Response to ‘“Legalists and Moralists” in the Historic Portrayal of the Constitution of the Church of England’

Abstract

It is a great challenge to respond as a theologian to Professor Doe's magisterial survey in the article published in the previous pages of this Journal.I was asked to respond to the paper upon which that article is based from a theological perspective as part of the Ecclesiastical Law Society's 2022 day conference. Professor Doe demonstrates how, in the years between Hooker and the Church Assembly, ecclesiastical lawyers had recourse to both ethical, natural law arguments and those purely from legal or even positivistic ones. It is significant to see how frequently the Anglican theorist, Richard Hooker, is invoked throughout the article. He dates, of course, from the Reformation period when, as Harold Berman points out, a pre-Enlightenment jurisprudence still obtained which combined all three dimensions of law – the political, the moral, and the historical. In my view, what is important about Hooker is that he makes no separation between the legal and the ethical because law is divine in origin and even in God himself there is a law of his being: ‘the being of God is a kind of law to his working’ in giving his perfection to what he makes and ‘God is a law both to himself and to all other things beside’. Moreover, the ethical is only realised in what we decide to do and the laws we make. Law in Hooker is even Christological because, just as the Father begets the Logos (the Son), so the law proceeds as his continuing work in creation and history. To walk in God's ways and obey his laws is to be in union with Christ. Hooker was, of course, working out the meaning of the emerging Church of England in the Reformation Settlement, but even the pragmatic is itself participatory in the divine law and he appeals back to the natural law tradition for that reason.