Hooker, Thomas
HOOKER, THOMAS (1586–1647), was an English and American Puritan minister. Born in Leicestershire, Hooker took his B.A. and M.A. at Cambridge, where he was variously Dixie fellow, catechist, and lecturer in Emmanuel College. As a minister he became active in the unofficial meetings of Puritan ministers then taking place. When William Laud moved to restrict nonconforming ministers in the late 1620s, Hooker fled, first to the Netherlands, thence to New England in 1633. He and Samuel Stone organized the first church in Newtown (now Cambridge), Massachusetts. Partly because of religious and political disputes in the Bay Colony, partly because of his parishioners' dissatisfaction with their land allotments, Hooker led in 1636 a removal to Connecticut, where he and his group founded Hartford. When the General Court of Connecticut first met in May 1638 to draw up its Fundamental Orders, Hooker's sermon on the occasion described the proper relationship between the people and their magistrates. Although an important political statement of early New England, the sermon is no longer commonly accepted, as it once was, as evidence of Hooker's democratic attitudes. Hooker maintained his influence in Boston, returning in 1637 to serve as a moderator of the synod called to deal with Anne Hutchinson and the antinomian threat, then later in 1645 to participate in the meeting called to consider responses to the Westminster Assembly. The first of these meetings marked the triumph of Hooker's preparationist theology as a nearly official view of the process of salvation for the New England churches. At the later meeting Hooker presented his Survey of the Summe of Church Discipline (London, 1648), which became one of the definitive statements of the congregational church order in New England. He died at Hartford on July 7, 1647.
More than thirty volumes appeared over Hooker's name or were legitimately credited to him; the most important, in addition to the Survey, are collections of sermons that examine the spiritual stages the soul passes through on the way to conversion. Under the influence of Richard Sibbes and other English preparationist theologians who held that the individual soul could not earn grace but could prepare itself for its reception, Hooker preached extensively on the subject and made his final survey of the soul's progress during his pastorate at Hartford. These sermons were published posthumously in the two volumes entitled The Application of Redemption (London, 1656–1659). Hooker was well known in his own time for his direction of troubled spirits in the process of discovering saving grace in themselves, and this concern is evident in his various sermonic works on the theology and psychology of conversion. He was also interested in the role meditation could play in the spiritual life of a soul under the workings of grace, and he has been recognized in this century as one of the significant Puritan exponents of the meditative process.
Bibliography
The best biography of Thomas Hooker is my own Thomas Hooker, 1586–1647 (Princeton, N.J., 1977), but there is also useful material, especially on Hooker's career in England and Holland, in Thomas Hooker: Writings in England and Holland, 1626–1633 (Cambridge, Mass., 1975), edited by George H. Williams and others. Notable in this volume is Sargent Bush's bibliography of the various printings of Hooker's numerous works. Bush is also the author of The Writings of Thomas Hooker (Madison, Wis., 1980), the best analysis of Hooker's religious concerns, his theology, and his sermon technique. Perry Miller's influential essay on Hooker's political position, "Thomas Hooker and the Democracy of Early Connecticut," appeared first in the New England Quarterly 4 (October 1931): 663–712, and was reprinted in Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, Mass., 1956).
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