Divine Law and Human Nature

From the Introduction

In this second volume of our project, we come to the work that Hooker is perhaps most renowned for. Here, in Book I, he offers a sweeping overview of his theology of law, law being that order and measure by which God governs the universe and by which all creatures, and humans above all, conduct their lives and affairs. In an age when Scripture has come under attack, so that the seriousness of one’s commitment to the Christian faith is often simply equated with one’s fidelity to Scripture, Hooker’s seeming attempt to relativize the role of Scripture may cause eyebrows to furrow in suspicion. In carving out a role for natural reason and human law, is he not perhaps an early apostle of the Enlightenment and modern secularism? If not, perhaps he is at least a representative of that type that appears in every age, the lukewarm spokesman for worldly wisdom who advises his fellow Christians about the need for moderation in all things, even in obeying God’s Word. So some readers of Hooker—and many more who have not bothered to read him—have imagined through the centuries.

But such a reading betrays the very confusion that Hooker warns against. As he says of his opponents in the concluding chapter of this book, “they rightly maintain that God must be glorified in all things and that men’s actions cannot glorify Him unless they are based on His laws. However, they are mistaken to think that the only law which God has appointed for this is Scripture.” Rather, even “what we do naturally, such as breathing, sleeping, and moving, displays the glory of God just as natural agents do, even if we do not have any express purpose in mind, but act for the most part unconsciously” (I.16.5; p. 95).^[1] In fact, Hooker compellingly argued throughout his Laws that it was precisely those who most exalted Scripture as God’s only revelation to us who were at most risk of secularizing. For this theory, however much it might attempt to find Scriptural teaching for any and every matter, must admit that when there was a matter where such teaching could not be found, here was an area left entirely to our own wits, without a ray of divine wisdom. But we must not so limit the scope of divine wisdom, argued Hooker.

C.S. Lewis, who revered Hooker as both one of the greatest of English prose writers and one of the great theologians of the Christian tradition, wrote that “there could be no deeper mistake” than to think that Hooker was disposed “to secularize.” On the contrary,

few model universes are more filled—one might say, more drenched—with Deity than his. “All things that are of God” (and only sin is not) “have God in them and he them in himself likewise” yet “their substance and his wholly differeth” (V.56.5). God is unspeakably transcendent; but also unspeakably immanent. It is this conviction which enables Hooker, with no anxiety, to resist any inaccurate claim that is made for revelation against reason, Grace against Nature, the spiritual against the secular.

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