Hooker And The Anglican Tradition by John S. Marshall - 1963: An Historical And Theological Study Of Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity

This book is in good condition. The cover shows a lot of wear around the edges. This is also the first edition of this book.

This view, which is well-represented in such mid twentieth-century works as John F.H. New's Anglican and Puritan, F.J. Shirley's Richard Hooker and Contemporary Political Ideas, and John S. Marshall's Hooker and the Anglican Tradition, 5 rested heavily on a certain self-understanding of Anglicanism as having, from its inception, charted something of a middle course between Rome and Geneva. This self-understanding was for many Anglicans somewhat transparently self-congratulatory, claiming as the special charism of that tradition its ability to achieve moderation in the face of dogmatism and sweet reasonableness in the face of conflict. Richard Hooker, with his beautifully-balanced, carefullyqualified prose, and his commitment to search out the rational foundations of every dispute, was taken to be paradigmatic of this theological method. Not only that, but Hooker's thought was often read as paradigmatic of such a "golden mediocrity" in its content as well, charting a course that steered the English church well away from the jagged rocks of Calvinist predestinarianism and Lutheran solfidianism, but without getting lost in the treacherous sea of postTridentine Catholicism. Hooker's theology was Thomist above all, hearkening back to the best features of the scholastic synthesis before the late medieval corruptions and the Reformation tumults.