Richard Hooker: "identity politics", conscience, freedom, & the State

​​How should the Church respond to modern “identity politics”?
What sort of separation should there be between church and state? 
Must Roman catholics abandon confessional confidentiality?  
Should Christian citizens expect “freedom of religion”?
Is there a bible verse for that?
Are the pressies right that Episcopacy is just a very “naughty” idea?
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​In the last 12 months each of the above questions have surfaced on my facebook feed. Earnest posts with cascading replies churning in their turbulent wake, and not a few side-eddies sucking their participants below the troubled surface.

In each instance my thoughts were immediately drawn to three books I’d recently read. These books made me freshly aware of the unacknowledged currents drawing along my own thinking on these kind of questions.

1. Richard Hooker: A companion to His Life and Work 
2. The Peril and Promise of Christian Liberty: Richard Hooker, The Puritans, And Protestant Political Theology
3. The Two Kingdoms: A Guide for the Perplexed

Each was authored by W. Bradford Littlejohn who founded The Davenant Institute and completed his PHD under Oliver O’Donovan at Edinburgh.

What follows is a brief commendation of each book. The three of them  overlap somewhat, but were uniquely compelling in their own way.

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1. Richard Hooker: A companion to His Life and Work
(W. Bradford Littlejohn, Cascade Books, 2015)

In many ways this was the most enjoyable read of the three books, and a great place to start. In the wash-up of the reformation in protestant England, we're introduced to the life, times, and theology of Richard Hooker:  part biography,  part theology,  part scholarly review.

Littlejohn provides an engaging overview of the long-standing contentions surrounding the Anglican Divine, Richard Hooker: a man claimed by everyone from Anglo-Catholics, to Evangelical-Reformed types, to even the odd Presbyterian! Without ever getting bogged down, the opening chapters introduce us to the scholarly myths surrounding Hooker and flag the various agendas fuelling them. The book is worth buying for its bibliographic resources!

In the background the whole time is Hooker’s engagement with the “Precisionists” (1) and the “Conformists” (2). The book outlines Hooker’s attempts to correct the errors of both extremes. Hooker offers not so much a compromise between the extremes of the two parties, but his own developed permutation of Luther’s “Two Kingdoms” doctrine (see review below). We are introduced to Hooker’s key work “”Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity” - which I found myself ordering online before I’d finished reading Littlejohn’s chapter about it! 

(1) The precisionists were the more “bolshie” Puritans: Hooker received his own theological training under moderate Puritans.
(2) The conformists were supporters of Royal Supremacy and “sacred kingship”.

Littlejohn highlights Hooker’s distinctively Christological approach to matters of Liturgy, Sacraments, Soteriology, Assurance, and Church Governance: sparking great moments of insight into ongoing modern tensions in Reformed and Evangelical circles (more generally) and Anglicanism (more specifically). 

The book closes with a chapter noting the relevance of Hooker’s theology for issues as diverse as the “Identity Politics” of the Gay Right’s Movement, and the question of what constitutes “adiaphora” in matters of Church Liturgy and Governance.

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2. The Two Kingdoms: A Guide for the Perplexed
(W. Bradford Littlejohn, The Davenant Trust, 2017)


I read this book last out of the three, but I’d recommend it as a follow-up. It is actually more of a “guide” than a book, coming in at barely 100 pages. Littlejohn sums up the significance of Hooker’s formulation of the "Two Kingdoms"  doctrine…  

“…for the Reformers, the two-kingdoms doctrine was not primarily about church and state, or even necessarily political theology more broadly construed, even if it had very important implications for political theology, which we will explore in this book. The two kingdoms were not two institutions or even two domains of the world, but two ways in which the kingship of Christ made itself felt in the life of each and every believer. As such, they were tangled up with all the various forms of “twoness” that run through Christian theology on every front.”

“two-kingdoms doctrine is above all a call to recover the exercise of prudence and wisdom, freed by the Spirit to creatively re-apply Biblical principles and precedents to situations and questions where God has not always supplied us with detailed blueprints and timeless answers…” 

The guide concludes with three chapters exploring the relevance of Hooker’s “Two Kingdom” theology for matters concerning i) Pastoral ministry,  ii) Church unity and Ecumenicism iii) Church and State interactions, and  iv) “The Market” and economics.

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3. The Peril and Promise of Christian Liberty: Richard Hooker, The Puritans, And Protestant Political Theology
(W. Bradford Littlejohn, Eerdmans, 2017)

This book is a more involved read than the previous two. However, if you enjoy either of the previous two briefer books, this will certainly be worth it!

Through focussed exploration of Richard Hooker's engagement with Puritan/Conformist debate over Christian freedom, Littlejohn offers compelling insights into modern liberalism, the nature of Church/state, conscience, and the public good. It covers all that is included in the previous two books, at a more involved level and with deeper direct engagement with Hooker’s own writing. Even so, it is not difficult to spot where both the content and manner of Hooker’s theology and polemics are relevant to the currents directing much modern controversy!

The conclusion engages with David Bentley Hart, Oliver O'Donovan, and Richard Baukham, and even offers insights into the underlying convictions of writers such as Joshua Harris and Mark Driscoll !

Below is an extended quote from the concluding chapter:

"On the one hand, to speak of a liberal order sustained by Christian confession seems downright oxymoronic in contemporary pluralist discourse. And yet it is hard to see exactly how else one might sustain the all-important desacralization of political power... The modest pretensions of liberal politics depend on the conception of the political realm as relative, penultimate, and temporal. And yet, all these terms only make sense in relation to their opposites. Relative in relation to what if not the absolute? Penultimate in relation to what if not the ultimate? Temporal in relation to what if not the eternal? ...according to Luther, the proclamation of Christian liberty and its concomitant doctrine, the two kingdoms, is in fact the only way to avoid, in the long run, the sort of totalitarianism that Berlin feared in his exposition of positive liberty."