Biblical Philology and Hermeneutical Debate in the Dutch Republic in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century

Spinoza’s time was rife with conflicts. Historians tend to structure these by grouping two opposing forces: progressive Cartesio-Cocceian-liberals versus conservative Aristotelian-Voetian-Orangists. Moderately enlightened progressives, so the story goes, endorsed notions such as human dignity, toleration, freedom of opinion, but shied away from radicalism, held back by the conservative counterforce. Yet the drift was supposed to be inevitably towards the Enlightenment. This chapter tries to capture theological conflicts in the Dutch Republic of the Early Enlightenment in a triangular scheme, that covers a wider range of conflicting interests. Its corners are constituted by ‘dogmatism’ (Dordrecht orthodoxy), ‘scripturalism’ (Cocceianism), and ‘rationalism’ (theology inspired by Cartesianism, Spinozism, or any other brand of new philosophy). Dogmatics and rationalists battled in terms of philosophy, whereas the scripturalists and their respective opponents fought each other rather in the field of biblical scholarship. This multilateral conflict within Dutch Calvinism made the ideal of a unified church untenable.