How can we bring the classics of the Reformation era back into the intellectual life and experience of modern Christians? Much of what our sixteenth- and seventeenth-century predecessors wrote strikes us as long-winded, obscure, and of doubtful relevance for the church today. At the same time, there is now a fear in some quarters that the mainline Protestant denominations, and in particular Anglicans (Episcopalians), have lost their way and need to recover the inspiration that led to their being established in the first place. The Davenant Institute has as its mission the reissue of theological texts from the Reformation and post-Reformation era that expound the central doctrines and concerns that shaped the Reformed Church of England. Many of these texts have been set aside by later generations and almost forgotten, and so the need for this labor of love is acute. One of the most prominent—and contested—figures of that age is Richard Hooker (d. 1600), whose Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity remains a classic monument of the Elizabethan age. More than anything else, it was the queen's settlement of English religion in 1559 that Hooker set out to defend. He was a conformist, rather than a traditionalist, and sought to support the Reformed church order in England as being fully consonant with God's Word.

Hooker rightly perceived that the worship and organization of the church—or its “polity,” to use the technical term—was not a matter that was clearly laid out in holy scripture, and he rejected calls from more radical Protestants to remove anything that was not explicitly Biblical from the worship and government of the church. He lived at a time when there was increasing pressure to do just that, and so his work comes across as basically conservative and defensive. But that was not his chief aim, and he should not be read as if it was. What Hooker wanted was a church that got its priorities right, that was not divided over secondary matters, and that retained as much visible continuity with the pre-Reformation past as was consistent with Protestant doctrine and principles. In his view, the Presbyterian party in the Church of England was extremist and intent on promoting as mandatory something that was, in reality, optional. He did not set out to prove that Presbyterianism was necessarily wrong, but rather that it was not obviously right to the exclusion of anything else. The New Testament allowed for a variety of practices, and as long as those used in the Church of England fell within the parameters of scriptural teaching, there was no compelling case for altering them. On the contrary, keeping the familiar patterns would avoid disruption and lessen controversy at a time when the essential thing was to preach the Gospel of salvation that Martin Luther and others had rediscovered in the pages of the New Testament.

Hooker wrote in English, rather than in Latin, and this creates a peculiar difficulty for us today. How far back should we be able to go before the language starts to sound strange, if not incomprehensible? Everyone would agree that Beowulf, written in Anglo-Saxon, now needs to be translated—it is a foreign language to us, even if it is called “Old English.” Chaucer is more borderline. If his work is written in modern spelling, accompanied by notes and a glossary of unfamiliar words, and studied by someone with a fair knowledge of French, it is just about possible to make sense of it without further ado. Writings from the Reformation era are more complicated because they are more easily understood—or so we think. Modern English is generally thought to have been developed by 1500 and we would now expect most people to be able to read Shakespeare or the King James Bible with only a little help for some obscure or obsolete words. The same is true of Richard Hooker, though here there is a difference. Shakespeare and the Bible were intended for public declamation; Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity was not. Its subject matter and style reflect the world of academe and the judiciary, the world in which the book was conceived and which it was intended to address. Modern readers usually find contemporary legal tracts difficult to read, so how much more will this be the case with a book that is over 400 years old?

It is to address this problem that the current edition was prepared. Strictly speaking, it is not a translation—though the editors have warned readers that it often feels like one—simply because the thought patterns of the original are often so complex that anything less would leave readers in much the same degree of bewilderment that they would have been with the original. The danger, of course, is that attempted modernization will fall between two stools. On the one hand, it may be too modern to do proper justice to its subject matter because its subtleties simply cannot be reproduced accurately in the everyday speech of today. For that reason, if for no other, no serious scholar of the sixteenth century will use this edition as a source; he or she will inevitably be forced to have recourse to the original. On the other hand, the modern version will still sound like a lawyer's brief (which, to a large extent, it was) and therefore fail to appeal to a wider public. It risks being left on the shelf as a noble effort undertaken in an unpopular cause, and Hooker's wider impact will be no greater than it was before.

Given this inevitable conundrum, the editors have done their best to weave their way between Scylla and Charybdis, and on the whole, they have succeeded better than we might have feared. Hooker's main ideas come across clearly, but readers must be prepared to brave the dryness of a legal text and accept that some of his arguments are now obscure because the context has changed. They should also be aware that Hooker was much less influential in his own time than he has been among American Episcopalians over the past half century. It is not uncommon nowadays to hear Anglicans in the United States extol Hooker as the virtual founder of Anglicanism, a view that puzzles people from other countries (and especially people from England, where Hooker is seldom read or referred to as an authority of any kind). There is also the danger that his approach may be taken out of context and used today in pointless arguments against Presbyterians and others. The fact that Hooker tends to be more popular among Anglo-Catholics than with Anglican Evangelicals is a warning about how his intentions can be distorted and his legacy misappropriated, since if he were alive today he would almost certainly find himself much more at home among the latter than among the former—indeed, he would probably be more comfortable with mainstream Presbyterians than with many modern Episcopalians!

The misinterpretation—and misuse—of Hooker in recent times is not the fault or the responsibility of the editors of a volume like this one though, and their efforts deserve to be commended for what they are. If Hooker can become more accessible to the modern reader as a result of their work, then it is all to the good. We eagerly await the second volume and hope that it will prove to be as attractive and successful in its aims as the first.