The claim is often made that modern biblical criticism, at least in its historical critical form, is neutral and objective. Even when biblical scholars concede that an individual exegete may use the historical critical method in a biased way, they often make a clear distinction between the method, which they maintain is neutral, and the specific biased exegete. Consider Joseph Fitzmyer's comments that ‘the historical‐critical method is per se neutral’, and elsewhere that, despite the problem with how it has been used at times it remains ‘an otherwise neutral method.’Footnote 1 Joseph Ratzinger pointed out, however, that what often emerges in such reconstructions, wherein the Bible is dissected into hypothetical original fragments, is a new form of secular allegory. He writes that, ‘The dismemberment of the Bible has led to a new variety of allegorism: One no longer reads the text but the supposed experience of supposed communities. The result is often highly fanciful allegorical interpretation….’Footnote 2 In fact, Ratzinger challenged the ostensible objectivity of modern biblical criticism in his justly famous 1988 Erasmus Lecture, ‘Biblical Interpretation in Conflict.Footnote 3
In order to examine the theo‐political implications of the framework of modern historical biblical criticism, I propose taking a look at Baruch Spinoza's (1632‐1677) programmatic method. The reason for turning to this seventeenth century figure is because of his significance in helping construct modern biblical criticism. His hermeneutic marks a turning point in the development of modern biblical criticism, and left its imprint on the method, in its various forms, through the early years of the twenty‐first century.Footnote 4 One of the primary motivating factors for Spinoza's method is the fear of religious violence. The idea of creating one objective method that anyone, regardless of religious affiliation, can use and arrive at the same conclusions, remains one of the guiding principles of modern historical biblical criticism.
In this article, I attempt to unmask the hidden agenda implicit in Spinoza's methodology, which carries a sort of violence of its own. I begin with some comments concerning Spinoza's milieu and what he identifies as the religious violence of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Then I turn to a brief examination of Spinoza's proposed hermeneutic, followed by situating Spinoza in the broader intellectual and historical context of the development of modern biblical criticism up to his time.Footnote 5 Finally, I attempt to deconstruct the pretensions of neutrality of such methods. My argument is that historical criticism has not secured its desired goal of placing every exegete on equal footing, but rather privileges those scholars who are willing to privatize theological commitments within scholarship. It thus inhibits any forms of biblical interpretation that are unwilling to part from particular assumptions and commitments, other than those permitted by historical criticism's own canons and dogmas.
Spinoza and the Concern Over Religious Violence
Early in his foundational work of modern political philosophy, Tractatus Theologico‐politicus, Spinoza states his reason for writing.Footnote 6 He is motivated by the perils of disparate theologies which he blames for the violent conflagrations which engulfed Europe during their long sixteenth and seventeenth century ‘wars of religion.’ In his own words: ‘this inconstancy [caused by religious superstition] has caused many disturbances and atrocious wars.’Footnote 7 The extent of damage these conflicts caused is difficult for us to fathom. Michael Gillespie explains the severity of these wars in his insightful work, The Theological Origins of Modernity, when he writes:
the Wars of Religion were conducted with a fervor and brutality that were not seen again until our own times. Indeed, the ferocity of the combatants may even have exceeded our own, for almost all the killing took place at close quarters, often in hand‐to‐hand combat, and thus without the emotionally insulating distance that modern technologies make possible.… During the Peasants Rebellion in the 1520s, over one hundred thousand German peasants and impoverished townspeople were slaughtered.… In 1572, seventy thousand French Huguenots were slaughtered in the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre.… Cromwell's model army sacked the Irish town of Drogheda in 1649, killing virtually everyone. They burned alive all those who had taken refuge in the St. Mary's Cathedral, butchered the women hiding in the vaults beneath it, used Irish children as human shields, hunted down and killed every priest, and sold the thirty surviving defenders into slavery.… By conservative estimates, the wars claimed the lives of 10 percent of the population in England, 15 percent in France, 30 percent in Germany, and more than 50 percent in Bohemia. By comparison, European dead in World War II exceeded 10 percent of the population only in Germany and the USSR. Within our experience only the Holocaust and the killing fields of Cambodia can begin to rival the levels of destruction that characterized the Wars of Religion.Footnote 8
Spinoza was sixteen years old when the last of these conflicts, the Thirty Years’ War, was brought to a close.
A bit closer to home, Spinoza was intimately aware of other more personal violence and severe punishments he could attribute to religious causes. The trial and arrest of his dear friend Adriaan Koerbagh (1632‐1669), who languished in prison while Spinoza prepared his Tractatus Theologico‐politicus for publication, was but a recent example for Spinoza. Although Koerbagh's actual punishment was less severe than the chief sheriff preferred, the sheriff made it quite clear what he thought should be the punishment: Koerbagh was to be dragged out in public, his right thumb was to be chopped off. After which an iron poker was to be heated and then, once heated, would be used to pierce his tongue, after which he would be resigned to prison for thirty years.Footnote 9
In light of this history, it is easy to see how and why Spinoza wants to secure freedom to philosophize within the Dutch Republic, but also abroad. If so much violence and bloodshed is the result of theological disputes between different religious traditions, and these disputes find their origins in divergent biblical interpretations, then the solution must be sought in an objective and neutral biblical hermeneutic which approaches the Bible without religious bias. What is needed, thought Spinoza, is the creation of a methodology anyone can employ, regardless of their particular religious tradition, and faith commitments. Spinoza thus sought to forge a scientific historical method for interpreting the Bible in order to secure academic freedom, specifically the freedom to philosophize, but also to ensure peace from violent religious conflict more generally speaking.
Spinoza's method, and later historical critical methodologies which remain indebted to Spinoza among many others, are not neutral and objective, pure and disinterested. Rather, historical criticism—by which I mean source, form, and redaction criticism—privileges interpretations that minimize or exclude a whole host of interpretive tools that, historically, have been used in reading Scripture throughout most of the Bible's interpretive history, including: synchronic readings; use of a regula fidei like already established religious dogma as an aid and guide to interpretation; attention to allegorical and tropological senses of Scripture; liturgical readings of Scripture in light of the juxtaposition of Scriptural texts within liturgical celebrations; etc. Such inherent bias in modern historical biblical criticism, I maintain, is by design.
Moreover, although appearing to salvage the traditional sensus literalis of Christian exegetical history, or peshat exegesis within Jewish traditions of interpretation, the literal exegesis of historical criticism has a tendency to eviscerate such a literal sense of any direct theological content.Footnote 10 Sometimes, as in the case of Spinoza, such a literal exegesis amounts to little more than a secular allegory where the goal is to reconstruct the meaning of a no longer extant oral or textual original source—a source which may or may not have ever existed outside of scholarly imagination—undergirding the text as it has come down to us (in its various forms). Often such meaning is reduced to hypothetical communal politics of those in power who may use their own or their community's theological categories either as a Machiavellian mask in which to hide their political machinations, or else as their actual political tools.
Religions, and the various theologies represented by specific religions, become the threat to freedom in modern biblical studies. Religion, in this context, is redefined, transforming from traditional notions of religion as a virtue concerning worship or pertaining to monastic discipline, and being transformed into religion as private belief, wherein all that is public is regulated by the state.Footnote 11 The ostensible neutrality and objectivity of modernity, and thus modern states, is just that, ostensible; it is a mask, and little more. As C.S. Lewis once wrote that the devil's policy of the moment is to remain concealed, so Catherine Pickstock underscores how, ‘The power of modernity is the power to disguise itself.’Footnote 12 Spinoza himself played an important role in this transformation.
Spinoza's Biblical Method: Inventing Scripture's Natural History
Spinoza spells out his proposed method for interpreting the Bible in the seventh chapter of his Tractatus Theologico‐politicus. At the core of Spinoza's method is the attempt to construct a ‘natural history’ (historia naturae) of the Bible. This ‘authentic history’ (sinceram historiam) of Scripture, patterned on the natural history of nature, is to be based, according to Spinoza, ‘only from Scripture itself’ (ex sola ipsa Scriptura).Footnote 13 From this reconstructed history, we will be able to understand what the biblical authors are trying to communicate.Footnote 14 For Spinoza, only after such a study is concluded can valid interpretations be made. The bulk of Spinoza's method involves precise philological and historical investigations which, by their very essence, and by the fact of the fragmentary nature of the historical record used in such a study, are impossible to complete as exhaustively as Spinoza demands.
The first step in Spinoza's method is to exhaustively study the original languages in which each of the texts of Scripture were written, and, in addition, the main language the biblical authors spoke, when different from the language in which they wrote.Footnote 15 Already this first step is an impossible task. Spinoza goes further, however, and demands knowledge of every possible ‘sense’ of ‘every single speech and phrase in common usage that can be admitted.’Footnote 16 After such an incredible scholarly feat, Spinoza moves to his second step, namely, where the would‐be exegete ‘Collects all the views of each book structuring them according to their main points so that we can keep in view all of the subjects.’Footnote 17 Included in this stage is the notation of any statements that are ‘ambiguous’, ‘obscure’, or that ‘appear to conflict with one another.’Footnote 18
Spinoza's third and final step in his biblical hermeneutic is that the historical critic ‘should comment on the issues involved in all the books of the prophets.’Footnote 19 This is arguably Spinoza's most involved step. The biblical investigator, and would be interpreter, must study all the aspects concerning the various human authors’ lives, customs, and aspirations. In order to accomplish these tasks, the exegete must discover who the author of each portion of Scripture was, what was the occasion of their writing, when they wrote, for whom they wrote, and in what language they wrote.Footnote 20 Furthermore, the interpreter must discover what happened to each book after it was written, including how each book was ‘initially accepted’, ‘into whose hands each book fell’, the number of variant readings for each portion, ‘by which council it was accepted as sacred’, and how each of the books within Scripture came to be collected into a single canon.Footnote 21 Afterward, Spinoza emphasizes, ‘All of this, I say, should be included in a history of Scripture.’Footnote 22
Now, the lines of investigation Spinoza opens up to his readers are laudable, and would likely be praised even by any of the prior exegetes who concerned themselves at all with the sensus literalis, from Origen and St. Augustine to St. Thomas Aquinas and beyond.Footnote 23 Learning about the original languages, Scriptural canonization process, various textual traditions and their variant readings, historical background to the authors and audience, cultural circumstances, etc., are important questions to which answers should be sought. Moreover, all of these aspects had long been areas of study. None of these particular areas for investigation originate with Spinoza; earlier intellectuals had been studying these matters for centuries.Footnote 24 What was unique was the way in which Spinoza gathered these methodological principles together in order to formulate a historical hermeneutic for studying the Bible.
The problem with his method is that nothing more can be down by the exegete until such an impossibly exhaustive method has been completed. Only after this all‐encompassing history has been composed does Spinoza think the work of biblical interpretation can begin. Spinoza is all too aware of the difficulties involved in adhering to such a meticulous method, which he enumerates, mostly pertaining to the difficulties in acquiring the level of proficiency Spinoza demands, namely, as when he writes that his method ‘requires the complete [integram] knowledge of the Hebrew language.’Footnote 25 David Dungan explains the net sum of what Spinoza was trying to accomplish when he observes:
Spinoza and his followers multiplied questions about the physical history of the text to the point that the traditional theological task could never get off the ground. That, however, was precisely the intended effect…to create an endless ‘nominalist barrage’,…an infinitely extendable list of questions directed at the physical history of the text, to the point where the clergy and the political officials allied with them could never bring to bear their own theological interpretations of the Bible.Footnote 26
Contending with the Emergence of Modernity
Spinoza stands in a prominent place within a stream, into which feed many intellectual rivers, which helped create and shape the modern intellectual world we scholars inhabit. More and more intellectual historians have pointed out modernity's theological roots, particularly in late medieval nominalism and theo‐political forms of Gallicanism or Erastianism.Footnote 27 Even in these theological positions, however, we find a secularizing trend which hands the public realm over to state rulers, relegating God, faith, religious practices, and such, to the inner recesses of the private and the individual. Prior to the seventeenth century, this secularizing trend is not so clear cut. As Andrew Jones has demonstrated in his doctoral dissertation, Church and state were intertwined so completely in the medieval period that they would be impossible to untangle. Rulers were concerned for spiritual matters, and members of the Church's hierarchy were equally concerned with temporal matters. Both kings and popes saw themselves as appointed by God, and they acknowledged God was operative in the world as well as in the monastery.Footnote 28 Spinoza is one figure, among many, who helps to change this, reconfiguring the secular, banishing the Spirit to the newly created private realm.
One understudied influence on Spinoza was medieval Muslim thought. Over the past century, a handful of scholars have begun to recognize the deep indebtedness of Spinoza's thought to medieval Muslim philosophical precursors. In some cases a direct relationship may be maintained, for many others the route was indirect.Footnote 29 One of these important influences was Ibn Rushd (1126‐1198), known to the Latin West as Averroës, whose works translated into Latin exerted a tremendous influence in the late medieval world, particularly among Aristotelian philosophers, for whom his commentary on Aristotle became a primary source.Footnote 30 Although St. Thomas Aquinas was by no means an Averroist, in his work he often referred to Averroës simply as ‘the commentator.’Footnote 31 Spinoza, like Averroës, saw the highest truth as something only accessible to enlightened philosophers.Footnote 32 The significant Muslim jurist, poet, philologist, polemicist, and all around polymath, Ibn Ḥazm (994‐1064), who died about 60 years prior to Averroës's birth, may also have been influential on Spinoza's work, particularly in his criticism of the Pentateuch.Footnote 33 Functioning in a similar way to the Averroist thought in Spinoza, is the voluntarist and nominalist influence coming from Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, which exerted such an influence on the Protestant Reformation itself.Footnote 34 Niccolò Machiavelli's reading of Scripture and of Christianity as a religious veil for political power likewise influenced Spinoza who was ‘one of Machiavelli's most perceptive readers.’Footnote 35
Late medieval and later scholasticism played its role as well on Spinoza, as it had on Descartes.Footnote 36 Unlike Descartes, however, who may very well be one of the last of the scholastics in the early modern period, Spinoza is even more so one of the first of the early modern thinkers. Spinoza's appropriation and reworking of scholasticism is mediated through his use of Francis Bacon and his Baconian scientific method for studying nature.Footnote 37 Dungan emphasizes that, ‘Nothing is rightly understood about the rise of modern biblical criticism if close attention is not paid to the shifting meanings given to the term “nature” throughout this period.’Footnote 38 This is important to keep in mind, especially with regard to Spinoza, as Matthew Levering observes:
Spinoza's key principle corresponds, in a certain way, to the parallel that the medieval (and some patristic) theologians had drawn between ‘the book of Nature’ and ‘the book of Scripture.’ He argues that one must interpret nature and Scripture by using the same methods.… The difference with patristic‐medieval interpretation thus begins with a different understanding of ‘nature’: for the patristic‐medieval tradition, nature is a created participatory reality that signifies its Creator and possesses a teleological order; for Spinoza nature simply yields empirical data within the linear time‐space continuum. It is not that the medieval rejected empirical study of nature; rather the difference is that Spinoza's ‘nature’ is metaphysically thin.Footnote 39
In some ways Bacon is more important to Spinoza's biblical method than is Descartes, whose methodic doubt Spinoza applied to Scripture, and with whose philosophy he was intimately familiar.Footnote 40
When it comes to the specifics of Spinoza's biblical criticism, a number of roughly contemporary intellectuals and even, in some cases, intimate friends, may have played a role in helping to shape Spinoza's thinking prior to publishing his Tractatus. The former French Huguenot‐turned Catholic lay Oratorian, Isaac La Peyrère (1596‐1676), made a number of similar observations nearly thirty years earlier, in his work Prae‐Adamitae.Footnote 41 A copy of La Peyrère's work continues to sit on the shelf in Spinoza's well‐preserved library in the Netherlands.Footnote 42
Spinoza was also influenced by Thomas Hobbes (1588‐1679), at least by Hobbes’ De Cive, which also finds a place in Spinoza's library, if not also by Hobbes’ Leviathan (which he could have had access to in its 1667 Dutch translation or its 1668 Latin translation), which is more significant concerning biblical interpretation than De Cive.Footnote 43 Spinoza's friend Lodewijk Meyer (1629‐1681), and his book Philosophia S. Scripturae interpres, may have been an influence, and was almost certainly someone against whom a portion of the Tractatus was aimed.Footnote 44 It is possible Koerbagh may have influenced Spinoza.Footnote 45 The Quaker Samuel Fisher (1605‐1665) may also have been a contemporary influence on Spinoza's work.Footnote 46 These are just some of the potential sources of influence on Spinoza's Tractatus, both in the more theoretical hermeneutical portions of chapter seven, but also in the more specific exegetical moves he makes throughout the Tractatus’ pages.
It must be emphasized that, for Spinoza, his formulation of a scientific historical method for interpreting the Bible was intended to be a lethal weapon in the political battles of his day; not merely a weapon of defense, but one of attack, not to maim, but to kill.Footnote 47 The hermeneutic's intended victim was what Michael Legaspi has called the scriptural Bible, but also religious communities like the Sephardic Jewish community in Amsterdam, the Calvinist politicians throughout the Dutch Republic, the Catholic Church more broadly speaking, and any religious tradition that is unwilling to privatize.Footnote 48 Yirmiyahu Yovel maintains that Spinoza's exegetical method was ‘primarily’ intended to be used as ‘a weapon in combating historical religion and a vehicle in constructing a purified substitute for it.’Footnote 49
Historical Criticism and the Enlightenment Project
Like the Enlightenment project itself, and the attendant mathematicization of modern rationality, the historical critical method is interested scholarship, notwithstanding protestations of objective disinterested neutrality.Footnote 50 When we examine the foundations of Spinoza's contribution to the modern biblical criticism of the Enlightenment period, we find just one example of how this plays out in the context of Europe's ‘religious’ wars. In his 1995 article, ‘“A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House”: The Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State’, and his expansion of this argument in his 2009 The Myth of Religious Violence, William Cavanaugh demonstrates the difficulties inherent in labeling such wars as ‘religious.’Footnote 51 Cavanaugh counters the popular modern myth that European state centralization was made necessary by the doctrinal strife of sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe. He shows, in contrast, how: state centralization preceded these conflicts by hundreds of years; these conflicts were not primarily fought over rival theological doctrines but in fact often involved Catholics at war with other Catholics with Protestant soldiers on both sides; and that the very modern notion of ‘religion’ as a private set of beliefs was created during this time and only gained widespread acceptance later, and thus would be anachronistic as a modifier to these conflicts.
Such conflicts, Cavanaugh explains, were often examples of temporal rulers using communal loyalties to orchestrate battles on behalf of their attempts to secure sovereign rule. In his words, such conflicts ‘were fought largely for the aggrandizement of the emerging State over the decaying remnants of the medieval ecclesial order.’Footnote 52 Spinoza himself played a prominent role in Cavanaugh's account of the modern redefinition of ‘religion’ and of helping to found the corresponding myth of ‘religious wars’ to enable the newly formed secular realm to declaw ecclesiastical authority.Footnote 53
The stories surrounding such conflicts, identified as religious in origin, would be reshaped during the Enlightenment to justify separating theological enquiry from other forms of scholarship. The seemingly intractable divergences between rival theological communities in the Christian world made theology appear unable, not only to function as Queen of the Sciences, but unable even to be considered scholarship at all. Alasdair MacIntyre makes the following observation, in light of the vastly disparate and apparently irreconcilable assumptions and guiding principles of any and virtually every contemporary discipline in the humanities: ‘It is ironic that the wholly secular humanistic disciplines of the late twentieth century should thus reproduce that very same condition which led their nineteenth‐century secularizing predecessors to dismiss the claim of theology to be worthy of the status of an academic discipline.’Footnote 54 MacIntyre links this incommensurable disparity in part with the elimination of religious tests at the university, using the case of William Robertson Smith as an example.Footnote 55
For my part, bringing up such objections has nothing to do with going after professors on heresy charges, or seeking to get professors fired from their jobs. Rather, it is to question the assumption that modern historical biblical criticism is an objectively neutral method. This is not to say that I think there is an alternate method that yields purely objective results in biblical interpretation. The attempt to find and utilize a method of biblical interpretation that is wholly disinterested, purely neutral and objective, in the Enlightenment sense, is, to borrow from Peter Novick, akin to attempting to nail jelly to a wall.Footnote 56 John Collins has praised modern historical biblical criticism for having ‘created an arena where people with different faith commitments can work together and have meaningful conversations.’Footnote 57 And yet, Jon Levenson explains the problem behind such apparently level‐playing field assumptions: ‘Like citizens in the classical liberal state, scholars practicing historical criticism of the Bible are expected to eliminate or minimize their communal loyalties, to see them as legitimately operative only within associations that are private, nonscholarly, and altogether voluntary.’Footnote 58
Conclusion
In his Gifford Lecutres, MacIntyre asserted that, ‘The ghosts of the Ninth Edition [of the Encyclopaedia Britannica] haunt the contemporary academy. They need to be exorcized.’Footnote 59 His reference is to the rationalistic and positivistic Enlightenment ethos which pervades western scholarly guilds, including the university. By and large MacIntyre is correct in his assessment, and Spinoza is one figure who contributed to this academic Zeitgeist.Footnote 60 What we have in contemporary biblical studies is, ‘an endless multiplication of ever larger technical commentaries focused on ever‐shrinking textual shards’, and, although often unrecognized by Spinoza scholars, this result was by design.Footnote 61
