Philip Hobday. Richard Hooker: Theological Method and Anglican Identity. London: T&T Clark, 2023. Hardback. 223 pp. £76.50.

There once was a time when Richard Hooker was a good old Anglican, and that’s all: mild-mannered, judicious, middle-of-the-road, and non-committal; holding the perfect balance between past and future, Rome and Geneva, faith and reason, Scripture and tradition. No longer. The past generation has witnessed a series of earthquakes within the narrow world of Hooker studies, compelling a comprehensive re-assessment of this most eminent of English Protestant divines and suggesting his wider relevance to the Protestant world more generally.

If the default old consensus was that Hooker was neither Reformed nor Catholic because he was a perfectly blended tertium quid, a “reformed catholic,” there were, of course, three main logical possibilities for exploding this consensus. One was to claim that Hooker was in fact Catholic in all important respects and not Reformed at all, the first of the Anglo-Catholics. A line of historiography dating back to John Keble in the 1830s sought to demonstrate as much, but always a bit sheepishly and half-heartedly, and few serious scholars today would try to continue this charade. Another was to claim that Hooker was in fact Reformed in all important respects and not Catholic at all, a straightforward English Calvinist who simply preferred bishops and vestments. This interpretation gained steam among evangelical Anglicans in the 1990s behind the work of Nigel Atkinson, who was in some ways popularizing the groundbreaking scholarship of Torrance Kirby (although Kirby has always been somewhat more nuanced on the key questions). But it always felt a bit like special pleading.

There was, however, a third possibility, following a path charted by the paradigm-shifting historiography of Richard Muller and his friends and disciples. What if the opposition between “Reformed” and “Catholic” was wrongheaded in the first place? What if, in other words, there was nothing particularly unique about Hooker’s status as a “reformed catholic,” which was in fact simply what it meant to be a moderate magisterial Reformed Protestant in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century? Not, of course, that there were no important differences between Rome and Protestantism during this period. Justification, for instance, comes to mind, not to mention that little disagreement about the status of the Bishop of Rome. The new historiography did not seek to blur these crucial lines of division. But it did seek to do two things.

One was to highlight, contra an aberrant twentieth-century consensus, that the Reformation was never intended to be a rethink of everything; on wide swaths of doctrine, philosophy, and ethics, the Reformers registered few disagreements with Roman Catholicism. Or perhaps more precisely, both Protestants and Romanists inhabited a wide terrain of shared agreements and disagreements; so, for instance, when it came to predestination, Dominicans and Calvinists largely mirrored one another in the seventeenth century (and quoted one another!) as did Jesuits and Arminians. A recent flourishing of scholarship on natural law, for instance, has demonstrated (1) that the Reformers by and large affirmed a doctrine of natural law in similar terms to their Roman counterparts; (2) that there were, however, significant variations among Protestant natural law theories; and (3) that these variations largely mirrored similar debates among early modern Romanist natural lawyers.

The other contribution of Mullerite historiography was to stress that even on those issues where unbridgeable chasms loomed up in the sixteenth century, such as on sola fide and sola Scriptura, the Reformers claimed, with surprising plausibility, that they were simply carrying on true catholic teaching, and Trent was abandoning it. Recent years, then, have witnessed a surge of studies showing the continuities between Protestant teachings on sacramental theology, political theology, predestination, and even justification with those of key medieval scholastics such as Thomas Aquinas. Of course, such studies are not without their critics, either Roman or Protestant, insisting that medieval Roman Catholicism was still definitely Roman Catholicism, not proto-Protestantism. Still, the result of all this scholarship is to at least open up the possibility of a much more complex, nuanced, and fluid set of labels and categorizations for early modern Protestant theologians than was previously available.

The relevance of this rethink to the world of Hooker studies—and Anglican studies more generally—should be immediately obvious. If it turns out that Calvin and Aquinas were not so far apart after all, then the countless books and articles purporting to show that “Hooker was close to Aquinas, and therefore no Calvinist” or “Hooker was close to Calvin, and therefore no Thomist” are just so much wasted ink. It is just this hypothesis that a new generation of new Hooker scholars have tried out in the past decade and a half, to remarkable effect. The composite portrait painted by this new scholarship offers us a Richard Hooker who is to be celebrated not so much for brewing a unique theological blend, but for giving a uniquely powerful and eloquent statement to a “reformed catholic” vision that was always inherent in the best of early modern Protestantism.

Philip Hobday’s new book Richard Hooker: Theological Method and Anglican Identity is an excellent example of the fruits that this new historiographical approach can render. In it, he focuses his attention squarely on the much-debated “Anglican tripod” of Scripture, reason, and tradition that is often (mis-)attributed to Hooker. According to the older narrative, Hooker departed dramatically from the standard Reformed teaching on sola Scriptura in two ways: first, he elevated the role of reason in theology in a way reminiscent of medieval scholastics such as Thomas Aquinas; second, he gave great authority to tradition alongside Scripture as a source for doctrine and practice. Of course, this older narrative is typically rather vague on most of the key points, failing to distinguish between the ways in which reason functions as a source of knowledge versus a tool for digesting other sources of knowledge (such as Scripture), and likewise between tradition’s utility in matters of doctrine (where Hooker leans little on it) vs. matters of practice or polity (his primary focus in the Laws). The older narrative also tends to reduce the magisterial Protestant doctrine of sola Scriptura to a caricature of naïve biblicism.

Although a number of recent scholars have chipped away at this older narrative, none have undertaken the kind of sustained demolition that Hobday offers in this fine study. In order to focus the study, he chooses as his reference points for “Reformed” and “Catholic” John Calvin and Thomas Aquinas, respectively. Not perhaps the most original choices, but certainly representative figures against which he can test his hypotheses. These hypotheses are as follows:

• (1a) Aquinas held a rather dimmer view of reason’s value in matters of theology than is generally realized, a view that clearly subordinates it to Scripture and that shows remarkable convergence with key Reformed concerns;

• (1b) Calvin held a rather more robust view of reason’s value in matters of theology than is generally realized, a view that gives it a key role alongside Scripture and that shows remarkable convergence with key Thomistic concerns;

• (1c) Hooker’s nuanced portrayal of the capabilities and defects of reason, and its role alongside and under Scripture, maps pretty readily onto the wide area of agreement between Aquinas and Calvin;

• 2a) Aquinas never elevated tradition to the authoritative position, equal to Scripture, later given it by Trent;

• 2b) Calvin never disparaged tradition as a valid and valuable source in theology, so long as it not be detached from Scripture or given equal authority;

• 2c) Hooker’s nuanced portrayal of the uses and abuses of tradition in theology is substantively the same as Calvin’s, despite differing rhetorical emphasis, and thus not inconsistent with Aquinas’s.

For each of these hypotheses, Hobday succeeds in marshaling a wealth of primary and secondary source evidence, supported by close readings and careful distinctions, that proves quite convincing. Not all readers will be persuaded of all of his arguments, to be sure, as there is plenty of contested interpretive territory here, but at the very least this work promises to reframe the conversation and sets a bar that future “un-Reformed” readings of Hooker will struggle to surmount.

To be sure, the book suffers from weaknesses typical to this genre of academic writing (the typical published dissertation). Stylistically, readers may find it dry and uninspired, and its pacing ponderous and at times repetitive. Of course, academic writing does not need to be this way, and it is a continuing disgrace on our graduate schools that they do not prioritize lively prose more. But Hobday’s work is certainly readable enough, which is more than can be said for a great many works of this kind.

One also finds oneself wishing that the book engaged with a somewhat more diverse cast of characters. After all, most theological readers by now have heard about and read about Aquinas and Calvin ad nauseam. And if there was anything the Mullerite revolution was meant to have wrought, it was a great widening of the source literature for historical theology. Henceforward, anyone comparing Protestant thought to medieval thought should be looking not only at Calvin, but at Lombard, Bonaventure, Albert the Great, Scotus, Ockham, Gregory of Rimini, and more. (Not that I know much about any of those folks, mind you, but I should like to.) And anyone seeking to triangulate the center of gravity of sixteenth-century Reformed thought has to look beyond Calvin to consider figures such as Bullinger, Vermigli, Musculus, Zanchi, Junius, Perkins, and more. Hobday’s book thus only scratches the surface on these important topics, though I suspect a wider-angle view would tend to corroborate and strengthen his overall conclusions, rather than undermining them.

Hobday, however, has certainly blazed an important trail for future Protestant historical theologians to follow, revealing a broad “reformed catholic” area of consensus on critical questions of theological method in the sixteenth century that holds great ecumenical promise for the church in the twenty-first century.

Brad Littlejohn (Ph.D., University of Edinburgh) is a fellow in the Evangelicals and Civic Life program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He founded and served for ten years as president of The Davenant Institute