4. Put to the Test
Rev K M Watkins
For all his boldness, Hooper was soon to discover that preaching Puritanism was one thing, but holding to it in practice was another. The test came quickly. The bishopric of Gloucester had become vacant. It was offered to Hooper soon after he had completed preaching the Lenten series of sermons before the King and his Council during February and March 1550. He declined it, but that initial refusal would be hard to maintain, for the Church of England was and still is Erastian in its church government, meaning that ultimately the state rules over the Church. The invitation was effectively a royal appointment by the King, and it was not meant to be refused.
Hooper gave two reasons for his refusal: the ordination oath which called on the name of saints, and the vestments that were required to be worn by bishops. In a letter to Bullinger written at the end of June 1550, he explained: “I declined . . . both by reason of the shameful and impious form of the oath, which all who choose to undertake the function of a bishop are compelled to put up with, and also on account of those Aaronic habits [vestments] which they still retain in that calling, and . . . wear, not only at the administration of the sacraments, but also at public prayers”.2
As for the first, the oath, it ended with the words, “so help me God, all saints and the holy Evangelist”.3 Hooper’s opposition to this was consistent with his second book published in Zurich more than two years previously: “What intolerable ill, blasphemy of God, and ethnical [that is, heathenish] idolatry is this, to admit and teach the invocation of saints departed out of
1This article is based on the fourth part of a paper given at the 2016 Theological Conference. John Hooper, influenced by Zwingli and Bullinger, the Zurich Reformers, had imbibed a more thoroughly biblical approach to reforming the Church than his English colleagues. With great zeal he had written and preached accordingly. Now he was to be put to the test.
2Letter to Bullinger written from London on 28 June 1550, Original Letters Relative to the English Reformation, vol 1, The Parker Society, ed Hastings Robinson, 1846, p 87.
3The Two Liturgies with other Documents set forth by Authority in the Reign of King Edward the Sixth, The Parker Society, ed Joseph Ketley, 1844, p 169.
this world! It taketh from God His true honour. . . . It diminisheth the merits of Christ; taketh from the law of God her perfection and majesty. . . . It condemneth the old Church of the patriarchs and prophets, likewise the Church of the apostles and martyrs, that never taught the invocation of saints. It accuseth the Scripture of God to be false . . . it maketh Christ a liar.”4
It is hard to believe that more than three decades after Luther had nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Castle church in Wittenberg, the professedly Protestant Church of England contained such a blatant remnant of Rome as this oath. Happily, it was soon to be put right. As Hooper boldly argued his case before King Edward VI on July 20, we are told that “the King declared, ‘What wickedness is here, Hooper? Are these offices ordained in the name of saints or of God?’, and, in front of everybody, personally crossed out the offending part of the oath.”5
That was one obstacle out of the way. The other remained, and although Hooper’s objection to the Romanist vestments was equally grounded on sound biblical argument, this requirement was not to be removed. Hooper recoiled from wearing the garments stipulated for Church of England bishops. According to his Puritan strain of Protestantism, these clothes were badges of allegiance to the Pope, unavoidably declaring the wearer to be a priest offering sacrifices to God, usurping the place of the Lord Jesus Christ as the only Priest of the New Testament age. Martin Micron from Ghent, who assisted John à Lasco in pastoring the Strangers’ Church set up for Protestant refugees in London, wrote to Bullinger, “Hooper denies . . . that they are matters of indifference, inasmuch as they obscure the dignity of the priesthood of Christ, and nurture hypocrisy, superstition, etc.”6
Hooper could not agree with Thomas Cranmer (Archbishop of Canterbury) and Nicholas Ridley (who by then had become Bishop of London) that the vestments were adiaphora – matters of indifference, to be used or not used as circumstances suggest. Like the Puritans properly so called, who would arise some years later in the Elizabethan era, Hooper was captivated by the regulative principle. The Church of England was not. The Anglican approach to worship has always been Lutheran in character: provided the Bible does not expressly forbid something, it may be brought into worship if the Church
4From “The Declaration of Christ and His Office”, Early Writings of John Hooper, ed Samuel Carr, The Parker Society, Cambridge, 1843, p 35.
5Pete Sullivan, A Gloucester Martyr: John Hooper and the English Reformation, Country Books, 2004, p 40.
6Letter of Martin Micron to Bullinger, written from London on 13 October 1550, Original Letters Relative to the English Reformation, vol 2, The Parker Society, ed Hastings Robinson, 1847, p 571.
desires. To this day, no attempts to correct this matter have been successful in the Church of England. The Puritans of Elizabeth I’s time could not do it. The godly 2000 ejected in 1662 could not do it. No concerted attempt has been made since. The best of Anglicans, such as George Whitefield in the 1700s and J C Ryle in the 1800s, seemed unconcerned about it.
Cranmer and Ridley saw the issue as one of authority, not of mere clothing. The vestments had been appointed by both Church and Parliament. Hooper’s simple duty therefore was to submit. There had to be uniformity. Individual conscience had to bow before lawful authority. That approach has some validity, except when the demand goes against Scripture, as Hooper rightly realised this did. In this case Hooper was right to apply the apostolic approach: “We ought to obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29).
Hooper referred to the controversy later in a letter to Bullinger: “The question respecting the habits, which was always exceedingly displeasing to me, was gravely discussed between the Bishop of London and myself. For my part, I very properly, if I am not mistaken, found fault with the use of them in the Church, and contended for their entire removal. He, on the other hand, most urgently and pertinaciously defended their use.”7
This was not an argument about whether ministers may wear clothing that distinguishes them as ministers before the public eye. Rather, it was an argument over the lawfulness of wearing clothes that were demonstrably sacerdotal. That is why Hooper called them “Aaronical” – their features signified priesthood, as if New Testament ministers of the gospel were sacrificing priests like Aaron of old. This was the heretical core of Romanism: that in the mass the “priest” is again offering up Christ to God, and thus perpetuating the sacrifice of the cross.
John Burcher, an English merchant then residing in Strasbourg, understood the situation well, as his report to Bullinger shows: “Hooper is striving to effect an entire purification of the Church from the very foundation. Other bishops, on the contrary, who nevertheless are men of learning and professors of the truth, are ashamed of this, because they will not open their eyes to their own errors. Hence they contend with all their might to have him entangled in the same superstitious ceremonies with themselves. They charge him with insubordination, because he positively refuses to admit any other rite of consecration than what the apostles adopted.”8
Regrettably, Hooper obtained little support from the wider Reformed community. Only à Lasco “emphatically took Hooper’s side. He not only
7Letter to Bullinger from Gloucester, dated 1 August 1551, Original Letters, vol 1, p 91.
8Letter of John Burcher to Bullinger from Strasbourg, dated 26 December 1550, Original Letters, vol 2, p 674.
shared Hooper’s theology but also was of a similar bold temperament.”9 Hooper had helped à Lasco to secure a charter for his Strangers’ Church within London, but outside Anglican jurisdiction. One author has rightly noted that it is “small wonder that Hooper interested himself so much in the strangers’ cause: the establishment of a model Reformed community and his own struggle against clerical vestments were essentially two aspects of the same effort, to free the English Church from the vestiges of Popery and urge it towards a more complete Reformation”.10
Hooper was aware of his isolation. He wrote later to Bullinger: “The use of vestments peculiar to Popery in the ministry of the Church has been the occasion here of great disturbance. Master à Lasco alone, of all the foreigners who have any influence, stood on my side.”11 Both Martin Bucer and Peter Martyr, major European Reformers, were in England at the time. Whilst no supporters of the vestments, neither would they support Hooper in his contentions. Martyr wrote to Bullinger: “It is very offensive to the King’s councillors, and to very many others . . . that a decree publicly received, and confirmed by the authority of the kingdom, should be found fault with as ungodly, and condemned as though it were at variance with the sacred writings”.12 But Hooper was right to find fault and condemn: the vestments were ungodly and unscriptural.
It was now that the Erastian nature of the Church of England came to the fore. Sanctions were applied to Hooper that were of a civil, not ecclesiastical, nature. Cranmer and Ridley were the leaders in this. They were godly men, but in this matter they erred. Eventually their efforts led the Council to commit the recalcitrant Hooper to the notoriously awful conditions of the Fleet prison. Even Bullinger counselled Hooper to concede. “Like Martyr and Bucer, Bullinger agreed that the vestments issue was not important enough to make such an issue over and counselled concession”.13 With this discouragement, and after three weeks of misery in the Fleet, Hooper relented. Browbeaten and dressed in the hated garments, he became Bishop of Gloucester on 8 March 1551.
John Foxe, in his famous Book of Martyrs, described Hooper’s elaborate
9Pete Sullivan, A Gloucester Martyr, p 44.
10Andrew Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities in Sixteenth Century London, Oxford, 1986, p 33, quoted in David G Newcombe, John Hooper: Tudor Bishop and Martyr, Davenant Press, 2009, p 104.
11Letter to Bullinger written from Gloucester, dated 1 August 1551, Original Letters, 1846, p 95.
12Letter of Peter Martyr to Bullinger written from Oxford, dated 28 January 1551, Original Letters, vol 2, p 487.
13David G Newcombe, John Hooper, p 162.
scarlet and white clothing on the day, and commented, “What cause of shame the strangeness hereof was that day to that good preacher every man may easily judge”. Foxe did not agree with Hooper’s stand, but commended him for his attitude, saying that the “he bare and suffered patiently” the “private . . . reproach” for “the public profit of the church, which he only sought”.14
Hooper’s eventual submission was not his finest hour. It was understandable, but Puritan-minded friends could wish he had held out. “John à Lasco and those from the Strangers’ Church who had so vigorously and committedly championed his cause were understandably disappointed by his apparent capitulation.”15 John Utenhove, another refugee from Ghent involved in the Strangers’ Church, wrote to Bullinger that it was “not without the greatest regret both of myself and of all good men, nor without affording a most grievous stumbling-block to many of our brethren”.16
Unscriptural impositions like the vestments, enforced under the banner of indifference, breach the Second Commandment, which requires God to be worshipped only as He has appointed in His Word. They also unwarrantably impinge on the blood-bought liberties of the children of God to be free of the commandments of men. Instead of regretting with Foxe and others that Hooper made it an issue, we should grieve that he did not see it through to the end. Ridley himself came to see things differently in the cold light of day. When imprisoned and facing death, he acknowledged Hooper’s “wisdom” and his own “simplicity” in the matter. At his degradation preceding his martyrdom, when they dressed him in “the surplice, with all the trinkets appertaining to the mass . . . Ridley did vehemently inveigh against the Romish Bishop, and all that foolish apparel, calling him Antichrist, and the apparel foolish and abominable”.17 The 1552 Book of Common Prayer removed things that Hooper had objected to, although Elizabeth’s 1559 Settlement backtracked and restored the vestments.
Up to today, most have no sympathy for Hooper. Newcombe, a recent biographer, speaks of Hooper’s “stubborn stance on the matter of vestments. His refusal to compromise was in direct conflict with the established adiaphoristic thought of Cranmer, and his fanatical rejection of anything that might be construed as idolatrous would eventually end in a humiliating climbdown at his own consecration.”18
14The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, ed S R Cattley, London, 1838, vol 6, p 641.
15Sullivan, A Gloucester Martyr, p 50.
16Letter of John Utenhove to Bullinger written from London on 9 April 1551, Original Letters, vol 2, p 586.
17The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, ed S R Cattley, vol 7, pp 543,544.
18Newcombe, John Hooper, p 64.
The problem with this interpretation is that even though Cranmer’s “adia-phoristic thought” had become the accepted norm in the Church of England, it was pushed so far as to become thoroughly unscriptural, and Hooper was right to contend against it, even at the expense of the Church’s peace and quietness. Would there were voices in the Church of England today that would contend against its departures from Scripture in so many areas!
As for what Newcombe calls Hooper’s “humiliating climbdown”, it is hard to refute that description. The intriguing question is why the Most High permitted His servant to suffer it, when undoubtedly Hooper was on the right side of the argument. An explanation has been suggested along the following lines.
Sadly, neither of Hooper’s objections to accepting the bishopric concerned the fact that the Episcopalian notion of the office of a diocesan bishop, possessing ecclesiastical authority over other ministers, is without a grain of biblical foundation. According to the New Testament, every pastor is a “bishop” and no pastor is to be promoted to oversee any other pastor. Each pastor’s bishopric is his own congregation – his responsibility is to oversee his flock. Episcopacy, otherwise called Prelacy – the government of the Church by prelates exalted above ordinary ministers – is an invention of men. In the Church of England it is another remnant inherited from the Church of Rome.
It is hard to understand why Hooper seemed to accept this aspect of the unreformed Church of England whilst rejecting others. He had seen better: the Church in Zurich, which to him was the New Testament pattern, was not structured on an Episcopalian hierarchy headed up by prelates. Perhaps, like a number of good men after him, it was the opportunity for wider usefulness that drew him in to the snare. Anyway, it was a blind spot that cost him dear. Had he applied the regulative principle consistently, to church government as well as to church worship, he might have been spared many griefs.