How the Mind of Christ is Formed in Community: The Ecclesial Ethics of Richard Hooker

Abstract

How do practices contribute to the formation of the mind of Christ in community such that the community truly becomes the body of Christ?” This dissertation demonstrates that Christ acts on his Church through a complex interaction of community and practices to generate the identity, diversity, and virtue of his body. This is a controversial claim because many hold that the matter of virtue rightly consists of adherence to cherished foundations like Scripture and tradition accompanied by calls to obedience. Nonetheless, this study seeks to identify resources to help the Church imagine a virtue ethics appropriate to a 21st century communion ecclesiology. It does so by reading Richard Hooker as an ecclesial ethicist.

Examining Hooker’s accounts of Scripture, participation, and liturgical practices, the dissertation develops a Hookerian account that extends the ecclesial ethics of Stanley Hauerwas and Sam Wells on both ends. On the front end, it derives from first principles an account of how humans come to see themselves as part of the theodrama in which improvisation is required. On the back end, it grounds improvisation in a theory of mimetic virtue. Along the way it shows how a largely Barthian Christology coheres with a positive account of sacramental practices and that a Hauerwasian emphasis on practices is not sectarian. Hooker’s repudiation of appeals to timeless absolutes in ethical reasoning and his demonstration that the self-ordering of the Church is phronetic action means that contemporary “liberal accommodationism” and “postliberal traditionalism” can no longer coopt Hooker to justify their ideologies.