Reading the Bible with Richard Hooker

Daniel Eppley, Daniel Eppley

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781506410784
• eBook ISBN:
  9781506408132
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Many of the divisions facing Christians today include disagreements over the interpretation of Scripture. These disagreements arise not only regarding the meaning of particular biblical passages, but also involve different approaches to determining how the meaning of Scripture is discerned. Such disagreement over the interpretation of Scripture is nothing new. Insights available from past efforts to resolve disputes over interpretation can be a valuable resource for modern efforts to facilitate intra-Christian dialogue. This study elucidates the biblical hermeneutic championed by Richard Hooker, a formative figure of the Anglican tradition, to recommend it as a resource for modern Christians. In his approach to interpreting scripture, Hooker recognizes the importance of both rational reflection and inspired insight while also treading a middle path that balances the respect due to interpretive authorities against the responsibilities of the individual conscience. These and other elements of Hooker's hermeneutic make it a valuable resource for those who seek to promote dialogue and reconciliation in a divided church.

5

Reasons of the Heart: Hermeneutics and Assurance

“The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.”
—Blaise Pascal

The first two chapters outlined the hermeneutic against which Hooker reacted and his objections to that hermeneutic. The third and fourth outlined the alternative that he put forward, an approach to Scripture that can underwrite a reasonable level of confidence that one has understood the biblical text and discerned God’s will correctly, thereby ensuring a degree of unity and order in the English church. At the same time, his approach recognizes the limitations and contingency of all human efforts at understanding and consequently provides avenues through which an established consensus can be challenged and modified as deemed necessary.

In this closing chapter, the focus shifts to consideration of the relationship between Hooker’s hermeneutic and his soteriology. Soteriology is a scholarly term for a person’s understanding of salvation, the answers a thinker gives to questions like: What must a person do to be saved? How can a person overcome sin and enter into a right relationship with God? Hooker’s hermeneutic may give rise to a bit of soteriological anxiety inasmuch as the Christian whose understanding of Scripture and thus whose knowledge of God’s will is probable, not certain, runs a risk of unintentionally acting in ways that are against God’s will. How can a person who in many matters lacks final certainty whether he is opposing God’s will—sinning—ever hope to have confidence that he is in a right relationship with God? Part of the late-medieval Catholic solution to this problem was to posit the institutional church—popes and councils who enjoyed the direct guidance of the Holy Spirit—as reliable arbiters of God’s will. When Martin Luther rejected the church’s hermeneutical authority, he put forward as an alternative the “Bible alone” as read by the Christian individual under the Spirit’s direct guidance as the highest arbiter of a correct understanding of God’s will. Luther’s search for an alternate source of hermeneutical assurance, however, arose from his prior concern for assurance of salvation.

Luther initially began to question the teachings of the Catholic Church because those teachings did not provide him with assurance that he was right with God (in other words, he did not find late-medieval Catholic soteriology satisfying). Strictly speaking, the Catholic Church against which Luther reacted did not fail to provide adherents with certain assurance of their salvation; it did not intend to provide certain assurance. Within Catholic soteriology at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the journey to salvation was a process of growth in holiness. The key to salvation was removal of sin from the soul; a holy heaven, after all, presided over by a holy God can only accommodate a holy creature. This was certainly not, however, to suggest that people rendered themselves holy through their own efforts. Rather, God graciously provided means through which the soul could be trained and aided to become holy: sacraments, prayers of intercession offered by saints alive and departed, indulgences, and purgatory were among the means available to the believer seeking to be purified of sin through the transformative power of God’s love, all made possible by Christ’s atoning sacrifice.

These means of grace worked in conjunction with human efforts to cooperate with grace. Because it was produced in part by human effort, holiness was contingent; one could never be certain, save by special revelation from God (held to be extremely rare), that one was fit for heaven and would ultimately be saved. Indeed, to claim to be saved was to claim to be holy—showing the spiritual sin of pride—and thus, in the words of Susan Schreiner, “holiness and certitude canceled each other out.”^[1] Rather than certainty, the proper Christian attitude was a humble confidence that God would graciously accept one’s faltering efforts to be good mingled with hope arising from the divine predilection to mercy. Some see this late-medieval soteriology as burdensome and the church that supported it as a theatre of fear, sin, and guilt with an onerous and repressive penitential system; others disagree, arguing that by and large late-medieval Catholics’ spiritual and psychological needs were met.^[2]

Whatever the effectiveness of late-medieval Catholic soteriology at meeting the spiritual needs of the general population, it certainly did not meet the needs of Martin Luther. Out of Luther’s crisis of doubt regarding his eternal fate emerged an understanding in which salvation was not directly related to the worthiness of the individual. Salvation, rather, was granted by “grace alone” (God simply declared one fit for heaven on account of Christ’s sacrifice), and the means by which one took hold of this grace was through “faith alone.” The true Christian was simultaneously justified or righteous in God’s eyes and a sinner in actual fact (simil justus et peccator in the Latin phrase that came to define this view). Growth in holiness was a fruit of, not a precondition for, acceptance by God and confidence of salvation.

Two aspects of this soteriology are noteworthy in relation to our topic. First, faith was understood as wholly a gift of the Holy Spirit. Confidence of God’s good favor, particularly in light of thoroughgoing awareness of one’s own sinful unworthiness, could not be mustered by mere human effort. Emphasis on the Holy Spirit as the bringer of a faith passively received by those elected to salvation prevented faith from becoming another “good work” by which one made oneself worthy of salvation, leaving all credit for salvation to be given to God alone. Second, by severing the connection between worthiness and salvation Luther also severed the connection between certainty and pride. Rather than certainty of God’s good favor being seen as sinful pride, such certainty was now understood as a gift of God as well as evidence of possession of the Holy Spirit.^[3]

In this way the soteriology of the reformers moved certainty or “assurance” of salvation to the center of Christian life. The faith that marked one as a child of God and appropriated grace was not merely general acceptance of Christian teaching (that Christ died for the sins of people in general), neither was it a hope or feeling of probability. Rather, it was certainty that Christ’s death paid the penalty for the individual believer’s sins. Luther’s protégé Philip Melanchthon identified the central message of the gospel as being the offer of salvation “to all who believe that ‘God is certainly (certo) favorable to them, on Christ’s account.’” This “Lutheran” conception of faith as certainty of one’s own salvation is taken up, with some differences in nuance and emphasis, by John Calvin and the Reformed tradition that grows out of Calvin’s thought, a tradition including many Elizabethan Protestants, particularly Puritans.^[4] Thus Debora Shuger stresses that a distinctive element of Protestantism is the “understanding of faith as certainty: the certainty of one’s own salvation and the certainty of one’s own salvation.”^[5]

Just as Hooker believed there were problems with the hermeneutic inherited from the Reformation as it was handled and applied by his presbyterian contemporaries, so he also questioned the doctrine of assurance as appropriated by Elizabethan Puritans. The promise of certainty of salvation that was a hallmark of Protestant soteriology could, and in Puritan hands often did, morph into a demand for certainty. Thus R. T. Kendall presents the highly influential Puritan preacher William Perkins as having “devoted himself primarily to showing men that they must, and how they can, make their calling and election [to salvation] sure to themselves.”^[6] Because certainty of salvation was God’s gift to the elect, it was all too easy to assume that those who lacked such assurance were not among the saved.^[7]

This being the case, we should not be surprised to find Puritans seeking signs of God’s favor in their lives that could bolster assurance regarding their eternal fates. Such a path to assurance, however, is strewn with psychological landmines of ambiguity. Apart from the inherent ambiguity of measuring the extent to which one is, in a holistic sense, happy, wealthy, or successful, it is even more troubling that both happiness and unhappiness, both wealth and poverty, both success and failure are, at various points in Scripture, presented as signs of God’s favor and also as signs of God’s disfavor. As Alexandra Walsham explains, such flexibility regarding the interpretation of events could be a source of either profound comfort or profound anxiety depending on one’s predisposition.

It was a set of rose-colored spectacles through which the setbacks, no less than the successes, of “professors of the faith” were transformed into emblems of divine approbation. . . . Yet it was equally capable of precipitating self-loathing, melancholy, and debilitating despair. The struggle to discern some pattern behind one’s violently swinging fortunes could induce an obsession, not to say neurosis, revolving around the unintelligibility of God’s predestinarian scheme.^[8]

As a result:

Oscillating between anxiety and arrogance, the godly [Puritan] incessantly scrutinized events for signs of divine favor and disapprobation, keys to unraveling the mystery of predestination. Minor mishaps, domestic irritations and medical ailments were all analyzed with the aim of unlocking the secrets of one’s spiritual fate in the afterlife and gaining assurance that one numbered among the heirs of salvation.^[9]

In addition to (mis)fortune, holiness of life was also scrutinized as a sign that one was among the elect. After all, “the smoke of sanctification must flow from the fire of grace, and therefore works, when evidenced as the fruits of grace, ‘certify election and salvation.’ . . . Though not the cause of salvation, such fruits of sanctification evidence salvation.”^[10] Unfortunately, hypocrites could also perform good works, and the elect were not wholly elevated above sin. The question of how holy is holy enough that one can stake one’s assurance of election on it sounds a lot like Luther’s original despairing question of how can I know I have done enough to be worthy of salvation in another guise.^[11]

Perhaps efforts to read one’s eternal fate from the vicissitudes of external life were simply looking in the wrong place. The most basic sign of election and possession of God’s Spirit is precisely the unshakable assurance that one is among the elect. “Assurance of one’s own election thus itself supplies the crucial evidence that one is, in fact, elect, or in Perkins’s words, ‘true faith is an infallible assurance,’ just as only an infallible assurance is true faith.”^[12] This effort is complicated, however, by the existence of “temporary faith,” a sort-of faith sometimes experienced for a time by those slated for damnation that brings with it a sort-of assurance of God’s love and favor. Such temporary faith does not really feel like true faith in the heart, lacking the full assuranc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• A Note on Quotations and Terminology
• A Note on Hermeneutics
• Introduction
• Scoundrels and Fools: Biblical Hermeneutics in Elizabethan England
• The Puritan Othello: Shakespeare and Hooker on the Dangers of Certainty
• Beyond a Reasonable Doubt: Private and Public Reason in Hooker’s Hermeneutic
• Dissent without Disloyalty: The Role of Private Interpretation of Scripture in Hooker’s Public Hermeneutic
• Reasons of the Heart: Hermeneutics and Assurance
• Conclusion
• Synopsis of Othello
• Index