What is the best way to characterize Spinoza's relationship to theology?

Answer 1

Baruch de Spinoza gave up traditional Judaism (was excommunicated) and embarked on a new way of expressing our internal psychological imperatives and external relationship with reality. Jesus tried to do the same thing and started a new religion. Spinoza made a major contribution to philosophy. He was accused of being an atheist because his use of the word God referred to the natural order. He rebelled against the ritual and rites of Jewish tradition and his ideas of "conatus" or man's innate urge toward "preservation of being" with the highest virtue of man being "the intellectual love of God/universe" was quite unique and advanced at the time. His love of science - particularly optics - was influential in his idea that the "miraculous" was only man's inability to trace causality back to its origin in the natural order. He was not a pantheist nor a monist.

Answer 2

Spinoza was heavily influenced by his jewish upbringing and the excommunication.


He is a monist, the thinks that there is only one substance in the entire universe, that one substance he calls god. though this was an idea that was rejected by religious institutions. Spinoza was arguing for one god.

Answer 3

Spinoza is theologically a monist in his conception of God.

Answer 4

He has no relationship to anything; he's dead, silly. :-P