Holy Scripture and the Law of God in Contemporary Anglicanism in the light of Richard Hooker's "Lawes"

By the Most Revd AET Harper, OBE Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland

There can be very few who would resist the view that Richard Hooker is even more formative of Anglican Theology and the Anglican theological method than was Thomas Cranmer of Anglican liturgy. Furthermore, the 16th century debate within which Hooker made his most significant contribution was one with striking similarities to the debate underlying the troubled state of the Anglican Communion today.

Hooker was appointed Master of the Temple in 1585, supplanting his cousin by marriage Walter Travers, who had exercised a very influential “readership” or “lectureship” there, obtained for him by his patron Lord Burghley in 1581. Indeed, Burghley was urging the Queen to appoint Travers to the vacant position of Master, most of the role and prerogatives of which Travers had assumed during the illness of the then incumbent, Richard Alvey.

Travers, however was a radical Calvinist and had earlier quit a brilliant career at Trinity College, Cambridge for Geneva and subsequently Antwerp. Archbishop Whitgift, in advising the queen on an appointment to the Temple, and being fully aware of the extent to which Presbyterianism threatened not only the queen’s episcopal church polity but also, ultimately, her authority as ruler of church and state, proposed first Dr Nicholas Bond but then, the queen judging Bond’s health to be unequal to the task, Richard Hooker ...

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