Spinoza's Lament in the Wilderness

the lament, neglect, mistaking aad triangles of a radical Christian

"The person with the Spirit makes judgments about all things, but such a person is not subject to merely human judgments, for,

"Who has known the mind of the Lord

so as to instruct him?"

But we have the mind of Christ. (Paul’s letter 1 Cor 2:15-16 NIV)"

Hiding in plain view, Spinoza uses a robust and intellectually sustainable Christology to articulate our union with God and the effects of that union. He describes our knowledge of that union and its effects, as well as the means of our acquiring such knowledge. Such knowledge enables people to piously follow true plans of living based on their intuited conceptions formed in their union with God. More importantly, Spinoza shows how we substitute a “godly” essence for our initial “earthly” essence.

Spinoza’s writings illustrate that in regards to the mind of Christ, Spinoza picked up the mantle of Paul, and, in regards to the explication of the mind of Christ, furthered that project substantially. Spinoza's work is, if not the first and perhaps only, then the most substantive philosophical development of the role of the mind of Christ in Christian religion, since the writing of Paul's authenticated letters.

This study considers Spinoza's critique of superstitious vagrant experiences of imagination based Christian thinking in light of Spinoza's Intellection based Christian thinking, undertaken to replace life’s vagrant experiences with Intellection based Christian thinking. After considering Spinoza's lament of the largely abandoned "old Religion" found at the opening of Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, the study suggests some reasons why Spinoza's Christian writings and thinking have been neglected or rather misconstrued. Not the least of these reasons is that readers have failed to distinguish things that Spinoza believed, in particular about the spirit of Christ, from what he could “Mathematically Demonstrate”. The point is made that Spinoza's approach to religion involved more than biblical interpretation using historical and textual criticism.

Pressured by the accelerating advancement of critical thinking, including the sciences, Christian theologies, founded on the vagaries of Imagination acquired through the body's interaction with other bodies and limited by the nature of words, images and historical narratives, are faltering. Spinoza offers an intellectually sustainable alternative.