Book contents
4 - The liberal engagement: reason, usage, history
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 February 2010
Summary
I am talking here about histories, which in no way depend on the truth of things.
Ludwig WolzogenTHE CHALLENGE OF REASON
In a mode and spirit quite different from what we saw in the preceding chapter, the writers we examine here engage Meyer's book with the kind of critique that significantly advances the discussion of biblical interpretation. At the same time, we again see the integrally political character of this great debate – that Spinoza's “politicizing” of the issue was not particularly eccentric but a making explicit of what was implicit. The larger context of the debate was a situation long endemic in the Dutch Republic: here was a fragmented country struggling to invent itself as a free republic and at the same time inclined to live under some form of biblical authority as befitted its hard-won Calvinist religious identity.
The issue of interpretation and the interpreter had become absolutely crucial. The eminent Reformed pastor and theologian Ludwig Wolzogen made that point clear in the dedicatory letter of one of his writings to “my lords” the magistrates of Utrecht (one of whom was the other subject of this chapter, van Velthuysen). Wolzogen had come under fire from the right for holding that God had “included all religion in scripture,” and that “only the [human] interpreter, not God,” had the task of educing what scripture meant. His critics viewed with alarm this expulsion of “God” from the interpretive process.
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- Spinoza and the Irrelevance of Biblical Authority , pp. 107 - 153Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001