Cranmer, Hooker and Reformed latitude
What, however, if shared Cranmerian and Hookerian themes - themes dependent on shared theological sources - have profoundly shaped the Anglican experience? Diarmaid MacCulloch's essay 'Tolerant Cranmer?' immediately suggests one feature of the Cranmerian influence on Anglicanism. The essay begins by referring to Cranmer as a "cautious, well-read humanist". This itself might put us in mind of Hooker and what Rowan Williams describes as his "contemplative pragmatism". The roots of such "contemplative pragmatism" also sound thoroughly Cranmerian:
Placed alongside Cranmer's preference for the attempts at comprehension by Melanchthon and Bucer, it indicates a rejection of those ecclesial statements and practices which tend to what Williams terms "elitist conceptualism", regarding these as undermining a gracious and generous unity of the Church around God's gracious and generous acts. The same spirit is evident in the hesitancy of Cranmer and Hooker regarding attitudes and practices which suggest a too rigidly defined visible church, and in a shared scepticism regarding both exalted jure divino claims for models of church order and straightforward, unnuanced invocations of the apostolic practice. In other words, if we were searching for a theological basis for Anglicanism's latitude, comprehension, and caution, it may be found - perhaps unexpectedly - in outworkings of the Reformed theological commitments of Cranmer and Hooker.
a mood that embraces a fair degree of clarity about the final goal of human beings and the theological conditions for getting there, but allows room for a good deal of reticence as to how this ought to work itself out and scepticism as to claims that we have found comprehensive formulations. The self-critical element in theological formulation here comes not from any strictly epistemological uncertainties but from the conviction of finitude and sin, intensified by a quite orthodox Reformed pessimism about human capacity.
Something of the practical outworking of this in ecclesial life is seen in how both Cranmer and Hooker sought to encourage conformity to the reformed ecclesia Anglicana by those who retained an allegiance to the papacy. Cranmer's approach is quoted by MacCulloch:
Shall we perhaps, in his journey coming towards us, by severities and cruel behaviour overthrow him, and as it were in his voyage stop him? I take not this the way to allure men to embrace the doctrine of the gospel ... let such as are not yet come to favour our religion, learn to follow the doctrine of the gospel by our example in using them friendly and charitably.
There is an obvious similarity with Hooker's response to those Disciplinarians who critiqued the Church of England for "admitting popish communicants":
according to the merciful examples and precepts whereby the gospel of Christ hath taught us towards such to show compassion, to receive them with all lenity and all meekness, if anything be shaken in them to strengthen it, not to quench with delays and jealousies that feeble smoke of conformity (LEP V.68.9).
As MacCulloch notes, it was Cranmer's "predestinarian" convictions which underpinned the pastoral generosity he urged and thus provided the basis for a rejection of any claims of definitive human knowledge of the status of those currently not accepting Reformed teaching. Similarly, as Williams notes, Hooker's approach was shaped by "a quite orthodox Reformed pessimism about human capacity":
What their hearts are God doth know ... For neither doth God bind us to dive into men's consciences ... In the eye of God they are against Christ that are not truly and sincerely with him, in our eyes they must be received as with Christ that are not to outward show against him (V.68.8).
MacCulloch also mentions Cranmer's "distinctive historical relativism about the early church", questioning the assumption "that the Apostolic Church of the first generation should be the ultimate court of appeal in all disputes about the nature of the contemporary Church". Something of this is reflected in Hooker's willingness to accept and affirm differences with the apostolic and patristic eras:
Sundry dissimilitudes we grant there are ... Many things there are in the state of Bishops, which the times have changed; Many a Parsonage at this day is larger than some ancient Bishopricks were; many an ancient Bishop poorer then at this day sundry under them in degree (VII.2.1).
Likewise, Hooker's affirmation of episcopal polity was not dependent on a straightforward appeal to apostolic precedent:
The name Bishop hath been borrowed from the Grecians, with it it signifieth one which hath principal charge to guide and oversee others. The same word in Ecclesiastical writings being applied unto Church-governors, at the first unto all and not the chiefest only, grew in short time peculiar and proper to signify such Episcopal authority alone, as the chiefest Governors exercised over the rest (VII.2.2).
This, of course, finds a core in Hooker's robustly expressed view that Scripture does not provide of "form of polity" for the Church, "set down for perpetuity" and "altogether unchangeable" (III.11). Such a view is not dissimilar to MacCulloch's description that "Cranmer viewed the first Christians as casting around to create makeshift structures of authority".
Cranmer and Hooker, therefore, both rejected models of ecclesiastical polity which proponents loudly claimed were Apostolic, if not bene esse and jure divino. Thus MacCulloch says of Cranmer:
he would be deaf to the attractions of Bucer's and Calvin's developing ecclesiology and their emphasis on recovering the structural forms of the Apostolic Church ... At the same time, opposing the other flank, Cranmer wanted to repudiate the false claims to authority by the traditional Church.
As for Hooker, Williams has summarised his view as "the desirability of bishops is insisted upon by refusing to argue their theological necessity", a form of argument which therefore offered an alternative to both Roman and Genevan claims:
To the Catholic challenge ... Hooker would reply that the problem comes precisely with a declaration of the necessity of anything beyond the basic grammar of incarnate divine freedom. It is perfectly consistent for him to defend episcopacy against Puritan attack on the grounds that there is no prescribed church order in the New Testament and that no order could in any case be so essential to the maintenance of orthodox faith that its presence or absence determined whether or not a body could be a church.
It is against this background, it is difficult not to see an anticipation of Hooker in MacCulloch's account of Cranmer's "passionately held view of the English Church as possessing a middle ground of truth which needed to be defended from two extremes of error".
There is another sense in which we might point to a similarity between Cranmer and Hooker which had a formative importance for Anglicanism. In his portrayal of Cranmer's commitment to ecclesiastical concord, MacCulloch points to two sources of influence:
his favourite continental theologians would be successively Philip Melanchthon and Martin Bucer, the two arch-exponents of the spinning of formulae designed to unite conferences of diverse theologians.
MacCulloch also suggests that Hooker can be compared to another cautious, irenic stream of Reformation thought:
Hooker's emphatic affirmation of the place of the civil magistrate in the Church, his relativistic discussion of episcopacy and his maintenance of a Reformed view of the Eucharist, still firmly distanced from Lutherans - even his turning away from Calvinistic harshness on predestination would not raise eyebrows in Bullinger's Zurich. The Ecclesiastical Polity was much more in the spirit of the Decades than has often been realized.
The importance of this emphasis on Hooker's likeness to Bullinger can be judged from Bruce Gordon's account of the Zurich Reformer's theology:
Bullinger believed in the peaceful outward ordering of religion ... Bullinger rejected all attempts by men to judge the souls of others; he was adamant that the authority of the magistrates had to be upheld ... his attitude towards the sacraments and church discipline revealed the depth of his abhorrence of the arrogance of human presumption. For Bullinger, this meant that excommunication could have no role in the life of the church. Unlike Calvin, Bullinger did not believe that the Lord's Table was to be protected from unbelievers, because it was not up to humans to discern the identity of the elect.
And so, as Williams says, Hooker opposed those theologies for whom "sacraments could only be human actions designed to further the homogeneity of that community of uniform spiritual achievement, which is the holy congregation".
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