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Richard Hooker and John Calvin

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2011

Extract

At a time when the theology of the reformed English Church was in the process of formation, Richard Hooker was compelled by the pressure of puritan argument to come to terms with Calvin's theological legacy and the Genevan experiment in theocracy—upheld by English reformists as the perfect model of a reformed Church. Hooker himself had been schooled in Calvinist theology: his nineteenth-century editor, John Keble, suggested that his earliest work revealed him to be still under the spell of the puritan divines who looked to Calvin and his successor Beza for their inspiration. Another nineteenth-century commentator, F. D. Maurice, observed that Hooker not merely reverenced but trembled before the name of Calvin, pointing out that ‘the caution and hesitancy of Hooker in finding fault with the foreign Reformer, when he was most disposed to be severe upon his English imitators, show how much the metaphysics of the Institutes governed his mind.’

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Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1981

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References

1 The Works of Mr Richard Hooker, ed. Keble, John, Oxford 1845, i. p. xlviiiGoogle Scholar (cited in the text hereafter as HW by volume and page). Maurice, F. D., Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, London 1872, ii. 191Google Scholar.

2 Thompson, W. D. J. Cargill, ‘The Philosopher of the “Politic society.”’, in Studies in Richard Hooker: Essays Preliminary to an Edition of his Works, ed. Hill, W. Speed, Cleveland and London 1972Google Scholar, 14f. All references to Cargill Thompson are to his argument in this essay.

3 Coleridge on the Seventeenth Century, ed. Brinkley, R. F., Duke University Press 1955, 148.Google Scholar

4 On the power of preaching in the thought of Hooker and Cartwright, see my The Church in the Theology of the Reformers, London (Marshall's Theological Library) and Atlanta (John Knox Press) 1980Google Scholar, part 2, ch. 1. On the state of clerical education and the reasons behind it, see O'Day, Rosemary, ‘The Reformation of the Ministry: 1558–1642’, in Continuity and Change: Personnel and Administration of the Church in England: 1500–1642, ed. O'Day, R. and Heal, F., Leicester University Press 1976Google Scholar.

5 On the concept of the true Church and its marks, see my paper ‘“The True Church” in Reformation Theology’, Scottish Jnl of Theology, xxx (1977), 319–45Google Scholar and the whole of the first part of my above-mentioned book.

6 See my article, ‘Moses and the Magistrate: a study in the rise of Protestant Legalism’, this JOURNAL, xxvi (1975), 149–72Google Scholar.

7 ‘John Jewel, Works (Parker Society) iii, Cambridge 1848, 79, 92.

8 On the Reformation concepts of the godly prince and the Royal Supremacy, see my The Church in the Theology of the Reformers, part 2, chs 4 and 5.

9 See here, ibid., part 1, ch.3.

10 See, for example, Pannier, J., Calvin et l'episcopat, Strasburg 1926Google Scholar; Milner, B. C., Calvin's Doctrine ofthe Church, Leiden 1970Google Scholar, especially p. 148; McNeill, J. T., ‘The Doctrine of the Ministry in Reformed Theology’, Church History, xii (1943), 7797CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Pattison, Mark, ‘Calvin at Geneva’, Essays, ed. Nettleship, L., Oxford 1889, iiGoogle Scholar. 20 (first published in the Westminster Review in 1858).

12 See Niesel, W., The Theology of Calvin, London 1956, 200Google Scholar.

13 Browne, Sir Thomas, Religio Medici, Oxford 1909, 8Google Scholar. I have pursued the theme of this article into the nineteenth century in research into interpretations of the Reformation among the Coleridgeans and the Tractarians in the context of the romantic and historical movements. See my article ‘The Shaking of the Seven Hills’, Scottish Jnl of Theology, xxxii (1979), 439–55Google Scholar. My book The Shaking of the Seven Hills: Romanticism, the Reformation and Philosophy of History will present the results of this research.