What Authority Do Prophets Have?

16 May 2026

This is Part 1 of a series on Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise.

In this article:

• The Life and Times of Benedict de Spinoza
• Natural Reason and Prophetic Revelation
• The Prophetic Imagination
• Criteria of Prophetic Certainty
• Philosophical Reasoning About Scripture
• Ellen White’s Prophetic Authority

The Life and Times of Benedict de Spinoza

Benedict de Spinoza was born in 1632 as Baruch Espinosa to a Sephardic Jewish family who had escaped persecution under the Portuguese Inquisition by relocating to Amsterdam, which was more tolerant of religious minorities. While his ancestors had been conversos—Jews who had nominally converted to Christianity to avoid religious persecution—Spinoza was raised as a Jew, learning the Hebrew language and studying the Jewish religion in the city’s Talmud Torah school.¹

Following his father’s death in 1654, Spinoza devoted himself to pursuing his main interest, philosophy. He studied Latin, in which he would later write his major works, under Franciscus van den Enden, a former Jesuit turned political radical, who introduced him to the writings of Aristotle and René Descartes. Through van den Enden, Spinoza became involved in a dissident Christian religious group called the Collegiants, who opposed clericalism and taught a rationalized form of Arminian theology. Nevertheless, for some time, Spinoza remained involved in his father’s synagogue, although he and its rabbis increasingly clashed over doctrinal matters. In 1656, the synagogue publicly condemned and excommunicated Spinoza for practicing and teaching “abominable heresies,” most likely the rationalist ideas circulating among the Collegiants. Following his cherem (censure), the members of his former synagogue were forbidden from interacting with him. Spinoza shedded his Jewish identity, rejecting his first name Baruch in favor of the Latinized Benedict.²

Spinoza never converted to an organized Christian denomination, although he maintained his relations with radical sects like the Collegiants, Anabaptists, and Quakers. Because of these affiliations, he came into conflict with Amsterdam’s Calvinist municipal authorities, as well as with its Jewish community. One night, after leaving the theater, Spinoza was assaulted by someone who tried to stab him. Believing that he was being targeted for his dissenting views, Spinoza eventually fled the city. By 1661, Spinoza had relocated to Rijnsburg, where the Collegiants were centered. There, he earned his living grinding lenses for use in microscopes and telescopes. (His lenses were praised by his acquaintance Christiaan Huygens, the astronomer who discovered Saturn’s rings.)³

In 1663, Spinoza published his first book, Principles of Cartesian Philosophy, a commentary on Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy. This book, which was the only one he published under his name during his lifetime, established him as a respected authority on Cartesianism. Around this time, he also began working on his magnum opus, the Ethics, which would not be published until after his death due to its controversial claims about God.⁴

The only other book that Spinoza published during his lifetime was the Theological-Political Treatise, released under an anonymous name and publisher in 1670. In this work, Spinoza defended the separation of church and state in support of Jan de Witt, the republican leader of the Dutch Republic. Two years later, when de Witt was violently murdered by a mob incited by the Calvinist supporters of the House of Orange, Spinoza came under the scrutiny of the political authorities, who had discovered that he was the author of the Theological-Political Treatise. Characterizing Spinoza’s book as “blasphemous and soul-harming” and “full of groundless and dangerous abominations that injure true religion and true worship,” the Synod of the Dutch Reformed Church condemned it in 1673, and the following year, it was banned. One pamphlet circulated by de Witt’s enemies, which listed the condemned books in his library, characterized the Theological-Political Treatise as “Forged in hell by the apostate Jew working together with the devil, and published with the knowledge and complicity of [Jan de Witt].”⁵

Spinoza spent the rest of his life in The Hague, where he finished his Ethics and wrote an unfinished book, Political Treatise, which advocated a democratic form of government. In 1677, he died from a lung infection, likely caused by inhaling glass dust while grinding lenses. After his death, his friends collected and published his writings thereby securing his renown as a philosopher.⁶

Natural Reason and Prophetic Revelation

In the Theological-Political Treatise, Spinoza begins his argument for the separation of church and state by analyzing the nature of religious authority. For Spinoza, all authority, whether religious or political, consists of a person’s ability to decide what others ought to do. When authority figures allow their religious beliefs to influence their political decisions, there is no clear separation of church and state, and the religious beliefs of the minority are vulnerable to violation. Thus, to understand how religion can be separated from politics, Spinoza critically examines the grounds of religious authority. He argues that in all theistic religions, authority derives from one’s power to interpret revelations from God on behalf of others. He therefore starts by examining the nature of prophetic revelation.

Spinoza opens the Theological-Political Treatise by defining the term revelation and distinguishing between two kinds of revelation according to how it is received. “Prophecy or revelation,” he states, “is certain knowledge about something revealed to men by God.” He notes that although these two terms have the same definitions, the term “prophecy,” in colloquial usage, refers specifically to divine knowledge interpreted by a prophet, one “who interprets things revealed by God to those who cannot themselves achieve certain knowledge of them and can therefore only grasp by simple faith what has been revealed.” In other words, a prophet is an interpreter of a divine revelation for those who are otherwise unable to receive it directly. To support this claim, Spinoza cites Exodus 7:1, in which God says to Moses, “See, I have made thee a god to Pharaoh: and Aaron thy brother shall be thy prophet.”⁷ Here Aaron is called a “prophet,” not because he directly received revelations for Pharaoh from God, but because he served as Moses’ interpreter.⁸

Because the term “prophecy,” in its common usage, refers to divine revelations as they are interpreted by another person, it is necessary to distinguish prophecy from revelation in general, and in particular from natural knowledge, which is also a kind of revelation. Spinoza argues, “Natural knowledge has as much right to be called divine as any other kind of knowledge, since it is the nature of God, so far as we share in it, and God’s decrees, that may be said to dictate it to us.”⁹ Here he is appealing to certain arguments from Cartesian philosophy, with which he expects his philosophical audience to be familiar. In his Principles of Cartesian Philosophy, where he presents René Descartes’ philosophy in the propositional style of Euclid’s Elements, Spinoza explains, “Whatever we perceive clearly and distinctly is true,” because the “faculty of distinguishing between truth and falsehood which is in us … was created by God and is continuously conserved by him.”¹⁰ He explains that things must be conserved by God, because if it were possible for something to conserve itself, then it would exist of its own accord; and since anything that exists of its own accord must be supremely perfect—that is, self-sufficient and complete—a thing that conserves itself would have to be God. However, this would entail that multiple gods could exist, which is impossible, since otherwise, each god would encroach on the others’ perfection.¹¹

Following Descartes, Spinoza concludes that because nothing can conserve itself, both the world and our knowledge of it cannot exist apart from God. When he states in the Theological-Political Treatise that God’s nature and decrees dictate natural knowledge to us, he is applying this Cartesian insight: it is because God continually decrees and sustains what exists that we can have any knowledge of the world at all, and thus the knowledge we possess can rightly be called a kind of divine revelation. Natural knowledge, he continues, “does not differ from the knowledge which all men call divine, except that divine knowledge extends beyond its limits, and the laws of human nature considered in themselves cannot be the cause of it.”¹² In other words, natural knowledge cannot be ascribed entirely to human nature, whereas this is not the case with divine law. What makes the divine law “divine,” in Spinoza’s view, is not that we obtain it through a supernatural revelation, but that it is concerned with determining what constitutes the supreme good.¹³

Spinoza denies the possibility of supernatural knowledge and miracles. As he argues in Chapter 6 of the Treatise, “nothing happens in nature that contradicts its universal laws; and nothing occurs which does not conform to those laws or follow from them.” He explains that since “whatever happens, happens by God’s will and his eternal decree, i.e. … according to laws and rules which involve eternal necessity and truth,” it must be the case that “Nature therefore always observes laws which involve eternal necessity and truth—albeit not all are known to us.”¹⁴ This precludes the possibility of a supernatural event or miracle that could contravene the order of nature.

Furthermore, Spinoza argues that if miracles occurred, this would undermine our belief in God. God’s existence, he explains, cannot be known a priori. Rather, “to conceive the nature of God clearly and distinctly, we must take notice of certain very simple ideas that are called common notions and connect the things that belong to the divine nature with them.” This will lead us to realize, “first, that God necessarily exists and is everywhere, secondly, at the same time, that all the things that we conceive involve the nature of God in themselves and are conceived by means of it, and, finally, that everything that we adequately conceive is true.”¹⁵ But if anything could happen “which conflicts with nature, it would be in conflict with those primary principles and therefore would have to be rejected as absurd, or else there would be doubts about those primary principles … and, consequently, about God.” He concludes, “It is far from true, therefore, that miracles … prove for us the existence of God. On the contrary, they would make us call into doubt that very point.”¹⁶

Since Spinoza rejects the possibility and desirability of miracles, he denies that prophetic revelation can be ascribed to a supernatural cause. Rather, he argues that revelations are attributable solely to a prophet’s imagination. What this means becomes clearer when we consider the Spinoza’s distinction in the Ethics between imagination and reason. There, he defines imagination as a kind of cognition in which we “form universal notions” either “from particular things represented through our senses to our intellect in a mutilated or confused fashion without any order” or from the association of words with our mental images of what they signify. In other words, imagination consists of abstractions from inadequate or disordered ideas and verbal associations.¹⁷

By contrast, Spinoza defines reason as a kind of cognition in which we “form universal notions … from the fact that we have common notions and adequate ideas of the properties of things.”¹⁸ That is, reason consists of inferences from ideas that are common to everyone, specifically, that we have a body subject to physical laws and that we therefore inhabit a world outside ourselves that we can reliably perceive through our senses.¹⁹ Given this distinction between imagination and reason, it is clear that when Spinoza distinguishes between natural and prophetic revelation, he is distinguishing between the divine knowledge that we can possess through our autonomous reason and the divine knowledge mediated through a prophet’s imagination.

Spinoza states, “With respect to the certainty which natural knowledge involves and the source from which it derives (namely God), it is in no way inferior to prophetic knowledge.”²⁰ Rather, the certainty provided by natural knowledge is more immediate than that which is provided by prophetic knowledge. A person who accepts a prophetic revelation can only do so “on the authority of the prophet and the credit which he enjoys,”²¹ whereas a person who accepts natural knowledge “may discern and embrace what [its practitioners] teach with as much certainty and entitlement as they do themselves.”²² Spinoza compares a prophet’s authority to that of a government: just as “sovereign authorities are the interpreters of the laws of their state, because the laws which they make are upheld exclusively by the authority of the sovereigns themselves and rely upon their testimony alone,” so are prophets the interpreters of their own revelations, and the authority of their interpretations likewise depends on their own credibility.²³

This comparison between hermeneutical and political authority is relevant to Spinoza’s central thesis in the Theological-Political Treatise, which is that a free society can only flourish when citizens’ right to think and speak freely—that is, to philosophize—is protected from infringement by religious authorities. For Spinoza, philosophy and theology have distinct aims and are separate disciplines. Philosophy or “reason … reigns over the domain of truth and wisdom, theology over that of piety and obedience.” While philosophy’s concern is to promote autonomous reason, theology’s concern is to articulate “the method and manner of obedience” to “the dogmas of true piety and faith.” In other words, theology is concerned with securing obedience to heteronomous moral commands.²⁴

Spinoza argues that the authorities of a state should respect its citizens’ right to philosophize freely, not only because this freedom is necessary for a just society, but also because it is politically expedient. If a state defers to religious leaders to decide what constitutes religious piety—which, as he argues in the Ethics, is primarily concerned with promoting justice and social welfare²⁵—it effectively allows them to usurp its authority to decide what is best for society. By contrast, if political authorities allow people to think freely, then their obedience to the state will be autonomous (especially in a democratic society), and the state’s authority will be more legitimate.

In short, for Spinoza, hermeneutical authority is political authority, especially in the context of religious society, since the power to determine how others should interpret a religious revelation is identical to the power to determine what properly constitutes justice and right behavior.

The Prophetic Imagination

Spinoza cites the Bible to support his claim that the prophets received their revelations entirely through their imaginations. He explains, “If … we peruse the sacred books, we shall see that everything that God revealed to the prophets was revealed to them either in words or in images, or by both these means together, i.e. in words and images.” But he argues that only when God revealed the laws to Moses were these words and images independent of the mind of the prophet who received them.²⁶ This claim hinges on Numbers 12:6–7, which says, “When there are prophets among you, I the Lord make myself known to them in visions; I speak to them in dreams. Not so with my servant Moses… With him I speak face to face—clearly, not in riddles; and he beholds the form of the Lord.” In other words, according to Spinoza, whereas God revealed himself to other prophets through images (visions) and an unreal voice, he spoke to Moses in a real voice and with a real corporeal form. He continues, “This is still more clearly confirmed by Deuteronomy 34:10, where it is said, ‘and there has not been’ (literally, ‘arisen’) ‘a prophet in Israel like Moses, whom God knew face to face,’ which has to mean, ‘by voice alone,’ for not even Moses ever saw the face of God,” according to Exodus 33.²⁷

Although Spinoza maintains that all the prophets since Moses only perceived God through their imaginations, he nonetheless suggests that because “the prophets perceived the things revealed by God through their imaginations, there is no doubt that they may have grasped much beyond the limits of the intellect. For far more ideas can be formed from words and images than from the principles and concepts alone on which all our natural knowledge is built.”²⁸ Here he is suggesting that the principles and concepts of natural knowledge are merely a subset of the ideas we are capable of conceiving. Thus, although our adequate ideas consist only of those that are derived from the foundational principles of natural knowledge (since we regard them as adequate only because we can have an immediate assuredness of their credibility), the truth may be present in the images and words revealed to a prophet—although this truth must be extracted from the revelation through critical examination.

“Plain imagination,” Spinoza argues, “does not of its own nature provide certainty, as every clear and distinct idea does. In order that we may be certain of what we imagine, imagination must necessarily be assisted by something, and that something is reason.” Of course, people are often persuaded by prophetic revelations without critically examining them. However, once a tension emerges in one’s mind between what they have been taught to believe and what they empirically observe to be the case, they are placed in a situation where they must think critically or otherwise experience cognitive dissonance. Spinoza states that the prophets themselves did not believe the revelations they had received apart from an observable sign: “The prophets always received a sign assuring them of what they had prophetically imagined, and for this reason Moses admonishes the Hebrews [in Deuteronomy 18:22] to seek a sign from prophets, such as the outcome of some future event.”²⁹

Nonetheless, even a sign is not sufficient to demonstrate a prophet’s credibility. Deuteronomy 13:1–3 states that God occasionally performs miracles through false prophets to test his people’s faithfulness. Moreover, “Ezekiel 14:9 plainly teaches that God sometimes deceives men by false revelations: he says, ‘and when a prophet’ (that is, a false prophet) ‘is deceived and has spoken a word, it is I God that has deceived that prophet.’” Nevertheless, Spinoza states, “God never deceives the pious and the elect, but as the ancient proverb says (see 1 Samuel 24:14), … God uses the pious as instruments of his own piety, and the impious as the agents and executors of his wrath.”³⁰

Criteria of Prophetic Certainty

Spinoza concludes that there are three criteria for prophetic certainty. First, “the matters revealed” to a prophet must have been “very vividly imagined.” This establishes that a prophet’s imagination is grounded, to at least some extent, in reality, since, as Spinoza indicates in the Ethics, visions or mental images are ultimately produced in the mind by “things represented through our senses to our intellect” (images) and by language signifiers (words).” Second, a prophet must have received a sign. Since Spinoza denies the existence of miracles that violate the order of nature, this does not mean that the sign must be supernatural. On the contrary, we can only be persuaded of God’s existence and the validity of a prophetic revelation if a sign conforms to natural laws. Finally, “the minds of the prophets” must have been “directed exclusively to what is right and good.”³¹

Importantly, this does not mean that a prophet’s beliefs have to be correct. Spinoza argues that the biblical “prophecies or revelations also varied according to the beliefs which the prophets had embraced, and that prophets held different, or even incompatible, beliefs from one another and had different preconceptions.”³² To support this claim, he notes how several of the Bible’s claims are either inconsistent with scientific knowledge or with each other.

For instance, in the case of the Bible’s scientific claims, Spinoza denies that Joshua correctly understood what was happening when he believed that the sun had stood still in the sky. Although Spinoza did not criticize the idea directly, he was concerned with repudiating geocentrism in favor of heliocentrism, which was still the subject of intense political controversy during his time, in particular between the Cartesians and the conservative Calvinists who subscribed to Aristotelian cosmology. Spinoza, who as a professional lens grinder was fascinated with optics, speculates that because of “the large amount of ice which was in the air there at that time (see Joshua 10:11), there was a greater refraction than normal,” which may explain why Joshua believed that the celestial sphere had halted in its orbit. Additionally, he notes that Solomon did not correctly understand the value of pi (the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter), which is depicted in 1 Kings 7:23 as equal to the ratio 30:10, rather than as more closely approximated by the ratio 31:10. The Bible, Spinoza argues, cannot be regarded as authoritative on mathematical or scientific matters. He states, “If one is permitted to claim that Scripture meant something else here,” such as that it was merely approximating the value of pi, “the consequence is the complete and utter subversion of the whole of the Bible. Everyone will be able to say the same with equal justification about every single passage. It will be possible to perpetrate and justify every absurd or malicious thing that human perversity can dream up, without impugning the authority of Scripture.”³³

As for the internal inconsistencies among the Bible’s prophetic revelations, Spinoza discusses several instances of disagreements among its prophets. For instance, he notes, “The rabbis who handed down to us the books of the prophets (the only ones now extant) found the opinions of Ezekiel to be so much in conflict with those of Moses”—such as when Ezekiel 16 contradicts Exodus 34:7 by denying that God will punish children for their parents’ sins—“that they almost decided not to admit that book among the canonical books, and would have completely suppressed it if a certain Hananiah had not taken it upon himself to explain it.” Another disagreement occurs between 1 Samuel 15:29 and Jeremiah 8:8–10: the latter passage states that God repents of his previous decrees, while the latter denies this.³⁴

Spinoza concludes, “We are not required to believe the prophets in anything beyond what constitutes the end and substance of revelation; for the rest, everyone is free to believe as he pleases.”³⁵ The end and substance of revelation is that which pertains to “uprightness and good conduct.”³⁶ As for its other claims, “prophecy is inferior to natural knowledge since it has no need of any sign but provides certainty by its very nature.” Prophecy, according to Spinoza, does not provide “mathematical certainty but only moral certainty.”³⁷

Philosophical Reasoning About Scripture

Spinoza’s analysis of prophecy in the first two chapters of the Theological-Political Treatise raises an important question. To what extent is Spinoza justified in relying on philosophy to elucidate the distinction between natural knowledge and prophetic revelation? That is, is it appropriate for him to ascribe a primary role to philosophy in conditioning how we view prophetic authority, or should we rather assume the primacy of prophetic revelations in conditioning how we view philosophical insights?

To answer this question, we must understand the philosophical school in which Spinoza was working, namely Cartesianism. Descartes’ primary concern in developing his philosophical approach was to devise a method for removing doubt about the existence of the external world. The question that preoccupied his mind was, “What, if anything, is indisputable?”³⁸ For Descartes, finding an answer to this question was central to avoiding the nihilism inherent in radical skepticism. If there is nothing indubitable about our sense of the world, then we are left in a position in which we cannot rely on our physical bodies, our senses, or our agency—much less on the possibility of God’s existence. Once skepticism insinuates itself in one’s mind, it becomes necessary to respond to it, not only if one is going to affirm the inherent value of their own experiences, but also if they are going to draw any conclusions about the reality outside themselves, including the reality of God.

As a rationalist, Descartes believed that all reliable philosophical knowledge could be obtained only by demonstrative reasoning from foundational axioms. It was therefore central to his task of repudiating radical skepticism to identify indubitable axioms. Applying his “method of systematic doubt,” Descartes was willing to entertain the possibility that all of our experiences of the world are illusions contrived by some malicious demon who wants to deceive us. Nevertheless, he argued that even if this were the case, the demon could “never bring it about that I am nothing, so long as I continue to think I am something.” Thus, Descartes concluded that “this proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind.”³⁹ In other words, “I am a thinking being.” Associated with this experience of being a thinking being are observations of things that appear to come from our senses. It remained for Descartes to demonstrate that these observations do come from our senses of an outside world, and that, accordingly, our minds are connected to an external body.⁴⁰

Descartes’ demonstration, described by Spinoza in his Principles of Cartesian Philosophy, can be summarized as follows. First, Descartes establishes that God exists by appealing to “the fact that we ourselves, who have an idea of him, exist.” If we had the power of self-conservation, then we would exist of our own accord, and thus we would be perfect in all respects (since whatever involves necessary existence is supremely perfect, “perfection” here meaning that which makes a thing complete). But we can detect certain imperfections in ourselves, such as doubt. Therefore, our existence depends not on our self-conservation, but on conservation by something else, which must ultimately be completely perfect. This completely perfect entity is God.⁴¹

Second, Descartes argues that as thinking beings, we perceive that the external world, as it appears to our senses, “is a cause sufficient to produce in us pleasure, grief, and similar ideas or sensations that are continuously produced in us against our will.” If we imagine that these sensations are deceptive (in that external reality is not, in fact, their cause), then “we at once destroy the clear and distinct concept that we have.” That is, we cannot reliably state that we experience these sensations because all knowledge of an effect depends on a clear and distinct knowledge of its cause. However, if we instead affirm that the external world is the cause of these sensations, as they appear to be, then we can affirm that the external reality exists. Since everything that truly exists must have been created by God, who “create[s] all things that we clearly perceive, according as we perceive them,” and who is “in no sense deceptive,” the external world must exist.⁴²

Finally, Descartes states that since we can clearly and distinctly perceive that there are differences in the sensations that we experience and that there appears to be no other cause for the differences in these sensations than that we are connected to an extended or corporeal substance, it must be the case that we are “united to one part of matter,” that is, to a body.⁴³

Descartes thus devises a method by which he not only demonstrates from our self-recognition as thinking beings that we have a body but also defends the existence of God as the basis of our certainty of the knowledge of the external world. The elimination of doubt concerning the existence of an external reality involves establishing faith in a God who is the ultimate cause of that reality. This is why Spinoza is comfortable applying Cartesian philosophy to an analysis of the distinction between natural knowledge and prophetic revelation. Natural knowledge consists of what we can clearly know about the nature of things, that is, what we can affirm beyond reasonable doubt. For Spinoza, if prophetic revelation is to be beyond rational doubt, it must withstand scrutiny concerning its nature and source. If we cannot clearly and distinctly know its nature and source—as would, by definition, be the case if the revelation had a supernatural origin—then there is no possibility of eliminating doubt and skepticism toward its claims. As he notes in the case of miracles, belief in occurrences that contravene the order of nature exacerbates doubts concerning God’s existence rather than confirming God’s existence. It is for this reason that Spinoza prefers a naturalistic conception of divine and human nature.

Nevertheless, as noted above, Spinoza concedes that the prophets may have been capable of perceiving much beyond the limits of reason, because “more ideas can be formed from words and images than from the principles and concepts” of scientific reasoning. How are we to interpret this statement, given Spinoza’s insistence on the importance of philosophical reasoning? Is Spinoza merely conceding his religious audience amid the danger of expressing his controversial ideas, or does he sincerely believe that there might be value in the words and images with which prophets express their views?

The answer seems to lie somewhere in between. Certainly, as is evident in his Ethics, which was withheld from publication until after his death due to the controversy that erupted after the publication of the Theological-Political Treatise, Spinoza believed that reliable moral insights could only be derived from reason. However, in arguing that prophetic authority offers moral certainty rather than mathematical certainty, he recognizes the social utility of the narratives by which prophets convey moral teachings. People are more receptive to ideas conveyed through storytelling than through the rigorous geometrical method Spinoza used in the Ethics. Therefore, although the use of religious symbolism tends to introduce interpretational ambiguities, we can still regard these symbols as valuable to some extent.

Moreover, it is likely that moral doubts can never be fully eliminated, as there is more certainty in claims about what is the case (as in scientific reasoning) than in claims about what ought to be the case (as in moral reasoning). It is for this reason that the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard regards faith, which he defines as the “subjective appropriation of an objective uncertainty,” as an indispensable element of human existence. There will always be objective uncertainties, particularly concerning issues of morality, that we can never resolve through the application of demonstrative reasoning alone.

However, although I believe Kierkegaard is correct to identify the anxieties produced by doubt as an unavoidable part of human existence, in my view, this does not mean that reason cannot be applied to illuminating moral issues. The demonstrative reasoning that Spinoza applies in his Ethics is a helpful procedure for a person to follow in eliminating doubts and clarifying their thoughts about moral problems. But demonstrative reasoning is only half of the picture. There is another kind of reasoning that I believe is equally important for morality. This is intersubjective, communicative, or dialectical reasoning. The notion of dialectical reasoning, as distinct from demonstrative reasoning, dates back to the Greek philosopher Aristotle. According to Aristotle, in demonstrative reasoning, the “premises from which the reasoning starts are true and primary,” that is, they “are believed on the strength not of anything else but of themselves.” By contrast, dialectical reasoning “reasons from opinions that are generally accepted” either “by all, or by the majority, or by the most notable and illustrious of them.”⁴⁴

Dialectical reasoning, in other words, is the kind of reasoning that is used in public forums, when we aim to persuade others of our points of view. Instead of being reasoning about something, as in the case of demonstrative reasoning, dialectical reasoning is reasoning with someone. Dialectical reasoning is most effective when those engaged in a conversation approach each other as equals, without any recourse to coercion to persuade another of one’s position. It is the proper form of political reasoning; and, in Aristotle’s view, since political dialogue aims to determine what is good for the citizens of a society, it is also the proper form of moral reasoning.

Applying Aristotle’s conception of dialectical reasoning to Spinoza’s claim that the certainty provided by prophets is moral rather than mathematical (that is, demonstrative), we can conclude that the authority of a prophet rests not on their scientific accuracy, but on their ability to persuade others of what is good. As Aristotle indicates, the success of this persuasion depends on an appeal to those views that are already accepted among those within a particular community. It does not depend on the scientific accuracy of those claims (unless these scientific claims are widely accepted in a society), and thus prophetic reasoning can rightly employ imaginative mythological symbols if these are successful in conveying moral truths. But it absolutely must appeal to the ethical presuppositions that are already prevalent in a given social context. If a prophet does not account for those views that are already prevalent among their audience, then not only will they fail to persuade others of their moral views, but they will undermine their own credibility. This does not mean that a prophet cannot criticize the prevailing moral views of their societies; but unless they take seriously the underlying principles involved in the ideas they are criticizing, rather than demanding the artificial substitution of those principles with religious presuppositions (by insisting, for instance, that nonreligious people should accept the validity of supernatural revelations), their criticisms will be ineffective.

Ellen White’s Prophetic Authority

Spinoza’s description of the nature of prophetic authority brings us to consider the Adventist church’s prophet, Ellen White. To what extent does White satisfy Spinoza’s three criteria of prophetic authority? Specifically, we should ask: (1) Did White vividly imagine what she saw in her visions? (2) Were her visions accompanied by signs? (3) Was her mind directed solely to what is good?

I have little reason to doubt that White meets Spinoza’s three criteria as being a prophet. Based on her descriptions of her visions, it is evident that she had a vivid imagination, and that she therefore satisfies Spinoza’s first criterion. Moreover, although numerous ethical criticisms have rightfully been leveled against White, particularly because she plagiarized others’ writings,⁴⁵ I have no reason to doubt that she had good intentions. White dedicated her life to the edification of the Adventist church, which she sincerely believed to be God’s chosen people. Therefore, it seems that she also satisfies Spinoza’s third criterion.

Perhaps the most difficult question to answer is whether she satisfies Spinoza’s second criterion: namely, whether her visions were accompanied by signs. In answering this question, it is important to remember that these signs do not need to be supernatural—rather, in Spinoza’s view, they cannot be supernatural. Thus we do not need an account such as that of J.N. Loughborough, who maintained that White held up an impossibly heavy Bible for half an hour during a vision she received in 1845, to support the claim that her visions were accompanied by signs. We can regard the physical signs that accompanied her visions according to eyewitnesses as sufficient—even if these signs had natural physiological causes. We can therefore conclude that White satisfies Spinoza’s second criterion, and that she indeed qualifies as a prophet.

But even if we establish to our satisfaction that White meets Spinoza’s rational criteria for a prophet, what does this entail concerning her prophetic authority? In other words, what falls within the scope of her prophetic authority? As we have noted, the certainty that a prophet provides is not mathematical certainty through demonstrative reasoning, but rather moral certainty through dialectical reasoning. This means that insofar as White’s credibility depends on the fact that she experienced visions, she can only properly be regarded as authoritative in moral matters. Moreover, she can only be regarded as morally authoritative to the extent that she effectively persuades others of her views by appealing to common principles on which they agree, rather than to the supernatural origins of her revelatory insights, which others can only accept by a deference to her heteronomous authority. As a prophet (rather than as a professor of Bible history, medicine, or geology), White cannot be considered authoritative in scientific matters. We cannot regard White’s geological claims concerning the nature of volcanic activity or her medical claims concerning the negative health effects of seasonings and “solitary vice” as authoritative simply because she meets the criteria of a prophet. We must evaluate her non-moral claims against our scientific knowledge, and if they do not withstand rational and empirical scrutiny, we must dismiss them as being based on imagination rather than on reason.

Imagination is not a problem on its own, nor is it inappropriate to recognize that imagination plays an important role in religious observance or moral reasoning. Imagination is indispensable to the development of new religious symbols and scriptural narratives by which moral truths may be conveyed to others. It only becomes a problem when we substitute it for critical thinking in situations where we can eliminate objective uncertainties. When imagination is misused in this way, it becomes a vector for the propagation of doubt. Thus, when the Adventist church promotes Ellen White’s non-moral claims as though they are scientifically accurate, when in fact science denies their validity, it only harms its ability to promote a knowledge of God as the cause of the natural world. It also interferes with its moral mission by promoting scientifically inaccurate claims as though they are morally necessary.