James Foote
Rightly interpreted, there is something truly encouraging in the saying of the angel to the Virgin Mary: that with God nothing is impossible. This statement applies generally, and its application to some particular cases is obvious and important. Men might despair of various things, were it not for the omnipotent arm of Jehovah. We see some men so wedded to their sins, so accustomed to all that is evil, so averse from all that is holy, so obstinately
1Foote (1781-1856) was a minister in Aberdeen. This article is the last point of application in one of his expository sermons in Lectures on the Gospel According to Luke. It has been edited. The passage expounded was Luke 1:26-38.
contemning all means for their benefit. Then we may be ready to say their conversion is impossible, or hopeless, and thus sinfully desist from all endeavours for their good, if we did not remember that the Lord has done many great things, and that He is still able to do all things.
We may think of the deceitfulness of riches, and the snares of an exalted position in life – and see some people deceived and caught in them. Then we might entertain scarcely any hope of them, for their salvation is so difficult as to have given rise to the proverb, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God”. We would lose hope unless, after the Lord repeated that proverb, He added, “With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible”.
Sometimes the people of God may be ready to think that they are in straits and difficulties and dangers from which they cannot be extricated. But this is to dishonour the providence and the power of God. When Moses doubted whether so vast a multitude could be fed in the wilderness, God said, “Is the Lord’s hand waxed short? Thou shalt see now whether My word shall come to pass unto thee or not.” Let not the contrite and desponding think that they cannot be saved, that their sins are too heinous to be pardoned, or that it will be impossible for them to hold out against their various temptations. True, their ruin would be inevitable if they only had themselves to look to, but “the Lord’s hand is not shortened that it cannot save, neither His ear heavy that it cannot hear”. Jesus Christ is able “to save them to the uttermost all that come unto God through Him.”
Whatever God has said He will bring about, let us not doubt that it is possible, or certain, that He will do so. Why, for instance, “should it be thought a thing incredible with [us], that God should raise the dead?” The Lord shall “change our vile body”, and fashion it “like unto His glorious body, according to the working whereby He is able even to subdue all things unto Himself”. What is there, consistent with wisdom and justice, that God cannot do? Is anything too hard for Him? In a word, if we trust in our own strength, nothing spiritually good can be accomplished; but if we trust in the Lord’s strength, everything will be achieved. With us nothing is good, but through God everything good is possible.
Here then is the secret of the whole: to renounce ourselves and to rely firmly on divine strength. “All things”, said Jesus Christ, “are possible to him that believeth.” “Hast thou not known? Hast thou not heard, that the everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary? There is no searching of His understanding. He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might He increaseth strength. Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly
fall: but they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.”
John Hooper – a Reformation Puritan13. “Mixed and Mingled Religion”
Rev K M Watkins
It was May 1549 when John Hooper arrived back in England – an England that was changing, and changing for the better. Under young King Edward VI, who had come to the throne on his father Henry’s death at the beginning of 1547, hopes were growing for further reformation. This had attracted Hooper, who “returned to England with a deep appreciation of what had been achieved in Switzerland and also a realisation of what needed to be done here”.2 His Puritanism had gathered momentum in Zurich and he was determined to see the same biblical purity applied in his homeland. In the end, Hooper would find “the Church in England a most unwilling pupil”.3 Indeed, “not long after his return . . . Hooper’s optimistic view of the pace of reform would clash with the moderate, measured goals of the ‘evangelical establishment’”.4
But things began well. Hooper was soon appointed chaplain in the house of Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, who was Lord Protector and arguably the most powerful man in the land, given that the King was so young. Hooper preached every day to large assemblies. “There is such a concourse of people at my lectures, that very often the church will not hold them”, he wrote to Bullinger.5 Hooper was able to set the message of the Bible before others
1This article is based on the third part of a paper given at the 2016 Theological Conference. Hooper was heavily influenced by the writings of the Zurich reformers, Zwingli and Bullinger, and given that King Henry VIII’s version of reformation retained so many remnants of Romanism, he was exposed to persecution in England. He therefore left for the Continent, arriving in Zurich in early 1547, where he published three books contending for a more thoroughly biblical reformation in England.
2Robert W Oliver, “The Externals of Worship”, in Anglican and Puritan Thinking, Westminster Conference Papers 1977, p 59.
3W Morris S West, “John Hooper and the Origins of Puritanism”, in The Baptist Quarterly, vol 15, issue 8 (October 1954), p 346.
4Carrie Euler, Couriers of the Gospel: England and Zurich, 1531-1558, Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 2006, p 187.
5Letter to Henry Bullinger, written from London on 5 February 1550, Original Letters Relative to the English Reformation, vol 1, The Parker Society, ed Hastings Robinson, Cambridge, 1846, p 75.
with passion and conviction. The Dutch Reformer, Martin Micron, who was in London at the time, wrote, “What a concourse of people, how many lives have been changed. . . . If the Lord God . . . increases His Spirit in Hooper, I do not doubt but that he will be the future Zwingli of England.”6
However, the more the common people heard him gladly, the more the old guard opposed him. One of his chief opponents was the Bishop of London, Edmund Bonner, who had never forsaken his Romanist views. The King’s Council had appointed a day for Bonner to affirm the Protestant faith, but instead he preached against it and asserted transubstantiation, the foundational error supporting the mass. Hooper was there, and his zeal for truth meant that he was willing to be involved in the more difficult aspects of reformation. He preached against Bonner’s views and also witnessed against him in proceedings before the Council which put Bonner into prison. Thus Hooper made another deadly enemy. He wrote to Bullinger words which were to prove prophetic: “I had a sharp and dangerous contest with that Bishop. . . . Should he be again restored to his office and episcopal function, I shall, I doubt not, be restored to my country and my Father which is in heaven”.7 The interests of biblical truth had demanded the stand against Bonner, and Hooper could not resist that call.
Events in the political realm moved swiftly through the latter half of 1549. Somerset, Hooper’s patron, fell from favour, and a new leader emerged: John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, later to become Duke of Northumberland. Rather than falling with Somerset, Hooper’s position was maintained by his becoming Dudley’s chaplain. Things still looked hopeful for reform, for it suited Dudley politically to favour more thorough reformation, to which the King was most amenable.
In February 1550, Hooper was chosen to preach before the King and Council the so-called Lenten sermons. In his bold and outspoken seven-sermon series on Jonah, he seized the opportunity to demand wholesale reform. The English Reformation had started – but it was only a start. It was not enough that the Church’s doctrine had been reformed – its worship and practice needed to be reformed as well, in a full Zurich-like Reformation – “to reform this Church of England unto the primitive state and apostolical doctrine” as Hooper put it in his fourth sermon.8
6Quoted by W Morris S West, “John Hooper and the Origins of Puritanism”, in The Baptist Quarterly, vol 16, issue 1 (January 1955), p 24.
7Letter to Henry Bullinger, written from London on 7 November 1549, Original Letters, vol 1, pp 69,70.
8Writings of Dr John Hooper, Bishop of Gloucester and Worcester. Martyr, 1555, The Religious Tract Society, nd, p 144. Further references to this volume are in the text of the article, prefaced by W.
In the Epistle Dedicatory prefacing the printed version of these sermons, Hooper warned that the devil “will do the best he can to preserve a mixed and mingled religion, that shall neither plainly be against, nor wholly with him; and so use the matter that partly God’s truth shall take place, and partly the superstitious inventions of man. The which mingled and mixed religion is so much the more dangerous as it is accounted for pure and good; therefore it is earnestly forbidden by God, as the examples of the Scripture declare” (W, p 85). Again, “Christ cannot abide to have the leaven of the Pharisees mingled with His sweet flour. He would have us either hot or cold; the lukewarm He vomiteth up, and not without a cause. For he accuses God of ignorance and foolishness who intends to adorn His doctrine and decrees with human cogitations” (W, p 86).
Hooper had good reason to attack “mixed and mingled religion”. The Puritan in him had been much stirred by remnants of Romanism contained in The Book of Common Prayer published the previous year.9 The section on the Lord’s Supper was especially grievous to Hooper’s Puritan sentiments. The word mass was even used in its title: “The Supper of the Lord and the Holy Communion, commonly called the Mass” (p 193). The officiating minister was to wear Romanist garments: “The priest . . . shall put upon him the vesture appointed for that ministration; that is to say, a white alb” (p 193), which a recent dictionary has defined as “a loose, sleeved, full-length, gownlike white linen vestment . . . worn with other vestments as by the celebrant of mass”.10 The minister was to perform his duties at an altar rather than a table: he was responsible for “setting both the bread and wine upon the altar” (p 200) and was to pray “turning him[self] to the altar” (p 202). The liturgy included prayers for the dead: “We commend unto Thy mercy (O Lord) all other Thy servants, which are departed hence from us, with the sign of faith, and now do rest in the sleep of peace: grant unto them, we beseech Thee, Thy mercy, and everlasting peace” (p 203). Communicants were to kneel when receiving the sacrament: “meekly kneeling upon your knees” (p 204).
Even where doctrinal progress had been made, the Church of England struggled to put it into practice. In a revealing letter to Bullinger written at the end of 1549,11 Hooper had acknowledged that “there are here six or seven bishops who comprehend the doctrine of Christ as far as relates to the Lord’s
9The quotations from the 1549 Book of Common Prayer in this paragraph are from The First Prayer-Book of King Edward VI, The Ancient and Modern Library of Theological Literature, London, 1888.
10Webster’s New World College Dictionary, fourth edition, 2010.
11The quotations in this and the following paragraph are from Hooper’s Letter to Henry Bullinger, written from London on 27 December 1549, Original Letters, vol 1, p 72.
Supper, with as much clearness and piety as one could desire”. But they were not “reforming their churches according to the rule of God’s Word”.
Hooper explained: “The public celebration of the Lord’s Supper is very far from the order and institution of our Lord. . . . In some places the Supper is celebrated three times a day. Where they used heretofore to celebrate in the morning the mass of the apostles, they now have the communion of the apostles; where they had the mass of the blessed virgin, they now have the communion which they call the communion of the virgin; where they had the principal, or high mass, they now have, as they call it, the high communion. They still retain their vestments and the candles before the altars; in the churches they always chant the hours and other hymns relating to the Lord’s Supper, but in our own language. And that popery may not be lost, the mass-priests, although they are compelled to discontinue the use of the Latin language, yet most carefully observe the same tone and manner of chanting to which they were heretofore accustomed in the papacy. God knows to what perils and anxieties we are exposed by reason of men of this kind.”
Hooper used his sermons on Jonah to entreat the authorities to forsake this “mixed and mingled religion” and embrace full reform: “Most gracious King and noble counsellors, as you have taken away the mass from the people, so take from them its feathers also, the altar, vestments, and such like as have apparelled her; and let the holy communion be decked with the holy ceremonies with which the high and wise priest Christ, decked and apparelled it first of all” (W, p 90).
Hooper appealed throughout the sermon series to the regulative principle. In the second sermon he said that we should “offer no other worship and religion unto God than He Himself by Word requires. If we do, we offer an idol of our own head, and honour the devil under the person and name of God” (W, p 106). In the sixth sermon, he argued for a return to biblical simplicity: “Let us submit ourselves, all our wisdom and learning, unto His Word; and think that what Christ and His apostles have instituted and used, can in nowise be bettered by us” (W, p 173). Hooper was a Reformation Puritan indeed! Everything added by man was to be removed; let worship be just as God has appointed in Scripture.
Hooper was rejecting and condemning what was already becoming, under Archbishop Cranmer’s leadership, the settled approach of Anglicanism. Imported from Luther’s Germany, not from Zwingli’s Zurich or Calvin’s Geneva, things not forbidden in Scripture were seen as adiaphora – matters indifferent – and could be used or not used as the Church saw fit. That always leads to the “mixed and mingled religion” which Hooper so much hated.
Hooper referred to the altars, which had still not been removed from the
English churches. The doctrine of the once-for-all sacrifice of Christ had overthrown the heresy that the mass was a sacrifice. With all boldness he spelt out the practical implications: “Turn the altars into tables, according to the first institution of Christ . . . for as long as the altars remain, both the ignorant people, and the ignorant and evil-persuaded priest, will always dream of sacrifice” (W, p 133). The Puritan was at work.
Even the architecture of the English churches needed to be changed: “This I would wish, that the magistrates should put both the preacher, minister, and the people in one place, and shut up the partition called the chancel, which separates the congregation of Christ one from the other, as though the veil and partition of the temple in the old law yet should remain in the Church; when, indeed, all figures and types ended in Christ” (W, p 136).
He especially spoke against the prescriptions for ordination that had recently been published by Cranmer entitled, The Form and Manner of Making and Consecrating of Archbishops, Bishops, Priests and Deacons. The oath concerning the King’s supremacy required the ordinand to swear on the saints, using the words, “So help me God, all saints and the holy Evangelist”.12 Hooper expressed his surprise: “Whereat I did not a little wonder”.13 He marvelled at the requirement that “he that will be admitted to the ministry of God’s Word or His sacraments must come in white vestments. . . . Sure I am, they have not in the Word of God that thus a minister should be apparelled. . . . It is rather the habit and vesture of Aaron and the Gentiles, than of the ministers of Christ” (EW, p 479). Hooper’s opposition to the Roman Catholic vestments would fuel a veritable storm a few months later. He spoke against the strange extra-biblical practice of the ordinand holding the communion bread and cup in one hand and the Bible in the other at his ordination. To manifest the absurdity of it, he asked, “Why do they not as well give him in his hand the [baptismal] font and the water? For the one is a sacrament as well as the other” (EW, p 479).
Hooper dealt at length with the sacraments. He said: “The sacraments are as visible words offered unto the eyes and other senses, as the sweet sound of the word to the ear, and the Holy Ghost to the heart” (W, p 155). He corrected the abuses of Baptism: “The matter and element of this sacrament is pure water: whatsoever is added, oil, salt, cross, lights, and such others, are the inventions of men; and better it were they were abolished, than kept in the Church: for they obscure the simplicity and perfectness of Christ our
12The 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.
13Early Writings of John Hooper, ed Samuel Carr, The Parker Society, Cambridge, 1843, p 479. Further references to this volume are in the text of the article, prefaced by EW.
Saviour’s institution. I pray the King’s majesty and his most honourable Council to prepare a ship, as soon as may be, to send them home again to their mother church, the bosom and breast of Rome” (W, p 169).
In the Lord’s Supper, the believer “doubts no more of an inward friendship, familiarity, concord, peace, love, atonement, and fatherly pity and compassion through Christ, by the means of faith, than he doubts that his mouth outwardly receives the signs and sacraments of God’s mercies. To excite this faith and belief in the merits of Christ in us, the bread is called His body, and the wine His blood” (W, p 172). As to administering the Supper, he said, “The more simple it is, the better it is, and the nearer unto the institution of Christ and His apostles. If he have bread, wine, a table, and a fair tablecloth, let him not be solicitous nor careful for the rest, seeing they are not things brought in by Christ, but by popes . . . as the candles, vestments, crosses, altars! For if they are kept in the church as indifferent things, at length they will be maintained as necessary things” (W, p 170).
The Puritan cares about things that others do not, such as posture and gestures used in worship. Hooper expressly condemned kneeling at the Lord’s Table. John Knox had come to the north of England at this time, and administered the Supper with the communicants sitting, not kneeling. Two years later, Knox would also preach before the King and Council and issue “a ringing attack”14 on kneeling. Hooper said: “The outward behaviour and gesture of the receiver should be without any kind of suspicion, show, or inclination of idolatry. Wherefore, seeing kneeling is a show and external sign of honouring and worshipping, and heretofore grievous and damnable idolatry has been committed by the honouring of the sacrament, I would wish . . . that the communicators and receivers should do it standing or sitting. But sitting, in my opinion, were best” (W, p 172).
Hooper was a Protestant. He condemned the papal system as “the nest of abomination” (W, p 97). He sought for the thorough extirpation of all remnants of Romanism. He argued against the false pity that allowed Romanist clergy to remain in their posts. Like the sailors did with Jonah, if they would not reform, “cast them all into the sea, that is, put them out of their office, and put better in their places” (W, p 126). But what drove Hooper was no sectarian hatred of Roman Catholicism. It was a love of Scripture. “His motivation . . . was his unswerving belief in the truth and sufficiency of Scripture and in the ideal of the New Testament Church.” The Bible was sufficient in all things: “The written Word of God is as perfect as God Himself” and “needs not that blasphemous and vile help of the Bishop of Rome” (W, p 151).
14Elizabeth Whitley, Plain Mr Knox, John Knox Press, 1960, p 57.
Hooper’s conclusion at the end of the seventh sermon could not have been bolder: “If your Majesty do these things, the blood of your people shall not be required at your hands. But . . . if not, the King of Nineveh, with his people, shall rise at the latter day, and condemn both King and Council. . . . Let us, therefore, believe and amend, or else we must perish” (W, pp 191, 192). Hooper had no doubt about the biblical duty of civil magistrates to ensure true religion in the land. Both Church and state were responsible for getting rid of all “mixed and mingled religion”.