints of the lectionary and the Propers for each Sunday. Preferring to preach at the Spirit moved them. The sectaries sought a narrower definition, a reformed church peopled by the elect, right believing, right acting people. Beginning in the last part of Elizabeth’s reign and in a more pronounced form in the next two Stuart reigns, radical reformed parsons began to refuse baptism and communion to those whose manner of religion or life offended their “puritan” sensibilities.

It is extraordinary that in such hot beds of Puritanism as the University of Cambridge and to a lesser extent Oxford a younger generation of scholars emerged who rejected the narrowness of Reformed Calvinism. Among them would be Lancelot Andrewes, perhaps with John Donne the greatest preacher of his age.It has been suggested that these young people, the first to be exposed to the cadences of Anglican worship from the cradle, were the first whose faith and spirituality was formed by the Book of Common Prayer.

Yet it was left to the protégé of the learned and Reformed Bishop of Exeter John Jewel, one Richard Hooker, the son of a newly emerged middle class merchant, to take the religion of the Prayer Book and defend its reasonability, catholicity and traditional heritage. In 1586 Hooker reluctantly accepted the appointment of Master (rector) of the Temple Church off Fleet Street in London, the parish church of the lawyers. He did so at the bidding of Archbishop Whitgift. The Temple Church, once the London center of the Knights Templar, was a hot bed of Puritanism. Its Lecturer, or curate, was Walter Travers, protégé of Richard Cartwright who was not episcopally ordained. Travers had the right to preach each afternoon. Hooker a shy and gentle soul found that the sermons he preached at morning worship were attacked each afternoon. “The forenoon sermon spoke Canterbury, and the afternoon Geneva”. Even after Travers was inhibited he launched a pamphlet war against Hooker. Hooker sought to be relieved of his post, retired to a country parish at Boscombe near Salisbury where he wrote the first four books of his masterly “Ecclesiastical Polity”. After a move to a country parish in the Canterbury diocese, he died in 1600, unaware that his great work would influence the theology, structure and theological temper of Anglicanism to this day. His last books were published posthumously. Even Pope Clement VIII said of Hooker’s great work “it had in it such seeds of eternity that it would abide till the last fire shall consume all learning.”

Studies of the Elizabethan church have been hampered by attempts to impose upon this era modern partisan interpretations, from both a "Catholic' and "Evangelical" viewpoint. Yet the Elizabethan Church of England has its own story and the impartial scholar must seek to leave behind modern baggage in telling the story. In this we all fail. Yet what was to triumph was something unique. In the end the memories evoked by a succession of worshipers and believes who took themselves to the churches of their ancestors and celebrated the important moments of life therein, trumped all attempts to impose upon Church of England folk the ideals of the few.

The following essays will explore Hooker’s writings and his contribution to the emergence of “Anglicanism” and commend them perhaps to Hooker’s young heirs, many of whom are discovering in Anglicanism a way to the truth and the life in Jesus. I leave that task to others!