Alien Drums

“… [N]othing taught in Scripture would work, could possibly be effective, except on the assumption that those to whom these words are directed over the ages have sufficient rationality to match up Scripture with the actual affiars of life.”

That is Daniel N. Robinson’s paraphrase of what Richard Hooker had to say in his Laws of Ecclesiastical Politie (1593). Robinson references Hooker in The Teaching Company’s Great Course titled American Ideals: Founding a “Republic of Virtue” (lecture 2). To continue the paraphrase:

“A providential God must have equipped us intuitively with sufficient rational power to comprehend our relationship to God, our relationship to each other, what the terms of political and social associations should be, etc. So, what we have Hooker appealing to first is the requirement that Scriptural interpretation not fly in the face of reason itself.” (p. 28)

Hooker was a “devout Christian writer, but he distinguishes between extreme literalism in the matter of Scripture and what a reasonable person’s understanding would be of what Scripture claims and means and requires of us all,” says Robinson, who is on the philosophy faculty of Oxford University.

One more quote from Robinson: Hooker was “trying to remove religion as the grounds of political upheaval, and revolutionary zeal, and one man turned against another.”

I think many of us would like to remove religion as “the ground for one man turned against another.” Religion need not be that way. Bad religion does so, but good religion does not. It is one thing to disagree with someone; it is another to demonize him.