Commontide
Proper 25
Liturgical Color: White/Gold
The 21st Sunday after Trinity
Almighty and everlasting God, you govern all things both in heaven and on earth: Mercifully hear the supplications of your people, and in our time grant us your peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Most liturgical texts are from the Book of Common Prayer (2019) of the Anglican Church in North America.
The New Coverdale Psalter, © 2019 by the Anglican Church in North America. Used by permission.
Priest and Teacher of the Church
Anglican Commemoration
Richard Hooker was the Elizabethan priest and theologian whose Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity gave the reformed Church of England its most careful account of itself. Master of the Temple in London and afterward a country parson in Kent, he wrote in defense of the English church's order against those who would remake it wholly on the Geneva pattern, arguing that Scripture holds the first place and that reason and the settled judgment of the church rightly order what Scripture leaves free. He died in 1600, and later ages came to call him the judicious Hooker and the father of Anglican theological method. His feast is November 3.
Richard Hooker was born in Heavitree, Exeter, and studied at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he mastered classical languages and theology. Appointed Master of the Temple Church in London in 1585, his preaching earned wide respect even from Puritan opponents.
Hooker's magnum opus, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, was begun around 1590 in response to Puritan challenges to the Elizabethan settlement. Books I-V were published in his lifetime (1594-1597); Books VI-VIII appeared posthumously and remain textually uncertain. The Laws is a work of extraordinary intellectual sophistication, engaging Aristotle, Aquinas, and contemporary Reformed theologians. Rather than relying on biblical proof-texting alone, Hooker argued from natural law, historical precedent, and rational inference, defending episcopal polity and liturgical order as theologically legitimate even if not explicitly mandated by Scripture.
In 1595, Hooker accepted the rectory of Bishopsbourne in Kent, where he lived quietly until his death in 1600 at age forty-six. His posthumous reputation grew immensely. By the seventeenth century he was recognized as the founding figure of Anglican theological method.
Hooker has been venerated as the founding figure of Anglican theological method. His reputation was shaped initially by royalist and High Church interpreters (Walton, Keble) and later rebalanced by modern scholarship recovering his Reformed sympathies alongside his Catholic sensibilities.