Articles New, Articles Forthcoming, and Something More Exciting

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Unfortunately, a series of unforeseen pressures on my time (some of them coming in the form of malevolent microorganisms) have forced me to abandon my blogging ambitions for this month; I still hope that next month will see a return to more writing here, but a number of academic writing commitments will get in the way.

However, I have not been idle, and I do have a number of publications that have just recently come out or are forthcoming.  Unfortunately, many of them you will need institutional journal subscriptions, a lot of money, or a good library to read, but someday, the open-access revolution may burst them out from the closely guarded paywall prisons in which they now reside.  The last and most exciting item, however, will be very widely and inexpensively available:

Fall 2013:

A review of Scott Kindred-Barnes, Richard Hooker’s Use of History in His Defense of Public Worship: His Anglican Critique of Calvin, Barrow, and the Puritans for the Journal of Anglican Studies.  Published online 9/27/13 here.

A review of A.J. Joyce’s Richard Hooker and Anglican Moral Theology for the Anglican Theological Review 95.4 (Fall 2013): 734–36.  Some of you will recall that I reviewed this book at length here last spring.  But if you want the concise version, in which my caustic criticisms are thinly veiled in polite academese, the journal review may interest you.

Winter 2014:

A review of Peter Leithart’s Between Babel and Beast for Political Theology 15.1 (Jan. 2014): 10–12.  Again, I have blogged about this book in a number of places, and reviewed it for Reformation21 last summer, but this is the concise, academic version.

A book chapter, “Bancroft versus Penry: Conscience and Authority in Elizabethan Polemics,” appearing in the very exciting new volume edited by W.J. Torrance Kirby, Paul’s Cross and the Culture of Persuasion in England, 1520-1640 (Leiden: Brill, 2014).  And trust me, it really is a very exciting new volume, bringing together historians, theologians, English literature scholars, architectural history scholars, etc. to paint a picture of the enormous cultural impact of the open-air pulpit outside St. Paul’s Cathedral throughout the events that laid the foundation for modern Britain and Anglophone Protestantism.  My essay looks at how the complex dynamics of authority in church and state, conscience, and Christian liberty played out in a sermon by arch-conformist Richard Bancroft and the published critique by John Penry in 1589-90.

An article for a more popular audience in a new journal, The Statesman, entitled, “Three Things Conservatives Could Learn from Richard Hooker.” Forthcoming Feb. 2014.

Spring 2014:

An article, “More than a Swineherd: Hooker, Vermigli, and an Aristotelian Defence of the Royal Supremacy” that will be appearing in Reformation and Renaissance Review 15.1 (April 2014): 78–93.  This is going to be a spectacular special issue of RRR, guest-edited by my friend Jordan Ballor and focusing on the life and thought of the great Florentine reformer Peter Martyr Vermigli.  My friends Eric Parker and Simon Burton also have excellent articles in this issue—indeed, so excellent that I’m a little embarrassed for my little contribution to be appearing alongside theirs.  My article looks at how, in an argumentative strategy that turns many stereotypes on their heads, both Peter Martyr Vermigli and Richard Hooker deploy Aristotle’s Politics and Nicomachean Ethics in order to establish a Christian monarch’s responsibility to care for and advance the church in his realm.  This realization carries lots of exciting implications for our understanding of early modern Protestant political theology, and also strongly suggests something I want to work out more fully in later research—that Richard Hooker was deeply influenced by Vermigli’s work.

There are a few other articles and book reviews I’ve got coming down the pipeline, but I don’t have a very good idea of publication dates, so I’ll leave those out, and skip to the big news…

Spring 2015:

Littlejohn.RichardHooker.Littlejohn.RichardHooker.47351Richard Hooker: A Guide to His Life and Thought.  A new book in the Cascade Companions series, to be published by Cascade Books.  These are short (120-200 page) books aimed at a wide audience—students, pastors, church book studies, and more—that seek to introduce the work of important thinkers, texts, movements in the Christian tradition.  Cascade has just sent me the contract to write this, and I’m proposing to finish it within a year.

My provisional Table of Contents (with very pithy, very un-Hookerian chapter titles) at present is as follows

 

 

 

Pt. I: Richard Hooker

1. The Legend

2. The Man

3. The Book

Pt. II: Vision and Aims

4. Protestant

5. Polemicist

6. Philosopher

7. Pastor

Pt. III: Key Theological Issues

8. Salvation

9. Law

10. Scripture

11. Church

Pt. IV: Legacy

12. Richard Hooker: Contemporary

Stay tuned for more news, as this and other projects develop.

 

Richard Hooker and Anglican Moral Theology Review, Pt. 6: Moral Theology Applied

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In this sixth and final installment of my review of A.J. Joyce’s Richard Hooker and Anglican Moral Theology (I salute you faithful few who have followed me all the way through this hopefully engaging but occasionally exhausting exercise), I shall look at her last two chapters, which are both quite brief and have to do, essentially, with the concrete application of Hooker’s moral theology.  Chapter Seven considers the relationship of the “exceptional case” to moral norms, the all-important balance between unchanging general norms and the demands of particular circumstances.  Chapter Eight seeks to bring together, or rather to illustrate, the themes outlined in all the previous chapters by consideration of one particular example, the understanding of marriage in Hooker’s thought.

Both are on the whole helpful chapters, though the first suffers from a frustrating vagueness as to which moral norms are exceptionable and which are not, and the difference between particular injunctions that specify general principles and those that contradict them; the second, perhaps more seriously, suffers from Joyce’s very un-Hookerian determination to try and drive a wedge between reason and Scripture.

Chapter 7 begins with an extended consideration of the Aristotelian ethical tradition, and its understanding that it was the nature of the moral life to be concerned with particulars, and general principles cannot adequately describe moral duties without exception: “for Arristotle, whatever is promulgated by the moral philosopher, political scientist, or lawgiver will only ever take into consideration the majority of cases.  It takes a wise man, whose perception has been developed through experience, to discern what it is that constitutes right action in a concrete situation.” (197-98) Read More

Richard Hooker and Anglican Moral Theology Review, Pt. 5: Hooker and the Moral Life

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In considering the sixth chapter of A.J. Joyce’s Richard Hooker and Anglican Moral Theology, we encounter much the same strengths and weaknesses as ch. 4 offered: a clear and sound summary of key building blocks of Hooker’s thought, vitiated at times by a running undercurrent of polemic against the idea of Hooker as a Reformed Protestant, which surfaces in explicit form from time to time.  The subject of this chapter is “Hooker and the Moral Life”—more precisely (since this might seem to be what the whole book is about), Joyce here offers an examination of Hooker’s crucially-important discussion of the “law of reason” (what is usually called natural law), followed by a consideration of the relationship of morality and soteriology, and of morality and change.  I will follow the order of Joyce’s exposition here, pausing to give particular attention to the more contentious points of her exposition.

She begins by noting, as she has several times before, Hooker’s quite close dependence on Aquinas and the Aristotelian tradition he mediates: “Although Hooker is by no means uncritical of Aquinas, and seldom quotes him explicitly within this context, both the framework and content of his exposition of the law of reason would appear to be substantially dependent upon the Thomist tradition of natural law, which derives ultimately from Aristotle” (150-51).  In this, she of course echoes the opinion of most, if not all, Hooker interpreters, although it is worth noting that this repeated observation betrays a bit of laziness on their part.  Many of the features of Hooker’s thought that scholars reflexively label “Thomist” could simply be called “scholastic” generally, commonplaces of the philosophical theology that sixteenth-century Christianity was heir to, and there is no need to posit a direct dependence on Aquinas at many of these points.  Moreover, the equation of Thomism and Aristotelianism, and of Hooker with both, is similarly lazy; there is, as Torrance Kirby in particular has argued of late, perhaps as much neo-Platonic influence upon Hooker’s thought as there is Aristotelian (and the same, indeed, could probably be said for Aquinas himself). Read More

Richard Hooker and Anglican Moral Theology Review, Pt. 4: The Authority of Scripture

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The fifth chapter of A.J. Joyce’s book, “Hooker on the Nature and Authority of Scripture,” covers some of the most important ground when it comes to the theology of Richard Hooker.  Indeed, perhaps it covers the most important ground, given that the role of Scripture in moral and political life was at the heart of his debate with the Puritans.  It is here, then, that we especially feel the lack of a thorough introduction to Hooker’s Puritan interlocutors; despite the stress she laid in ch. 3 on the importance of understanding Hooker’s polemical context, we have been given only the most cursory overview of how his opponents argued, and are thus in a poor position to judge if and when he polemically exaggerates their position, and what motivates his own statements on Scripture.  (See here for my exposition of Cartwright and Travers’s biblicism which Hooker was opposing.)

As in the previous review, the focus here shall unfortunately be primarily on the weak points and ambiguities within this chapter, rather than on its many strengths.  Joyce’s approach in this chapter is a bit more scattered than the fairly systematic presentation she offered in ch. 4, but she does offer helpful summaries of Hooker’s defense of the concept of “things indifferent,” his teaching on the sufficiency of Scripture unto salvation, and the importance of reason as a supplement unto Scripture (or Scripture as a supplement unto reason) when it comes to things accessory to salvation (all points on which I have blogged here before). Read More

Richard Hooker and Anglican Moral Theology Review, Pt. 3

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In the first part of my review of A.J. Joyce’s Richard Hooker and Anglican Moral Theology, I remarked that this was an oddly schizophrenic book, a bit of a Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde.  On the one hand, it features a basically sound, thorough, and helpful exposition of the key aspects of Hooker’s moral theology out of the primary sources, and on the other hand, an uneven and confused polemic against Reformed readings of Hooker.  Chapter Four, investigating Hooker’s theological anthropology, is a case in point.

The choice to begin with an account of human nature, rather than of the sources of moral theology—reason and Scripture—might seem an odd one, but Joyce’s instincts are good here.  For Protestantism in particular, we must first start from an account of human nature, and its current fallen state, before we can say much about how the authorities of reason and Scripture function in human life.  Put simply, a very strong doctrine of total depravity would tend to demand a moral theology based almost entirely upon special revelation; a more optimistic doctrine of human nature would create more space for the use of general revelation in constructing an account of the moral life.  The classic stereotype, of course, is that Hooker gives us a remarkably rosy evaluation of human nature, one which differs notably from the Reformed understanding of total depravity, and the grim pessimism of a figure like Calvin, and therefore represents a fundamental departure from an authentically Protestant understanding of the relative authority of reason and Scripture.   Read More