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Richard Hooker and Reformed Theology: A Study of Reason, Will, and Grace. By Nigel Voak. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. xviii + 348 pp. $90.00 cloth.
The assumption that Hooker was a leading defender of an established via media Anglicanism against its Puritan critics, taken for granted little more than a generation ago, has been widely rejected by recent scholarship. As a result, the placement of Hooker in his theological milieu has become problematic: was he a theologian of the Reformed tradition? A theologian who spoke the Reformed words but lacked the Reformed music? Was he the inventor of Anglicanism rather than its defender? An idiosyncratic thinker, Hooker is difficult to understand because of the subtlety, complexity, and ambiguity of his writings and because his untimely death rendered the direction of his thought amenable to different interpretations. Nigel Voak, through a close and analytic reading of Hooker's writings in relation to a limited number of topics, and with comparisons especially to Aquinas and Calvin in order to assess his relation to medieval Catholic scholasticism and Reformed theology, attempts to pin down the thought of his subject.
Accepting that the late Elizabethan Church of England in which Hooker came to maturity was thoroughly Reformed, and that Hooker's own theological formation was under such Reformed thinkers as Bishop John Jewel and the Oxford theologian John Rainolds, Voak argues that while Hooker continued to adhere to such Reformed distinctives as the Perkinsian order of salvation and a view of Christ's presence in the Eucharist akin to that of Calvin, he nonetheless developed views on...