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TITLE:BETHLEHEM ACADEMIC FINDS MISSION IN
June 26, 1996
Episcopal News Service
James Solheim, Director
(212) 922-5385
ens@ecunet.org

96-1511
BETHLEHEM ACADEMIC FINDS MISSION IN RESURRECTING RICHARD HOOKER

BY CAROLINE CAVETT
           (ENS) Philip Secor had looked forward to the day.
Cathedrals--especially English cathedrals--have long been one of his special
interests. And on this day he and his wife, Anne, would see the great one in
Exeter. They and other American and British visitors followed
instructions to meet a guide beside the statue out front. She began to
describe the points of interest inside.
           As they neared the door, someone pointed to the statue and asked
curiously,
"Who's that?"
           "Oh, him," said the guide with an offhand laugh. "He's Richard
Hooker who
lived around here and wrote things for the church. He was a tired old man with
a shrew of a wife he had to marry. You Americans
probably know that name more from the Civil War general who let his 'Hooker's
women' travel with the troops. Pretty soon they dropped
the 'women' part and became just 'hookers.' That's about all we know."
           Stunned by this flippant affront to an old friend, Phil Secor broke
away from the tour. He stood beneath the statue and made a
vow: "Richard, I'll put an end to this. One day the Anglican world will know
and appreciate you as the true light you are."

GIVING THE CHURCH ITS FOUNDER
           It has been some years since that Exeter day. But Phil Secor, a
vestryman at
Trinity Church in Bethlehem, is keeping his promise. By 1997, Secor's
definitive IN SEARCH OF RICHARD HOOKER--FATHER OF
THE ANGLICAN SPIRIT will help to avenge the obscurity and mistreatment that
history has dealt this theologian who helped to define the
via media, or middle way, between Catholic dogma and rigid Protestantism that
were sweeping his Elizabethan world and threatening the
Church of England from both sides. While many think of the Church of England
and its broader Anglican Communion as a by-product of
Henry VIII's lust for Anne Boleyn, both its roots and its heritage go much
deeper into theology, morality, and the political structure than
one king's joust with a pope who got in his way. According to Secor, it's time
that we knew that.
           There are a variety of reasons that Richard Hooker has slipped from
our
twentieth-century consciousness. For one, his prose on how theology and
morality relate both to church and state is not easy reading. For
another, we've absorbed so many of the foundations that he laid that we've
forgotten to wonder about their source. Phil Secor's expressive
blue eyes sparkle as he defines his quest: "I want to give the Episcopal
Church its founder."

FEW KNOW ABOUT HOOKER
           For background purposes, Richard Hooker was born near Exeter in
Devon in
1554 to a poor branch of a prominent family. He entered Oxford's Corpus
Christi College under the patronage of the famous Reformation
Bishop of Salisbury, John Jewell. And he later became tutor to both the son of
the Bishop of London and the grandnephew of the martyred
Archbishop Cranmer, gaining notice among powerful figures within the Church of
England.
           Ordination followed in 1579, after which he came to the attention
of John Whitgift, Archbishop of Canterbury, and the scourge
of radical elements seeking to remake or destroy Anglicanism. Hooker began THE
LAWS OF ECCLESIASTICAL POLITY, which became
the most influential theological work in the Anglican Church, in the midst of
fiery controversy, and by 1595, when he had become rector of
Bishopsbourne parish near Canterbury, he had also published the first five
books of The Laws, including the one that explains and justifies
worship, common prayer, sacramental life, and other important characteristics
that were to become the form and spirit of Anglicanism
around the world. In 1600 he died. And although his work made him the most
famous and influential Anglican theologian for the next 300
years, whose pivotal impact spread over church and state alike, the scarcity
of knowledge about the man himself gradually condemned him
to obscurity. Until now. 

HOOKER GETS A ROOM
           "I've always liked ideas," Phil Secor enthusiastically explains.
"And people
fascinate me. Now I have the opportunity to put flesh to these words." A
lifelong Episcopalian (brief forays into the Lutheran and Methodist
traditions notwithstanding), Secor expresses his concern that one reason the
church is in trouble today is that it has lost touch with its roots.
"These were powerful, real people with humanly expressed faiths, which is
important in all lasting institutions," he says. "In some ways,
I've become a pilgrim who has taken as his mission the presentation of our
great founding spirit who 400 years ago formulated and distilled
many ideas we take for granted today."
           But if Secor is a pilgrim with a mission, he's certainly no Gloomy
Gus. He
graciously opens the door to the Richard Hooker room in his Saucon Valley
home, an office whose environment quickly puts a visitor in the
mind of sixteenth-century England. Everywhere in sight are neatly arranged
maps, books, drawings, artifacts, and reproductions of Richard
Hooker's world.
           Only the computer shocks one back to 1996. It's no surprise that
Hooker
seems alive.
           But while Richard Hooker finally has a room, most likely sunnier
and more
comfortable than anything he might have enjoyed before, he also has in Secor a
champion who ran up on him almost by accident over 30
years ago in preparation for a political science doctoral dissertation. His
Duke University advisor suggested Hooker. "You're an
Episcopalian," he said. "Here's a man who influenced not only the development
of your church but also the course of constitutional law."

A CAREER IN ACADEMICS, FUND-RAISING
           Secor's dissertation was successful. So was his life as an
academician at Duke as well as at Dickinson and Davidson Colleges in
the fields of political philosophy and Soviet, European, and American
politics. He eventually became Dean of the College at Muhlenberg in
Allentown and later President of Cornell College in Iowa. When he retired from
that position in the mid-1980's, he and Anne returned to
the Lehigh Valley where he established and ran a flourishing consulting firm
to help nonprofit organizations with their fund-raising efforts.
With his empathy for people, however, Secor says that he found that his
financial expertise became secondary to the alliances that he helped
to forge. "You can't expect people to give money until they build a base of
shared values. Seeing that occur was the real reward."
           But he never forgot Richard Hooker. Nor the slight he had felt for
Hooker at
the hand of the Exeter guide.
           So he sold his business last year and devoted his energy to
completing the
biography that he had started several years before. If all goes well, he will
begin seeking a publisher within the next few months. And the
Episcopal Church will have a new take on a once-forgotten founder who not only
kept it alive during its years of extreme stress but defined
for all times the VIA MEDIA that has made it the church it is today.

HOOKER'S RELEVANCE TODAY
           As Secor likes to say, "We've always been a tolerant group. The
fact that we
can argue among ourselves on almost everything sometimes makes for a messy
church. But when we can also embrace each other at the
altar, that gives us a strength that no lock-step organization could attain."
Some of that goes back to Hooker who insisted that revelation of
God came not only from tradition (a la Roman Catholic), nor only from
scripture (as the Calvinists insisted), but from a blend of these
truths plus the necessary use of our own reason to process them.
           Secor's research has been a happy way to combine scholarship and
travel, as
his long quest has called for numerous visits to English archives, libraries,
churches, and colleges. "The fact that historians are now more
attentive to the lives of people -- their habits, their desires, their
pleasures and faults--has made a book like this more timely," he says,
vowing to bring to light a non-perfect man who transcends dry facts.

WHAT'S NEXT?
           What's next, a visitor asks. Secor laughs heartily, saying that his
children have solicitously broached the same subject. "Well, I
have a mystery novel cooking," he promises, revealing neither plot nor outcome
but dangling a tantalizing theme: a stolen Russian icon.
"But what I suppose I'd really like to do is to visit every Episcopal Church
in the United States to introduce Richard Hooker as the man
who is responsible for much of our spiritual heritage. I like to go places,
and I like to make speeches. Don't you think that would be fun?"

--THIS ARTICLE IS REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION FROM DIOCESAN LIFE, THE NEWSPAPER
OF THE DIOCESE OF
BETHLEHEM. CAROLINE CAVETT, EDITOR OF THE NEWSLETTER OF THE CATHEDRAL CHURCH
OF THE NATIVITY IN
BETHLEHEM, IS A FREE-LANCE WRITER AND SERVES ON THE DIOCESAN COMMUNICATION
MINISTRY.