The Word Made Flesh for Us: A Treatise on Christology and the Sacraments from Hooker's Law (Library of Early English Protestantism)

“The Word Made Flesh For Us is a wonderful modernization of Richard Hooker’s sixteenth century classic that somehow succeeds in making the work more accessible even as it preserves the breviloquence of its English prose. The editors’ choice to focus on Christology and the sacraments is there is an obvious connection between the hypostatic union (God was in Christ), the mystical union (Christ is in us), and the sacraments (divinely ordained means for cementing this union). Moreover, with its conceptual distinctions and logical inferences, Hooker’s Christology is a veritable masterclass in theology that is as analytic as it is orthodox.”

– KEVIN VANHOOZER

Research Professor of Systematic Theology,
Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

In this fifth volume of a multi-year translation project by the Davenant Institute, we present key sections from Book V of Hooker’s Laws, in which Hooker thoroughly yet succinctly lays out the Reformed yet catholic perspective on both Christology and the sacraments. Long regarded as both the theological and rhetorical high point of the Laws, these chapters provide a survey of the church’s historic teaching on the person of Christ and our union with him, as well as an irenic defense of Reformed distinctives over against the Catholic, Lutheran, and anti-sacramental alternatives.

Yet this is no dry theological Hooker’s descriptions of Christ, baptism, and especially the eucharist are among the most stirring passages penned during the English Reformation. Book V of the Laws is as valuable today as it was when first written for the edification of the church, the sharpening of the mind, and the enrichment of the soul.