Book Review: Reading the Bible with Richard Hooker

Abstract

Reading the Bible with Richard Hooker. By Daniel Eppley. Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 2016. xxxviii + 307 pp. $79.00 (cloth).While the recent renaissance of Richard Hooker studies has produced many fine research monographs and articles, there remains an urgent need to get Hooker back into the classroom, the pulpit, and the pew, to enable this startlingly relevant sixteenth-century divine to speak into the twenty-firstcentury church and society. Daniel Eppley's new book, Reading the Bible with Richard Hooker, answers to that need wonderfully, while at the same time offering fresh insights and opening new paths of inquiry for Hooker scholars. Recognizing that today, just as much as in the Reformation era, many Protestants remain confused about just what to do with their mantra of sola Scriptura, Eppley mines wisdom from Hookers clash with Thomas Cartwright and the Puritans to address the nature of certainty, and the role of reason and human authority in Christian faith. Eppley brings his careful reading of Hookers corpus into conversation with Susan Schreiner's recent research on the quest for certainty in the sixteenth century and Barbara Shapiro's on the seventeenth century, but also, more creatively, with the play Othello.Chapter 1, Scoundrels and Fools, carefully surveys the background of religious debate that set the stage for Hooker's contribution, particularly the Admonition Controversy between John Whitgift and Thomas Cartwright. Despite their radically different conclusions and allegiances, both men, argues Eppley, shared a commitment to a simplistic and literalistic biblical hermeneutic that made them see any who disagreed with them as either ill-intentioned scoundrels or unintelligent fools.Chapter 2, The Puritan is perhaps the most engaging read as well as the most original contribution of the book, comparing Hooker's diagnosis of the dangers of a misguided search for certainty to that offered by Shakespeare in his famous tragedy. Although not claiming that Hooker's analysis directly influenced Shakespeare's play, or even that Shakespeare had the problem of Puritanism specifically in mind when he wrote Othello, Eppley persuasively argues that both are wrestling, within a few years of each other, with the same constellation of issues such that they can shed remarkable light on one another. Both, in short, show that the misguided quest for certainty in matters that are intrinsically uncertain is a recipe for destructive selfdeception, as ambiguous evidence is made to bear an unsustainable weight.Chapter 3, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, expands upon this argument by showing how Hooker, recognizing that most matters of scriptural interpretation and application are probabilistic rather than certain, puts great weight on the role of the community and its representatives in making these probable judgments. …