Spinoza and the Irrelevance of Biblical Authority (review)

J. Samuel Preus. Spinoza and the Irrelevance of Biblical Authority. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xvi + 228. Cloth, $54.95.

This book is the history of ideas at its best. In lesser hands, volumes in the genre tend to be reductionist to the point of redundancy and irrelevance, forcing the reader to wonder about the originality of the thinker under discussion and the ideas in question. If the relevant ideas are no more than those of others, then why should one take an interest in them (again)? Accounting for originality and genius bedevils the history of ideas.

Preus is well aware of the problem of reductionism and redundancy throughout his book and works hard to show how Spinoza is both a creature of his time as well as a trailblazer in biblical criticism. Many readers will know of Ludwig Meyer as one of Spinoza's correspondents and a member of his philosophical inner circle, but fewer I suspect will know of him as a radical biblical critic, whose Philosophia Sacrae Scripturae Interpres (1666) precipitated considerable debate among both conservative and liberal theologians. Most importantly, it was this very work of Meyer, which, according to Preus, motivated a response from Spinoza himself, and this response is none other than the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (TTP), published anonymously in 1670.

As the very title of his book makes clear, Meyer's radical biblical hermeneutic enthrones philosophy as the criterion by which biblical ideas are to be evaluated and truth is to be revealed. This program is hardly novel (Maimonides and other philosophically minded theologians proposed to reinterpret Scripture when it offended against common sense), but it "challenged 150 years of development in Protestant ways to approach Scripture" (68). Protestant theology emphasized (against Rome) the autonomy of Scripture (sola Scriptura)--that Scripture could be approached directly by the lay reader and needs no external source or authority, ecclesiastical or philosophical, to ground, explain, or enforce it. Scripture is a revealed text that stands on its own, and the "conservative" Protestant response to Meyer by theologians such as Maresius and Serarius is in large measure offered in the name of simple faith, a gross distinction between secular wisdom and revealed truth, and the uniqueness and radical (ahistorical) contingency of Christianity and the Bible. From the "liberal" side (represented by van Welthuysen and Wolzogen), the Protestant response to Meyer and his philosophical interpretation of Scripture is to insist that the text is not in fact a philosophy text, but rather an historical one that requires the skills of an exegete sensitive to language and contextual nuance to wrest meaning from it. In this debate, liberals can be seen to counter conservatives in the name of history and comparative analysis, while both liberals and conservatives counter Meyer's apriorism, with its dogmatic and potentially authoritarian implications. Nevertheless, disagreements aside, all parties, including Meyer, share the view that the Bible is a repository of divine truth, and that it is the job of the interpreter of the text--philosopher, historian, or simple believer--to reveal the truth in its pristine form.

Enter Spinoza. For Preus, what distinguishes Spinoza from Meyer and the latter's Protestant critics on the left and the right is his insistence on understanding and interpreting the Bible as (just) an historical text and consequently as one without any divine significance and meaning, a wholly human text written by human beings a long time ago. Though beholden to conservatives for the strong dualism between faith and reason (religion and science) and to liberals for invoking history in any viable interpretation of Scripture, Spinoza is finally at odds with all in denying the Bible any authoritative status as a revealed text. Giving a new twist to the Protestant notion of the autonomy of Scripture (sola Scriptura), that the text must be understood in its own terms, Spinoza counters Meyer and his evaluation of the Bible against the external...