Finally, I challenge the suggestion that Hobbes is being devious and revealing his atheism when he bumbles his way through the status of natural law as law; or when he contradicts himself in his discussions of the binding nature of the law; or when he derives ought from is. The ambiguities we find in discussion of these issues are the very ambiguities that devout Hobbes’s clerics were grappling with in their own discussions of natural law. The allegedly devious passages about natural law in might not suggest atheism or a secular world view; they Leviathan might suggest that Hobbes was seriously engaging vexing questions about the place and significance of natural law in Reformed Protestant, faith-centered England while advancing his own political project. Mid-Seventeenth–Century English Natural Law in Time and Space Natural Law in Time When constructing their conceptions of natural law, many Englishmen located the concept outside history in the transcendental realm. But an ahistorical conception of natural law is not the only conception Englishmen presented. Nor is it the hegemonic one. Sacred history was a temporal framework within which many Englishmen constructed their conceptions of natural law. According to this framework, time was divided into three periods. The first was the period of nature and nature or its law governed. This period ran roughly from Adam to Moses. The second period was the period of law. The Decalogue ruled from the time of Moses to Christ. The third period was that of grace and the Gospels reigned from Christ until His second coming. Romans 2 grounded the temporal division that associated nature and/or natural law with the first period of sacred history. In the second letter to the Romans, Paul talked about Gentiles who did not know the law (the Decalogue) because they lived before Moses. Paul said these
Finally, I challenge the suggestion that Hobbes is being devious and revealing his atheism when he bumbles his way through the status of natural law as law; or when he contradicts himself in his discussions of the binding nature of the law; or when he derives ought from is. The ambiguities we find in Hobbes’s discussion of these issues are the very ambiguities that devout clerics were grappling with in their own discussions of natural law. The allegedly devious passages about natural law in Leviathan might not suggest atheism or a secular world view; they might suggest that Hobbes was seriously engaging vexing questions about the place and significance of natural law in Reformed Protestant, faith-centered England while advancing his own political project. Mid-Seventeenth–Century English Natural Law in Time and Space Natural Law in Time When constructing their conceptions of natural law, many Englishmen located the concept outside history in the transcendental realm. But an ahistorical conception of natural law is not the only conception Englishmen presented. Nor is it the hegemonic one. Sacred history was a temporal framework within which many Englishmen constructed their conceptions of natural law. According to this framework, time was divided into three periods. The first was the period of nature and nature or its law governed. This period ran roughly from Adam to Moses. The second period was the period of law. The Decalogue ruled from the time of Moses to Christ. The third period was that of grace and the Gospels reigned from Christ until His second coming. Romans 2 grounded the temporal division that associated nature and/or natural law with the first period of sacred history. In the second letter to the Romans, Paul talked about Gentiles who did not know the law (the Decalogue) because they lived before Moses. Paul said these
Hobbes%20and%20Natural%20Law%20in%20Context1_WPSA.docx