Bethlehem Academic Finds Mission in Resurrecting Richard Hooker
Episcopal News Service. June 26, 1996 [96-1511]
Caroline Cavett, Editor of the Newsletter of the Cathedral Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem
(ENS) Philip Secor had looked forward to the day. Cathedrals -- especially English cathedrals -- have long been one of his special interests. And on this day he and his wife, Anne, would see the great one in Exeter. They and other American and British visitors followed instructions to meet a guide beside the statue out front. She began to describe the points of interest inside.
As they neared the door, someone pointed to the statue and asked curiously, "Who's that?"
"Oh, him." said the guide with an offhand laugh. "He's Richard Hooker who lived around here and wrote things for the church. He was a tired old man with a shrew of a wife he had to marry. You Americans probably know that name more from the Civil War general who let his 'Hooker's women' travel with the troops. Pretty soon they dropped the 'women' part and became just 'hookers.' That's about all we know."
Stunned by this flippant affront to an old friend, Phil Secor broke away from the tour. He stood beneath the statue and made a vow: "Richard, I'll put an end to this. One day the Anglican world will know and appreciate you as the true light you are."
It has been some years since that Exeter day. But Phil Secor, a vestryman at Trinity Church in Bethlehem, is keeping his promise. By 1997, Secor's definitive In Search of Richard Hooker -- Father of the Anglican Spirit will help to avenge the obscurity and mistreatment that history has dealt this theologian who helped to define the via media, or middle way, between Catholic dogma and rigid Protestantism that were sweeping his Elizabethan world and threatening the Church of England from both sides. While many think of the Church of England and its broader Anglican Communion as a by-product of Henry VIII's lust for Anne Boleyn, both its roots and its heritage go much deeper into theology, morality, and the political structure than one king's joust with a pope who got in his way. According to Secor, it's time that we knew that.
There are a variety of reasons that Richard Hooker has slipped from our twentieth-century consciousness. For one, his prose on how theology and morality relate both to church and state is not easy reading. For another, we've absorbed so many of the foundations that he laid that we've forgotten to wonder about their source. Phil Secor's expressive blue eyes sparkle as he defines his quest: "I want to give the Episcopal Church its founder."
For background purposes, Richard Hooker was born near Exeter in Devon in 1554 to a poor branch of a prominent family. He entered Oxford's Corpus Christi College under the patronage of the famous Reformation Bishop of Salisbury, John Jewell. And he later became tutor to both the son of the Bishop of London and the grandnephew of the martyred Archbishop Cranmer, gaining notice among powerful figures within the Church of England.
Ordination followed in 1579, after which he came to the attention of John Whitgift, Archbishop of Canterbury, and the scourge of radical elements seeking to remake or destroy Anglicanism. Hooker began The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, which became the most influential theological work in the Anglican Church, in the midst of fiery controversy, and by 1595, when he had become rector of Bishopsbourne parish near Canterbury, he had also published the first five books of The Laws, including the one that explains and justifies worship, common prayer, sacramental life, and other important characteristics that were to become the form and spirit of Anglicanism around the world. In 1600 he died. And although his work made him the most famous and influential Anglican theologian for the next 300 years, whose pivotal impact spread over church and state alike, the scarcity of knowledge about the man himself gradually condemned him to obscurity. Until now.
"I've always liked ideas," Phil Secor enthusiastically explains. "And people fascinate me. Now I have the opportunity to put flesh to these words." A lifelong Episcopalian (brief forays into the Lutheran and Methodist traditions notwithstanding), Secor expresses his concern that one reason the church is in trouble today is that it has lost touch with its roots. "These were powerful, real people with humanly expressed faiths, which is important in all lasting institutions," he says. "In some ways, I've become a pilgrim who has taken as his mission the presentation of our great founding spirit who 400 years ago formulated and distilled many ideas we take for granted today."
But if Secor is a pilgrim with a mission, he's certainly no Gloomy Gus. He graciously opens the door to the Richard Hooker room in his Saucon Valley home, an office whose environment quickly puts a visitor in the mind of sixteenth-century England. Everywhere in sight are neatly arranged maps, books, drawings, artifacts, and reproductions of Richard Hooker's world.
Only the computer shocks one back to 1996. It's no surprise that Hooker seems alive.
But while Richard Hooker finally has a room, most likely sunnier and more comfortable than anything he might have enjoyed before, he also has in Secor a champion who ran up on him almost by accident over 30 years ago in preparation for a political science doctoral dissertation. His Duke University advisor suggested Hooker. "You're an Episcopalian," he said. "Here's a man who influenced not only the development of your church but also the course of constitutional law."
Secor's dissertation was successful. So was his life as an academician at Duke as well as at Dickinson and Davidson Colleges in the fields of political philosophy and Soviet, European, and American politics. He eventually became Dean of the College at Muhlenberg in Allentown and later President of Cornell College in Iowa. When he retired from that position in the mid-1980's, he and Anne returned to the Lehigh Valley where he established and ran a flourishing consulting firm to help nonprofit organizations with their fund-raising efforts. With his empathy for people, however, Secor says that he found that his financial expertise became secondary to the alliances that he helped to forge. "You can't expect people to give money until they build a base of shared values. Seeing that occur was the real reward."
But he never forgot Richard Hooker. Nor the slight he had felt for Hooker at the hand of the Exeter guide.
So he sold his business last year and devoted his energy to completing the biography that he had started several years before. If all goes well, he will begin seeking a publisher within the next few months. And the Episcopal Church will have a new take on a once-forgotten founder who not only kept it alive during its years of extreme stress but defined for all times the via media that has made it the church it is today.
As Secor likes to say, "We've always been a tolerant group. The fact that we can argue among ourselves on almost everything sometimes makes for a messy church. But when we can also embrace each other at the altar, that gives us a strength that no lock-step organization could attain." Some of that goes back to Hooker who insisted that revelation of God came not only from tradition (a la Roman Catholic), nor only from scripture (as the Calvinists insisted), but from a blend of these truths plus the necessary use of our own reason to process them.
Secor's research has been a happy way to combine scholarship and travel, as his long quest has called for numerous visits to English archives, libraries, churches, and colleges. "The fact that historians are now more attentive to the lives of people -- their habits, their desires, their pleasures and faults -- has made a book like this more timely," he says, vowing to bring to light a non-perfect man who transcends dry facts.
What's next, a visitor asks. Secor laughs heartily, saying that his children have solicitously broached the same subject. "Well, I have a mystery novel cooking," he promises, revealing neither plot nor outcome but dangling a tantalizing theme: a stolen Russian icon. "But what I suppose I'd really like to do is to visit every Episcopal Church in the United States to introduce Richard Hooker as the man who is responsible for much of our spiritual heritage. I like to go places, and I like to make speeches. Don't you think that would be fun?"