Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise (1670) is a landmark both in democratic political theory and in the history of biblical interpretation. J. Samuel Preus highlights Spinoza's achievement by reading the Treatise in the context of a literary conflict among his contemporaries about biblical interpretation. Preus's exposition of neglected primary sources surrounding Spinoza's work offers new evidence regarding his rhetorical strategy and intent in the Treatise. The book provides not only a valuable contribution to Spinoza scholarship but an important account of the origins of modern methods of biblical interpretation.

Spinoza's political thought has been subject to a significant revival of interest in recent years. As a response to difficult times, students and scholars have returned to this founding figure of modern philosophy as a means to help reinterpret and rethink the political present. Spinoza's Authority Volume II makes a significant contribution to this ongoing reception and utilization of Spinoza's 1670s Theologico-Political and Political treatises. By taking the concept of authority as an original framework, this books asks: How is authority related to law, memory, and conflict in Spinoza's political thought? What are the social, historical and representational processes that produce authority and resistance? And what are the conditions of effective resistance? Spinoza's Authority Volume II features a roster of internationally established theorists of Spinoza's work, and covers key elements of Spinoza's political philosophy.

Scriptural Authority and Biblical Criticism in the Dutch Golden Age explores the hypothesis that in the long seventeenth century humanist-inspired biblical criticism contributed significantly to the decline of ecclesiastical truth claims. Historiography pictures this era as one in which the dominant position of religion and church began to show signs of erosion under the influence of vehement debates on the sacrosanct status of the Bible. Until quite recently, this gradual but decisive shift has been attributed to the rise of the sciences, in particular astronomy and physics. This authoritative volume looks at biblical criticism as an innovative force and as the outcome of developments in philology that had started much earlier than scientific experimentalism or the New Philosophy. Scholars began to situate the Bible in its historical context. The contributors show that even in the hands of pious, orthodox scholars philological research not only failed to solve all the textual problems that had surfaced, but even brought to light countless new incongruities. This supplied those who sought to play down the authority of the Bible with ammunition. The conviction that God's Word had been preserved as a pure and sacred source gave way to an awareness of a complicated transmission in a plurality of divergent, ambiguous, historically determined, and heavily corrupted texts. This shift took place primarily in the Dutch Protestant world of the seventeenth century.

Biblical scholars by and large remain unaware of the history of their own discipline. This present volume seeks to remedy that situation by exploring the early history of modern biblical criticism in the seventeenth century prior to the time of the Enlightenment when the birth of modern biblical criticism is usually dated. After surveying the earlier medieval origins of modern biblical criticism, the essays in this book focus on the more skeptical works of Isaac La Peyrere, Thomas Hobbes, and Baruch Spinoza, whose biblical interpretation laid the foundation for what would emerge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as modern biblical criticism.

According to conventional wisdom, by the late 1800s, the image of Bible as a supernatural and infallible text crumbled in the eyes of intellectuals under the assaults of secularizing forces. This book corrects the narrative by arguing that in America, the road to skepticism had already been paved by the Scriptures' most able and ardent defenders.

Frampton reassesses Spinoza's relationship to higher criticism by drawing attention to the emergence of historical-critical investigations of the Bible from among heterodox Protestants during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Nancy Levene reinterprets a major early modern philosopher, Benedict de Spinoza - a Jew who was rejected by the Jewish community of his day but whose thought contains, and critiques, both Jewish and Christian ideas. It foregrounds the connection of religion, democracy, and reason, showing that Spinoza's theories of the Bible, the theologico-political, and the philosophical all involve the concepts of equality and sovereignty. Professor Levene argues that Spinoza's concept of revelation is the key to this connection, and above all to Spinoza's view of human power. This is to shift the emphasis in Spinoza's thought from the language of amor Dei (love of God) to the language of libertas humana (human freedom) without losing either the dialectic of his most striking claim - that man is God to man - or the Jewish and Christian elements in his thought. Original and thoughtfully argued, this book offers fresh insights into Spinoza's thought.