The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker: Volume IV, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: Attack and Response, the Folger Library Edition. W. Speed Hill, General Editor

by Richard Hooker, John E. Booty (Editor)

We turn to Richard Hooker to understand the intellectual background of the Renaissance. He sets forth in his writing the ethical, political, and religious assumptions of his age. This magnificent old-spelling edition of Hooker’s works has long been needed, and is being greeted with universal admiration.

Volume Four presents the text of the first and only major attack on the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity ―namely, A Christian Letter , 1599―with Hooker’s marginal notes made on his own copy of the Letter ; and the more extensive essays which he left in manuscript, written in preparation for a published reply. The importance of these notes and essays lies in their expansion of some of the more controversial points made in the Laws , and in the light they shed on Hooker, his personality, method, and sources.

John Booty’s Introduction and substantial commentary place Hooker’s arguments firmly in their historical and theological contexts.

332 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Richard Hooker (March 1554 – 3 November 1600) was an Anglican priest and an influential theologian. Hooker's emphases on reason, tolerance and the value of tradition considerably influenced the development of Anglicanism. He was the co-founder (with Thomas Cranmer and Matthew Parker) of Anglican theological thought. Hooker's great Elizabethan guide to Church Government and Discipline is both a masterpiece of English prose and one of the bulwarks of the Established Church in England. Hooker projected eight books for the great work. The first four books of Ecclesiastical Polity appeared in 1593, Book V in 1597. Hooker died in 1600 at the age of forty-six and the remaining three books were completed, though not revised, before his death. The manuscripts fell into careless or unscrupulous hands and were not published until long afterwards (1648 to 1662), and then only in mutilated form. Samuel Pepys makes mention of Hooker's Polity three times in his Diary, first in 1661, "Mr. Chetwind fell commending of 'Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity,' as the best book, and the only one that made him a Christian, which puts me upon the buying of it, which I will do shortly." In 1667 Pepys bought the new edition that had been printed in 1666, the first to include the life of Hooker by Izaak Walton.

Reviews

[W. Littlejohn · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolutely fascinating volume, this represents the last writings of Hooker's life, when he was called upon to respond to a sweeping attack on the Lawes, published as "A Christian Letter [. . .]," which shrewdly sidestepped the almost irrefutable meat of Hooker's argument (on adiaphora, the nature of law, the flexibility of ecclesiastical ordinances, etc.) and opted to attempt to discredit him by arguing that on fundamental premises of theology (Christology, sacraments, predestination, the authority of Scripture) he had departed from the confessional standards of the English Church, and from Reformed orthodoxy. Many of the charges were so strained as to be laughable (e.g., that he was an Arian), but others touched on very crucial issues in Hooker's theology (e.g., how he handled predestination), prompting Hooker to start working on a thorough, carefully-reasoned response, which unfortunately remained mostly incomplete at his early death.

In this volume, then, we have (in addition to a fine introduction), three sections: first, A Christian Letter, with Hooker's delightfully impatient and frequently scornful marginal notes interjected throughout--his first impressions, apparently, as he read through the text; second, a rough outline that he penned of how he was going to construct his response on the issue of predestination; and third, the essentially coherent and even polished, but fragmentary "Dublin Fragments," containing his most thorough statement on the most vexed issue of the day, predestination. For anyone struggling to make sense of that doctrine, to articulate their vaguely-felt concerns with strict TULIP Calvinism, to find an acceptable, cogent, and biblical middle way, READ THIS TEXT. Here you will find evidence of a truly gifted theological mind at work, and one enormously erudite, richly steeped in the traditions of the Church and desirous of following them as much as possible. And the Dublin Fragments are only about 75 pages long.

I confess that I had to read through them in some haste, only slowing down to carefully study certain key parts of the argument. This text certainly merits extremely careful attention and study, but unfortunately, predestination is scarcely, if at all, relevant to my thesis work, and I haven't the leisure for such careful attention right now.