Laws Of Ecclesiastical Polity Research Articles

Literary Forms/Techniques & Methods of Study

Literary Forms/Techniques & Methods of Study Fred W. Guyette, Christopher T. Begg, Richard A. Taylor, and Brian J. Meldrum 170. [Bible Study in Orthodox Judaism] Hayyim Angel, "Bridging Tradition and the Academy: The Literary-Theological School in Orthodox Bible Study," JBQ 50 (1, 2022) 19–35. Traditional Judaism includes core beliefs in prophecy, the divine revelation of the Torah through Moses, and the existence of an Oral Law that accompanies the Written Torah. However, beginning in the seventeenth century with the philosophers B. Spinoza and T. Hobbes, and moving through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with Liberal Protestant critical Bible scholarship, these and other basic religious foundations came under attack by a host of writings and new assumptions. Can faith and scholarship walk together? Nehama Leibowitz (1905–1997) believed these two approaches could enrich each other. Rabbi [End Page 53] Mordecai Breuer (1921–2007) accepted many of the claims of the JEDP model proposed by J. Wellhausen, except that he did not think the documents were written by a human being. Rabbi Yoel Bin-Nun, for his part, is among those who choose to bypass historical considerations in order to take a literary approach to Scripture. Bin-Nun believes that it is important to see the nuances, the complexities, and the faults of biblical heroes. Only in this way can value and moral meaning truly be drawn from, e.g., the stories of the patriarchs.—F.W.G. 171. [Literal and Allegorical Readings of the Psalms] John Barton, "Literal and Allegorical Readings of the Psalms: Imagining the Psalmist," Psalms and the Use of the Critical Imagination, 138-45 [see #927]. For most contemporary readers of the Bible, there is an irreducible difference between Jewish and Christian readings of the Psalms. The roots of the traditional Christian reading can already be seen in the way Peter uses Psalms 16 and 110 in Acts 2:24-36. On the Day of Pentecost, Peter was trying to explain to a gathering of Jews why Christ died, how God raised him up on the third day, and how Jesus ascended into heaven. The Church Fathers—Ambrose and Augustine spring readily to mind—took this allegorizing approach to the Psalms even further. For them every Psalm somehow pointed to Christ, the promised Messiah. For Jewish readers, however, the Messiah has not yet come, and God is One, not Triune. For them, a more literal approach to the Psalms is called for: each Psalm is a prayerful dialogue between the human soul and God, the Creator of the Universe. A passage from Richard Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1597) can help bring this difference into sharper focus. Hooker begins by saying that the Psalms can teach the virtues that all people need to live a moral life: "Heroical magnanimity, exquisite justice, grave moderation, exact wisdom, repentance unfeigned, unwearied patience …" But then Hooker's summary of the Psalms continues in a way that has more to do with a Christian view of salvation history. They show us, he says "the mysteries of God, the sufferings of Christ, the terrors of wrath, the comforts of grace, the works of Providence over this world, and the promised joys of that world which is to come." We cannot undo the ancient "parting of the ways," but there are good reasons for Jews and Christians to keep probing the boundaries that separate them from one another, in ways that build up friendship and mutual respect.—F.W.G. 172. [Claus Westermann; The Assumptive World of Trauma Survivors] Elizabeth Boase, "Engaging Westermann and the Assumptive World," JSOT 46 (2, 2021) 177-92. The work of Claus Westermann was foundational for the modern study of lament literature in the HB. Westermann's work on the Psalms arose from his experiences in World War II, where he learned to value both the praise and lament elements of the Psalms. This article reconsiders Westermann's contribution to the theology of lament in light of contemporary theory concerning the impact of trauma on individuals, focusing on the understanding of the impact of traumatic experience on the "assumptive" world of those who suffer. There are, I argue, significant points of...

“So Natural Is the Union of Religion with Justice”: Hooker’s Defense of Religious Establishment

One of the greatest contributions of Anglican theology has been its consistent defense of the value of public religious establishment, and the classic defense remains that of Richard Hooker in his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1593–1600). In the opening chapters of Book V of the Laws, Hooker offers a compelling argument that religion is a crucial support to a well-ordered and virtuous polity while seeking to forestall the objection that this “instrumentalizes” religion to merely political ends. He also acknowledges the generic value of any kind of public reli- gion while nonetheless contending that the wise ruler must choose that religion that is true, namely, Christianity. Hooker’s defense of religious establishment remains relevant in a Western world coming to terms with the contradictions of secular pluralism. KEYWORDS: Anglicanism, religious establishment, public religion, Richard Hooker, civic virtue, justice

Confessional (Self-)Identification of the Church of England and Calvinism

The most difficult aspect of the problem of the Church of England’s identity is constituted by a lack of specific confessional orthodoxy in the reformed English Church forming the core of her identity. One of many reasons for it lies in the fact that there are no explicit doctrinal sources. The Church of England’s doctrine is dispersed over several documents, called “historical formularies”, that are either political, like the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, or liturgical, like the Book of Common Prayer and the Ordinal, in nature, but are neither discursive nor analytical in character. In this article, the author attempts to verify and falsify the validity of the claim that the Church of England’s hamartiology and soteriology are fundamentally Calvinistic. To achieve that goal, he turns to “Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity” by Richard Hooker, a prominent 16th-century English theologian, who played a pivotal role as the primary apologist of the “Elizabethan settlement” and a “Founding Father” of the Church of England’s orthodoxy, in order to analyse his hamartiological and soteriological views. Taking into consideration Richard Hooker’s “place of honour” in the political and religious history of the reformed English Church, the author concludes that the doctrine of the Established Church in England used by the Crown as a litmus test of political loyalty, was not Calvinistic either in its form or content, but preserving continuity with the pre-Reformation Latin theology, on the one hand, and, in the spirit of Christian Humanism, receiving and adopting Eastern Christian theological thought, on the other, it, somewhat unsuccessfully, tended towards a via media between Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodox, and radical reformers, i.e. was used as a negative identification tool marking the Christians of England along the “us — them” line.

The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity in Modern English. Vol. 1, Preface and Books I–V. By Richard Hooker. Edited by Bradford Littlejohn, Brian Marr, and Bradley Belschner. Lincoln, Nebr.: Davenant, 2019. xlix + 349 pp. $22.95 paper.

The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity in Modern English. Vol. 1, Preface and Books I–V. By Richard Hooker. Edited by Bradford Littlejohn, Brian Marr, and Bradley Belschner. Lincoln, Nebr.: Davenant, 2019. xlix + 349 pp. $22.95 paper. - Volume 88 Issue 4

Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, written by Richard Hooker

Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling, written by Richard Hooker

ARTHUR STEPHEN MCGRADE (ed.). Richard Hooker. Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling.

ARTHUR STEPHEN MCGRADE (ed.). Richard Hooker. Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling.

Luke Savin Herrick Wright Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Anglican ChurchSamuel Taylor Coleridge and the Anglican Church. Luke Savin Herrick Wright. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. Pp. viii+295.

<i>Luke Savin Herrick Wright</i> Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Anglican Church<i>Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Anglican Church</i>. Luke Savin Herrick Wright. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. Pp. viii+295.

Le théologico-politique chez Richard Hooker (Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity) et Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan)

Hooker et Hobbes ont tous deux été amenés à défendre la suprématie royale contre ses adversaires presbytériens. Une certaine ressemblance de formulation ne doit toutefois pas masquer de profondes divergences, portant à la fois sur l’ampleur de la prérogative royale en matière religieuse et sur la nature de la religion elle-même.

‘The Eye of the Typhoon’: Shakespeare and the Religious Controversies of his Time

In between those two great humanist lawyers and lord chancellors, Sir Thomas More and Sir Francis Bacon, it may be maintained without undue exaggeration that there is a wide gap, even a yawning chasm, in the understanding of all too many scholars concerning the intellectual history of what has come to be known as ‘Early Modern England’. When we ask whose were the main intellectual and spiritual influences on the minds of Englishmen during the period, the names commonly offered for consideration are mostly those of foreigners such as Machiavelli and Montaigne, Erasmus and Rabelais, Luther and Calvin—if in English translation. Closer to home may be added the names of More himself, his adversary William Tyndale, John Foxe with his Book of Martyrs, and Richard Hooker with his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.

Minds Indifferent: Milton, Lord Brooke, and the Value of Adiaphora on the Eve of the English Civil War

I. IntroductionOn the eve of the Civil War, England witnessed a debate over religious reform perhaps unparalleled since the effects of the Reformation had redrawn the channels and boundaries of religious authority. In the climate of increasing political and religious tensions as the personal rule of Charles I came to a close, the search for religious truth began to be measured against an ideal of a national religion unified by doctrine and practice with a new complexity and intensity. The claims of the Laudian bishops alongside the monarch to an unrestricted jurisdiction based on divine right crowded in on the privilege of Parliament and the moral authority of the individual conscience. In varying degrees, members of Parliament, ministers of every religious faction, and pamphleteers weighed the consequences of restructuring the Church in order to diminish the bishops' influence upon the monarch, civil affairs, and religious doctrine and practice.Between 1638 and 1642, the debate over Episcopacy acted as a calculus for the value of historical traditions, human judgment, and the imagination to salvation. At the centre of this debate was the doctrine of adiaphora, a point of epistemological uncertainty that blocked any easy resolution to this conflict. The Canons of 1640 defined adiaphora as 'of its own nature indifferent, neither commanded nor condemned by the Word of God, either expresly, or by immediate deduction', and they argued 'therefore that no Religion is to be placed therein, or scruple to be made thereon'.1 But in practice religion was 'placed therein' and scruples were 'made thereon'. On the surface, the Episcopal controversy scrutinized polity, but at its core the conflict was over the validity of man-made moral law. For English Protestants just before the Civil War, adiaphora threatened not so much a dearth of moral value as an instability, even a failure of moral knowledge. Those favouring Episcopacy clung to the peace and epistemological consistency they found in the truths of historical tradition. Reformers, however, invited the peace of toleration that allowed the seemingly paradoxical - religious certainty and epistemological diversity. Looking variously to divine, canon, natural and civil law, writers engaged in this debate were connected by their interest in finding a moral law that maintained both truth and peace without sacrificing the integrity of either one.In 1638 in his Religion of the Protestants, William Chillingworth articulated a new kind of toleration that questioned the desirability of a fixed standard by which to measure the individual conscience. This introduction of scepticism signified a clear departure from the idea of the via media embodied in Richard Hooker's codification of a natural law that unified religion in the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1593). Between 1638 and 1642 England watched as the Laudian impositions on the Scottish Kirk in the late 1630s culminated in the Bishops' Wars in 1640, as Ireland erupted in rebellion in 1641, and as its own civil war commenced in 1642. Controversialists of all stripes in the Episcopal debate - from moderate Episcopalians mildly examining the jurisdiction of the Church, to Presbyterians who would replace bishops with presbyters, to Independents who had a clear interest in an increased space for religious liberty, to more radical opponents of any national church - found themselves reassessing the reform measures undertaken by the Elizabethan Church that had brought them to this uncertain point in ecclesiastical history. Amid the political and religious strife of the early 1640s, as civil war in England became increasingly probable, both Hooker's confidence and Chilling-worth's scepticism proved insufficient models for either moderate or radical nonconformists who were themselves torn by their commitment to freedom of conscience and toleration on the one hand, and a sense of moral duty and a call to the active resistance to the Caroline Church on the other. …

Richard Hooker: The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity Revisited

Richard Hooker's book, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, is much more than a museum piece or a dissertation on how to run churches. It is a classic of doctrinal reflection, and is topically relevant. His main opponents at the time belonged to the militant Puritan wing of the English Church, and in answering them Hooker provides a still-rich line of thought. Theologically speaking, the most basic sense of law, for Hooker, is God's acceptance of the logic of a limited creation. A crucial concept is ‘compatible variety’, and this should be kept in mind when reading Hooker on the laws of nature, the laws of society, and the law that regulates the Church. Also of importance is the distinction between the unchangeable basics, in Church or state, and those laws that contribute to the maintenance of this or that particular society or Christian community. For Hooker, the mistake of his Puritan opponents was to think that the Bible is an exhaustive source of laws of both kinds. The Bible is neither a complete nor an incomplete law book. Law, as the form of compatible variety, is also the form in which God's ‘abundance’ is to be perceived and experienced. Outside the abiding truths about the sort of life God's life is and the dignity given to creatures, human intelligence and ingenuity and prudence have a wide remit. According to Hooker, the most basic rebellion is to refuse the limits that make compatible variety possible. Law assumes, then, that we do not ‘begin socially as a set of unrelated atoms, whether individuals, classes, races or interest groups. Our basic position is one of potential agents in a negotiation through which we discover our welfare, and discover something we do not know at the start. Key theological notions are creation and the Body of Christ.

Political Power and Ecclesiastical Power in Richard Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity

Cet article etudie le rapport entre pouvoir politique et pouvoir religieux dans l'anglicanisme selon Richard Hooker, dont l'heritage apparait nettement dans ses Laws. L'anglicanisme se fonde sur une conception theocratique du pouvoir que Hooker justifie par la notion traditionnelle de 'corps politique'. Hooker passe de ces premisses a une justification politique apparemment paradoxale de l'anglicanisme place sous l'autorite seculiere du Parlement. Etant donne ce bouleversement historique des rapports de pouvoir, quelle justification un parlement seculier peut-il donner a l'exigence de conformite religieuse ? L'A. montre que l'anglicanisme n'est pas pour Hooker une religion de pure forme, et que le propos des Laws est autant d'asseoir sa legitimite theologique que politique. Hooker apparait eminemment comme un heritier des Peres de l'Eglise. En somme, pouvoir politique, et pouvoir religieux relevent de deux categories distinctes, et le pouvour effectif de ce dernier depasse ses limitations juridiques. De la sorte, l'anglicanisme est pour Hooker, plus qu'un sage compromis politique, la traduction intitutionnelle d'une sagesse superieure

:Ceremony and Civility in English Renaissance Prose

Ceremony and Civility in English Renaissance Prose analyzes the emergence of civil prose in texts of the early modern period and defends English Renaissance writers against the current attack on their aristocratic politics. Using Thomas More's History of King Richard III, Philip Sydney's Defense of Poetry, Richard Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, and Thomas Browne's Religio Medici, Anne Hall demonstrates the emerging differentiation of civil and ceremonial prose in the early modern period. These works combine ceremonial discourse, acknowledging such traditional values as a God-centered world, and civil prose with its circumspections and irony, thus revealing a philosophical awareness of the complexity of moral and political questions. Since the 1970s, there have been two chief arguments about Renaissance literature. The first is that most Renaissance writers used traditional forms to bolster authority and that they should be regarded with suspicion. The second is that some Renaissance writers altered traditional forms to subvert authority and that they should be admired. Anne Hall contends that there is an alternative position-that many Renaissance writers used tradition to bolster authority and that their versions of tradition and authority deserve a defense that responds to current attacks on their racism, violence, and colonialist repression in texts that were once thought to be about love and education. Hall argues that Renaissance writers could not foresee the ways in which they would need to defend their position against Enlightenment attack, and she supplies what she believes would have been their defense, concluding that such Renaissance discourse must not be considered solely on a historical basis but also from a philosophical viewpoint.

Review: Book: Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity

Review: Book: Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity

The Source of the Most Famous Quotation from Richard Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity

The Source of the Most Famous Quotation from Richard Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity

Richard Hooker on the Lawful Ministry of Bishops and Kings

The part of Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity most attractively relevant to the theme of this conference is Book V, the first spiritually constructive exposition of the religion of the Book of Common Prayer. Hooker’s edifying account of the public duties of religion in the first seventy-five chapters of Book V and of the ordained ministry in the concluding six chapters can readily be appreciated today on its merits, leaving aside the fact that the religion of the Prayer Book was legally prescribed for all English Christians when Hooker wrote. It is on this currently unattractive fact of legal prescription that I want to concentrate, however, for it sets the historical context for the public devotional theology of Book V. To understand Hooker’s justificatory account of this fact is to become clearer about an essential difference between what is going on today when people minister and are ministered to in accordance with Anglican religious forms and what Hooker, at least, held to be going on when these forms were used in the sixteenth century.

Richard Hooker and his Contemporaries on Episcopacy: an Elizabethan Consensus

Although much has been written about Hooker's thought in recent years, particularly since the preparation of the Folger edition of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, surprisingly little has appeared on the relationship between Hooker's ideas and those of contemporary defenders of the Elizabethan establishment. Hooker's Laws was a controversial work, and we can expect to learn much about its meaning by comparing it with the works of his fellow controversialists. The aim of this article is to demonstrate the insight that can be gained from a comparison of his thought with that of his contemporaries, by examining one major problem in its exegesis – that is, his attitude to the role of bishops in the government of the Church.

:Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: Books VI, VII and VII, Volume 3 in The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker

:<i>Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: Books VI, VII and VII, Volume 3 in The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker</i>

Richard Hooker. Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: An Abridged Edition

Richard Hooker. Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: An Abridged Edition

Book Review: Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity 1–2

Book Review: Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity 1–2