Thomas Hooker

Thomas Hooker (born July 5, 1586 in Marksfield , Leicestershire , † July 7, 1647 in Hartford , Connecticut ) was one of the leading figures of the first generation of Puritans in New England . He was one of the founders of the Connecticut Colony.

Life

Hooker was a student at Dixie Grammar School at Market Bosworth and studied theology at Cambridge University . He mostly adhered to the doctrine, but not to the rite of the Anglican official church and therefore suffered after 1630 from the persecution of the Puritans by the Arminian Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud . In 1630 he fled to Holland, where he became the right hand man of William Ames . In 1633 he emigrated to the colony of Massachusetts , founded four years earlier , in which several thousand Puritans had already settled. He was appointed first pastor in the Newport Ward, now Cambridge, Massachusetts . His former property is now on the campus of Harvard University .

Thomas Hooker moved west with a group of about one hundred people from the Bay to Connecticut in June 1636 and founded the city of Hartford, the first and largest settlement center of the Connecticut Colony . Not far from there was the first house in Windsor since 1633 that was also fortified. In the group was the widowed Ann Edwards with her son William Edwards. Ann Edwards later married James Coles. Ann and William Edwards were ancestors of Jonathan Edwards.

Hooker's Doctrine of the State

The congregationalist Hooker and his followers, like the circle around Roger Williams , disapproved of the theocracy of John Winthrop in Boston. For Hooker, the basis of state power lay in the free consent of the people, to whom he granted the privilege of electing the government. "Hooker believed that the basis of state authority should be the will of the people and that the bearers of state power should be elected by the citizens." As in Massachusetts, the active and passive right to vote was only available to men with a certain property (freemen). Hooker was instrumental in drafting the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut of 1639, considered the first written constitution of a modern democracy . In preparation for this constitution, “he delivered a famous sermon in 1638 which classically formulated the American understanding of democracy as a demand for faith”.

Together with the colony of John Davenport in New Haven, Connecticut , the residents of Hartford smoothly and cautiously achieved an inwardly tolerant independence as early as the 17th century, which Boston would only fight for by force a century later: the cradle of American democracy .

World historical significance

Together with Roger Williams, Hooker has the great merit of combining the democratic form of government established by the separatist congregationalists in Plymouth Colony (1620) and the Puritans in Massachusetts Bay Colony (1628) with the central human right of religious freedom. This tradition was continued in 1682 by William Penn in Pennsylvania . These three colonies, especially the large area of ​​Pennsylvania, became places of refuge for persecuted or discriminated religious minorities. The small Catholic minority and the even smaller Jewish group received full citizenship and were free to practice their religion. The combination of democracy with their civil liberties and religious freedom, the Hooker, Williams and Penn from their understanding of the gospel were derived, was the Declaration of Independence (1776), the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights (United States) , the constitutional basis of the new country, which in turn became a model for many states around the world (including Germany ) , especially in the 19th and 20th centuries, and found its way into the Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations . The French Revolution took over two of its three catchwords - égalité, liberté [equality, freedom] - from the American declaration of independence (equality, liberty).

Individual evidence

1. ^ Iain H. Murray: Jonathan Edwards: A teacher of grace and the great awakening , Christian literature distribution, Bielefeld 2011, ISBN 978-3-86699-306-8 , pp. 30f.
2. ^ Clifton E. Olmstead (1960): History of Religion in the United States . Englewood Cliffs., NJ: Prentice Hall, Inc. Library of Congress Catalog No. 60-10355, p. 74.
3. ^ M. Schmidt: Hooker, Thomas . In: The religion in past and present , 3rd edition, Volume III, Col. 449.
4. ^ André Maurois : The history of America. Rascher, Zurich 1947, pp. 47–51.
5. ↑ Allen Weinstein and David Rubel: The Story of America: Freedom and Crisis from Settlement to Superpower , New York, NY, 2002, pp. 58, 62, 63
6. ↑ Clifton E. Olmstead, History of Religion in the United States , pp. 74-76, 98-105, 113-117
7. ↑ DK Stevenson, American Life and Institutions , Stuttgart, 1987, p. 34
8. ^ G. Jasper, United Nations , in Religion in Past and Present , 3rd Edition, Volume VI, Column 1328-1329.

literature

• Frank Shuffelton: Thomas Hooker 1586–1647. Princeton University Press, Princeton 1977, ISBN 0691052492 .