King of Conscience: Benjamin Hoadly and the Sincerity of Catholicity

"If Christ be our King; let us shew our selves Subjects to Him alone, in the great affair of Conscience and Eternal Salvation: and, without fear of Man's judgment, live and act as becomes those who wait for the appearance of an All-knowing and Impartial Judge; even that King, whose Kingdom is not of this World." (Benjamin Hoadly, Bishop of Bangor, The Nature of the Kingdom, or Church, of Christ, 1717)

Benjamin Hoadly is an oft neglected and misunderstood figure within the world of English politics, English ecclesiology, and Protestantism in general. Hoadly was condemned as a Hobbist and a Lockean, a defender of an oligarchic establishment and the purveyor of democratic anarchy. And there was no doubt that Hoadly was well-loved by some at the highest rungs of power, but favor came from his straightforward defense of the Glorious Revolution and his capacious mind. Queen Caroline rewarded a wide swathe of England's brights, from Tory critics such as George Berkeley to Arian Rationalists like Samuel Clarke. Hoadly was infamous for his role in the Bangorian Controversy, which provoked an ecclesiastical crisis which ended with the shuttering of Convocation (the Church of England's conciliar organ) for nearly a hundred years. Like most of English ecclesiastical history, Hoadly is quickly roped into reified categories of two: tory vs whig, latitude vs high churchman,  liberal vs conservative, low vs high church, etc. But while this form of categorization may be helpful as an elementary heuristic for entering into high British politics, it quickly breaks down after any cursory examination of the figures or ideas involved. The same applies to Hoadly, who offers for a Christian resourcement the right kind of foundation for ecclesiology. The main foundation, for Hoadly, is that Christ is the active king over his kingdom. All of his concerns, concepts, and controversies flow from this fundamental point. However, if Christ is the ruling king and the kingdom of God is among us, what does this mean for Christians?

Hoadly is most often associated with Lockean contractualism, a liberal turn in ecclesiology which saw the church as a voluntaristic association, one of the many social groups which constitute Society over which government regulates (most often in terms of defending negative liberties, preventing one group's infringement of liberties from another). And despite a book length argument that Hoadly depended on Locke, his theories of government were more often neglected among his contemporaries and immediate successors. Instead, Locke was generally considered as one of the old Republicans who had thrown in as radical supporters of William, the Dutch Stadtholder who would see James Stuart flee his throne. Hoadly was no soft Tory on the issue of the Glorious Revolution, but vocally supporter William's invasion of Britain. Hoadly was offering a partisan definition of revolution, but rebutting the empty posturing of royal absolutism, who had actively begun to subvert this new government. For William, as royal nephew and son-in-law to the fleeing prince, the government fell upon his shoulders because the nation's representatives, viz. Parliament, acclaimed him such. It was for this reason that John Adams, a self-professed True Whig in support of America's self-determination, saw Hoadly, along with Sidney, Locke, Trenchard&Gordon, and other defenders of law over royal dispensation.  Hence Adams offers his typical verve:

“Our author's criterion for determining the cases in which the people (in whom " all majesty and authority fundamentally re- sides, being only ministerially in their trustees or representatives) may use sharp and quick remedies for the cure of a common- wealth," is very judicious, and has been the rule in all English revolutions since ; " in such cases only as appear to be manifest intrenchments, either in design or in being, by men of power, upon the fundamentals or essentials of their liberty, without which liberty cannot consist." This rule is common to him and Milton, and has been adopted by Sidney, Locke, Burnet, Hoadley ; but this rule is useless in a simple democracy. The minority have no chance for justice in smaller cases, because every department is in the hands of their enemies ; and when the tyranny arrives at this last extremity, they have no hope, for all the means, at least the most of the means, of quick and sharp remedies, are in the hands of their enemies too ; so that the most desperate, irremediable, and forlorn condition of liberty, is in that very collection of all authority into one centre, that our author calls " a Right Constitution of a Commonwealth”. (Works of John Adams, VI, pg. 202)

It was in this way Hoadly was related to Locke, not out of derivative political or ecclesiastical authority. Hoadly's ecclesiastic concern is defining how precisely Christ rules. Rather than Locke, the bishop depends most strongly upon the Protestant sapiential ecclesiology of Richard Hooker. There are two fundamental kingdoms in the world: kingdom of God and the kingdom of men. The former is the means of salvation and the latter is often corrupted through the domain of satan. The former pertains to world of conviction and belief, while the latter pertains to outward behavior. Rather than seeing this as a precursor to proto-liberal notions of public and private authority, Hoadly in no way denies that the former expresses itself fully in and through the latter. However, it's quite clear (from the doctrine of the New Testament) that they're not equivalent. One can perform outward actions without any particular internal disposition or intention. Christ condemns Pharisees for their emphasis on outward conformity, going as far as inventing new laws to hem in proper outward action, to the expense of internal renewal. Thus giving can occur equally from a overflowing charity of the heart, as well as from vain hubris which seeks to win patronage. The subtlety between these can be detected, thus Christ commands His disciples to be vigilant to supervise, but this escapes the power of the law to determine or punish. Instead, ultimate fidelity is something only open to Christ, God-in-flesh who establishes the law which binds the conscience and keeps to himself the right to punish. Thus, while civil power may punish bodily action, the true determination lies with God alone. Thus, civil authority may punish adultery or murder, but it is incapable of punishing the lust or rage which leads to these actions.

The most important element of conscience is the sincerity with which one professes Christ Lord and Savior. But, again, outward acts of blasphemy may be punished by a civil magistrate, but the inner blasphemy of an unbelieving heart is not available to censure. However, an ecclesiastical regime which enforces this rigid conformity errs in two ways: 1) it attempts to regulate which it has no right to, usually through additional rules; 2) it creates a nation of hypocrites, hiding their unbelief from preachers who'd bring to bear deeds of darkness through the light of the Gospel. Hoadly in no way challenged an institutional church, which he believed was rightly governed by bishops (though this in no way unchurched presbyterians). He also did not believe it was unjust for the government to have a religious motivation (as opposed to a wholly neutral or anti-Christian posture) to punish crimes. A just society would see adultery penalized and open blasphemous provocations censured. However, Hoadly believed the civil magistrate had this power as a servant of God to keep the peace. Thus, censure of blasphemy was not to promote holiness as much as it was to prevent public vice. Only the preaching of the gospel could renew a heart to truly adhere to God's saving word. Civil penalties would only restrain public discontent, but not encourage saving souls. Again, Hoadly was not introducing a secularized notion of the state or law as a neutral procedural instrument that was divorced from any religious or philosophical commitments. However, these laws must restrain their overreach and ferocity lest they slip from a temporal-bodily focus into controlling the souls of men. Not only does such become an impossible regime of increasing repression, but it strips Christ of his kingly prerogatives.

Hoadly's high-church opponents were non-plussed at this argument, although it flowed from Hooker. The English ecclesiastical theorist reflected an earlier eirenic approach to churchmanship against the more vigorous presbyterian Cartwright. Rather than a divide between Anglican/Puritan, or even worse, Anglican/Calvinist, Hooker vs Cartwright represented plurality in the Reformed world. It was more rightly Zurich/Strasbourg vs Geneva, focused primarily over how discipline operated as the "third mark" of the church. For hard-edged Geneva-influenced puritans like Cartwright, the lack of discipline in the Church of England was disturbing to say the least. But, unlike Anabaptists, Cartwright, like other Genevans, believed in this kind of aristocratic polity to be possible for both church and state. The ungodly should be disenfranchised from law-making or governing, lest the society displease God and sink into vice. Active discipline would keep the church pure, as much as the church was the font of society, with its pastors as vigilant prophets, ready to denounce false doctrine and evil living. The alternative, for Hooker, was an emphasis on the distinction between spiritual-ecclesiastical authority from temporal-civil. Discipline was fine and good, but it generally pertained to bodies and fell under the jurisdiction of civil authority. That's not to say that Hooker was Erastian, in the sense that the institutional church was product of civil society to organize the preaching of the gospel and the distribution of sacraments. Rather, Hooker believed in an Apostolically established church, which continued through the ages (a mild apostolic succession through proper teaching and historically rooted offices). It's in this sense that the Catholic Church subsists: "as in the main body of the sea being one, yet within divers precincts hath diverse names, so the Catholic Church is in like sort divided into a number of distinct societies, every of which is termed a Church within itself. In this sense the Church is always a visible society." (Hooker, Ecclesiastical Polity, Book III.1)

In other terms, Hooker understands the Church as a trans-historical society, the Kingdom of God, manifest and visible throughout the world, yet distinct from any particular network of assemblies. The Church is Catholic in as much as it holds to the ancient saving truths, even as particular customs may diverge, which are settled through ancient custom and the needs of a particular people through its representative government (crown-in-parliament). All theology flows from God's revelation, but this theology must be received and interpreted through the lens of the human mind. Thus Hooker quotes Thomas favorably that "Human laws are measures in respect of men whose actions they must direct, howbeit such measures they are, as have also their higher rules to be measured by, which rules are two, the law of God and the law of Nature." Despite Cartwright's appeal to Scripture, Hooker raises the specter which will haunt the confessional wars and ultimately gut all sides: the skepticism of the hermeneutic circle. Hooker is not introducing rationalism or an optimistic appeal to reason, despite his via media Broadchurchmen of the 19th c. will claim Hooker as one of their own. Instead, Hooker, in the intellectualist tradition, tackles the contours of human reason before the absolute interpretive claims of his Genevan interlocutors. And it is reason which becomes the medium through which man exercises his faith in receiving God's word. It is the Virgin Mary's interjection ("how can this be?") to the angel Gabriel's shocking news. Nevertheless, per the Blessed Mother, reason's role is ultimately to submit and work through God's revelation. Mary does not submit before divine omnipotence, but her honest doubt is the very means to which her submission is credited to her, as it was for Abraham. Belief and unbelief are human actions, even if ultimately divinely initiated and empowered. This is what Hoadly means by sincerity: the necessity of man to make divine promises his own.

Applied, Hooker's ecclesiology remains widely open. It in no way countenanced open and evil living, in the nationalistic form that Broadchurchmen were open to allowing. However, pastoral inquisition remained at a minimum, not to detract from the preaching of the Word of God. Again, a priest would not tolerate open practices of immorality, but he also would not subject the congregation to withering scrutiny, often along extra-biblical laws. The problem, for Hooker as it was for Thomas, was not the existence of canon law, but the application of canon law to intervene into the life of the soul. Canon laws could determine dress, meeting times, liturgical formulae, and scriptural reading. But they could not punish immorality beyond the realm of conscience, afflicted through withholding the sacrament viz. excommunication. The preaching of the law and the gospel, the commands of God (and man's failure to uphold them) and the promises of God (to save even sinners), would convert mankind, and this power belonged in general to the priesthood. But outward conformity, and its punishment, ultimately belonged to temporal authority. A priest may put a Christian out for his immorality (though this punishment was, in the same sense of St. Paul, ameliorative, with hope that the wayward come back), but he has no right to punish as a clergyman. Confusing these authorities together was the source of error for Jesuits and Genevans, which Hooker saw as engaged in a similar ecclesiastical error (even if the latter preached the pure gospel unlike the former).

It was this view which Hoadly had adopted for a post-confessional world. Against High Churchmen, Hoadly did not believe lashing Dissenters, Protestants outside the Church of England, would make them honest Christians. Instead, the Test Act had made Dissenters become hypocrites, cheating the law (openly) and placing the governance of the Church in their hands. Unlike High Churchmen, Hoadly thought tightening the screws would only intensify hypocrisy. No amount of legal pressure can effect salvation. Additionally, Hoadly caused waves because he believed sincere Christians, even in error, were in no way damnable. This meant that Arians, who adhered to bald promise that "those who confess Christ is Lord with their mouth and believe he was raised from the dead will be saved", who sincerely interpreted Christ's Lordship in a less-than-fully-divine way would not ipso facto go to hell. This raised the hackles of those who would condemn Hoadly as a crypto-Arian, but Hoadly was far from such. He fully believed the basics of Nicaean and Reformed trinitarian theology, but did not believe threats could in anyway convince the Arian to believe otherwise. To add sanctions, as the Athanasian Creed does, was to go beyond the explicit statements of scripture. This did not make truth relative or insignificant, but a recognition of God's mercy on questions of interpretation. The victory of heresy would only be won on the field of scriptural exegesis, not punitive canon law or the magistrate's sword. Bad doctrine would ultimately crumble through scrutiny. This approach may be interpreted as naive liberal belief that dialogue would lead to truth, but Hoadly anchored his claims on the revelation of scripture. It wasn't sincerity in the abstract, but the revealed truths of scripture. St. Paul had made the foundation of salvation "Jesus is Lord", and it is not Christians' responsibility to improve upon the Apostles' words. Again, it in no way impugns Nicaean doctrine, but grounds it more firmly upon Scripture, for it is Scripture which make these dogmatic declarations true, not these dogmatic declarations which justify Scripture. Thus Hoadly would stand upon Chillingworth's blunt and profound claim: "The Bible is the Religion of Protestants." In other words: the promise of salvation (and its converse) can only hang on the clear words of Scripture.

But it was precisely this ecclesiology which had come under threat after the Glorious Revolution. The Non-Jurors emerged as a schism from the Church of England when, after failing to swear oaths, William deprived these churchmen of their offices. Substantially, the Non-Jurors claimed an alternative ecclesiology, where episcopal authority and office were not subject to royal control. A king may remove a bishop from the House of Lords, remove his tithes and land, but he could never take his diocese or his mitre. For William to sack bishops, and see them replaced with others, was royal tyranny and overreach. However, this grievous sin was combined with the Non-Juror's emphasis on Passive Obedience. Not only had the rest of the Church of England condoned, through assent, William's attack on the church, but the Church sinned in pledging loyalty to him (either as king de jure or de facto). These Non-Jurors, typified by Charles Leslie, were adamant that this failure to support the rightful king, as well as prayers for the usurper as lawful king, was damnable. Most Non-Jurors little emphasized this open Jacobitism, defending James II and his descendants as the rightful kings of Britain. However, they all agreed that the ministry had the right to bind conscience through their own pronouncements. In contrast to Hoadly's Hookerian idea of the priesthood, where binding/loosing was through the proclamation of the law and the gospel, the Non-Jurors believed the priest could unflinching pronounce damnation over someone. This power was not absolute, as Henry Dodwell, a prince of patristics, noted that God could overturn the rulings of his subordinates. Nevertheless, the authority of bishops and priests included a personal application of divine law, which included the interpretation necessary to apply to individual cases. Thus, Hoadly never denied the truth of Romans 13, but denied it applied as active capitulation to a king who broke the law and became a tyrant. It was not a call to rebellion, per se, as it was to refuse obedience to lawless action.

In other words, Hoadly and the Non-Jurors diverged widely on the nature of the ministry's authority and the commands of scripture. For bishop of Bangor, there was no exclusive promise to the ordained ministry to issue these judgements of salvation and damnation that were, fundamentally, binding. The words of Scripture were not dead, but living, as Christ actively applied them to the hearts of Christians through the preaching of the Word. It was in this sense that Christ was, is, and ever will be the King of Heaven, the King of Conscience, who will effect his judgement in the final resurrection. Christ granted authority to the Apostles to publish his teachings, but there was no guarantee that this authority translated to their successors, the bishops. If such was the case, it could also mean that episcopal rules and judgements could bind the conscience in the same way the scripture could. Eastern Orthodox conciliarism and Roman Catholic magisterial papism both claimed these authorities, as well as confessional subscription among some Continental churches. However, the problem was whether these bodies or documents were expositions of scripture or had assumed powers not delegated. And as contemporary times have made clear, even these authorities require additional interpretation, and these interpretations require additional verification. This hermeneutic problem is not substantial if full comprehension is necessary. For Hoadly, God will forgive the heterodox if they sincerely believe in their interpretation. The orthodox minister's job is to persuade through good preaching and teaching, not given to the excess of passions to win the argument on the level of emotion (whether of joy or terror). Only the words of scripture, and their plain meaning, could bind the conscience.

Non-Jurors, in contrast, emphasized the role the ministry had, as subordinate authorities, to bind the conscience through their ruling. Thus, to the Arian, the Non-Juror could rightly threaten damnation through conciliar, creedal, historic, and magisterial authorities. The Arian's sincere belief that "Jesus is Lord" does not prove Christ's Godhead was hand-waived as damnable error, repressed through anathema. And more importantly, a godly commonwealth would submit itself to the Church's (or at least the orthodox and true Church's) rulings in enforcing policy. The Non-Jurors had radicalized to the point of recognizing spiritual and temporal authority as distinct, but they were still Two Kingdoms Protestants. In their case, however, the ministry could terrorize the conscience when it embraced error. In some ways, this was not as far off from Hoadly. However, this approach could make unclear issues (such as who the correct bishop of a contested diocese was or who the true government of England was) into issues of life and death. Hoadly appealed to the individual conscience at the level of principle, where good Christian priests could only encourage, not bind, through their preaching. For Hoadly, Christ still actively governed as king through his pronounced law; for Non-Jurors, Christ's active rule was through his subordinates, the bishops.

Neither Hoadly nor the Non-Jurors were accepted in the main, with politicians and polemicists adopting elements of each system. For many churchmen, who slammed the hammer down on Hoadly's teaching, though royally handicapped from doing much else, Hoadly's doctrine dissolved the entire church into a voluntaristic society. Instead, they opted for the Non-Juror's clerical ecclesiology to defend the corporate privileges of the Church, though shying away from is most extreme positions (such as de-churching non-episcopal Protestants, making their sacraments and ministerial orders dubious at best). Nevertheless, this accusation was never Hoadly's point, but instead a broad biblical Christianity that recognized charity even as it pursued orthodoxy. Hence, Hoadly's attack on the Test Act and civil disenfranchisement for Dissenters flowed not from his indifference. As already stated, Hoadly believed episcopacy was the form of government that the Apostles instituted and for the good of the Church. He also believed in the general thrust, as confessional restatements of Scripture, of the Creeds and the 39 Articles. But these were not replacements or additions to Scripture, but attempts at faithful articulation within a unique historical context. They were not immune to error, even if they could be, incidentally, without fault. Their authority flowed from Scripture and it was only Scripture which could bind a Christian. Thus error was to be undone through truth, not persecution.

Hoadly's significance may seem negligible today, even as it forms the basic truth of Christian intercommunion. Hoadly allowed the heterodox on both sides, either Dissenting Arians or Roman Catholic, to be counted faithful Christians if they, as prescribed in Scripture, called on the name of Christ and believed He rose from the dead in their hearts. That did not justify their errors, but God was generous. It was not to unchurch those who remained committed to the Scripture, even as it formed the charitable basis to correct false teachings. Hoadly offers a biblical catholicity against sectarian rigidity. It is all too easy, viz. the internet, to become a stand-alone magisterium, whether standing on the scripture, councils, confessional statements, or revered theologians. It is also an easy temptation to enter an absolutist hermeneutical spiral, where one requires charismatic power (whether through an endowed institution or through personal enlightenment) to offer authoritative exegesis. No text is uninterpreted, but no text lacks sufficient context to provide a framework to distinguish the unreasonable from reasonable interpretation. You cannot honestly mistake Shakespeare for a cook book if you, at all, pay attention to the work. Often this bold claim has come under withering scorn from those who attack the "hegemony of reason", spawning from the Renaissance, the Reformation, and Enlightenment. Wasn't division precisely proof that there is no undisputed interpretation? This position becomes the rearguard anti-modern revanchist liberalism of the 19th c., which engaged in an increasingly elaborate shell-game to disguise a foundation less foundation of proceduralist debate. However, the probabilistic reasoning of Hoadly is not the foundation of knowledge, but the means to engage in debate to win over the disaffected to the truth without threat in this world or the one to come.

Most Christians take Hoadly's ecclesiological truth for granted, even as most formally deny it. I can treat Christians, who personally are ignorant on a variety of very important concepts, as brothers even as I seek to woo them. Hoadly's argument seems alien and radical within his own day, when it was supposed that all were Christian. However, in a day and age in the North Atlantic, when most increasingly do not identify as Christian, the hope is to see broader spiritual unity among Christians, even as they remain institutionally apart. In a world where Christian clerisy has been generally annihilated, replaced with new forms (cult of Science or Medicine), Hoadly offers an alternative to mere anticlericalism of Christians aimlessly floating between churches. The reality is, despite anti-Protestant traditionalists claim to the contrary, we're all exercising private judgement, all reading Scripture (and tradition) and offering our own interpretations (whether they accord with a certain hierarchy or not). Let us be honest about what we are all doing! Let us recognize each other in the body of Christ, even as we vigorously oppose error. The purpose is not some naive belief that debate will produce truth, as if it is the bubbling up from a chemical reaction. Rather, it is because Christ actively governs his kingdom, which is none other than the Church, that the truth will have its day. It is precisely an active trust in God's providence that truth of Scripture will be manifest. When the Ethiopian eunuch puzzled over the prophet Isaiah, st. Phillip did not claim an apostolic authority but preached Christ. It was from the gospel that he was fully converted, aware now that the Age of Ages had broken into the world.

For the bishop of Bangor, Christ was not a mere concept or a distant ruler, whose government was obscured through swarms of functionaries and subordinates. Rather, his ministry (ordained or lay) was an effective republication of his law. It was a living word that could cleave between bone and marrow. Christ alone rules over the consciences of men, and thus any Christian may stand up Scripture and ask for an explanation. God does not fume at His children's questions, He provokes them. The marvels of His work bring forth praise, as they are justified in time, so that all mouths are stopped. The Protestant principle that Scripture interprets Scripture arises from recognition of the Bible as a text, one that can be justified through history. It may be a claim of faith, to believe it is the Word of God, but such a claim is not alien to reason. And thus Hoadly promotes a cool temper over fiery invective, for it is through the former one will be misled. It is the spirit of being a good Berean, pouring over the scripture and weighing the claims. The NT applauds this disposition. Nowhere does Christ or the Apostles compare the Church to the temples of Egypt, where the pomp of spectacle is necessary to disguise missing doctrine. 

It is through this generous spirit that Christ will continue to govern his church and establish fraternal bonds between his people. Let us thank God for this much maligned servant.