"Even Your Own Deed Also": Law and Corporate Moral Agency

How can we be free even in the midst of obedience to laws with which we do not agree?  In a recent post, I expored the conundrum of law and liberty in the Reformation, and how we might be free even in submission to law when we recognize that obeying the law is a means of loving the neighbor.  Hooker, in seeking to persuade Puritan consciences that the laws of the English church were edifying, rational, and had in their favor the approval of centuries of church practice, and of the wisest among the Church of his own day, seems to be smoothing the way for such a free and voluntary law-obedience:

“Surely if we have unto those laws that dutifull regard which their dignitie doth require: it will not greatly need, that we should be exhorted to live in obedience unto them . . . . The safest and unto God the most acceptable way of framing our lives therefore is, with all humilitie lowlines and singlens of hart to studie, which way our willing obedience both unto God and man may be yeelded even to the utmost of that which is due” (III.9.3). 

Nonetheless, what about when we don't think the laws in question are edifying and rational?  What about when we, and others, heartily disagree with the decisions taken by those in authority?  Given the breadth and depth of the Puritan protest, it seems a bit audacious for Hooker to declare, “To them which aske why we thus hange our judgmentes on the Churches sleeve, I answer with Salomon, because two are better then one. . . . The bare consent of the whole Church should it selfe in these thinges stop theire mouthes who livinge under it dare presume to barke against it.”  After all, the “consent of the whole church” was precisely what was lacking

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"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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Why We Really Need a New Biography of Richard Hooker

The only modern biography of Hooker, Philip Secor's Richard Hooker: Prophet of Anglicanism, offers a complex, detailed narrative of Hooker's life, replete with intimate anecdotes illuminating his personality, etc.  The only problem is that half of it is fabricated out of whole cloth, spun out of the whimsical fantasies of Secor's overactive imagination.  If this criticism merely applied to the trivial anecdotes and episodes, it might be one thing, but unfortunately, Secor's whole understanding of the theology and thought-world of Hooker and his period derives from a similarly slipshod pastiche of fact and fiction.  I offer here for your un-edification his fanciful synopsis of the distinctive characteristics of "Puritans" and "Anglicans" in the Elizabethan period on page 51: 

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Indifference that Makes a Difference

Just what are adiaphora--"things indifferent"?  Regular readers will know that this concept, so central to the magisterial Reformation, has become a key theme not only of my thesis work, but of my ethical and theological reflection in general in the past year.  They may also have noticed that, however important, it is a highly unstable and ambiguous concept.  In a recent thesis chapter draft, I explored three different contexts in which the term might be used, and was used during the Reformation--exactly how one correlates the three, I think, makes a great deal of difference.  

The ancient Cynics, who coined the term, sought to designate all externals as adiaphora, identifying virtue solely with the interior quality of the self-sufficient soul.  The Stoics, who adopted the term as well, were inclined to be more guarded, treating all externals as adiaphora but still distinguishing between those things absolutely neutral and those that were such as to be generally preferred or rejected, although not intrinsically and in all cases good or evil.  The extreme Cynic position had few subsequent takers, although it made a sort of reappearance in Peter Abelard’s radical voluntarism, which asserted that “apart from intention all human actions, considered in themselves, are indifferent.”

Many other Church Fathers and medieval theologians tended to adapt the Stoic usage, qualifying it still further, and seeking to correlate it with the class of actions neither commanded nor forbidden, but “permitted” by the divine law of Scripture.  Luther, who made the concept of adiaphora so central to his doctrine of Christian liberty, came close to reviving the Cynic radicalism of the concept by the way he tied it to justification by faith.  Since we are saved and accepted before God by faith and faith alone, Luther could argue, all human works are completely indifferent, and no deed done in faith and love is to be preferred or valued over any other.  Having unleashed this antinomian spectre, however, Luther was quick to qualify, dialectically balancing this stark solfidianism with a renewed emphasis on the usefulness of the law and the importance of works of charity within the Christian life.

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Libertine Legalists

(This is an excerpt from a thesis chapter I am drafting, "Richard Hooker and the Freedom of the Christian Commonwealth"--it explores the paradoxically libertine yet legalist implications of the Puritan rejection of human authority)

For Hooker, the problem with Puritanism is a warped doctrine of Christian liberty which will assuredly destroy the liberty of the Church (and along with it, the State and the individual).  As we have seen already, the doctrine of Christian liberty declared that Scripture alone had authority over the conscience, and that therefore, no other authority outside Scripture could bind the believer.  Given the original thrust of this doctrine as a weapon against papal authority, it is no wonder that it should tend to abridge the liberty of the Church, pitting against it the freedom of the individual and the authority of Scripture.  Rightly qualified, of course, this exclusive authority of Scripture applied only in matters of faith and salvation, in “the spiritual kingdom” into which, by definition, no man could reach, and the doctrine did not need to pose any threat to suitably humble human institutions.  But as the Puritans had made Church discipline and ceremonies to be matters of faith and salvation, a clash was inevitable.  

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