Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: Books I to IV
London: J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd., 1958, 429 pgs.
Summary: Richard Hooker (1554-1600) in 1584 became the master or rector of the Temple in London. The Temple was a prominent church that was Puritan friendly because of the patronage of a prominent noble and a diplomat. Prior to the coming of Hooker a simpler worship service had been allowed and maintained by Walter Travers (1548-1635). Travers’ ordination was through a continental presbyter, and he refused to be ordained under Anglican orders. He was thus disqualified by the Anglican hierarchy from becoming rector. Travers was left on as a lecturer or reader.
Hooker quickly established the worship of the main church services along the lines of the Anglican prayer book. Travers and the Puritans attempted for a time to run a parallel church service. Hooker and Travers soon began preaching against each other in opposing services leading to charges and counter charges of sin and incompetence. Archbishop Whitgift (1530-1604) silenced Travers and was supported by the Privy Council in 1586.
The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity was the fruit of the public dispute between the Puritans and the Anglican over church polity, the Book of Common of Prayer, and the entailed ceremonies. The main focus of the first four books is epistemology, hermeneutics, and inconsistencies in the Puritan/Presbyterian critique. The three issues are intermixed and the editors have provided citations of Hooker’s quotes and allusions from Travers and Thomas Cartwright’s (1535-1603) defense of Presbyterian practice and government; the critical apparatus from Keble’s Hooker’s Works is also included.
Hooker’s basic argument is that the New Testament is either silent on how the church ought to be ordered or allows modifications from the “historical” commands and examples found in the New Testament. To make this argument, he must first define what law is and how reason and revelation function together to guide the church.
In Hooker’s estimation of things law is embedded in the order of creation: “That which doth assign unto each thing the kind, that what which doth moderate the force and power, which doth appoint the form and measure, of working, the same we term a Law. So that no certain end could ever be attained, unless the actions whereby it is attained were regular; that is to say, made suitable, fit and correspondent unto their end, by some canon, rule or law” (1.2.1, pg. 150).
God lays down eternal law which is “that order which God before all ages hath set down with himself, for himself to do all things by” (1.2.6, pg. 154). The law that orders natural agents is natural law; the angels obey the Celestial law; the law of Reason binds together those that are reasonable. And that which “is not known but by special revelation from God, Divine law; Human law, that which out of the law either of reason or of God men probably gathering to be expedient, they make it a law” (3.1, pg. 155).
Human beings are born without knowledge or intuition and so we must use reason to discern what is best for us. Reason gives us insight into the purpose of the law and the application of the law.
Hooker summarizes:
A law therefore generally taken, is a directive rule unto goodness of operation. . . .The rule of voluntary agents on earth is the sentence that Reason giveth concerning the goodness of those things which they are to do. And the sentences which Reason giveth are some more some less general, before it come to define in particular actions what is good (1.8.4, pg. 177).
Reason is the determining factor in deciding what must be done and if it be good or evil by considering the different laws that we are exposed to—divine, natural, and human. The outcome of reason or the sentence tells us “what must be done; or else permissive, declaring only what may be done; or thirdly, admonitory, opening what is the most convenient for us to do” (1.8.8, pg. 181).
As powerful as reason is human laws (civil/ecclesiastical) are necessary, because we must assume “the will of man to be inwardly obstinate, rebellious, and averse from all obedience unto the sacred laws of his nature” (1.10.1, pg. 188). {This was picked up by John Locke.} Men in general desire their own good above others, and therefore, law must be devised “which all men shall be forced to obey. . .men of common capacity and but ordinary judgment are not able (for how should they?) to discern what things are fittest for each kind and state of regiment” (1.10, pg. 193).
The purpose of divine or supernatural law is to allow man to find his ultimate good in God. Or to order his life in accordance with his heavenly purpose. It is only in the Bible that we discover things “concerning that Faith, Hope, and Charity, without which there can be no salvation” ( 1.11.6, pg. 209). Without God’s law there is no knowledge of man’s ultimate end with God and the means by which it is obtained. Scripture is sufficient for the knowledge of salvation.
The church is a hybrid society, because it is both earthly and supernatural. In as much as the Bible lays down universal laws that cannot be changed, these laws must be followed from Scripture. Yet those laws which “do not always continue, but may perhaps be clean otherwise a while after, and so may require to be otherwise ordered than before; the laws of God himself which are of this nature, no man endued with common sense will ever deny to be of a different constitution from the former, in respect of the one’s constancy and the mutability of the other” (1.15.3, pgs. 221-222).
Hooker sees the main error of the Puritans as misunderstanding the difference between divine law which applies to salvation and the other laws that apply the ordering of the church in the most convenient way. Natural, human, and rational law are subsumed within divine law. “For as they rightly maintain God must be glorified in all things, and that the actions of men cannot tend unto his glory unless they be framed after his law; so it is their error to think that only law which God hath appointed unto men in that behalf is the sacred Scripture” (1.16.5, pg. 227).
In the second book Hooker deals with four texts used by the Puritans to require “that Scripture is the only rule of all things which in this life may be done by men” (Book 2—title, 233). The texts are Proverbs 2:9; 1 Corinthians 10:31; 1 Timothy 4:5, and Romans 14:23.
The primary text comes about by combining 1 Timothy 4:5, “it is made holy by the word of God and prayer,” and Romans 14:23, “For whatever does not proceed from faith is sin.” Because things are made holy by the word of God, if something is not contained in the word of God it cannot be of faith and is by definition sin.
Hooker responds, “I would demand of them first, forasmuch as the nature of things indifferent is neither to be commanded nor forbidden, but left free and arbitrary; how there can be any thing indifferent, if for want of faith sin be committed when any thing not commanded is done. So that of necessity they must add somewhat, and at leastwise thus set it down: in every action not commanded of God or permitted with approbation, faith is wanting, and for want of faith there is sin” (2.4.3, pg. 242).
Hooker’s frustration is that the Puritan/Presbyterian definition of indifference creates the rhetorical effect of obeying the Bible in all things, but in reality they are forced to be as arbitrary as the Anglicans. The difference is that Anglicans claim that their authority comes from wisdom, civil/church position, and the Bible, but the Puritans claim an absolute biblical.
Which point I wish they did well observe, with whom nothing is more familiar than to plead in these causes, “the law of God,” “the word of the Lord;” who notwithstanding when they come to allege what worked and what law they mean, their common ordinary practice is to quote by-speeches in some historical narration or other, and to urge them as if they were written in most exact form of law. What is to add to the law of God if this be not? When that which the word of God doth but deliver historically, we construe without any warrant as if it were legally meant, and so urge it further than we can prove that it was intended; do we not add to the laws of God, and make them in number seem more than they are? It standeth us upon to be careful in this case. For the sentence of God is heavy against them that wittingly shall presume thus to use the Scripture (3.5, pg. 3-4-305).
Continuing into the third book, the author also points out that the Jerusalem Council forbid fornication, eating meat sacrificed to idols, blood, or meat from animals strangled in Acts 15. The meat sacrificed to idols was now moot, but on the issue of eating blood or meat from strangled animals the Western church had abrogated the command. Hooker points out, “Notwithstanding, as the law of ceremonies delivered unto the Jews, so this very law which the Gentiles received from the mouth of the Holy Ghost, is in like respect abrogated by the decease of the end for which it was given” (3.10.2, pg. 330).
The basic issue is twofold. Hooker defines the church as national and the church has the right to add ceremonial laws, revealed and unrevealed, and to abrogate them based on the end of the law or the intent of the law. “But touching things which belong to discipline and outward polity, the Church hath authority to make canons, laws, and decrees, even as we read that in the Apostles’ times it did. Which kind of laws (forasmuch as they are not in themselves necessary to salvation) may after they are made be also changed as the difference of times or places shall require” (3.10.7, pg. 333).
In the fourth book, Hooker continues to point out inconsistencies in the Puritan/Presbyterian critique of Roman or Roman-like ceremonies within the Anglican ceremonies.
Benefits/Detriments: An enormously influential theological treatises for the English speaking world.
It is extremely important that modern evangelicals and fundamentalists comprehend the accuracy of Hooker’s critique of the Puritan/Presbyterian understanding of “things indifferent” in both church and everyday life. Hooker’s work is a dead letter if we don’t link the impulse of claiming rock music comes from the “pit of [noise]” (Ps. 40:2), super-fecundity from Psalm 127:5, that paddling as the only discipline to Proverbs 22:15, and so forth to this Puritan misstep.
Further, as Oliver O'Donnovan writes on Thomas Cartwright (1535-1603), the continental Reformed did not share share in this Puritan excess:
“In their opposition to external ecclesiastical forms (of liturgy, vestments, offices, and discipline) legislated by Elizabeth's parliament of 1559, Cartwright and Travers repudiated Calvin's notion of ‘things indifferent’ (adiaphora), i.e., not regulated by God's express law, which might be variably decided on other grounds by ecclesiastical authorities, including civil sovereigns. Instead they proposed the comprehensive regulation of Christian action by God's revealed commands, either by his ‘particular’ commands or, in the case of apparently free action, by his ‘general’ commands. On the principle that particular commands elicit the more perfect obedience, Cartwright argued that the church's ministries and discipline are, in all important respects, established by Christ's particular directives, given in the speech and practice of the apostles and evangelists, as recorded in Acts and the Epistles: while ‘unspecified’ details of orders and ceremony, etc., are subject to Christ's general directives delivered by St. Paul” Oliver O’Donovan and Joan Lockwood O’Donovan, From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999), 703.
Hooker also pointed out rather firmly that if his guidelines for the changing of ceremonies are not followed, then consistency with both Calvin’s rule and the Puritan modification requires believers’ baptism rather than infant baptism and congregationalism rather than either a presbyter or episcopacy. Hooker’s preface was a careful argument that the Anabaptist’s principles of hermeneutics, ecclesiology, and separation are more coherent than the Puritan argument on these issues.
At the same time, Hooker makes three horrifying missteps of his own. The first is his definition of the earthly church as a national body rather than a local body. The second is to assume absolute abrogation of the ceremonial and civil law of both Old Testament and New Testament.
Thirdly, that New Testament authority exists to abrogate or modify the New Testament ceremonial law.
The examples that he gives are generally the temporary setting aside of a law to meet the overall end of the law. Such examples are not nullification. The intent of the Sabbath and the show bread law was never to weaken the anointed king of Israel and his followers. In situations where strangled slaughter, eating blood or food sacrificed to idols would confuse the gospel, the church should avoid these things. These laws were not abrogated in intention. The need for holy convocations (Lev. 23:2-4) continues (Heb. 10:25). The day of the week may change, but the intent remains the same. The law is never abolished (Matt. 5:17).
He also does not recognize that both the New Testament and Old Testament ceremonial and civil law not only organized the people but communicates particular truths about God and his people. To change a revealed ceremony or to change the revealed civil/church order is to change the truth communicated or to abandon that truth. When the congregation no longer participates in church discipline and electing elders and deacons, the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers (1 Peter 2:9) is suppressed. To allow women to be pastors confuses the historical narrative of the Fall (1 Tim. 2:12-14) and the complimentary order and submission of the Godhead (1 Cor. 11:3). Taking away the cup from the laity or exchanging the bread for apple slices changes the truths communicated.
Further, the entire Old Testament law continues to function as a device to communicate God’s expected moral outcomes for his people. Paul’s casual collation of the Old Testament law in regards to women speaking authoritatively in church (1 Cor. 14:34) and moral law application of don’t “muzzle the ox” (Deut. 25:4) in 1 Corinthians 9:9 and 1 Timothy 5:18 shows that the intent of the law is not abrogated.
Exemplar Quotes:
LoveMy desire therefore to be loved of my equals in nature as much as possible may be, imposeth upon me a natural duty of bearing to them-ward full the like affection. From which relation of equality between ourselves, with several rules and canons natural. Reason hath drawn for direction of life no man is ignorant; as namely, “That because we would take no harm, we must therefore do none;” “That sith we would not be in any thing extremely dealt with, we must ourselves avoid all extremity in our dealings;” “that from all violence and wrong we are utterly to abstain;” and such like. . . . 1.7.7, pg. 180
Epistemology and DoctrineThe truth is, that the mind of man desireth evermore to know the truth according to the most infallible certainty which the nature of things can yield. The greatest assurance generally with all men is that which we have by plain aspect and intuitive beholding. Where we cannot attain unto this, there what appeareth to be true by strong and invincible demonstration, such as wherein it is not by any way possible to be deceived, thereunto the mind doth necessarily assent, neither is it in the choice thereof to do otherwise. And in case these both do fail, then which way greatest probability leadeth, thither the mind doth incline. Scripture with Christian men being received as the Word of God; that for which we have probable, yea, that which we have necessary reason for, yea, that which we see with our eyes, is not thought so sure as that which the Scripture of God teacheth; because we hold that his speech revealeth there what himself seeth, and therefore the strongest proof of all, and the most necessarily assented unto by us (which do thus receive the Scripture) is the Scripture. Now it is not required nor can be exacted at our hands, that we should yield unto any thing other assent, than such as doth answer the evidence which is to be had of that we assent unto. For which cause even in matters divine, concerning some things we may lawfully doubt and suspend our judgment, inclining neither to one side nor other; as namely touching the time of the fall both of man and angels; of some things we may very well retain an opinion that there are probable and not unlikely to be true, as when we hold that men have their souls rather by creation than propagation, or that the Mother of our Lord lived always in the state of virginity as well after his birth as before (for of these two the one, her virginity before, is a thing which of necessity we must believe; the other, her continuance in the same state always, hath more likelihood of truth than the contrary); finally in all things then our consciences best resolved, and in a most agreeable sort unto God and nature settled, when they are so far persuaded as those grounds of persuasion which are to be had will bear ( 2.7.5, 268-269)
The OT Church Adding to the Ceremonies without Explicit CommandIf all things must be commanded of God which may be practised of his Church. I would know what commandment the Gileadites had to erect that altar which is spoken of in the book of Joshua. Did not congruity of reason induce thereunto, and suffice for defence of their fact? I would know what commandment the women of Israel had yearly to mourn and lament in the memory of Jephpthah’s daughter; what commandment the women of Israel had to celebrate their feast of Dedication, never spoken of in the law, yet their feast of Dedication, never spoken of in the law, yet solemnized even by our Saviour himself; what commandment finally they had for the ceremony of odours used about the bodies of the dead, after which custom notwithstanding (sith it was their custom) our Lord was contended that his own most percious body should be entombed. Wherefore to reject all orders of the Church which men have established, it to think worse of the laws of men in this respect, than either the judgment of wise men alloweth, of the law of God itself will bear (3.11.15, 350-351)
Adding to the LawWhich point I wish they did well observe, with whom nothing is more familiar than to plead in these causes, “the law of God,” “the word of the Lord;” who notwithstanding why the come to allege what work and what law they meant, their common ordinary practice is to quote by-speeches in some historical narration or other, and to urge them as if they were written in most exact form of law. What is to add to the law of God if this be not? When that which the word of God doth but deliver historically, we construe without any warrant as if it were legally meant, and so urge it further than we can prove that it was intended; do we not add to the laws of God, and make them in number seem more than they are? It standeth us upon to be careful in this case. For the sentence of God is very heavy against them that wittingly shall presume thus to use the Scripture (3.5, pg.305).