Richard Hooker And The English Reformation

This collection of seventeen essays addresses the substance of Richard Hooker's achievement as a theologian and philosopher in the context of principal themes of English Reformation thought. Hooker has been variously described as a Protestant scholastic, Renaissance Aristotelian, Erasmian humanist, Thomist, moderate Calvinist, and founder of a distinctive new theological method. The main thrust of these essays is to weigh such protean claims against careful readings of his oeuvre. Five principal loci of Reformation discourse are addressed: 1) the relation between the "orders" of Grace and Nature; 2) the doctrines of Providence and Predestination; 3) the Church and the liturgy; 4) sacramental theology; and 5) the polemical cut-and-thrust of the late-Elizabethan context. Scholars, seminarians, and students alike will find that this volume offers a fresh, critical illumination of Hooker's distinctive contribution to sixteenth-century religious reform.