Suspending Judgment: Hooker the Anti-Tweeter

While reading an essay by Georges Edelen this week, "Hooker's Style," I came across a more prosaic explanation of my instinctive antipathy to Twitter and its ilk (expounded in recent posts here and here); perhaps Hooker is just rubbing off on me.  Hooker, of course, is notoriously the Anti-Tweeter, occasionally indulging in sentences than can run up to a page in length, and which might take a week to diagram.  His Puritan opponents accused him of "cunningly framed sentences, to blind and entangle the simple"; Thomas Fuller famously described it as "long and pithy, drawing on a whole flock of several clauses before he came to the close of a sentence."  Indeed, Edelen's survey of Book I reveals that half his sentences are longer than 40 words, and fully a tenth are longer than 80 words.  However, Edelen suggests that there may be a method to his madness—that in his sentence style we see the key to his thinking as a whole.

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The Soul of a Christian Commonwealth

(An excerpt from a recent thesis chapter draft; citations removed)

Nowhere is Hooker's dependence on the dictum "grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it" more true than his treatment of the role of religion in the commonwealth. While Hooker understood public religion as a natural and civil phenomenon, not as exclusively Christian or spiritual, this did not mean it was a mere simulacrum of the spiritual; rather, although achieving its effect through natural and outward instruments, Christian worship can serve as a real pathway toward our growth in grace.  The key point, however, was that the civil kingdom, in addition to being concerned with all the mundane concerns of public order, economic prosperity, and outward protection that characterize our modern conception of the domain of politics, was also properly a religious order; it existed under God, toward God, and animated and structured by worship. 

Given Hooker's argument in Book I, it is not hard to see why this should be the case.  Human nature is not satisfied with mere finite, earthly ends, but constantly seeks a happiness beyond the bounds of temporal existence, a happiness to be found in God.  This restless longing for God, which subordinates and orders all other desires, will always, thinks Hooker, be reflected in the life of human society, which will always establish some kind of religious devotion at the heart of its public life.  Because of the centrality and ultimacy of this religious devotion, worship is not merely of value for its own sake, but serves as an anchor for the public life of the community, guaranteeing unity around a common object of love, and reverent esteem for the magistrates who are the guardians of this common life.

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Hooker in the Bedroom

Since launching The Calvinist International just a month ago, Steven Wedgeworth and Peter Escalante have built it into a first-class site, with thoughtful articles on topics as diverse as Shakespeare, VanDrunen, and Von Mises, an invaluable "Resources" page, and a very exciting project of Evangelical Resourcement entitled "How Then Have We Lived?," which I'm sure I'll be returning to over and over.  

This paean, of course, is somewhat self-serving, as TCI has just been kind enough to host the paper I presented at the Society for the Study of Theology last month, "Indifference that Makes a Difference: Richard Hooker and the Conundrum of Christian Liberty"; only, thank goodness, Peter E. has dressed it up (or undressed it?) with a snazzy new title: "Hooker in the Bedroom? Law, Liberty, and Things Indifferent."  In it, I try to draw on some very old categories to provide some conceptual clarification to contemporary evangelical confusions recently highlighted by Mark Driscoll's Real Marriage, which managed the impressive feat of scandalizing feminists and fundamentalists at the same time.  

Grace Perfects Nature: Hooker on Nature's Threefold Need for the Supernatural

(The following is a fragment of a thesis chapter draft I've been working up; it restates and repackages a number of matters that I've touched on here before, hopefully in a more satisfying and systematic way.)

Although Hooker lays great stress on the independent integrity and perspicacity of the order of nature, which has moral weight on its own, apart from the provision of special revelation, Hooker's valorization of reason and nature is often overstated by his interpreters.  In fact, I would suggest, there are three crucial qualifications on the "autonomy" of nature and reason.  First, nature and reason cannot be autonomous in the sense of encompassing their own end; nature cannot be considered a self-enclosed compartment, nor can reason be satisfied merely with the task of investigating creation.  This much is clear already from Hooker’s inclusion of the first great commandment as one of the prescriptions of the law of reason, however, he will have much more to say in support of this claim in Book I, chapter 11, insisting that man’s final end is one beyond nature—God.  Second, nature and reason cannot be autonomous in the sense of being capable, on their own, of reaching their final, supernatural end.  On this point, Hooker is particularly nuanced, attributing most of this incapacity to the reality of sin, but acknowledging a dependence on divine grace even in the state of innocence.  Third, nature and reason cannot be autonomous in the sense that the gift of revelation serves solely to provide a path to the supernatural end, and leaves reason perfectly adequate on its own for all natural purposes.  Let us investigate each of these three points in turn.  

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That Which is Not Negotiable

The sad news yesterday of Rowan Williams's impending departure from Canterbury seems to call for a tribute of sorts, which, purely by coincidence, I was planning to post this week anyway.  The following is a fantastic passage from his essay, "Hooker: Philosopher, Anglican, Contemporary" in Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community.  

Having summarized Hooker's account of the mutability of human affairs, the need for a readiness always to revisit our conceptions of what God calls us to do in the realm of practical action, he asks why it is that the same liberty to innovate should not be permitted to us in doctrinal affairs, as in matters of action?  After all, few moderns are still prepared to take seriously Hooker's happy confidence that Scripture affords us perspicuous access to objective truth, unconditioned by historical circumstance, when it comes to the fundamentals of faith.  Williams's response constitutes a thoughtful and sensitive attempt to defend Hooker's basic distinction, while translating it into theological terms more intelligible to our age:

"We cannot pretend that we are theological innocents, timelessly confronting the mystery of God's action.

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