Is the Christian Faith Rationally Defensible?

19 May 2026

This is Part 4 of a series on Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise.

In this article:

• Faith and Obedience
• Tenets of Universal Faith
• Spinoza’s Views on God
• Spinoza’s Views on Salvation
• The Possibility of a Rational Christian Faith

In the previous parts of this series on Benedict de Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise, I have examined his views on the original purpose of the Ten Commandments and whether obeying them is morally necessary. For Spinoza, the reason why we ought to act morally is to secure social cohesion and welfare, thereby guaranteeing that everyone’s needs are met. Thus, insofar as any law, whether religious or political, does not contribute to this goal, it is inessential to morality. As I will discuss in this article, Spinoza argues that the true, universal moral law consists only of our duty to adopt a moral disposition that is conducive to a just society. Additionally, he argues that the sole purpose of any religion is to instill this moral disposition in its adherents.

However, Spinoza does not maintain that the whole purpose of human life is to abide by these religious or moral norms. Ultimate blessedness, he explains, does not consist in deferential obedience to religious authorities, even though this obedience can secure the social conditions that are necessary for pursuing blessedness. Far from being the whole purpose for which people exist, a just society is merely a condition for our pursuit of a higher source of fulfillment. Ultimate blessedness, according to Spinoza, can only be obtained by an intellectual love of God and by our autonomous cultivation of virtue. He therefore distinguishes between faith, which is intended to induce people to act justly, and philosophy, which is intended to enable people to live virtuous, happy lives.

In this article, I will evaluate Spinoza’s arguments concerning faith and philosophy. First, I will examine his understanding of faith, as presented in the fourteenth chapter of his Theological-Political Treatise. I will then consider his views of how to live virtuously, as outlined in his magnum opus, Ethics. Finally, I will evaluate whether Spinoza’s views, which are based on his conception of God as immanent in nature and on the correlated affirmation that human existence is intrinsically valuable, can be reconciled with the central claim of Christianity, namely that faith in Jesus is the only means of salvation. While admitting the difficulty of reconciling these two positions, I will conclude by proposing two ways of synthesizing Spinoza’s views with the Christian emphasis on salvation by grace through faith: first, by recognizing that the power of Jesus Christ is immanent in all of us; and second, by affirming the doctrine of universal reconciliation.

Faith and Obedience

Spinoza devotes Chapter 14 of the Theological-Political Treatise to examining the nature of faith and distinguishing it from reason. A correct understanding of faith, he states, depends on the recognition that scriptural claims are adapted to the understanding of those who are not philosophers or theologians. Spinoza stands in the spirit of the Reformation when he maintains that the Bible was not intended for specialists but for everyone.

However, for Spinoza, this does not mean that every historical event or scientific fact that the Bible discusses is true. “Anyone who accepts everything in Scripture indifferently as God’s universal and absolute doctrine and cannot correctly identify what is adapted to the notions of the common people, will be incapable of separating their opinions from divine doctrine.”¹ This is obvious from the fact that the Bible yields numerous contradictory opinions for which people can cite ample scriptural evidence, which is the reason for the doctrinal differences that divide the various denominations.

Spinoza explains that he does “not mean to charge these sectarians with impiety for adapting the words of the Bible to their own beliefs.” After all, the Bible was “adapted to the understanding of the common people” so that “anyone may adapt it to his own beliefs” if this facilitates his obedience to God. Rather, Spinoza’s concern is with the sectarians’ refusal “to grant the same liberty to others,” which in his time was a significant source of political discord. This is hardly less true in our time than it was in Spinoza’s, and his analysis of these issues remains highly relevant to our contemporary political conflicts, both inside and outside the Adventist church.²

Spinoza states, “to determine how far each person possesses freedom to think whatever they wish about faith and who we should regard as the true faithful even if their beliefs differ from ours, we must [correctly] define faith and its fundamental principles.”³ Having argued in Chapter 13 of the Treatise that the Bible’s purpose is to instruct people in obedience to God, which consists in love for one’s neighbor, he proceeds to define faith as “acknowledging certain things about God, ignorance of which makes obedience towards him impossible and which are necessarily found wherever obedience is met with.”⁴ Spinoza notes three important points to be drawn from this definition.

First, he cites James 2:17, which says, “So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.”⁵ He notes that according to this verse, “faith does not lead to salvation itself, but only by means of obedience.” That is, faith that does not produce obedience—specifically, charity and justice—thereby demonstrates that it is incapable of securing a person’s salvation since a person is only saved if they are charitable and just.⁶

Second, Spinoza states, “whoever is truly obedient [to the moral law] necessarily possesses the true faith which leads to salvation.” This obedience, which consists of love for one’s neighbor, is the only criterion by which we can determine whether a person has true faith. He cites 1 John 2:3–4 and 4:7–8 to support this claim: “Now by this we may be sure that we know him, if we obey his commandments. Whoever says, ‘I have come to know him,’ but does not obey his commandments, is a liar, and in such a person the truth does not exist.” “Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.” Since God is love, obedience to God’s commandments consists of love. Spinoza explains, “[John] even concludes, because no one has seen God, that no one recognizes God or is aware of him other than through love of his neighbor, and hence that the only attribute of God that anyone can know is love, so far as we share in it.” We can only determine whether someone is faithful to God by considering whether they love others. Spinoza states, “the true antichrists are those who persecute honest men and lovers of justice because they differ from them in doctrine and do not adhere to the same tenets of belief as themselves. For we know that those who love justice and charity are faithful by this measure alone, and he who persecutes the faithful is an antichrist.”⁷

Finally, Spinoza notes that his definition of faith entails “that faith requires not so much true as pious dogmas, that is, such tenets as move the mind to obedience, even though many of these may not have a shadow of truth in them.” We can recognize a person as having true faith so long as they are kind and loving. “Each person’s faith therefore must be deemed pious or impious by reason of their obedience or disobedience alone, and not in relation to truth or falsehood.” We may still regard a person as faithful even if their opinions differ from our own. This requires us to conceive faith in more universalistic terms. As Spinoza says, “It follows that in the true universal and general faith”—that is, in the conception of faith that encompasses everyone who is obedient to God—there are “no dogmas capable of giving rise to controversy amongst honest people.”⁸

Tenets of Universal Faith

Spinoza proceeds to list seven tenets of faith that he regards as universally acceptable among those who believe in God:

1. “There is a God (that is, a supreme being) who is supremely just and merciful, or an exemplar of true life.”

2. “He is one.”

3. “He is everywhere present and all things are manifest to Him.”

4. “He possesses supreme right and dominion over all things.”

5. “Worship of God and obedience to Him consist solely in justice and charity, or in love of one’s neighbor.”

6. “All who obey God in this rationale of living, and only they, are saved; those who live under the sway of pleasures are lost.”

7. “God forgives the repentant their sins.”⁹

Each of these tenets is necessary, Spinoza argues, if we are to believe “that there exists a supreme being who loves justice and charity, and that, to be saved, all people must obey and venerate Him by practicing justice and charity towards their neighbor.” If people do not affirm them, or if they attach additional requirements to this list, then they risk either undermining the main purpose of faith, which is to secure our charity and justice, or alienating those who are otherwise charitable and just. We ought to be suspicious of the potential authoritarianism and exclusivism involved in such a claim. What reason would a person have to argue that true faith involves more than charity or justice, which are intended for the benefit of everyone, except to secure some additional benefit or privilege for themselves? Spinoza states that the particular details of what one believes concerning each of these tenets are irrelevant to faith provided that they encourage genuine obedience.¹⁰

For Spinoza, the discovery of the truth is an entirely different subject matter than the determination of what constitutes obedience to God. The former is the domain of philosophy, while the latter is the domain of theology. Spinoza states, “the aim of philosophy is nothing but truth, but the aim of faith, as we have abundantly demonstrated, is simply obedience and piety. The foundations of philosophy are universal concepts, and philosophy should be drawn from nature alone. But the foundations of faith are histories and language and are to be drawn only from Scripture and revelation.”¹¹

Nevertheless, as he indicates in his other book Ethics, Spinoza believes that a knowledge of the truth does yield the recognition that salvation consists of an intellectual love for God accompanied by charitable and just actions. The purpose of faith, in the absence of true knowledge, is to enable those who cannot otherwise pursue the arduous task of philosophizing to be able to obey God and to coexist harmoniously within a just society. One catches a sense of philosophical elitism in Spinoza’s distinction between philosophy and theology, given his frequent references to the ignorance of the “common people.” This can be explained by the fact Spinoza was critical of the exploitative relationship between religious leaders and their followers. In his view, this relationship was sustained not only by the theologians’ thirst for power but also by the people’s lack of intellectual discipline and social accountability. Spinoza’s apparent elitism thus seems to derive from two underlying impulses: a disgust with the parasitic relationship between religious authorities and believers, and a firm conviction that intellectual discipline is essential to disrupting this parasitic order.

For Spinoza, the intellectual discipline involved in autonomous reasoning is essential to resisting the power of political authorities. He denied that moral and political freedom are inherent within our free will, which in his view is merely a fantasy by which we convince ourselves that we are freer than we are, without exerting any effort towards becoming free. Rather, freedom exists only as the result of practical discipline. This includes (1) intellectual discipline, which involves determining what is beneficial for ourselves and for others by considering the nature of things, rather than by listening to existing authorities; (2) moral discipline, which consists not of having right beliefs, but of acting charitably and justly; and (3) political discipline, which consists not of arguing over conflicting ideologies or deferring to an idea of inevitable historical progress, but of mobilizing to bring about that which is beneficial for society. These three forms of discipline are intertwined: we cannot act morally and politically to achieve the good unless we first know what the good is. We can only derive our knowledge of the good from a consideration of the nature of things in general, and of human nature in particular, because what is good is what is good for us.

Spinoza’s Views on God

To understand how a knowledge of human nature yields recognition of our moral responsibilities, we should consider Spinoza’s views on God and salvation, which he presents in his Ethics. In doing so, we will be able to see Spinoza’s position on his tenets of universal faith. We will also be able to see what Spinoza envisions as an autonomous, rationalistic faith, as opposed to a faith aimed only at securing our obedience to a heteronomous law.

In Ethics, Spinoza provides three demonstrations for his proposition that “God, or a substance consisting of infinite attributes each one of which expresses eternal and infinite essence, necessarily exists.”¹² I believe the second demonstration is sufficient to demonstrate his understanding of God’s necessity. However, before considering this demonstration, it is necessary to know what he means by this definition of God.

Spinoza defines a substance as “that which is in itself and is conceived through itself, i.e. no concept of any other thing is needed for forming a concept of it.”¹³ In other words, a substance is anything that does not depend on something else for its existence and that we can conceive without reference to other things. This term has a long history in Western metaphysics, but for our purposes, it will be sufficient to note that although there are continuities between how Spinoza and previous philosophers used this term, Spinoza radically transforms it to respond to a problem raised by Cartesian philosophy.

We saw in Part 1 of this series that René Descartes maintained it was possible to find certainty concerning the existence of a reality outside ourselves by positing the existence of a God who does not deceive us concerning our sensory impressions of the world. Spinoza, for his part, found Descartes’ solution to this problem to be inadequate. To simply assert that God does not deceive us does not meet Descartes’ criterion of truth, namely that whatever is perceived as clearly and distinctly as the truth of our existence as thinking beings is true. We cannot certainly know that God does not deceive us. Spinoza agrees with Descartes that we cannot be certain of anything unless we have a clear and distinct idea of God, by which we can be assured that we can obtain a clear and distinct idea of other things. However, he denies that it matters whether we can know whether God deceives us. In Spinoza’s view, no matter how we come to have a clear and distinct idea of God, and regardless of whether it is the case that God does not deceive us, this idea in itself will be sufficient to provide us a basis for rational certainty.¹⁴

How can we come to have this clear and distinct idea of God? Spinoza answers that this is possible because God constitutes the essence of the human mind. He explains, “a human mind is a part of the infinite intellect of God, and accordingly when we say that a human mind perceives this or that, we are simply saying that God has this or that idea, not insofar as he is infinite but insofar as he is explained through the nature of a human mind or insofar as he constitutes the essence of a human mind.”¹⁵ In contrast to Descartes, who distinguished between three substances—the mind, God, and the external world—Spinoza maintained that if it is possible for us to have rational certainty about our mind or the external world, both these “substances” must be attributes of a single substance, namely God, who as their immanent cause provides an intrinsic sense of their rational certainty. Moreover, everything that we can perceive through the attributes of thought and extension (i.e. the spatial world) must also depend on God for their existence. Otherwise, we cannot be certain that we are perceiving them clearly and distinctly.

We are now in a place to understand Spinoza’s definition of God and his second demonstration of God’s existence. God is “a substance consisting of infinite attributes each one of which expresses eternal and infinite essence.”¹⁶ This means that God is the Being or substance underlying and expressing all of reality through attributes that are infinite because they express God’s infinite essence, consisting of everything that can be ascribed to an infinite intellect. Each thing that we perceive in extension or conceive in thought is a quality or “mode” of the divine substance. Nothing is an accident of the divine substance. Rather, everything is essential to it, because everything that we can conceive or perceive is only accessible to our minds insofar as God is its source.

Although we can only perceive God through two attributes, specifically thought and extension, the essence of God expressed through these attributes is infinite, exceeding the limits of the human mind. This is important to Spinoza because it is central to his contention that our perceptions do not constitute reality, but that God, an ontologically primary reality outside ourselves, constitutes us. We are therefore not justified in projecting our motives onto reality, or in believing that reality is perfect only insofar as it is good for us. Good and bad, perfection and imperfection, are merely subjective human judgments. It is absurd, in Spinoza’s view, to ask the theodicean question of whether God can be considered good, simply because of the existence of that which we consider to be bad. I will return to this point below.

Spinoza’s demonstration of God’s existence proceeds as follows. To reason about something is to know the reasons or causes by which it exists, and if we can conceive a thing as not existing, there must be a reason for its nonexistence. If God does not exist, then there must be a reason for his nonexistence, and this reason must belong to a different substance than God. However, because the reason for God’s nonexistence would have a different nature than God (since it belongs to a different substance), there could be no causal relationship between God and the substance to which this reason belongs, and thus it could not explain why God does not exist. Therefore, we cannot identify a reason why God does not exist. Rather, since we can clearly and distinctly define God as a substance with infinite attributes that express infinite essence, we must conclude that God does exist.¹⁷ In other words, Spinoza concludes that because any reason for supposing that we cannot have a clear and distinct conception of the world would have to come from “outside” the world, which is absurd, he concludes that we have a basis for rational certainty. He notes that this demonstration of God’s existence is an a priori proof, in that it depends only on a clear conception of reason itself, rather than on the awareness of the existence of the outside world. (Spinoza offers an a posteriori demonstration of God’s existence, but he indicates that this demonstration would be insufficient to persuade us that we can find a basis for rational certainty).¹⁸

Spinoza’s definition of God as substance suggests a panentheistic conception of God. It is not strictly pantheistic, because God is not coterminous with the attributes of thought and extension. Thought and extension are what a human intellect can perceive as constituting God’s essence. However, God’s essence exceeds that which a finite human intellect is capable of perceiving. Nonetheless, Spinoza affirms, “Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be, or be conceived, without God.”¹⁹ It follows that God cannot be rightly conceived as a particular, corporeal being existing in space—and much less as an anthropomorphic being—because he is space itself when conceived through the attribute of extension.²⁰

Moreover, Spinoza continues, “God is the immanent and not the transitive cause of all things.” Note that he is not contrasting God’s immanence with his transcendence, but with transitive causation, the ability to cause things outside his substance. Spinoza is effectively denying the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, which states that the substance of material things is different from the divine substance. Spinoza’s demonstration of this proposition is straightforward. Since all things that exist are in God and are conceived through God, he is therefore the cause of the things that are in him. Moreover, there cannot be more than two substances with the same nature. To say that two substances have the same nature is to say that the same qualities belong to them. But if the same qualities belong to two different substances, then we cannot distinguish them, and therefore we cannot certainly know that they are distinct substances. Consequently, there can be no substance other than God; and he must be immanent within those things, rather than a distinct, transitive cause of those things.²¹

As their immanent cause, God determines everything that exists and happens. Spinoza argues, “Nothing in nature is contingent but everything is determined to exist and to operate in a specific way by the necessity of the divine nature.”²² Spinoza’s demonstration of this proposition is highly involved and spans multiple propositions; for our present purposes, it is sufficient to note one of the central claims on which it is based. He states, “That by which things are said to be determined to operate in a specific way is necessarily something positive.”²³ In other words, nothing can determine itself to act of its own accord; everything has an efficient cause, and this efficient cause must be something else that exists. This principle is foundational to Spinoza’s claim that nothing has free agency by which it can spontaneously materialize or act. Since the principle that everything must have a rational explanation or cause is, in Spinoza’s view, “self-evident,” it follows that God, as the only being that exists “in itself,” must determine everything that happens, since everything else that happens depends on prior conditions for its existence or occurrence.

Spinoza states that because nothing exists outside God by which he can be compelled to act, “God acts by the laws of his own nature uncompelled by anyone.”²⁴ What are the laws of God’s nature? Spinoza contrasts his view with the prevailing view of God as a monarchical figure. He states, “By God’s power ordinary people understand God’s free will and his right over all things… . They say that God has the ability to destroy all things and to reduce them to nothing. And they frequently compare God’s power to the right of kings.” However, as noted above, Spinoza rejects an anthropomorphic conception of God, and consequently, a monarchical conception of God’s dominion. Rather than exercising arbitrary dominion over the world, it is through the laws of nature that God controls the world. “God acts by the same necessity as that by which he understands himself.” That is, since God’s power is identical to his intellect, everything that God conceives with his infinite intellect is necessarily expressed in reality, and in such a way that we can only understand it as having God as its ultimate cause. (This is necessarily the case if God is the basis for rational certainty.)²⁵ Spinoza states, “Things could not have been produced by God in any other way or in any other order than they have been produced.”²⁶ “Everything,” he concludes, “depends upon the abilities of God. In order for things to be different than they are, the will of God would necessarily have to be different. But the will of God cannot be different,” because the reason for God’s will is intrinsic to himself. “Neither therefore can things be different.”²⁷

Spinoza’s Views on Salvation

As we noted above, according to Spinoza, the purpose of faith is to secure people’s obedience to God, specifically through charity and justice. He distinguishes between faith and philosophy by arguing that whereas the former is concerned with obedience, the latter is concerned with the pursuit of truth. Nonetheless, Spinoza believes that philosophy can teach us how to act charitably and justly. The difference between faith and philosophy is that whereas the former secures our obedience to a heteronomous law through the promise of a reward or the threat of punishment, the latter enables us to act charitably and justly through the cultivation of our autonomous reason. Although the moral aims of both faith and philosophy are the same, in Spinoza’s view, the person who exercises their autonomous reason is more intrinsically virtuous than one who obeys only to obtain a reward or avoid punishment.

In Ethics, Spinoza explains that the purpose of charity and justice is to foster political unity: “The things that generate concord are related to justice, equity and honor.” These, in turn, are nourished by “things that pertain to religion and piety.”²⁸ He defines religion as “whatever we desire and whatever action we do of which we are the cause insofar as we have an idea of God or insofar as we know God.” Moreover, he defines piety as “the desire to do good which is generated by our living by the command of reason.”²⁹ For Spinoza, we can only live by the command of reason insofar as we recognize God as the cause of everything that exists since it is only in this way that we can have rational certainty. Thus, provided that we have an adequate knowledge of God and the nature of the good, religion necessarily produces piety, which is foundational to a just society.

Spinoza identifies two emotions that characterize those who live by the command of reason. One is spiritedness, which he defines as “the desire by which everyone endeavors to preserve his own being by the dictate of reason alone.” The other is generosity, which he defines as “the desire by which each one endeavors to help other human beings by the dictate of reason alone and to unite them in friendship with himself.”³⁰ Both of these emotions, which are collectively called fortitude, are good in that they are directed at securing what is beneficial both to ourselves as individuals and collectively. What distinguishes fortitude from other emotions is that it proceeds from reason rather than from imagination or opinions.³¹ Reason enables us to certainly know what is beneficial to ourselves and others. Spinoza states,

A person of fortitude considers above everything that all things follow from the necessity of the divine nature. Accordingly, whatever he finds troublesome and bad, everything that appears impious, horrifying, unjust and base, arises from his conceiving the things themselves in a disturbed, mutilated and confused fashion. Because of this he endeavors above all to conceive things as they are in themselves and to remove impediments to true cognition, such as hatred, anger, envy, derision, pride and all the other things of that sort … ; and thus, as far as he can, he endeavors, as we said, to act well and be joyful.³²

Spinoza’s Ethics culminates in the proposition, “Blessedness [i.e. salvation] is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself; and we do not enjoy it because we restrain lusts; on the contrary we are able to restrain lusts precisely because we enjoy it.”³³ That is, salvation is intrinsic to virtue. It is not an extrinsic reward for good behavior that has been deferred to a future date or the afterlife. Nor should we strive to be virtuous in the hope that we will be rewarded for our good deeds or because we are afraid of being punished for our bad deeds. Virtue contains within itself an intrinsic sense of blessedness that arises because we are secure in our rational certainty and our knowledge of what is good. Spinoza states that in contrast to his understanding of blessedness, most people believe they are free only “insofar as they are allowed to obey their lust, and that they are giving up their right insofar as they are obliged to live by the precepts of divine law.” They therefore regard the self-discipline involved in developing fortitude as a burden “that they hope to throw off after death and to receive a reward for their servitude, i.e. for their piety and religion.”³⁴

Spinoza rejects this view of salvation and damnation, along with the notion of freedom involved in it. A person is not free simply because they can do whatever they want. Rather, for Spinoza, a person is free when they can effectively pursue what is beneficial to themselves. “The first and only foundation of virtue or of the right manner of living rightly … is to pursue what is useful to oneself.”³⁵ This is because the endeavor to persevere in existing is the very essence of the thing—that is, the indispensable quality of the thing without which it would not be what it is. If we dispense of the endeavor of a thing to be what it is, then we necessarily dispense of the thing itself.³⁶

This principle applies as much to people as it does to other things: if we are obstructed in our endeavor to live, we will cease to live. Human beings are not exceptions from the laws of nature; we are part of nature, and subject to its laws. For Spinoza, recognizing this is necessary for knowing what constitutes the good. He argues that recognizing that our actions are determined by natural causes has four main benefits. First, “it teaches that we act solely at the behest of God and that we share in the divine nature, and that we do so more and more, the more perfect our actions are and the more we understand God.” It therefore shows us “what our highest happiness or blessedness consists in,” namely “the cognition of God, which leads us to do only those things that love and piety urge us to do.” Second, “it teaches us how we ought to conduct ourselves in the face of fortune or things that are not within our abilities.” Spinoza states that we ought to “bear both faces of fortune with equanimity, because of course all things follow from the eternal decree of God by the same necessity as it follows from the essence of a triangle that its three angles are equal to two right angles.” Third, “this doctrine contributes to social life” by showing us the nature of fortitude (spiritedness and generosity). Finally, it “teaches us how citizens should be governed and led, not to be slaves, but to do freely the actions that are best.”³⁷

In particular, salvation for Spinoza involves overcoming the harmful emotions that prevent us from cultivating fortitude. His proposed remedy for bad emotions consists of identifying the power that the mind has to control them. First, he states, the mind’s power over the emotions consists in “cognition of the emotions itself.” That is, by forming a clear understanding of one’s emotions, a person can understand the causes from which they necessarily arise and prevent the harmful desires they produce from becoming excessive. Second, the mind’s power over the emotions consists “in the fact that [the mind] separates the emotions from the thought of an external cause which we imagine in a confused way.” Third, the mind’s power consists in the time it takes for us to cultivate spiritedness and generosity, which are more powerful than the emotions that arise from our negative passions. Fourth, the mind’s power consists “in the very many causes which foster the affections related to the common properties of things or to God.” That is, the more we understand the relationships between the causes that contribute to our emotions, the less likely we are to blame any particular person or experience for our misfortunes, and the more we can make the best of our circumstances. Finally, the mind’s power consists “in the order by which the mind is able to order and connect its emotions with each other,” and thereby understand how our emotions, as natural phenomena, have other emotions as their natural causes.³⁸

Spinoza admits the difficulty of attaining blessedness by overcoming negative emotions. Some have detected a hint of pessimism in his final remark in the Ethics: “Now if the way I have shown to lead to this looks extremely arduous, it can nevertheless be found. It must certainly be arduous because it is so rarely found… . But all noble things are as difficult as they are rare.”³⁹ For my part, I hardly see this conclusion as more pessimistic than the traditional Christian doctrine of damnation. Spinoza is very detailed in his instructions as to how he believes we can attain blessedness, so there is much less ambiguity in knowing whether we are saved than in traditional religion, which leaves our salvation up to divine preordination or the tenuousness of sanctification. I believe that those who have found blessedness by cultivating an intellectual love for God and habits of fortitude have a moral responsibility to instruct others concerning how they can likewise lead virtuous lives, as Spinoza has done in Ethics. We should make it our aim not only to aspire to virtue ourselves but to work towards the collective attainment of blessedness, to the extent that this is possible.

The Possibility of a Rational Christian Faith

Having considered Spinoza’s rationalistic faith—which, in my view, is faith insofar as it assumes we can clearly and distinctly understand the world—we are now left with a choice. On the one hand, we have Spinoza’s panentheism, in which God reveals himself through the laws of nature and is immanently accessible to the human mind. This rationalistic faith does not derive its authority from a special or supernatural revelation. Rather, it is universally accessible to everyone who cultivates reason and intellectual discipline. However, the conception of salvation involved in Spinoza’s rationalism is entirely naturalistic: it does not promise a future resurrection from the dead but regards salvation as a state of virtuous living.

On the other hand, we have Christianity, in which God has revealed himself in the life of Jesus, as confirmed by his resurrection. We can only regard this faith as authoritative insofar as Jesus’ resurrection has been accurately testified by the church. The entirety of Christian doctrine stands or falls on the issue of whether the early Christians were correct in believing that Jesus had been resurrected from the dead. If they are correct, then we have a promising basis for hope that we, too, can be resurrected to eternal life at the Second Coming.

For his part, Spinoza did not believe in the Christian doctrine of the resurrection. For him, Christ represented the “idea of God” and served as God’s “mouthpiece.” But as a thoroughgoing naturalist, Spinoza could not bring himself to believe that Jesus had been resurrected, or that a supernatural salvation from death was at all possible. For Spinoza, salvation is nothing other than virtue, by which we can see ourselves from the “vantage of eternity” as proceeding by necessity from God’s infinite nature and thereby understand how we can meaningfully conduct our lives.

Christians, by contrast, are left in a more difficult position. For Paul, a supernatural deliverance from death is possible, as was demonstrated by Jesus’ resurrection. Continuing to sustain faith that this resurrection occurred, two thousand years later, is challenging enough. But Christian doctrine stakes an even more difficult claim on this one, namely, that Jesus’ capability to raise people from the dead and to raise himself from the dead is proof that he was the unique incarnation of God.

Indeed, demonstrating the uniqueness of God’s presence in Jesus remains one of the greatest apologetical challenges facing Christianity. If, as Paul maintains, Jesus’ resurrection is proof that God has replaced salvation by works with salvation by faith, and if, furthermore, the resurrection is proof that Jesus was the incarnation of God, then it seems necessary to believe in the factuality of the resurrection. But in the present day, we can only accept the factuality of the resurrection on the authority of the Christian tradition, which has hardly proven reliable throughout history. Does this mean that Christian faith is impossible for the present-day believer? Or can we believe in Christ’s resurrection, even without having certainty concerning its historicity?

The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard called the idea that God existed in human form the “absolute paradox.” Following Kierkegaard, the theologian John Macquarrie identifies three major components to the Christological paradox: (1) the tension between Christ’s particularity and his universality; (2) the tension between his historicity and his preexistence; and (3) the tension between Christ’s adoption and incarnation. For Macquarrie, these “inescapable” elements of the Christological paradox demonstrate “the need for a dialectical method which allows for the possibility that every statement made [in theological discourse] may need to be corrected by a statement of apparently opposite tendency.”⁴⁰

For instance, when we consider the first tension, between Jesus’ particularity and universality, we must attempt to account for his particularity by considering the unique historical conditions that gave rise to his reception as the Christ by the early church. For instance, we can notice “that the particular intellectual climate prevalent at that time, including messianic expectations, ideas of incarnation, mystery religions and so on, gave birth to an interpretation of the life and death of Jesus Christ.”⁴¹ Nevertheless, mere recognition of the historical conditions that led to Christ’s reception will hardly be sufficient to persuade those in the twenty-first century of Jesus’ divinity. If we are to affirm that Jesus is the Christ for all people in all ages, there must be a universally accessible criterion by which we can recognize his unique divinity. On the other hand, to identify such a criterion would admit the possibility that others could also satisfy it.

Macquarrie states,

Many who have felt the scandal of [Christ’s] particularity in this way have tried to resolve the problem in the same way as Kant and many other idealist philosophers. Acknowledging that a truth must first appear in a concrete instance, they have held that this is accidental, and that we can go on to grasp the truth in its universality, without further regard to the contingent circumstances of its first appearance. Thus the story of the historical incarnation of the Logos in Jesus Christ becomes the general truth of the unity of God and man, and the story itself is regarded as simply an illustration of the general truth.⁴²

Rationally, the only way we can resolve the paradox between Christ’s particularity and universality is by recognizing the mythical character of the incarnation and resurrection narratives—that these particular events, even if they are not historical realities, nonetheless symbolize a process by which each person, can overcome the fallenness that affects all people through faith in the power of Christ that dwells in our hearts.

This is the position endorsed by Spinoza when he identifies the “spirit of Christ” with the “idea of God,” an idea that we all intrinsically possess.⁴³ It is likewise the position that the early Adventist author E. J. Waggoner advocated when he stated that to believe in Christ “means simply to believe that He dwells personally in every man—in all flesh.” Waggoner maintained that “the fact that we see life everywhere, also in ourselves, in spite of the curse which is everywhere, is positive proof that the cross of the Crucified One is there bearing it,” and that “wherever there is a fallen, sin-scarred, miserable human being, there is also the Christ of God crucified for him and in him.”⁴⁴

These panentheistic positions are responsible for Spinoza’s excommunication from his synagogue and Waggoner’s expulsion from the Adventist church. After all, their attempts to reconcile faith with reason by identifying the spirit of Christ as universally present in all people contradicts the doctrine of the unique incarnation. It seems that faith, if it is expected to affirm traditional teachings concerning Christ’s uniqueness as the Son of God, exists in irreconcilable tension with reason.

This tension between reason and tradition, which reflects the paradox between universality and particularity, also applies to the other two paradoxes that Macquarrie identifies. In the case of the tension between Christ’s preexistence and historicity, we could rationally affirm Christ’s preexistence by maintaining that the idea of Jesus’ essence has existed in the mind of God for all eternity. However, we could also say this concerning ourselves.⁴⁵ What we cannot say about any other person is that Christ was resurrected and ascended into heaven. However, we also cannot affirm Christ’s resurrection with any rational certainty.

We are left in a position in which, if we want to affirm the traditional doctrines of the church concerning Christology, we must follow Kierkegaard in recognizing faith as the “subjective appropriation of an objective uncertainty”: that is, even if we objectively prove Christ’s resurrection and ascension, we can live as though these were historical facts. Is this consistent with reason? Macquarrie suggests that it is, provided we continually engage in the dialectical method by which these Christological paradoxes will be progressively resolved. However, this seems to amount to the suggestion that the paradox may never be finally resolved. It has been two thousand years since the problem first emerged, and yet we are no closer to a solution now than we were then.

The apologetical challenge that confronts the church is this: How are we to persuade a person—whether ourselves or others—of the reasonableness of the Christian claim that Jesus was uniquely God? I believe only two possible solutions to this problem do not insist on a deferential faith in the church’s traditional authority.

One solution is that, following Paul, we can recognize that there are two seemingly different paths to salvation, which are, in fact, the same. Specifically, we can accept that we are either saved by grace through faith in Christ, who demonstrated the powerlessness of heteronomous ceremonial laws to secure our obedience, or that we are saved by discovering God in his self-expression in nature, that is, through the natural light of reason, which is universally accessible to everyone without the need for historical narratives (as Paul indicates in Romans 1). If Spinoza and Waggoner are to be believed, then these paths are the same, because the life-giving power of God which dwelled in Christ is the same power that sustains all creation. However, if we accept this solution, we would have to admit that the power of Christ that dwelled in the life of Jesus, although it may have dwelled in Jesus with an unrivaled intensity, is a power that is not unique to Jesus but is present in all of us.

The other solution is that, if we believe that the path to God through natural knowledge is an unsure means of attaining salvation (due, perhaps, to the temptation to make an idol out of nature, as Paul discusses in Romans 1), we can at least affirm the doctrine of universal reconciliation, which I have promoted in previous articles. That is, we can affirm that the kind of faith one adopts—whether this is a Christian faith that depends on the authority of the church or a rational faith based on understanding God through nature—is less important than the practice of faith. By treating others charitably and justly, which are the practical consequences of true faith, we can participate in the intra-historical process by which God is seeking to reconcile the world to himself and thereby save all humanity, regardless of their doctrinal differences.