Inspirational Quotes by Richard Hooker (English Theologian, Political Theorist)

Richard Hooker (1554–1600) was an English Anglican theologian and political theorist. He authored the excellent prose classic Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, to which Anglican theology owes its tone and direction.

Born near Exeter, he studied at Corpus Christi, Oxford, where he became a Fellow in 1577. He took orders in 1581, and in 1584 became rector of Drayton Beauchamp near Tring.

After a drawn-out debate over his appointment as Master of the Temple in 1585, Hooker resolved to set forth the basis of the Church government, and in 1591 accepted the living of Boscombe near Salisbury. There he began his eight-volume work, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1594, 1597, 1648, 1662,) a defense of the Church of England as established during Elizabeth I’s reign.

Still unfinished at the time of his death, Hooker’s work defended the Church of England against both Roman Catholicism and Puritanism. It asserted the Anglican tradition as that of a “threefold cord not quickly broken”—Bible, church, and reason. He argued that in England, there was an essential unity between church and state, which were distinct facets of a single community, both subject to the authority of the monarch.

Hooker’s work much inspired the ideas of later political theorists such as John Locke and Edmund Burke.

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