Dr Jonathan Halliwell, CENDD’s education adviser, traces the legacy of Richard Hooker, our Deacon of the Month, to our recent online conference, Last Orders.
Defending the diaconate: a ministry of proclamation
This month, the Anglican Church commemorates Richard Hooker (1554-1600). As the extract from Exciting Holiness puts it,
‘Richard Hooker became one of the strongest advocates of the position of the Church of England and defended its ‘middle way’ between puritanism and papalism. Perhaps his greatest work was Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity which he wrote as the result of engaging in controversial debates. He showed Anglicanism as rooted firmly in Scripture as well as tradition, affirming its continuity with the pre-Reformation Ecclesia Anglicana, but now both catholic and reformed.’
Hooker certainly defended the diaconate, but as Francis Young explains in his book Inferior Office? A History of Deacons in the Church of England (James Clarke & Co, 2015), a key moment in the history of the diaconate came with the1550 Ordinal, marking a shift in status from lay to ordained. It seems that the Ordinal was an unwieldy attempt to fuse a hierarchical model of ministry, essentially unchanged from the pre-Reformation church, with the proposal (of Martin Bucer) that deacons should have a distinct ministry. Thus, deacons were retained in the threefold order of ministry and exercised a distinctive kind of ministry from that of the presbyter, focusing on the care of the poor. [1]
The current official teaching of the Roman Catholic Church, formulated at the Second Vatican Council (Dogmatic Constitution on the Church Lumen Gentium 29) states that the diaconate is part of the sacrament of holy orders “at a lower level of the hierarchy”. It is of a piece with Cranmer’s characterisation of the diaconate as an ‘inferior [= lower] order’. However, Reimund Bieringer’s detailed study of διάκονοι in the New Testament concludes that they ‘do not belong to the lowest level of a hierarchy of ordained ministers. Their primary role is not to serve the people of God, but they are authorized representatives or envoys of the believing community’.[2]
Our understanding has evolved since the Reformation. Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity states that deacons were stewards of the church, unto whom at the first was committed the distribution of church goods, the care of providing therewith for the poor, and the charge to see that all things of expense might be religiously and faithfully dealt in. A part also of their office was attendance upon their presbyters at the time of divine service.
A sign that the function of the deacon’s ministry was being questioned is that Hooker attacked those ‘to whom it seemeth a thing so monstrous that deacons should sometimes be licensed to preach’; he responded to Puritan critics with a powerful defence of the role of deacons as teachers of the faithful:
To charge them for this [i.e. preaching] as men not contented with their own vocations and as breakers into that which appertaineth unto others is very hard. For when they are thereunto once admitted, it is a part of their own vocation, it appertaineth now unto them as well as others, neither is it intrusion for them to do it being in such sort called, but rather in us it were temerity to blame them for doing it. Suppose we view the office of teaching to be so repugnant unto the office of deaconship that they cannot concur in one and the same person? What was there done in the Church by deacons which the apostles did not first discharge being teachers?[3]
Young notes that Hooker’s defence of the diaconate was successful ‘but at the expense of relegating the deacons’ traditional role of relieving the poor to the past. And it seems likely that a direct consequence of Hooker’s approach was that for the next two centuries, lifelong and long-term deacons would serve primarily as curates and schoolmasters’ (p.18).
If Hooker’s legacy was a mixed one, his defence of the deacon’s right to preach at least has good precedent in Scripture. The appointment of the Seven in Acts 6, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, was about proclamation of the word; interpreting for the Hellenistic widows, who had been overlooked in the distribution of food. Philip’s ministry in Acts 8 to the Ethiopian eunuch is a ministry of proclamation. In his teaching and interpretation of Scripture, he extends the ministry of word and sacrament to an Ethiopian eunuch, which enables him to belong more fully in the household of God.
It is clear that the basic distinction drawn from the early church was that the ministry of word and sacrament belonging to the apostles became that of presbyters, whilst the ministry to the poor by the Seven was taken up by the deacons. But in trying to distinguish deacons from the presbyterate in terms of function, it seems to me that the Reformers failed to grasp two vital aspects of order: first that deacons have overlapping functions with other ministers; and second, that these functions must be held together with the apostolic calling, the fundamental being, of a deacon.[4]
All of which bring us to the recent conference “Last Orders? Restoring the priority of the Diaconate” (November 2024). Joy Gilliver, Head of Discernment in the Church of England, pointed out that one of the problems we have when we evaluate ordained ministry on the basis of the functions that people perform, is that all forms of ordained ministry, bishop, priest, deacon, have overlapping and distinctive functions.
What a functional approach tends to do is set up a hierarchical status-driven picture of ordained ministry, where orders get defined by what they can’t do, and those who seem to be able to do the most end up at the top. And so you end up with a kind of pyramid. When you look at ministry like that, with the Bishop at the top, because the bishop can do the most, then the priest, then the distinctive deacon and then often the licensed lay minister, and then the laity, you end up with a sort of sense in that model where oversight gets less and less the lower down the pecking order you go.
In rehearsing the basic hierarchical model in Ministry in Three Dimensions, Steven Croft misses this insight, though he makes a good case for diakonia being the foundation of all ministry. Thanks to the groundbreaking work of John Collins, we have a reformed understanding of the deacon as an envoy with a mandate to represent the church in the mission of God. This contrasts with the Reformation emphasis on service as essentially social work.[5] The former places the emphasis on the apostolic trajectory of the deacon’s ministry, which is reflected now in the Qualities & Evidences for diaconal ministerial education.[6] To be clear, the deacon is commissioned for a particular task, but the primary emphasis is on the sending, rather than the task itself. Indeed, a survey of the New Testament evidence reveals that the meaning ‘envoy’ is a more accurate translation than ‘servant’ and that the essential nature of the task is “proclamation”.[7] That is why it is the special responsibility of the deacon to read the gospel, regardless of a particular church’s liturgical tradition.
To this extent, Hooker’s reasoned defence of the diaconate, rooted as it is in both Scripture and tradition, is a very Anglican thing!
Dr Jonathan Halliwell
[1] Young, Francis: Inferior Office? A history of deacons in the Church of England (James Clarke and Co., 2015), p.9. See the section ‘Deacons and the Elizabethan Settlement’, pp.13-19.
[2] Reimund Bieringer, ‘Exegetical Perspective: Women and Women Deacons in the New Testament, in Hildegard Warnink (ed.), Unlocking the Future: Women and the Diaconate’ (Monsignor W. Onclin Chair 2020), Leuven: Peeters, 2020, 45.
[3] Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie (London, 1723), 281-2.
[4] Rosalind Brown Being a Deacon Today (Canterbury Press, 2005), xiv notes that the diaconal vocation is always a blend of being and doing: ‘[To] define a deacon simply by “being” is inadequate; to define it simply by function runs the risk of reducing the church to one more human agency among others’.
[5] J.N. Collins, Diakonia. Reinterpreting the Ancient Sources, New York Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Brown (2005), 13.
[6] Deacon’s Toolkit – CofE Network of Distinctive Deacons
[7] Dieter. Georgi, The Opponents of Paul in Second Corinthians, Philadelphia PA: Fortress, 1986 (German original 1964), 29.
CofE Network of Distinctive Deacons 