Philip Hobday, Richard Hooker: Theological Method and Anglican Identity, T&T Clark Studies in English Theology (New York: T&T Clark, 2023), pp. xiii+223. ISBN 978-0-5677-0803-8

A characteristic of contemporary Anglicanism is seemingly interminable debates about Anglican identity, in which the debating parties construe Anglicanism as catholic, reformed, or a via media between the two.This debate is not infrequently worked out through competing analyses of the Elizabethan theologian Richard Hooker, who despite his relative unimportance during his lifetime has come to be seen as the touchstone for Anglican theological identity.Those who wish to stress a 'catholic' Hooker tend to compare him to Thomas Aquinas; those who seek a 'reformed' Hooker note instead his similarities to John Calvin.Philip Hobday, in his Richard Hooker: Theological Method and Anglican Identity, a revised version of his doctoral dissertation, argues that this debate about Anglican identity broadly and Richard Hooker specifically is so frustratingly irresolvable because it rests on a fundamentally mistaken understanding of the relationship between 'catholic' and 'reformed'.Hobday argues that 'catholic', by which he means the teaching and practice of the pre-Reformation Church, and 'reformed', which he uses to refer broadly to the commitments of those advocating separation from Rome in the sixteenth century, need not be seen as opposing end points of a continuum, in which becoming more catholic means becoming less reformed (and vice versa).Rather, he suggests that the two need not be seen as in opposition to each other at all, meaning that it is possible to be simultaneously catholic and reformed.The project of his book is to show that on questions of theological method, this is in fact the case: the 'catholic' and 'reformed' positions are not opposed but express a shared consensus.A comparison of Richard Hooker with both Thomas Aquinas (representing 'catholic' theology) and John Calvin (representing the 'reformed') shows that these three theologians share a broadly compatible account of the theological warrants of Scripture, reason and tradition.Thus, Richard Hookerand Anglicanism as a wholeneed not be seen as either catholic or reformed, and still less a sort of midpoint between the two, but rather ought to be understood as fulsomely and fully catholic and reformed.