The Good, the Bad, and the ?!?!: Hooker on Chukim--part 1 (because it's just too long)

The book of Leviticus is a code of conduct required of Israel as a result of the establishment of a relationship with God in the books of Genesis and Exodus. More or less. There's loads of stuff in here; rules about moral, sexual, and sacrificial conduct, Sabbath, slavery, harvest, social justice, etc. Most of us nod enthusiastically when reading about many of these laws (like the prohibitions of stealing, cheating, and lying--19:11). And then there are those, called chukim, or divine decrees that just seem...random (like mixing wool and linnen--19:19). Richard Hooker, the 16th century divine (basically the father of Anglicanism) addresses these unusual laws in the context of his discussion about the reformation of laws or church practises:

It may so fall out that the reason why some lawes of God were given is neither opened nor possible to be gathered by the wit of man. As why God should forbid Adam that one tree, there was no way for Adam ever to have certainely understoode. And at Adam’s ignorance of this pointe Satan tooke advantage, urging the more securely a faulse cause because the true was unto Adam unknowen. Why the Jewes were forbidden to plowe their grounde with an oxe and an asse, why to cloth them selves with mingled attire of wooll and lynnen, both it was unto them, and unto us it remaineth obscure. Such lawes perhaps can not be abrogated saving onely by whome they were made: because the intent of them being knowne unto none but the author, he alone can judge how long it is requisite they should indure.

(Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Book III, Chapter 10.1)

Obviously Hooker, like most Christians, would hold that these laws were abrogated by Jesus. However, Hooker's belief in Divine law as moral and just, despite humanity's inability to fathom the reasons, led Hooker to differ from scholars such as John Selden, Dionysius Vossius (a pupil of Menasseh Ben Israel), and John Spencer. It also underscores Hooker's own puzzling relationship with his go-to guy on the subject of the 'Israelite State'--Maimonides. In The Guide of the Perplexed (III:37), Maimonides explains the reason for the prohibition on shaving (Leviticus 19: 27, 28) as follows:

The shaving of the corner of the head and of the corner of the beard has been forbidden because it was a usage of idolatrous priests. This is also the reason for the prohibition of mingled stuff, for this too was a usage of these priests, as they put together in their garments vegetable and animal substances bearing at the same time a seal made out of some mineral..." (trans. by Shlomo Pines, p. 544)

In Book IV, Hooker pretty explicitly parts ways with Maimonides, who had been his authority until then:

That shaving therefore and cutting, which the law doth mention, was not a matter in itself indifferent, and forbidden only because it was in use amongst such idolaters as were neighbours to the people of God: but to use it had been a crime, though no other people or nation under heaven should have done it saving only themselves. As for those laws concerning attires : " There shall no garment of linen and wool- Levit. len come upon thee ;" as also those touching food and diet, wherein swine's flesh, together with sundry other meats, are forbidden; the use of these things had been indeed of itself harmless and indifferent: so that hereby it doth appear, how the law of God forbad in some special consideration, such things as were lawful enough in themselves. But yet even here they likewise fail of that they intend. For it doth not Dent, appear that the consideration, in regard whereof the law forbiddeth these things, was because those nations did use them. Likely enough it is, that the Canaanites used to feed as well on sheep as on swine's flesh; and therefore, if the forbidding of the latter had no other reason than dissimilitude with that people, they which of their own heads allege this for reason, can shew I think some reason more than we are able to find why the former was not also forbidden. Might there not be some other mystery in this prohibition than they think of? Yes, some other mystery there was in it by all likelihood. For what reason is there, which should but induce, and therefore much less enforce us to think, that care of dissimilitude between the people of God and the heathen nations about them, was any more the cause of forbidding them to put on garments of sundry stuff, than of charging them withal not to sow their fields with meslin; or that this was any more the cause of forbidding them to eat swine's flesh, than of charging them withal not to eat the flesh of eagles, hawks, and the like? Wherefore, although the church of Rome were to us, as to Israel the Egyptians and Canaanites were of old ; yet doth it not follow, that the wisdom of God without respect doth teach us to erect between us and them a partition-wall of difference, in such things indifferent as have been hitherto disputed of.

Eagles, hawks, and the like? Mmm...and now the forbidden fowl must be tasted:


Hey! Pay attention!

As I was saying, quite simply, it would seem that Hooker is against the idea of God telling people what to do 'because i told you so'. He argued against the voluntarist position of the Puritans who felt that law was dependent on God's will alone. In The Problem of Pain, CS Lewis meditates on the relationship between religion and morality:

It has sometimes been asked whether God commands certain things because they are right, or whether certain things are right because God commands them. With Hooker, and against Dr. Johnson, I emphatically embrace the first alternative. The second might lead to the abominable conclusion (reached, I think, by Paley) that charity is good only because God arbitrarily commanded it—that He might equally well have commanded us to hate Him and one another and that hatred would then have been right. I believe, on the contrary, that ‘they err who think that of the will of God to do this or that there is no reason besides His will'

Ok-that's all for part 1. Just thinking aloud. Thanks for reading. And if you didn't--it will get better soon (not in part 2--just when i get unstuck and off this topic).