In any list of Anglican theologians, Richard Hooker’s name would stand high, if not first. He was born in 1553 near Exeter, and was admitted in 1567 to Corpus Christi College, Oxford, of which he became a Fellow ten years later. After ordination and marriage in 1581, he held a living in Buckinghamshire. In 1586, he became Master of the Temple in London. Later, he served country parishes in Boscombe, Salisbury, and Bishopsbourne near Canterbury.

A controversy with a noted Puritan led Hooker to prepare a comprehensive defense of the Reformation settlement underQueen Elizabeth I. This work, his masterpiece, was entitled The Lawsof Ecclesiastical Polity. Its philosophical base is Aristotelian, witha strong emphasis upon the natural law eternally planted by God in creation. On this foundation, all positive laws of church and state are grounded—upon Scriptural revelation, tradition, and reason.

Book Five of the Laws is a massive defense of the Book of Common Prayer, directed primarily against Puritan detractors. Hooker’s arguments are buttressed by enormous patristic learning, but the needs of the contemporary worshiper are paramount, and he draws effectively on his twenty-year experience of using the Prayer Book.

Concerning the nature of the church, Hooker wrote: “The churchis always a visible society of men; not an assembly, but a society. For although the name of the church be given unto Christian assemblies, although any multitude of Christian men congregated may be termed by the name of a church, yet assemblies properly are rather things that belong to a church. Men are assembled for performance of public actions; which actions being ended, the assembly dissolveth itself and is no longer in being, whereas the church which was assembled doth no less continue afterwards than before.”

Pope Clement VIII is reported to have said that Hooker’s work “had in it such seeds of eternity that it would abide until the last fire shall consume all learning.”