Richard Hooker

Richard Hooker was an Elizabethan Anglican theologian and philosopher whose Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity provided an influential synthesis of natural law, reason, and scriptural authority.

Hooker argued that natural reason is a reliable guide to moral and political law, that consent and reason — not just Scripture — ground legitimate authority, and that ecclesiastical polity must accommodate human reason and historical circumstance — positions that directly shaped Locke's political theology.