Though the spike in publications on Richard Hooker that followed the publication of the Folger Library Edition of his works in the late 1970s appears to have slowed over the last decade, the pace has diminished in the absence of a consensus regarding his legacy. Diarmaid MacCulloch, Michael Brydon and Peter Lake have pointed out (respectively) that subsequent movements have read and adopted his writings selectively, that his reputation has evolved dramatically and that it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the post-Restoration presentation of Hooker’s Of the lawes of ecclesiasticall politie as a defining document of ‘Anglicanism’ has complicated efforts to distinguish debates about its historical significance from present contests over the identity of the Church of England. In this volume Nigel Voak offers another significant intervention in these debates. His previous work in Richard Hooker and reformed theology (Oxford 2003) focused on the role of reason, the nature of the will and the efficacy of divine grace. This latest contribution adds further nuance to his treatment of reason by exploring its relation to the doctrine of Scripture.

Whereas Voak’s earlier work examined Richard Hooker’s thought directly, the present study also considers Hooker’s reception and subsequent influence. Building on his previous critiques of readings that portray Hooker as a straightforward exponent of traditional Protestant distinctives, this work develops those insights in a new direction. Voak argues that Hooker’s theology does, in an important sense, transmit a post-Reformation legacy. However, this legacy is not that of Reformed orthodoxy, but rather aligns more closely with the ‘Religion of Protestants’ articulated by William Chillingworth.

The question of Hooker’s relationship to a traditional three-fold distinction between different kinds of certainty is crucial to this argument. For example, the late medieval theologian and casuist Jean Gerson, drawing from Aristotle’s Nicomachean ethics, distinguished between supernatural, natural and moral or civil certainty. The first is capable of absolute assurance; the second, of a certainty deriving from demonstration based upon first principles and natural reasoning; and the third, of probable certainty which, though lacking absolute assurance or such confident demonstration, may still warrant belief and action (p. 31). Voak then describes an analogous approach in Aquinas, who distinguished between a ‘firmness of adherence’ derived from religious faith which is therefore infallible, and a ‘certainty assimilated from evidentness’ derived from cognition of objective evidence which is therefore fallible (p. 38).

Careful reading of these pages reveals not only the subtlety and variety of these categories in the tradition before Hooker, but also suggests caution in identifying Hooker’s epistemology with that of Aquinas, as several recent studies have done. Voak points out that Hooker makes the opposite point from Aquinas in A learned and comfortable sermon on the certaintie and perpetuitie of faith in the elect. Whereas, for Aquinas, religious faith is immediately infused by divine grace and therefore capable of an entirely different type of certainty than that assimilated from evidence, for Hooker, ‘certaintie of adherence’ is instead founded upon apprehension on the one hand and relative to the strength of the evidence apprehended on the other (p. 47). This approach also differentiated Hooker not only from Reformation figures like Calvin, but also from later Reformed theologians ranging from John Owen and Francis Turretin (p. 86) to Wolfgang Musculus and William Whitaker (p. 130). Thus, Voak simultaneously finds a gap between Hooker’s epistemology and a wide range of Reformed figures and suggests that Hooker’s antecedents are more likely found in Scotus than Aquinas (p. 134). The two most important points are that Hooker denied a common view that many Reformed orthodox theologians shared with Aquinas that ‘religious faith is defined by an absolutely certain assent’ (p. 20), and he also denied the distinctively ‘Reformed doctrine that Scripture is a self-authenticating first principle by the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit’ (p. 21).

Methodologically, Voak proceeds through sustained close readings of Hooker’s writings and sermons, followed by careful analyses of both Hooker’s advocates and his critics. These include, among others, Archbishop William Laud, the aforementioned Chillingworth, the Roman Catholic apologist Edward Knott, the Nonconformist Richard Baxter, the latitudinarian Edward Stillingfleet and ultimately John Locke. Throughout, Voak attends not only to broad intellectual affinities but especially to practices of quotation and allusion, with sensitivity to the ways later authors selectively deployed or reshaped earlier texts in service of their own polemical aims. Laud is shown not merely to draw upon Hooker’s authority but actively to ‘interpret’ and ‘control’ his legacy in his 1624 response to the Jesuit John Fisher [aka Percy] (p. 207). Voak then turns to Chillingworth’s purportedly ‘Socinian’ reading of Hooker in The religion of Protestants (1637/38), situating this interpretation in relation to Chillingworth’s ties to Laud and his temporary conversion to Roman Catholicism under Fisher’s influence. The analysis subsequently returns to Laud’s 1639 revisions of his earlier work, in which Laud sought both to defend his appeal to Hooker and to reassert opposition to Catholic appeals to tradition, now reframed against Chillingworth’s rationalising tendencies. Voak thus traces two divergent trajectories: a Laudian appropriation that reshapes Hooker to appear more consistently Protestant, and a rationalising current extending from Hooker through Chillingworth and Stillingfleet to Locke.

Ultimately, the questions of Richard Hooker’s ‘Reformed’ credentials and his role in shaping, sustaining or challenging particular conceptions of ‘Anglicanism’ must be addressed not only through Hooker’s ideas, but also through careful comparison with historically and theologically precise accounts of what it meant to be Reformed or Anglican (and when). Theologians engaging in such assessments may therefore benefit from studies that situate Hooker’s words in relation to the sources he drew upon and the later thinkers who engaged with his work. As for historians, in this study Nigel Voak certainly demonstrates, on the basis of extensive evidence, that subsequent scholarship must negotiate more carefully with the ways in which Hooker’s epistemology drew more from other medieval theologians than from Aquinas, differed significantly from Calvin and other later Reformed orthodox theologians, and proved fertile soil for thinkers from Chillingworth and Stillingfleet to Locke, who retained Hooker’s probabilistic reasoning from evidence but were less firm than Hooker in their adherence to traditional Christian doctrine.