Background
Richard Hooker was born in 1554 in Heavitree, Exeter, Devon, England.
(Richard Hookers Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity is one of ...)
Richard Hookers Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity is one of the great landmarks of Protestant theological literature, and indeed of English literature generally. However, on account of its difficult and archaic style, it is scarcely read today. The time has come to translate it into modern English so that Hooker may teach a new generation of churchmen and Christian leaders about law, reason, Scripture, church, and politics. In this second volume of an ongoing translation project by the Davenant Trust, we present Book I of Hookers Laws, for which he is perhaps most famous. Here he offers a sweeping overview of his theology of law, law being that order and measure by which God governs the universe, and by which all creaturesand humans above allconduct their lives and affairs. In an age when the idea of natural creation order is under wholesale attack, even within the church, Hookers luminous treatment of the relation of Scripture and nature, faith and reason is a priceless and urgently-needed gift to the church.
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Richard Hooker was born in 1554 in Heavitree, Exeter, Devon, England.
He went to Corpus Christi College, Oxford, about 1568.
His appointment as deputy to the regius professor of Hebrew is one of the best-known events in his Oxford career; and a small pension of £4 a year was given Hooker by the mayor and Chamber of Exeter in 1582. It is likely that he left Oxford in 1584, when he was presented to the vicarage of Drayton Beauchamp. It is possible that he never resided there, because he was negotiating in London for the mastership of the Temple Church, which he got in 1585.
While at Oxford, Hooker had been tutor to Edwin Sandys, who was to have a notable career as a statesman, become a director of the Virginia Company, and be knighted. Hooker sold the copyright in the eight books of his Ecclesiastical Polity to Sandys for about £50 plus a certain number of copies of the printed books; while, for his part, Sandys was to get the books printed. Only the first five appeared and at considerable cost to Sandys: the first four in 1593, the fifth book in 1597. Why the last three books were not published until the middle of the 17th century has caused much discussion among scholars, touching not least upon the genuineness of these volumes. In 1591 Hooker had accepted the living of Boscombe in Wiltshire, from which in 1595 he went to the living of Bishopsbourne, near Canterbury, where he died.
(Richard Hookers Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity is one of ...)
Quotes from others about the person
"In the long and crowded roll of great English men of letters there is no figure of greater significance than Hooker. .. . His own life's work is a monument of pure and splendid prose style and of lucid philosophic thought, based on unsurpassed scholarship in the vast field of his theme. " - C. J. Sisson
In 1588 he married Joan Churchman; they later had two sons, who died in infancy, and four daughters.