Richard Hooker and Church Government:

The Re-establishment of the Anglican Church in America

Abstract

Richard Hooker was a leading Anglican theologian in Elizabethan England. In his books Of the Laws of the Ecclesiastical Polity, it is maintained that laws of God,nature, reason, and laws concerning doctrine are unchangeable; on the other hand,law of human and positive is mutable. According to Hooker, laws of church government and order are positive and when the necessity of exigency, episcopal ordination could be changed. In the American Revolution, William White, an Episcopal Church clergy insisted that church government and order in America were changeable by developing Hooker's argument. It seems that Hooker's theory of mutable laws of church government had a significant influence on the modern American Episcopal Church.