Collect: Grant to us, O God Most High, the gifts of wisdom and understanding, that following the teaching of your servant Richard Hooker, we may cleave without compromise to those saving doctrines on which the faith of your Church is founded, and order all else most fittingly by the rule of love and the bond of peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Ghost, one God, now and for ever. Amen

Richard Hooker was an English priest who died in 1600, and we remember him today as a theologian who defended the Church of England and its choice of “the middle way” (via media) between Roman Catholic and Puritan ideologies.

Hooker was educated at Oxford University and devoted himself to scholarship and reflection on the subtle points of theology.

He is mainly remembered for the one great work that he wrote, entitled Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. This work was addressed to the Puritans because they sought to purify the Church of England according to their own narrow reading of the Bible. Against this movement Hooker argued for a more liberal outlook, which coordinated the testimony of Scripture, the course of Christian history, and the values of human reason, in order to defend the English Church as a communion for all peoples, not just a small group of “saints.”

His defence of Anglicanism is now commonly known as the Three-Legged Stool of Anglicanism, (Scripture, Reason, and Tradition) and has been accepted as the cornerstone of the Anglican faith.

“What Scripture doth plainly deliver, to that the first place both of credit and obedience are due; the next whereunto, is what any man can necessarily conclude by force of Reason; after this, the voice of the church succeedeth. That which the Church by her ecclesiastical authority shall probably think and define to be true or good, must in congruity of reason overrule all other inferior judgements whatsoever” (Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie)