Hooker, Richard

Abstract

Richard Hooker was the most influential theologian of the late Elizabethan age. He was a student of theology from 1569 in Oxford, and his tutor was the influential Puritan and theologian, John Rainolds. From 1579 Hooker taught Hebrew and was later appointed Master of the Temple in London in 1585, where his sermons emerged as a vision of a religion which was far removed from any radicalism and inspired by the belief of a merciful God. While he was Master of the Temple, he had a long dispute with the Puritan Walter Travers, who accused him of excessive moderation. The most important works of Hooker were the eight books Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie, where the theologian defended the still young Anglican via media of the pressures of the Presbyterian Puritans and the counter-reformed Catholics. The Lawes reflect the theological disputes that Hooker had while at the Temple with Travers on soteriology and ecclesiology. In the eight books, Hooker decisively shaped the doctrinal, political, and official profile of Anglicanism: the theologian reaffirmed the principle of the sola scriptura, the legitimacy of the episcopate, and of the Anglican liturgical forms adopted in the Church of England. Above all, Richard Hooker argued vigorously in favor of the full legitimacy of the laws which were divided into revelation, reason, and tradition, and they also accounted the insurmountable limit that the royal power could not exceed. His legacy was changing: from the traditional view of the theoretics of Anglicanism, Hooker’s thoughts were interpreted in various ways, through virtue of the multiplicity of the ideas and theories that pervaded his work so that no category could confirm and contain, once and for all, his thinking which was his major work.