Spinoza

I guess July 27th was the 350th anniversary of Baruch Spinoza's excommunication from his Jewish community. Spinoza is a giant among philosophers. Funnily enough, although I majored in philosophy, I don't think I ever learned about Spinoza or read his works. I know vaguely that he was a pantheist, but Rebecca Newberger Goldstein claims that he gave us modernity. Modernity is basically summed up in the title one of Kant's books, Religion within the Bounds of Reason. According to Goldstein,

Spinoza's faith in reason as our only hope and redemption is the core of his system, and its consequences reach out in many directions, including the political. Each of us has been endowed with reason, and it is our right, as well as our responsibility, to exercise it. Ceding this faculty to others, to the authorities of either the church or the state, is neither a rational nor an ethical option.

Our religion should thus be tamed by our reason, and reason should build the foundation of our religion. All revelation is disallowed. We need not be contacted from the outside, but only sit in our room with a paper and a pencil and pull our ethics and beliefs from within us.

But when we sit in our rooms, we all start from different places, and we take different paths. So it's no surprise that we end up in different places. There are plenty of ethical systems, and though many are similar in letter, they are very different at heart. Utilitarian and emotivism and categorical imperatives and divine command theory, and darwinian survival-of-the-fittest, and so on and so on. Reason will not unite us.

Reason is not our redeemer; Christ is. From the beginning, reason is compromised (cf. Rom 1:19-21). God can be known, is known in fact, by everybody. They who don't believe in him are merely "suppressing the truth" by unrighteousness (vs. 18). We see, then, that righteousness is neccessary to have proper reason; obedience is key to getting things right. We must be regenerated, given new hearts, before we can depend on our reason at all.

Even then, however, a man is likely to suppress the truth. A man's decisions always look good to himself, but he will often believe things simply because they suit him. So, he must, contrary to the quote above, submit his reason to other authorities, secondarily to the church, and primarily to the Word who speaks in the scriptures. Where a man's thinking differs from these he must obey them, even when he doesn't see the reason. I'm pretty sure he'll understand it eventually: "I believe that I may understand," goes an old saying.

A better book title for Christians is Reason within the Bounds of Religion (there is such a book, by Nicholas Wolterstorff). But in school we were all taught to think like Kant, and sometimes it's quite hard work to begin to think like Wolterstorff. But keep trying, because it's Christ working in you for His good purpose.