laudable Practice

To mark Richard Hooker Day, words from the Lawes (III.9.2). Amidst the violent bitterness of Reformation controversies, Hooker- who opened and concluded the Preface to the Lawes by invoking "the God of peace" -  called the ecclesia Anglicana from "distempered affections" which distorted reflection, discernment, and judgement. In our own time of angry, embittered, divisive ecclesial and civic culture wars, with their hyper-partisanship, Hooker's call has a new resonance: at such times as we are to deliberate for ourselves, the freer our minds are from all distempered affections, the sounder and better is our judgment. When we are in a fretting mood at the church of Rome, and with that angry disposition enter into any cogitation of the orders and rites of our church; taking particular survey of them, we are sure to have always one eye fixed upon the countenance of our enemies, and according to the blithe or heavy aspect thereof, our other eye sheweth some other...

Joseph Hall (appointed Bishop of Exeter in 1627, translated to Norwich in 1641) appears early in Stephen Hampton's Grace and Conformity: The Reformed Conformist Tradition and the Early Stuart Church of England , as one of the "representative voices" of that tradition. Oddly missing from the book's bibliography, however, is Hall's 1623 sermon - when he was Dean of Worcester - to Convocation, ' Noah's Dove ', a statement of peaceable irenicism in a time of bitter theological controversy. The previous year, James VI/I had issued his 'Directions Concerning Preachers': That no preacher of what title soever under the degree of a bishop, or dean at the least, do from henceforth presume to preach in any popular auditory the deep points of predestination, election, reprobation or of the universality, efficacity, resistibility or irresistibility of God's grace. Three years after Hall's Convocation sermon, Charles I published ' A Proclamation ...

From the 1652 Whitsun sermon by Bishop Hall, moderate Calvinist and Dort delegate, an expression of Episcopalian piety - irenic, quiet, peaceable - with roots in Hooker and flowering in the Laudian Taylor and the Latitudinarian Tillotson : God's Spirit leads us Sweetly and Gently ... not in a blustering and hurrying violence, but by a leisurely and gracious inclination. So, in Elijah's vision, there was fire, wind, earthquake; but God was in none of them: these were fit preparatives for his appearance; but it was the still soft voice, wherein God would be revealed. Those, that are carried with a heady and furious impetuousness and vehemence of passion in all their proceedings, which are all rigour and extremity, are not led by that Good Spirit; which would be styled the Spirit of Meekness: who was pleased to descend, not in the form of an eagle, or any other fowl of prey; but in the form of a meek and innocent dove. We could easily imagine the words coming from Hooker or Tayl...

From Taylor's  Ductor dubitantium , a rather glorious Hookerian account of legitimate variety in sacramental practice, rejecting attempts to impose a uniformity on all the churches as a fettering of Christian liberty, exercised by "every particular or national Church" (cf. Article XXXIV). Note, in particular, Taylor's recognition that the Words of Institution are not necessarily required to consecrate the Eucharist, bringing to mind the Anaphora of Addai and Mari and also Reformed and Moravian practice. With Hooker, he reminds us that all Apostolic injunctions are not necessarily binding upon the Churches, "for Christ onely is our law-giver". The extract also exemplifies how Episcopalian thought interpreted Christian liberty in terms of the liberties of national Churches, rather than as a proto-individualism. Above all, here is a joyous irenicism in which the historic variety and diversity of Christian practices concerning the Sacraments is justified and aff...