Hi Drew old chum – yes that’s maddening; and I’ve known of similar cases. I think it is reassuring to know that our ancestors also came across similar issues and that there can be a dialogue between present and past regarding pastoral practice. So hey I’ll do one on Richard Hooker (a better version of a post I did on another thread some time ago)…
1579 (?)
From 1570 to the end of the century a bleak and uncompromising form of Calvinists determinism characterised the pastoral (and political) theology of the powerful Puritan wing of the Church of England (both the sectarians and the moderates – although the moderates like Archbishop Whitgift were capable of more nuanced understanding than sectarians like the formidable Thomas Cartwright). According to this theology, because God has decided who is going to hell beforehand it is useless praying for some people (indeed it is superstitious and ungodly). This emphasis very often went ‘with a rather wooden understanding of assurance, and the need for a constant sense of being in God’s favour, with the consequence that if you didn’t feel you were in God’s favour, you had to take this as a likely sign of God’s reprobation. (Rowan Williams, ‘Christian Imagination in Poetry and Polity’, p.p. 25-6)
The man who was to become the main intellectual opponent of extreme Puritanism was Richard Hooker 1554 –16000, the Anglican priest and theologian, given the epithet ‘Judicious’ by his biographers and little in stature by his cotemporary Calvinist detractors. Hooker’s major work is the encyclopaedic ‘Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity’ (several volumes written from the mid 1580s to the end of the century), but his challenge to extreme Calvinism is already evident in an early sermon he preached in the 1570s on the theme of ‘The Certainty and Perpetuity of Faith in the Elect’.
In ‘Faith in the Elect’, against damning teachings about assurance, Hooker maintains that fluctuations of human emotion, periods of darkness and doubt, are to be expected in life and are not indicators of reprobation; people should not be ‘deceived by too hard an opinion of themselves’. His wise pastoral reassurance in this is reminiscent of Staretz Silouan advice: ‘Keep you mind in hell, and despair not’:
’‘An aggrieved spirit is therefore no argument for a faithless mind…(An) occasion for men’s misjudging themselves, as if they were faithless when they are not, is, when they fasten their thoughts on the distrustful suggestions of the flesh, and finding great abundance of these in themselves, they gather thereby ‘Surely unbelief has taken full dominion, it has taken possession of me; if I were faithful it could not be thus (and) …they lie buried and overwhelmed; when notwithstanding as the blessed apostle acknowledges (Romans. Viii. 26, 27) that ’the Spirit groaneth’, and that God hears us when we do not hear God ;so there is no doubt, but that our faith may have and does have her private operations secret to us, but known to God…Tell this to a people who has been deceived by too hard an opinion of themselves, and it will only augment their grief…Well to favour (indulge) them a little in their weakness; let what they imagine be granted– that they are faithless and without belief. But are they not grieved for their unbelief. Do they not wish it might be otherwise and also strive for this. We know they do…The faith therefore of true believers, though it has many and grievous downfalls, yet does it still continue secretly invincible’’. (‘The Works of That Learned and Judicious Divine, Mr. Richard Hooker’, Vol. iii. p. 474-6)
In 1581 Hooker came to prominence as preacher at St Paul’s’ Cross – the open air pulpit at old ST Paul’s Cathedral which was the stage for radical preaching and bookselling.- where he offended Puritans for diverging from the views on predestination and for suggesting that even the Pope might be saved. The following year, he was appointed Master (Rector) of the Temple Church in London by the Queen where he soon came into public conflict with his cousin Walter Travers, a leading Puritan and Reader (Lecturer) at the Temple – they had a sort of dual by sermons.
Hooker’s clearest statement of what could be called’ hypothetical universalism’ – edging towards a hopeful universalism but lacking the resources of a doctrine of purgatory - comes in Book v. of his ‘Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity’ where he states that :
‘[The]safest axioms of charity to rest itself upon are these ‘ he which steadfastly believes is (saved) and ‘he which believes not as yet may be the child of God’. It becomes not us during this lifetime altogether to condemn any man seeing that (for anything we know) there is hope of every man’s forgiveness, the possibility of whose repentance is not yet cut off by death. And therefore charity ‘which hopeth all things’ prayeth also for all men’’. (Hooker, Laws, Bk v, Ch.49. 1-2)
Christopher Insole comments on this passage:
’'This charity which ‘hopes all things’ does not do so in vain theologically speaking. Hooker’s vision of the Church is one which expresses the desire for participation found at every level of creation, finding its ultimate consummation in the infinite desire for God. It cannot be in vain to hope for ‘every man’s forgiveness’ if one’s anthropology inclines one to view the deepest satisfaction of all the yearning creation, is to move towards the creative centre. Peter Lake gives a beautiful evocation of Hooker’s vision, showing how in ‘the face of the Puritans’ inherently subversive view of the community of Christians, permanently fractured by division between the godly and the ungodly/the elect and the reprobate, one has Hooker’s more restful vision of the visible church which included everyone within the slow moving cycle of its outward observances, while the slow trickle of sacramental grace performed its subtly ameliorative work and the mystical body of Christ grew with glacial slowness and a soothing lack of conflict’. (Christopher Insole, ‘The Politics of Human Frailty’ pages 56 -57)