"Stirred Up Unto Reverence": Worship as the Key to Hooker's Theology

The two most compelling portraits of Richard Hooker's theology have been offered by the great scholars Peter Lake, in Anglicans and Puritans? (1988), and Torrance Kirby, in a series of publications over the last twenty years.  Both are brilliant and insightful.  The only problem is that they appear, at least at first glance, to contradict.  Lake identifies Hooker as the "founder of Anglicanism," whereas Kirby eschews that term entirely as anachronistic and misleading.  Kirby sees Hooker as articulating a strict Protestant distinct between the two kingdoms, between visible and invisible Church, treating the former as part of the civil kingdom, whereas Lake emphasizes the continuity between the two and argues that for Hooker, outward forms of worship serve as the means of inward grace.  Can these two be convincingly bridged?  I had despaired of it, but as of today, I think they can be.  

The key idea on which Lake builds his case is Hooker's concept of edification, a concept central to the debate between Puritans and conformists, and integral to his defence of the Elizabethan church establishment.  Whereas the Puritans demanded that church orders and ceremonies dynamically enrich and build up the body of Christ, rooting out sin and training in godliness, most conformist apologists were content to rest their case on the "edification" that uniformity, decorum, and civil peace engendered.  Hooker was willing to meet the Puritans on their own turf, as Lake argues, and yet, as Kirby argues, he had to do so without confusing the two kingdoms distinction as the Puritans had.  How?

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Fermentations Online is Here!

After many long delays and fruitless vigils, the new web platform of Fermentations magazine is online!  We still have lots of work to do on architecture, styling, and content, but the basic structure and a couple dozen of our most recently published articles are there now, so please feel free to go rummage around, and check back frequently for updates!

Featuring articles by Peter Leithart, Doug Jones, Wesley Hill, and a crew of exciting young writers, and interviews with writers like Stanley Hauerwas and Eric Stoddart, Fermentations seeks to provide thoughtful and creative reflections on the intersection of theology and culture.  With the new website, soon you will be able to read all of our old articles, recipes, poems, short stories, and trademark "Bits of Tid," including some material never before published; and once we get everything running smoothly, you can expect brand-new content on at least a weekly basis.

The Party of Death

With Roe v. Wade day coming up, it is a time for bloggers everywhere to be weighing in with some thoughts about abortion.  Unfortunately, I already did that, purely by coincidence, two days ago, reflecting on some of the occasional unsavory excesses of the pro-life movement (for a chilling reminder, though, of the moral gravity of abortion in America, it's worth reading Al Mohler's post today, “Abortion is as American as Apple Pie”).

The greatest problem with evangelical politics today, however, is not that it is too pro-life but that it is not pro-life enough.  This is hardly a novel observation, having become a slogan of sorts for more leftward-leaning evangelicals, who would like to see a Christlike commitment to peace become part of Christian politics in America.  But the extent of the Christian Right's myopia has become glaringly obvious in this election cycle, which has been summed up for me (no doubt unfairly) in two memorable moments: (1) The cheers of a debate crowd when a moderator asked Rick Perry about the 234 death-row inmates he had executed as governor of Texas (which I blogged about last October), and (2) The crescendoing boos of a debate crowd (made up of my fellow Bible Belt South Carolinians) when Ron Paul said earlier this week, "Maybe we ought to consider a Golden Rule in foreign policy: we shouldn't do to other countries what we don't want to have them do to us."  

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Abortion and the Politics of Protest

In a recent piece for First Things On the Square, Kathryn Walker reviewed a book called Raised Right: How I Untangled my Faith from Politics by Alisa Harris.  I hadn't so much as heard the book before, but my interest is certainly piqued now.  Harris, like so many others in my generation, finds herself, despite having been given a full-blown fundamentalist, pro-life, right-wing upbringing, having somehow wandered across the political divide, so that she is now unmistakably left-wing, though still, I take it, evangelically Christian.  In this book, she chronicles her journey and tries to explain why.  For a fuller summary of the book, I certainly recommend Walker's excellent review; if I ever get around to reading it myself, perhaps I'll offer my own review, but for now, I simply wanted to pick up on one interesting question that Walker raises.

Walker does not share Harris's newfound sympathies for the Left, but she does at least give her a fair hearing, and grant that she may have some good points.  But for Walker, the most important issue is still abortion, and she can't accept Harris's rationale for minimizing that issue.  Harris remains pro-life, but has lost her sympathy for the pro-life movement, it's foot-stomping and sign-waving, and wants to invest her effort into caring for women, rather than politicking.  But Walker asks toward the end of her review why Harris happily engages in sign-waving in protest against Bank of America—"she embraces public displays against injustice, and it’s hard to see any difference in the latter over the former ones, except for the causes themselves. And in this case, it’s not clear why corporate greed trumps infanticide in degrees of heinousness."

Walker's question set me pondering a bit, because I must confess I find myself feeling a lot like Harris at times.

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A Prayer for Church Unity

Composed for St. Paul's and St. George's Church, the Second Sunday of Epiphany; on the passage 1 Corinthians 1:1-17

Blessed God and Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ, 

We thank you for this challenging passage before us today, and the challenging message we have just heard.  May the words we have heard today stick in our hearts and strengthen us to be your Body in the world, one in faith, hope, and love.  

We give thanks to you God for the grace that has been given us in Christ Jesus, that in every way we have been enriched in him in all speech and all knowledge, so that we are not lacking in any spiritual gift.  Lord, you have blessed us immensely.  You have blessed us with material gifts, with the gift of great freedom, with gifts of knowledge, as we today have the theological learning of two thousand years literally at our fingertips. 

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