Word Made Flesh for Us, The: A Treatise on Christology & the Sacraments from Hooker’s Laws

Consider how God is in Christ.

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 tract: 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.

105 pages

“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 inspired: 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

“The Elizabethan era was a period of significant controversy in the Protestant Church of England. As the present edition of Book V of Richard Hooker’s Laws attests, the controversy between what we would today call “Anglicans” and “Presbyterians” was, in many respects, a debate internal to the Reformed tradition about how best to apply shared principles of Reformed Christology and sacramental theology to questions about the church’s order and worship. The Davenant Press is once again to be commended for making a work of great historical and theological interest available to a wider audience in a readable and affordable edition.”

– SCOTT SWAIN

James Woodrow Hassell Professor of Systematic Theology,
Reformed Theological Seminary