Richard Hooker's vision of Protestant Christendom

Recently reading Diarmaid MacCulloch's charming essay 'The Bay Psalm Book' (in his excellent All Things Made New), I came across this reference to the Church of England's Reformed identity in a description of the English Protestant settlements in the New World:

from Church of England Virginia through Separatist Plymouth to 'Congregationalist' Boston, they were all variants on a Protestant theme: an English version of the great family of Reformed Protestant Churches which, back home in Europe, stretched from the Outer Hebrides to Transylvania. The Reformed were 'Reformed' because they were not Lutheran, a form of Christianity which they regarded with almost as much loathing as that of the pope in Rome.

On this day when Richard Hooker is commemorated, we might want to question this assumption (an assumption also shared in Stephen Hampton's Grace and Conformity: The Reformed Conformist Tradition and the Early Stuart Church of England). 

Now to be clear, I am not at all suggesting we invoke the tired and wholly inaccurate view of Hooker as the creation of the mythical via media beloved of post-1833 century Anglo-catholics. Hooker stood, clearly and explicitly, within the wider Reformed tradition, while crucially recognising - as Torrance Kirby has brilliantly demonstrated - that 'Reformed' was a contested category. Part of that contest was how the Reformed looked on the rest of Protestant Europe, the Lutheran churches of the Scandinavian kingdoms and the German principalities.  Hooker gave voice to a compelling, peaceable eirenic vision of Protestant Christendom, as this convincing recent thesis has stated:

This thesis argues that Hooker defended the 1559 Elizabethan Settlement as being congruent with wider Protestantism, but this clearly raises a question of how that wider grouping should be understood. Hooker did not hold to any one particular national Church as a gold-standard, but drew on an eclectic and diverse number of Protestant theologians. These included Calvin, Bullinger, and Zwingli, but also Lutherans such as Melanchthon and Luther himself. In doing so, it was Hooker’s aim to argue that the Elizabethan Church was able to fit into that broad family. The diversity of that family made Hooker’s argument all the easier, since he was able to cherry-pick elements from whichever Church or theologian suited his arguments. This was not mere evasion, but genuinely reflected Hooker’s view that most of the variations within that family were adiaphora, matters of indifference.

Hooker's vision, of the Church of England's place amongst the family of churches of the Reformation which included the Lutherans, echoed the views of his mentor, John Jewel, expressed in the authoritative Apology of the Church of England. In that work, after all, Jewel had declared Lutheran-Zwinglian differences to be of little significance:

as for … Zwinglians and Lutherans, in very deed they of both sides be Christians, good friends and brethren. They vary not betwixt themselves upon the principles and foundations of our religion, nor as touching God, nor Christ, nor the Holy Ghost, nor of the means of justification, nor yet everlasting life, but upon one only question, which is neither weighty nor great.

Jewel's summary of the Lutheran-Reformed debate on the Holy Supper, "one only question, which is neither weighty nor great", could easily function as a summary of Hooker's great chapter 'Of the sacrament of the body and blood of Christ' in Book V of the Lawes:

Take therefore that wherein all agree and then consider by it selfe what cause why the rest in question should not rather be left as superfluous than urged as necessarie (V.67.7).

Jewel's insistence on this eirenic account of the Churches of the Reformation was also seen when he recorded the jurisdictions in which the Church had been reformed, placing Lutheran kingdoms and principalities alongside Reformed city states:

the kings of our country of England, the kings of Denmark, the kings of Sweden, the dukes of Saxony, the counts palatine, the marquesses of Brandenburg, the landgraves of Hesse, the commonwealth of the Helvetians and Rhaetians, and the free cities, as Argentine, Basil, Frankfort, Ulm, Augusta, and Nuremberg.

Hooker, in other words, inherited from Jewel this eirenic vision of Protestant Christendom embracing the Lutheran tradition. It was to be an abiding characteristic of a significant expression of English Conformist thought, throughout the 17th century and beyond.  For example, consider Laud's rebuke to his accusers when they failed to consider Lutheran episcopal polities:

unless these Men be so strait Laced, as not to admit the Churches of Sweden, and Denmark, and indeed, all, or most of the Lutherans, to be Reformed Churches.

All of which brings us back to that opening extract from MacCulloch's essay.  No, it was not at all the case that the Reformed ecclesia Anglicana regarded the Lutherans with loathing.  Such was not the vision Hooker inherited from Jewel.  Hooker - and a significant part of the Conformist tradition after him - promoted a quite different, much wiser, expansive view of Protestant Christendom embracing the Lutheran churches.