Like perhaps many other things in life, a book is a disconcerting combination of, on the one hand, meticulous planning and disciplined execution, and, on the other hand, the completely unforeseen and fortuitous: the chance meeting and conversation at a conference or (more often perhaps nowadays) online, the curious footnote pursued into a treasure-trove of exciting discoveries, an offhand suggestion by your supervisor that blossoms into an important new line of inquiry, the epiphany that comes during the morning walk to your desk or over your third coffee as you muse on Rachmaninov’s Third. Unfortunately, it is only the first of these categories, by far the less consequential contribution, that the lowly writer can take any credit for. For the rest, he can only say, non nobis, Domine, sed Nomini Tuo da gloriam! However, it smacks suspiciously of false modesty to wax eloquent thanking God on an Acknowledgments page, a way of not-so-subtly insinuating to one’s readers that everything before them has God’s personal stamp of approval, being his own handiwork. Thankfully, however, God works mostly through strange and fallible secondary causes, especially those that walk on two legs, and to these it is appropriate to indulge in effusions of gratitude.
Many of these (some long dead) have made their contribution primarily through the written word, sealed up between two covers of a book; these are honored in the appropriate (though depressingly formal) way in the footnotes and bibliography that accompany this work, so there is little point listing them here. I will make an exception of three only. David VanDrunen deserves a word of thanks here. His book Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms fortuitously came my way six years ago and set me on a quest of refutation that led me unexpectedly to write the dissertation that led to the present book. In the process, of course, the nature of the refutation changed dramatically, and I learned a great deal from him; indeed, by the end it was clear that the points I wished to make could be argued without needing a sustained polemical foil, so you will find relatively little of VanDrunen’s work in these pages. In any case, I am grateful to Dr. VanDrunen, who was polite enough to meet me for a beer and a somewhat confusing argument about Calvin even after I had intemperately savaged him in print—and has been just as gracious when our paths have crossed since. In a very different way, my debt to Torrance Kirby in various ways is evident all over the pages that follow, although he will no doubt find much to quibble with. The rich insights I have mined from his books and articles have been complemented by his patient correspondence and feedback over the past few years, during the early part of which he displayed great perseverance in trying to drill the Reformational two-kingdoms concept into my thick head. Third, of course, I must thank Richard Hooker, “of blessed memory” (as Paul Stanwood likes to always add), who has been far more to me during the years of writing this book than merely its subject. I hope it will not sound like sacrilege to say that his words have been a lamp for my feet and a light unto my path in more ways than I can count, many of them well beyond the scope of this research.
For introducing me to Hooker (or reintroducing, as I had made a passing though passionate acquaintance with him during a summer study at Oxford some years ago), I must thank of course my PhD dissertation supervisor Oliver O’Donovan, who throughout the process of my doctoral studies guided me with a gentle but judicious hand. His suggestions have been few but carefully chosen, and have usually yielded abundant fruit—none more so than his absurd insistence that I spend my Christmas break five and a half years ago toiling through the eight books of the Ecclesiastical Polity, which had, I thought, little bearing on my anticipated topic. The reader will find that when I came to write the conclusion of this book, his influence on me proved deeper than even I had realized, as I could not help circling back to his many insightful formulations of related problems in his own works over the past few decades. His wife, Joan, proved an extraordinary (though again, an unforeseen) secondary supervisor, meticulously flagging the least grammatical transgression or conceptual ambiguity throughout the process, and bringing to bear a rare mastery of the key texts and concepts with which I was wrestling. I have missed both of them dearly since leaving Edinburgh nearly three years ago, and I hope they will forgive my long procrastination in bringing this work to print. Susan Hardman Moore and Paul Avis served as gracious but attentive examiners for my dissertation defense, offering several useful suggestions on how to improve the text for publication.
Perhaps just as important as their formal supervision has been the quirky but unfailing advice of my friend and mentor, Peter Escalante. I had the uncanny experience, at various times since stumbling upon the topic and argument of this book, that I was simply unfolding ideas that he had somehow planted in my head sometime in autumn 2010. I appreciate also Peter’s willingness to read over each chapter draft as it appeared. Many other friends (some of them friends formed along the way) also helped by their suggestions, conversations, feedback on drafts, and penetrating questions. Steven Wedgeworth, Jordan Ballor, and Eric Parker in particular, gave me many helpful ideas and put a number of key resources in my path; the opportunity to work with Jordan on a project on sixteenth-century Calvinist church discipline was especially fruitful. My dear friend Andrew Fulford read over several bits at the crucial revising stage, helping me ensure that they were polished and comprehensible enough, and has also given valuable feedback on the revisions. His own doctoral work on Richard Hooker, which I have enjoyed discussing with him these past couple of years, promises to add greatly to what I have tried to achieve in my own writing. I also owe a great debt of gratitude to my old and brilliant friend Davey Henreckson, who will no doubt be the secure occupant of a professorial chair at Yale Divinity while I’m still trying to jerry-rig my own personal theological-pedagogical revolution a few years hence. Throughout the process, he has asked many challenging but penetrating questions, and made a number of suggestions, many of which turned out to be very useful indeed—putting me onto John Perry’s Pretenses of Loyalty, for instance. His read-through of the entire finished manuscript and of the rewritten first chapter of this book last year was particularly helpful. Matthew Tuininga, with whom I was so fortunate as to spar repeatedly during the time I was working on my dissertation, and with whom I have been even more fortunate to become friends since, also offered very valuable feedback on the entire project. And of course my faithful friend Brad Belschner has always been there to talk through ideas with me and reassure me that I was not crazy to get excited about the things that I got excited about. More recently, conversations about Richard Hooker with Ryan Handermann and Brian Marr have helped me improve some passages and highlight some key themes.
Although I dared to be rather pleased with how the original dissertation turned out, this book, I hope, is considerably improved. In particular, the first and last chapters are almost entirely rewritten and expanded, and various other points in the argument have been filled out or nuanced by the insights of subsequent research, conversations, and feedback. I am grateful to the O’Donovans for pointing me to Jon Pott at Eerdmans as a publisher for this study, and to Jon for his enthusiasm for the project, valuable suggestions, and great patience as an editor. I am grateful also to David Bratt, who took over the editorship of this project when Jon retired, and who was also gracious enough to allow me to let a couple of deadlines slip when other responsibilities piled up in the way of finishing the revised manuscript. John Witte Jr., the editor of the series in which this book appears, was good enough to take a liking to the text, and even better to suggest some much-needed improvements. He will certainly not agree with everything in the resulting final product, but the argument, I hope, is now clearer, stronger, and more accessible than it might otherwise have been.
When a pile-up of seemingly impossible deadlines threatened to postpone once more my finalization of this manuscript, Brian Marr, my research assistant, was good enough to do some wonderful editorial work on checking and standardizing the text that saved me many hours and much stress. For all the faults that remain in the text, whether minor typos or massive lapses in argument, the responsibility remains of course fully my own.
Even the rare reader inquisitive enough to read through an Acknowledgments section is likely to skip ahead when he encounters the section thanking family, as it is sure to be sentimental, and almost entirely unrelated to the matter of the book. And yet for the writer, no section could be more important. In particular, the bit where the author thanks his wife for her extraordinary patience and longsuffering over years of penniless and seemingly pointless toil (often in a foreign land, no less) can seem quite perfunctory, and yet it is anything but. To my wife, Rachel, I am indescribably and eternally grateful for her unfailing support at every stage of the way. It may sound trivial, clichéd, or maybe even sexist to single out for gratitude the extraordinarily fine dinners that I could look forward to at the end of a day of study and writing, but few things contributed so much to the relative ease and efficiency of my work. “An army can’t move except on its stomach,” said Napoleon, and the same is true of an academic. My seven-year-old son Soren was a source of frustration as well as delight along the way, but even the former was invaluable in keeping me grounded—such as his resort to the blunt expedient of slamming my laptop shut and saying “Don’t work!” when it was high time to call it a day. My now three-year-old angel Pippa provided constant joy and inspiration on the crucial last leg of the dissertation (and to think I was afraid she would slow it down with sleepless nights!). Dear little Oliver arrived after the heavy-lifting was done, but his good cheer and mischievous grin have been another encouragement in my work of revision since. To thank one’s mother may seem acceptable at a high school graduation speech, but frankly embarrassing at later stages of life. And yet I must thank her once more for teaching me to write—to write essays clearly, quickly, and effectively, from a young age. Too many scholars must labor simultaneously with forming their ideas and forming their words; I have been fortunate enough to be able to focus on the former and let the latter take care of themselves, thanks in large part to that training many years ago. My dad too has provided an ever-ready ear, to chat about things Hooker-related, or not-so-related, throughout my PhD work and beyond, keeping my morale up with his humor and his uncanny willingness to agree with me.
Finally, I will thank God directly—not for the content of this book, but for the joy it has brought me. For too many PhD students, it seems, a dissertation has become stale and lukewarm by the date of submission, and they are only too happy to do to it what God wanted to do to the Laodiceans. I am happy to say it was not so for me, and even if I occasionally tired of returning to it for publication revisions, it is still with a very fond farewell that I send this manuscript forth upon its voyage of publication.