Charles Miller's Richard Hooker and the Vision of God represents the latest volume in an ongoing, and perhaps accelerating, stream of new monographs on Hooker, a testament to the growing momentum of the renaissance in Hooker studies that began with the publication of the Folger Edition of his works four decades ago. Miller does not aim, however, merely to add another brick to the growing edifice of Hooker scholarship (or, to take a more cynical perspective, to throw another brick in the ongoing brawl of scholarship), but to bring Hooker back out of the academic's study and into the churches. He laments that in recent work on Hooker, ‘the conversation has largely forsaken the vicarage and entered the lecture hall. The scholarly circle is enlarged but, as so often happens, those writing are increasingly talking only to themselves’; among clergy and seminarians, ‘the name of Hooker is more honoured than read’ if it is even still widely known. Attempting to ‘bridge the gap’ (p. 11) then, Miller sets out in this book to reintroduce the modern Anglican theological student to the broad and rich theological vision of Richard Hooker; indeed, he even includes a substantial appendix anthologizing key passages from Hooker's works, in the hope of stimulating the uninitiated to further reading.
To this end, Miller undertakes the daunting task of integrating Hooker's occasional writings – the sermons and the Dublin Fragments – and the lengthy polemic of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, more often than not immersed in practical questions of church polity, into a loose systematic theology. He proceeds from foundational issues like the doctrine of God and of creation, through Christology, soteriology, and theological method, to matters of ecclesiology and political theology. In attempting such a systematic overview of Hooker's theology, Miller follows in the footsteps of Olivier Loyer's L'Anglicanisme de Richard Hooker (1979; alas, still untranslated) and the lesser-known, but important Systematic Theology of Richard Hooker by G.W. Morell (1969). Such an endeavour certainly necessitates a fair bit of reorganization, shifts in emphasis, and filling in important theological loci that Hooker left largely unexplored. The resulting organization is occasionally repetitive and sometimes might have given Hooker himself pause (such as the positioning of a theology of worship and the sacraments before any discussion of faith and justification). Nonetheless, Miller's re-presentation of Hooker's theology is generally faithful, and indeed helps illuminate the structure and guiding assumptions of Hooker's thought at many key points.
Perhaps more problematically, however, Miller does not always seem clear if he is seeking to offer the modern seminarian an account of the theology of Richard Hooker, or an account of theology with Richard Hooker – that is, an attempt to work through key loci of theology with Hooker as our chief guide. Were the former his aim, it would be difficult, for instance, to account for the substantial interpolations of Eastern Orthodox sources and concepts (John Meyendorff and Georges Florovsky, for instance, receive frequent mention); however, if the purpose is to put Richard Hooker into ecumenical conversation on a range of key theological topics, Miller's approach at such points makes more sense.
Given Miller's stated goals, it would obviously be unfair to criticize him for failing to engage in the sort of scholarly detail and precision that we might demand in a purely academic monograph. However, as a would-be popularizer, Miller must be evaluated against a demanding twofold standard: first, does he in fact succeed in popularizing, in making Hooker easily accessible to a relatively wide audience? Second, while omitting explicit discussion of all the details, debates, and nuances, does he nonetheless demonstrate that he has a firm grasp of them which anchors his discussion? This book unfortunately leaves significant doubts on both scores. On the first, Miller does not seem quite committed to his stated goal of bringing Hooker into the vicarage, at least the contemporary Church of England vicarage, which is rarely the home of theological erudition. His numerous footnotes, and wide-ranging discussions of patristic, scholastic, Orthodox, and Reformation concepts are likely to lose many of his intended readers. More mundanely, but equally important, the book betrays the absence of a firm editorial hand: typographical errors distract, the prose is overly leisurely and at points tediously repetitive, with a fondness for metadiscourse, and an idiosyncratic – sometimes erroneous – vocabulary interferes with comprehension.
On the second score, Miller certainly shows himself to be aware of the extensive literature and complex debates surrounding Hooker's theology which have intensified in recent years. However, rather than deftly charting a sure course through these debates, he seems to poise uncertainly between alternative readings of Hooker, sampling bits and pieces from each, which leaves the impression that he is (in true Anglican fashion!) trying to have his cake and eat it too. Part of this hedging may derive from the long gestation of the book; Miller mentions in the Acknowledgments that it has been nearly twenty years in progress, and the landscape of Hooker scholarship has evolved considerably in that time. The result, however, is a somewhat murky attempt to concede, on the one hand, the force of recent arguments for Hooker's continuity with the magisterial reformers, while, on the other hand, restating an old via media portrait of Hooker as perhaps more medieval than Reformed. True to the form of interpreters within the latter paradigm, Miller makes a great deal of Hooker's supposed reliance on Aquinas and peppers his text with frequent vague allusions to a contrasting ‘Calvinist mainstream’ that is never really spelled out or footnoted. Perhaps even more striking is the absence of Hooker's puritan interlocutors from this text; while Miller frequently juxtaposes Hooker against his ‘nonconformist contemporaries’, these too are virtually never cited. Of course, Miller is writing for a non-specialist audience, but if he can find room to cite Georges Florovsky in a book on Hooker, he certainly ought to find room for Thomas Cartwright.
At a few points, Miller's desire to read Hooker in terms suited to the soft Anglo-Catholicism that prevails in much modern Anglicanism results in distortions of his theology. For instance, while summarizing what appears on its own terms to be a perfectly lucid and coherent account of Eucharistic presence in Book V of Hooker's Laws, Miller persists in worrying that it is incoherent or ‘fragile’, since it is ‘less than “Catholic”‘ (p. 152). And on p. 228 he asserts, in bald contradiction of Book III, ch. 1 of the Laws, that when it comes to the ‘visible’ and ‘mystical’ church, ‘the thrust of [Hooker's] exposition is that we cannot, and should not, make such a distinction’.
In spite of these notable shortcomings, Miller's book constitutes an impressive attempt to synthesize Hooker's rich and expansive theological vision, and to put it into ecumenical conversation for the sake of today's theologians and church leaders. Were it to succeed in gaining wide use as a seminary textbook, the Anglican churches could not but profit thereby.
