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

What’s Wrong with the Regulative Principle?

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After two weeks of hibernation (well, excluding the comments thread on the most recent post), the lights will be slowly flickering back on here.  And where better to re-start than with S&P’s patron saint, Richard Hooker?  In this post, I want to look squarely at a question that has been dancing around in the background of many of my Hooker and Puritanism posts, and much of my research on those topics: What did Hooker think about the so-called “regulative principle of worship”?  

The RPW, as any self-respecting Presbyterian knows, runs something like this: “In its worship, the church is to be so guided by Scripture that it must include only those elements for which there is a Scriptural basis, whether it be by way of command or example.”  There are of course looser and stricter applications of this rule, and many of the stricter ones seem to reach bizarrely unbiblical conclusions, such as excluding all musical instruments (um, ever read the Psalms, fellas?).  In principle, though, regulativists agree in denying the so-called “normative principle,” viz., that the Church may worship in any way that is not forbidden by Scripture.  

In reality, of course, the practical difference between the two parties—at any rate with mature, intelligent, and theologically sensitive representatives of them—turns out to be rather less than that bald opposition implies.  For both sides can usually recognize that Scripture offers much more than merely commands and prohibitions; for the most part, it offers principles and historical examples that can and should inform our worship, but in indirect ways that do not necessarily admit of one-to-one application.  Both sides usually draw upon historical precedents as well in forming their liturgies.  The difference then often reduces to one of emphasis, so that regulativists say, “We need to let our worship be always guided by Scripture, always mindful of course of history and common sense” and normativists say “We need to let our worship be guided by history and common sense, always mindful of course of Scripture.”

In particular, the differences are blurred by a key qualification that advocates of the regulative principle have, since their earliest days, had to make: we must distinguish, they say, between “elements” and “circumstances” of worship.  The former are perpetual, essential, commanded by God in Scripture, and must be justified out of it; so we cannot add any additional elements not given in Scripture.  The latter are variable, accidental, not necessarily given in Scripture, and open to improvisation within the general rules of Scripture.  The first consist of the basic building blocks of worship, the latter of the particular ways in which they are manifested in a particular congregation.  It is not hard to see how such a distinction could admit of enormous elasticity.  So, for instance, a loose regulativist might well say merely that “songs of praise” are an “element” whereas the selection of what to sing, how to sing it, and how to accompany it, are “circumstances” that may vary a great deal, and for which we need not seek detailed Scriptural justification.  Stricter regulativists, however, might well contend that the use of musical instruments constitutes an “element,” not a “circumstance,” or that, if singing is an “element,” only Scriptural words must be sung.  A thoughtful non-regulativist, on the other hand, if pressed, could justify many liturgical practices, whether traditional (e.g., a liturgical procession) or contemporary (e.g., a skit) as a “circumstance” or a form of embodying one of the basic elements—prayer, praise, proclamation, offerings, and sacraments.

Moreover, not only must it be conceded that some things may clearly be done in worship that are not prescribed in Scripture, but it also seems clear that not all things prescribed in Scripture for worship must be done in our worship.  Most regulativists today tend to also be cessationists, maintaining that the gift of tongues has ceased and therefore was not intended as a permanent fixture of Christian worship.  

On these basis, some critics have suggested that the terminology of the regulative principle vs. the normative principle isn’t all that useful.  

 

So if we asked, “Was Richard Hooker—or is Anglican worship—opposed to the regulative principle of worship?” the answer is not that simple.  The Puritan critics of Prayer Book worship were insistent that a matter of basic principle was at stake—Are we going to be ruled by God’s Word or not?  Thriving on dualistic oppositions, they saw the entire debate as hinging upon the clash between this regulative principle—worship *according to* the Word of God—vs. the normative principle—worship *not contrary to* the Word of God.  At the end of Book III of the Lawes, however, Richard Hooker disarmingly dismisses this dualism.  In point of fact, he says, they share the same basic principles regarding worship; they just differed over the particular applications:

“For our constant perswasion in this point is as theirs, that we have no where altered the lawes of Christ further then in such particularities onely as have the nature of things changeable according to the difference of times, places, persons, and other the like circumstances.  Christ hath commanded prayers to be made, sacraments to be ministred, his Church to be carefully taught and guided.  Concerning every of these somewhat Christ hath commaunded which must be kept till the worldes ende.  On the contrary side in every of them somewhat there may be added, as the Church shall judge it expedient.  So that if they will speake to purpose, all which hitherto hath been disputed of they must give over, and stand upon such particulars onely as they can shew we have either added or abrogated otherwise then we ought, in the matter of Church-politie. Whatsoever Christ hath commanded for ever to be kept in his Church, the same we take not upon us to abrogate; and whatsoever our laws have thereunto added besides, of such quality we hope it is, as no lawe of Christ doth any where condemn.” 

In other words, we too stick firmly to all those things that Christ has commanded us to keep, omitting those things that were merely temporary ordinances, and all those things we add are mere matters of changeable circumstance.  The real debate is simply which particular matters fall under which heading, and whether, in the matters of changeable circumstance, the Anglican orders be beneficial or not—it is not whether or not Scripture is to be authoritative for our worship:  

“they must agree that they have molested the Church with needless opposition, and henceforward as we said before betake themselves wholly unto the trial of particulars, whether every of those things which they esteem as principal, be either so esteemed of, or at all established for perpetuity in holy Scripture; and whether any particular thing in our church polity be received other than the Scripture alloweth of, either in greater things or in smaller.”

Hooker will therefore occupy hundreds of pages in Book V working through these particulars one by one.  Does this mean, then, that Hooker accepts, ultimately, the regulative principle, but merely applies it in a very different way?  In the end, no.  The clever rhetorical move of reducing the whole debate to one over particulars comes only after Hooker has dismantled the principle in the form stated by the Puritans, leaving them as the only valid logical interpretation of the principle the watered-down version that Hooker will “agree” with.

Hooker’s preference, however, would be to reject the principle as a useful starting-point, and not only because it proves so useless and ambiguous when pressed, but on the basis of two underlying assumptions that taint the Puritans’ invocation of it.  First, it proceeds on the assumption that, as Cartwright says, “it is the virtue of a good law to leave as little as may be in the discretion of the judge,” so that the most specific form of a law is the most perfect.  So while it may be that a moderate and judicious use of the regulative principle would be unproblematic from Hooker’s standpoint, he recognized that the impulse that led to the advancing of the principle in the first place militates against such moderation.  All Protestants, after all, had always maintained that Scripture must guide our worship, but faced with the uncertainty and diversity that this general commitment left unresolved, the Puritans proposed the regulative principle as a more precise rule.  The goal from the beginning then was to attempt to restrict the scope of what might be considered “changeable circumstance.”

Second was the Puritan conviction that it was only because it had been set down in Scripture that any element of worship could be legitimate.  According to the reasoning of the regulative principle, public prayer would not be an acceptable element of Christian worship had it not been prescribed in Scripture.  But this was to mistake the uniqueness of Christian worship, which consists not so much in its elements as in its object, not so much in form as in content.  Of course, this is not to deny that the distinctive content of Christian faith does shape the form of our worship in many ways, or that Scripture provides plenty of guidance in that distinctive shape.  But consider that prayer, singing, praise, penitence, offerings, instruction, reading from Scripture all may be found in other world religions.  Indeed, Scripture itself teaches that the instinct to worship is natural to mankind.  On consideration, it is really only the sacraments that constitute truly unique elements of Christian worship, though even here it is the content—Christ Himself—that makes them unique more than the forms, which have parallels in other religions (washing rituals, sacraficial meals).  In this, as in so much else, Hooker insists that grace restores and perfects nature, rather than replacing it.

Of course, we do as a matter of fact find justification for these elements in Scripture, so why does it matter whether we could theoretically justify them from nature as well?  Because it affects our view of the purpose of Scripture.  Scripture, Hooker argues, presumes us already instructed by nature of the propriety of certain matters of liturgy and polity, rather than seeking to offer a complete blueprint starting from scratch.  But if we approach it assuming that it is only by being first set down in Scripture that an element of worship becomes valid, and assuming that the most precise instruction is the best, then we will find ourselves sifting the Scriptures in vain for detailed teaching on matters they simply do not address.  The result will be a stretching and warping of the Scriptures, a dishonor to them rather than an honor:

“As for those marvellous discourses whereby they adventure to argue that God must needs have done the thing which they imagine was to be done; I must confess I have often wondered at their exceeding boldness herein.  When the question is whether God have delivered in Scriptrue (as they affirm he hath) a complete, particular, immutable form of church polity, why take they that other both presumptuous and superflous labour to prove he should have done it, there being no way in this case to prove the deed of God, saving only by producing that evidence wherein he hath done it?  But if there be no such thing apparent upon record, they do as if one should demand a legacy by force and virtue of some written testament, wherein there being no such thing specified, he pleadeth that there it must needs be, and bringeth arguments from the love or good-will which always the testator bore him; imagining, that these or the like proofs will convict a testament to have that in it which other men can no where by reading find.  In matters which concern the actions of God, the most dutiful way on our part is to search what God hath done, and with meekness to admire that, rather than to dispute what he in congruity of reason ought to do.”

Puritanism: A Guide for the Perplexed

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Readers of this blog hear a lot about Puritanism, most of it bad.  But what on earth is Puritanism?  What do we mean by the term?  It means a dozens of different things to different people, and in fact always has.  In hopes of helping clear the waters a bit and establishing the context for my own use of the term (which I am toying of discarding in favor of “precisianism,” for reasons you will see below), I’ve adapted the following introductory discussion from my chapter draft on Puritanism, and I hope it is of some use and interest to those who have been scratching their heads all this time:

Between 1567 and 1572, the Elizabethan Church enters upon a decisive new stage, engendering a movement which was to leave a wide and lasting legacy on the Reformed world, particularly in Britain and America, over succeeding centuries, a movement traditionally known as “Puritanism.”  Although a number of scholars have quite helpfully traced lines of development for the Puritan movement back to the Marian exile, or the Edwardian reform, or even the Henrician period, there is wisdom in the preference among contemporary scholars to confine the term to the Elizabethan era and beyond.  While the Elizabethan Vestiarian controversy is quite frequently narrated as the first chapter in this new movement, and is undoubtedly central to its development (as recognized in the previous chapter), there are good reasons for drawing a caesura between its conclusion in 1567 and the outbreak of the Admonition Controversy in 1572, when young radicals John Field and Thomas Wilcox, frustrated by the lack of official response to Puritan complains, published and disseminated a scandalously rancorous Admonition to Parliament.  

The document, clearly intended (despite its name) as a piece of public propaganda, ignited a firestorm of controversy: Field and Wilcox were imprisoned, an official Answere by John Whitgift was commissioned, and battle lines were drawn as pamphlets and counter-pamphlets, treatises and counter-treatises, began to multiply.  The immediate literary controversy, in which Whitgift emerged as the spokesman for the establishment, and Thomas Cartwright as the spokesman for the Puritans, lasted until 1577, but the movement that the Admonition called into being lasted in organized form until the early 1590s, when it had grown so militant that dramatic steps were taken by the bishops and Elizabeth’s Privy Council to quash it.  The personnel of this new movement, however, were rarely the same as those who had fought it out with the bishops over vestments in 1565-67, most of whom had grudgingly submitted when it was clear the policy was inflexible.  Of the twenty scrupulous Protestants who presented a supplication to the bishops over vestments in 1565, only three, says Patrick Collinson, “remained staunch to the radical cause until their deaths,” and most “at once dissociated themselves from the new extremism.”  So much so, in fact, that from 1572 on, “we are evidently witnessing the beginnings of a new movement rather than the conversion of the old.”

And indeed, the issues at stake in the Admonition Controversy are far different, and broader, than those in the Vestiarian.  No longer is the question one of the legitimate scope for resisting imposition of certain ceremonies that troubled scrupulous consciences, a dispute on the margins of the Elizabethan settlement, but it concerns the basic validity of that settlement across the board.  “We in England are so far off from having a church rightly reformed, according to the precscript of God’s word, that as yet we are not come to the outward face of the same,” the Admonition fulminates, throwing down a gauntlet to the bishops and the government.  At stake now is not whether the bishops should enforce strict conformity, but whether the bishops have power to govern the church at all; not whether civil law should presume to bind ministers to wear the cap and surplice, but whether civil authority has any place in the church.  A fundamental platform of the Admonition is the presbyterian doctrine of church government, which, aside from a general sense that lower clergy ought to have more authority in determining church affairs, had been nowhere on the radar in the earlier controversy.  This system of polity is not presented as a suggestion, as that best suited to the edification and good government of the churches, but as a biblical requirement.  This emphasis reflects a shift in attitudes toward adiaphora across the board, with the new Admonitionists suggesting not so much that indifferent ceremonies were being used unedifyingly, but that they were not indifferent in the first place.  As Collinson puts it, the “presbyterians replaced pragmatism with dogma.”  Earlier protests against tyranny in adiaphora, and suggestions that only Scripture could guide us to their right use, hardly seem to provide a basis for these aggressive new claims.

The reasons for such a dramatic shift in the tenor of protest, it must be confessed, remain something of a mystery.  The faultlines in the doctrines of adiaphora and Christian liberty, as we have argued in the previous chapter and shall explore further here, lead rather naturally to the biblicist mutation we find in the Admonition.  The adoption of Presbyterianism, however, appears more surprising, though it can be largely explained by two factors.  The first was the bishops’ complete loss of credibility during the Vestiarian controversy.  While in fact most of them were sympathetic to the concerns of scrupulous ministers, they were called upon to act as enforcers of a policy demanded by their sovereign, who discreetly recused herself from controversy, refusing to lend any official support, or civil enforcement, to the policy she had asked Archbishop Parker to promulgate.  Parker and his colleagues, then, were left in the unenviable position of justifying a policy which they had not crafted, unable to appeal to the sovereign for backing, and thus sure to appear to their opponents like arbitrary, power-hungry clerical tyrants of the sort that the Reformation had meant to rid England.  This, and the passionate attachment of most Englishmen to their sovereign, led those unsatisfied with the resolution of the controversy to focus their animus on the bishops, and begin calling into question the validity of the office in the first place, given its obviously (to them) tyrannical tendencies.  Second, the fact that Beza in Geneva had written sympathetically on behalf of the anti-Vestiarians, while Bullinger in Zurich had sided largely with the bishops meant that dissidents (many of whom had been exiles in Geneva under Mary), began to look exclusively to Geneva to find resources for their cause.  Beza’s presbyterian doctrine, a hardened and doctrinaire version of that which Calvin had pioneered, was taken up by some of these dissidents, particularly Thomas Cartwright, who made a name for himself by expounding the Presbyterian system in a series of lectures on Acts at Cambridge in 1570.  However, it is not enough to explain Cartwright’s Presbyterianism simply as the application of Genevan ideas to England, as has been customary among many historians.  On the contrary, with Cartwright and his associate Walter Travers, we find a systematic development of Presbyterianism, along with a distinctive version of the two-kingdoms doctrine, that went beyond anything Beza had yet articulated and indeed likely exerted an influence on his own crystallization of Presbyterian doctrine.  Certainly, Cartwright’s views on adiaphora, law in Scripture, and the two kingdoms go well beyond those of his hero Calvin, with whom he has too often been simply equated.

 

Of course, it will not do to let Cartwright speak for all so-called Puritans.  When Collinson speaks of a new movement beginning with the Admonition, he does not intend by this to imply the extinguishment of the old.  On the contrary, the more moderate style of nonconformity, and the more measured calls for the reform of obvious abuses in the administration and preaching ministry of the church, continued well beyond the Admonition Controversy, and indeed outlasted the demise of the hard-line Presbyterian movement in the 1590s.  Collinson and Peter Lake have succeeded in the last few decades in reconfiguring our concept of Puritanismso that no longer is the extreme rhetoric of the Admonition Controversy normative in defining the movement.  Rather, the moderate noncomformity and zealous Protestantism of a Laurence Chaderton (the Master of Emmanuel College at Cambridge from 1584 to 1622), they have argued, is more representative of the ethos of Puritanism, which is thus close to the mainstream, rather than on the dissident fringe, of Elizabethan and Jacobean Puritanism.  

This study can thus not avoid the extraordinarily vexed question of defining “Puritanism,” a question disputed for four centuries and now it appears further from resolution than ever.  Contemporary historians have vied with one another in expressing frustration with the elusiveness of the concept.  Patrick Collinson likens it to an elephant whose shape and attributes are debated by a group of blindfolded men, Christopher Hill to a “dragon in the path of every student of the period,” and W.J. Sheils to a “protean beast.”  If I might add my own metaphor to the discussion, we might say that Puritanismis like an impressionist painting, which appears luminous and distinct from a distance, but dissolves into a chaos of incongruous colors upon closer inspection. 

This ambiguity is perhaps not surprising in view of the fact that the term “puritan” originated as a term of abuse by its conformist opponents, and thus it was naturally long before any puritan acknowledged the term for himself.  As is usual with protest movements, puritanism had far more unity in the eyes of its opponents than of its various advocates, who quarrelled with one another, each denouncing others as either extremists or time-servers, and claiming his own platform as a moderate middle ground.  Elizabethan puritanism combined conformist, reformist, and separatist impulses, which created faultlines not merely between different “puritans” but often within one and the same puritan leader.  So it is that at different points in his career, we find Thomas Cartwright denouncing the Church in England as one that can scarcely lay claim to the title, having denied the kingship of Christ over it, and defending it against Rome as a true and pure church, authentically reformed; Presbyterianism is presented at times as a sine qua non for a church of Christ, at times merely as a desirable ornament.   Peter Lake has thus sought to undermine any attempt to draw a clear and fixed dividing line between “moderate” and “radical” Puritanism, mere conscientious nonconformity and Presbyterianism.  Amid the shifting rhetorical contexts in which Puritan principles were advocated, and the at times turtuous attempts of Puritan leaders to resolve the warring impulses within their own platform, it is no wonder that many modern historians have thrown up their hands in resignation at the attempt to describe a coherent theological or practical agenda for the movement.

A number of a generalizations attempting to define the heart of Puritan doctrine, many rooted in the earliest conformist polemics, have been offered, refuted, and counter-offered in variant forms.  For instance, it has been common to summarize the essence of Puritanism as biblicism; as Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales put it, “for the puritan the Bible was elevated to the status of the sole and complete repository of doctrinal and moral truth.”  They go on to quote William Bradshaw that Scripture was “the sole canon and rule of all matters” and Jacobean Puritan Robert Harley’s description of a Puritan as “one that dares do nothing in the worship of God or course of his life but what God’s word warrants him, and dares not leave undone anything that the word commands him.”  Of course, as others have pointed out, a high view of Scripture was not at all unique to Puritans, but was shared by their conformist adversaries; the difference, then, can be identified when it comes to the question of adiaphora.  Puritanism, it has been declared, consists in the rejection of the concept of adiaphora: “the Puritans’ extreme reliance on scripture led them . . . to denounce the whole idea that certain religious observances were ‘adiaphora’—‘things indifferent’—and that the leaders of the church and government had the right to decide whether they were valid and binding.”  Yet this stereotype has been categorically denied by John S. Coolidge in his detailed study of Puritanism and adiaphora, The Pauline Renaissance in England: “The Puritan categorically denies that he means what Conformists nevertheless persist in suspecting that he means: ‘to exact at our hands for every action the knowledge of some place of Scripture out of which we stand bound to deduce it . . .’ .  On the contrary, Puritans sometimes make a point of insisting that there is no precise scriptural directive for Church ceremonies, and that these should therefore not be the same in all times and places.”  And indeed, Peter Lake’s study Moderate Puritans in the Elizabethan Church not only reveals moderates like Chaderton extensively employing the adiaphora concept, but even Thomas Cartwright himself in his critiques of separatism during the 1580s.  Indeed, even in the Admonition Controversy, Cartwright repeatedly grants the validity of the concept, and either contends simply that a particular matter under dispute (e.g., Presbyterian church government) does not happen to be an adiaphoron, or else falls back upon the earlier insistence that adiaphora must be used to edification.  On this basis, Lake and others have denied that a rejection of adiaphora should be understood as part of even the Puritan platform.  Stephen Brachlow, on the other hand, cautions against disposing too readily of this stereotype, noting that harder-line Puritans were subject to intense cross-pressures when it came to this question, unable to do away with the adiaphora concept in certain settings, but hardly comfortable with it.

Another common but unstable stereotype is the idea, loudly and frequently repeated by their conformist opponents, that Puritans were seditious, against the royal supremacy over the Church, ready to “spoil him [the magistrate] of the one half of his jurisdiction.”  Puritan opposition to the royal supremacy, and indeed revolutionary tendencies more broadly, has been a popular subject among modern historians, always eager to find political implications to old theological controversies.  And yet here too the “protean beast” proves elusive, with Puritans of all stripes vying with one another in the fervency with which they affirm their loyalty to the Queen and even her supremacy over the Church.  John Penry, a radical if there ever was one, executed for sedition in 1593, calls the charge “plaine slandering” and protests “Looke whatsoever prerogative in ecclesiastical or civil causes hee or any man livinge can truly attribut unto the civil magistrate, wee do the same.”  Cartwright also never loses an opportunity, in his interchange with Whitgift, to denounce Whitgift’s charges on this score, and insists that on the Presbyterian platform, the Queen would still have wide jurisdiction over religious matters.  Confronted with these protestations of innocence, some historians have suggested that this is a point which tends to divide Presbyterians, who still favor an established church, from separatists, who seek a “reformation without tarrying for the magistrate.”  Yet as the example of Penry, on the verge of separatism when he wrote the tract quoted above, shows, this generalization too falters.  Brachlow’s treatment of the issue in Communion of Saints conclusively shows even hardened separatists doing homage to the concept of the royal supremacy.  Again, however, he suggests that this does not mean that the stereotype is altogether wrong; instead, we find strong cross-pressures which led more radical Puritans to continue making affirmations that they had great difficulty squaring with their doctrine.  Certainly it was the opinion of many conformists at the time, such as Whitgift and Bancroft, that puritans affirmations of loyalty were mere lip-service, and the true thrust of their platform, intentional or not, was destructive to the Queen’s jurisdiction. 

The distinction of Presbyterians and separatists, just mentioned, is another way in which historians have attempted to make sense of the various threads within the Puritan movement.  The former still wanted an established church, legally imposed on the nation as a whole, with a unified institutional apparatus, while the latter argued for individual voluntary congregations of the faithful, free from the coercion of the magistrate or of clerocratic Presbyterian synods.  Certainly this divergence loomed large in the 1640s and 1650s, once Puritans were given the opportunity to put their program into practice, but as Brachlow has convincingly shown, it is somewhat anachronistic five decades earlier, in which any line the historian draws between the two camps dissolves on closer inspection.  Again, he argues, all Puritans were cross-pressured by the desire on the one hand to maintain unity with the national church and the inability to imagine a plurality of “churches” within the same land, and on the other hand, their strong emphasis on the need for “visible saints,” for the church to become in reality the pure community of the “godly” that God had called it to be, and to exclude the lukewarm from its midst.

 

Given the evident difficulty of drawing stable generalizations about Puritanismas either a theology or as a political-ecclesiastical program, and yet the seemingly indispensable value of the concept, there has been a notable shift among historians in recent years toward thinking and speaking of Puritanismas a “culture,” an “ethos,” or a “mentalité.”  Durston and Eales capture the new emphasis well in their statement “Above all else, puritanism was a movement grounded in a highly distinctive cast of mind—or to use a more fashionable term, mentalité—which displayed itself in the individual puritan as a peculiarly severe yet vibrant spirituality, and within groups of puritans as a unique and dynamic religious culture.”  Along with this has gone a tendency to rely less and less on polemical portrayals of puritanismby its opponents, given the obvious difficulty of mapping their stereotypes onto the messy reality, and more on more on the internal dynamics of Puritanismin its various manifestations, as attested by its adherents and the products of its practical piety.  Moreover, by focusing less on attempts to draw strict dividing lines  between “Puritan” and “Anglican,” contemporary scholarship has been able to recognize much more clearly the extent to which aspects of Puritan theology and culture permeated the Elizabethan and Jacobean churches.  Accordingly, it seems that recent studies have grown increasingly tired of the tendency to rely on the “canonical texts” of Puritanism—the writings of Thomas Cartwright and his close allies during and immediately following the Admonition Controversy—for an understanding the movement, deeming them to have been mined to depletion by now, unlikely to yield much fresh insight.

Unquestionably, the recent flowering of scholarship along these lines has fostered an abundance of new understanding, shattering sterile stereotypes and paving the way for fresh consideration of aspects of Puritan life and piety, and lesser-known Puritan figures that have been previously marginalized.  What it has gained in breadth, though, it may be fair to say, some of the recent scholarship has sacrificed in depth.  That is to say, by adopting a posture of skeptical detachment from the sharp dichotomies drawn by the preeminent theological interlocutors of the period—Cartwright and Travers on the one hand, Whitgift and later Hooker on the other—scholars have perhaps missed opportunities to clearly discern the genuine theological commitments that were at stake and their relation to the received principles and tensions of the magisterial Reformation. If we conclude too hastily that conformist allegations of Puritan “popery” or “Anabaptistry” are mere stock-in-trade polemical jabs, without asking why these identifications were significant to the interlocutors, we will miss substantive emerging differences in ecclesiology and the theology of law and authority.  Given the remarks above about the elusiveness of pinning down Puritan convictions, it goes without saying that many of the theological faultlines are implicit, and take the form of divergent emphases rather than fundamentally contradictory claims.  We must resist the temptation to impute directly to any of these theologians the apparent logical conclusions of his claims, but we must equally resist the temptation to say nothing about those underlying trajectories.  

If we confine ourselves to the period 1570-1593, and to the more “radical puritans” of this period, those determined to erect a Presbyterian discipline, we might do well to jettison the slippery terminology of “puritan” and adopt instead what was in fact the designation of choice in this early period, “precisian.”  This too, of course, was a pejorative term adopted by conformist adversaries, rather than a self-label, but it captures perhaps more clearly the aspects of the presbyterian movement that will dominate my discussion here, and that dominated Whitgift, Bancroft, and Hooker’s critiques of the movement.  

In this, I am following the lead of Dwight Bozeman, who in his recent book The Precisianist Strain: Disciplinary Religion and Antinomian Backlash in Puritanismto 1638, identifies the theme of “preciseness,” a “zest for regulation,” as lying at the heart of both Puritan theology and piety.  “A primary attribute of the deity they served, ‘exact precise severitie’ was equally a habit and credential of his people.  ‘Walke precisely, or exactly, or strictly in all things,’ enjoined John Preston in a sermon, ‘Exact Walking’ . . . . To ‘walk exactly,’ this eminent preacher and college head explained, is to ‘goe to the extremity.’  It is ‘so to keepe the commandements . . . that a man goes to the utmost of them, . . . lookeing to every particle of them.”  It is clear from this description that by speaking of Puritan “preciseness” Bozeman does not mean to resurrect the stereotype of Puritan as mere nitpicker, preoccupied by a merely negative agenda of removing offenses that trouble his trivial scruples.  John Coolidge, echoed by Peter Lake, has rightly attacked this image, emphasising the very positive vision of reform that drove precisians of all stripes.  But contrary to Coolidge’s sometimes rosy-spectacled revisionism, this positive reform was to be conducted at every point according to strictly predefined rules, under the watchful eye of a rule-loving God.  At the heart of this outlook was the urge to leave as little undetermined as possible, and the conviction that failures to conform to these determinations were punished severely.  

It is not at all hard to see how such an outlook was bound to create deep theological rifts in a church formed by the Protestant spirit of adiaphorism, which contended both that a great deal of the Christian life was left undetermined—or at least underdetermined—by God’s commandments, and that, by virtue of the doctrine of justification by faith, failures to walk exactly were readily pardonable.  The doctrine of Christian liberty, with which the Puritan protest began, is at risk of being lost in a thicket of legalism.

Grace Perfects Nature: Hooker on Nature’s Threefold Need for the Supernatural

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(The following is a fragment of a thesis chapter draft I’ve been working up; it restates and repackages a number of matters that I’ve touched on here before, hopefully in a more satisfying and systematic way.)

Although Hooker lays great stress on the independent integrity and perspicacity of the order of nature, which has moral weight on its own, apart from the provision of special revelation, Hooker’s valorization of reason and nature is often overstated by his interpreters.  In fact, I would suggest, there are three crucial qualifications on the “autonomy” of nature and reason.  First, nature and reason cannot be autonomous in the sense of encompassing their own end; nature cannot be considered a self-enclosed compartment, nor can reason be satisfied merely with the task of investigating creation.  This much is clear already from Hooker’s inclusion of the first great commandment as one of the prescriptions of the law of reason, however, he will have much more to say in support of this claim in Book I, chapter 11, insisting that man’s final end is one beyond nature—God.  Second, nature and reason cannot be autonomous in the sense of being capable, on their own, of reaching their final, supernatural end.  On this point, Hooker is particularly nuanced, attributing most of this incapacity to the reality of sin, but acknowledging a dependence on divine grace even in the state of innocence.  Third, nature and reason cannot be autonomous in the sense that the gift of revelation serves solely to provide a path to the supernatural end, and leaves reason perfectly adequate on its own for all natural purposes.  Let us investigate each of these three points in turn.  

Hooker begins chapter 11 by returning to his statements early in chapter 5, where he introduced the law of reason, saying that it was the way in which man sought the unique goodness proper to his nature.  Everything created, he says, must have not merely particular goods, but a final good, “our Sovereign Good or Blessednessness, that wherein the highest degree of all our perfection consisteth, that which being once attained unto there can rest nothing further to be desired.”  Indeed, when we look at created goods, we see how they each serve not as goods in themselves, but as instruments unto some higher good: “we labour to eat, and we eat to live, and we live to do good, and the good which we do is as seed sown with reference to a future harvest.”  However, if this merely continued in an infinite regress, “whatsoever we do were in vain. . . . For as to take away the first efficient of our being were to annihilate utterly our persons, so we cannot remove the last final cause of our working.”  Therefore, he concludes, “something there must be desired for itself simply and for not other.”  For animals, mere continuance in being is an end in itself, but not for man.   For man, as the highest order of being, “doth seek a triple perfection: first, a sensuall, consisting in those things which very life it selfe requireth as necessary supplementes, or as beauties and ornaments therof; then an intellectuall, consisting in those things which none underneth man is either capable of or acquaineted with; lastly a spiritual and divine, consisting in those things wherunto we tend by supernatural meanes here, but cannot here attain unto them.”  This last, the  “spiritual and divine” good, must be infinite, for it is that final good “which is desired altogether for itself,” a desire that would be evil if bestowed on anything finite. 

So what is this final spiritual good, this supernatural end?  It is union with God.  For “No good is infinite but only God; therefore he is our felicity and bliss.  Moreover, desire tendeth unto union with that it desireth.  If then in Him we be blessed, it is by force of participation and conjunction with Him. . . . Then are we happy therefore when fully we enjoy God, as an object wherein the powers of our souls are satisfied even with everlasting delight: so that although we be men, yet by being unto God united we live as it were the life of God”.  (This description of man’s blessedness will be very important later on for our discussion of Christology.)  Hooker goes on to specify further this condition of blessedness: it must be “according unto every power and faculty of our minds apt to receive so glorious an object”—”both by understanding and will”; it must be perpetual, a perpetuity that cannot proceed from any natural necessity within us, but “from the will of God, which doth both freely perfect our nature in so high a degree, and continue it so perfected.”

Now this desire for supernatural happiness, Hooker is at pains to establish, is itself natural, for all men have it.  It is not in our power not to desire this, he says.  Therefore, being naturally desired, it must in some sense within natural capacity: “It is an axiom of Nature that natural desire cannot utterly be frustrate.  This desire of ours being natural should be frustrate, if that which may satisfy the same were a thing impossible for man to aspire unto.  So man’s reason is not enclosed within the bounds of creation, but naturally transcends these bounds, by desiring and striving unto the supernatural end of union with God.  If natural desire, then, is not “frustrate,” is natural reason capable on its own of achieving this end? 

Certainly not as man now finds himself.  For “this last and highest estate of perfection whereof we speak is received of men in the nature of a reward,” for works of obedience to the Creator.  This would have been Adam’s path to perfection and bliss had he not fallen.  However, Hooker is careful to qualify here, quoting “the wittiest of the school-divines” (Scotus) that we do not speak of this reward in terms of strict justice, as if God were “bound to requite man’s labours in so large and ample a manner as human felicity doth import; inasmuch as the dignity of this exceedeth so far the other’s value.”  Even in man’s natural state, then, the supernatural end of blessedness could only come “by the rule of that justice which best beseemeth him [God], namely, the justice of one that requireth nothing mincingly, but all with pressed and heaped and over-enlarged measure,” (ibid.) and the perpetual continuance of that blessedness infinitely transcends mere natural justice.  In any case, however, says Hooker, this is a moot point, for Adam failed, and what man now living can present his works, such as they are, before the throne of the Almighty and demand such a reward?  “There resteth therefore either no way unto salvation, or if any, then surely a way which is supernatural, a way which could never have entered into the heart of man as much as once to conceive or imagine, if God himself had not revealed it extraordinarily.” Thankfully for us, this latter is the case, and God has revealed a means, transcending any capacity of reason, whereby we might be granted this highest end of our desire.  

This supernatural duties thereby revealed are faith, hope, and charity, and are not merely beyond natural capacity to do, but even to know.  “Laws therefore concerning these things are supernatural, both in respect of the manner of delivering them, which is divine; and also in regard of the things delivered, which are such as have not in nautre any cause from which they flow, but were by the voluntary appointment of God ordained besides the course of nature, to rectify nature’s obliquity withal.” 

This last distinction leads us to a third point.  Thus far, we might be excused for understanding Hooker to say that nature falls short only of encompassing its naturally-desired supernatural end, but not of merely natural ends.  On this reading, the revelation of divine law would serve merely to establish supernatural duties, which would serve merely to lead us to God, while reason remained perfectly adequate to guide us in natural, civil duties toward our fellow man.  Certainly Hooker has already said a great deal in praise of reason’s ability to guide us in such endeavors, and will continue to say a great deal throughout the laws.  After all, God’s wisdom comes to us in many ways, all of which are to be respected and valued in their particular place: “Some things she openeth by the sacred bookes of Scripture; some things by the glorious works of nature; with some things she inspireth them from above by spirituall influence, in some thinges she leadeth and trayneth them onely by worldly experience and practise. We may not so in any one speciall kind admire her that we disgrace her in any other, but let all her wayes be according unto their place and degree adored.”  However, Hooker does not in fact think that the law of reason is so self-sufficient even within the realm of natural duties, or that Scripture has nothing to say about such duties (the conclusion that VanDrunen implies).  Nor does he think the converse (which proceeds from the same misunderstanding) that the supernatural law, being once delivered, can serve as a substitute for the law of reason (the conclusion that the Puritans implied).  

Rather, he declares at the outset of ch. 12, “When supernatural duties are necessarily exacted natural are not rejected as needless.  The law of God therefore is, though principally delivered for instruction in the one, yet fraught with precepts of the other also.  The Scripture is fraught even with laws of Nature.”  In re-directing us to our final end, Scripture cannot but re-direct us also with respect to our finite ends, since these are ultimately oriented toward that final end of union with God.  If we pursue finite goods with a view toward possession of God as highest good, then our dis-orientation from our final end, as a result of sin, cannot but distort our grasp of finite ends.  Consequently, the re-orientation provided by revelation will set us back on our natural path and illuminate that path again for us.  

We must distinguish, therefore, between “supernatural law” in the sense of origin and object.  Inasmuch as divine law reveals supernatural duties, it is, as Hooker has just said, supernatural both in respect of its origin (we could not know it but by special revelation) and in respect of its object (it concerns those duties which comprise our supernatural path to our final end).  However, divine law also reveals natural duties; in these it is supernatural in respect of origin, but not of object.  This distinction—between divine laws that are strictly soteriological, and divine laws that are also natural—is of course absolutely crucial for Hooker throughout the Lawes, and corresponds again to the two kingdoms distinction.  It is this which enables him to maintain sola Scriptura strictly within the arena of supernatural duties, while insisting that Scripture and the law of reason can be mutually interpreting in the arena of natural duties.

After delineating at some length the ways in which the law of reason can fail to adequately inform us of our natural duties, Hooker recapitulates with admirable concision and precision the triple dependence of the natural on the supernatural:

“We see, therefore, that our sovereign good is desired naturally; that God the author of that natural desire had appointed natural means whereby to fulfil it; that man having utterly disabled his nature unto those means hath had other revealed from God, and hath received from heaven a law to teach him how that which is desired naturally must now supernaturally be attained.  Finallie we see that because those later [the supernatural] exclude not the former [the natural] quite and cleane as unnecessarie, therefore together with such supernaturall duties as could not possiblie have been otherwise knowne to the world, the same lawe that teacheth them, teacheth also with them such naturall duties as could not by light of nature easilie have bene knowne.”