Holy Means Whole: According to Richard Hooker

Generally speaking the core value that is most promoted in the Episcopal debates over their identity is that of comprehensiveness or inclusiveness. The question that is open for debate is what the origin for this value is.

Some argue that it comes from the mediating position of the Anglican Church between that of Catholicism and that of Protestantism. This is what makes it comprehensive or inclusive. This idea of following a middle course then is the determining factor in what comprehensiveness means. Add to this the fact that comprehensiveness is the idea behind the great debates currently happening in the Episcopal and Anglican Churches over homosexuality and then you realize this is no small matter.

The difficulty is that finding the true historical roots for comprehensiveness is not easy nor is it without controversy. Back in 2004 or 2005 I ran across a person who argued that the root meaning for comprehensiveness came from the meaning of holiness or wholeness. Unfortunately for me, this person’s writings on the internet on no longer available at the link I had discovered. He also argued that Richard Hooker was the key author behind this idea.

I think you could argue that it would go back further than Hooker and it would have to originate at least in Cranmer, if this argument is true. This is because Cranmer included in parts of the prayer book or the 39 articles the concept of wholesome. You might even have to go back to a translator named John Wycliffe and argue that his understanding of holiness and wholeness as synonymous is significant.

Yet Richard Hooker is one of the key people in the debate as to the meaning of being an Anglican or an Episcopalian. Both sides of the current debates claim an historical legacy to support their cause.

I think it is not controversial to say that one of the core values of being an Anglican or Episcopalian has to be their comprehensiveness in the sense of wholeness. To pick just one prominent example, their stance is that of recognizing 5 solas in the place of Luther’s 3 solas. On a core value level they instinctually identify when others have left some things out.

Richard Hooker once preached a sermon titled: “A Learned and Comfortable Sermon of Certainty and Perpetuity.” In that sermon he had this among many other things to say: “The truth of some things is so evident, that no man which hears them can doubt them: As when we hear, that a part of anything is less than the whole, the mind is constrained to say this is true.”

I think this is a core value of Anglicanism, when you see the architectural magnificence of Hooker’s writings and when you see 5 solas rather than just 3. They are not satisfied with just some of the parts of anything. They strive also for the whole. They see the whole as greater.

Whether or not holiness or wholeness is the origin for the idea of comprehensiveness or not, though I suspect it is, the value of wholeness is at least one of the core values of Anglicans and Episcopalians.

I wish they would come back to this core value. It would be helpful to both sides of their titanic debate. It might even solve their greatest problems and weaknesses in the debate.