The conference paper interprets Spinoza‟s concept of “sola scriptura” as a reductio ad absurdum of historical-critical approaches to text interpretation. It shows that despite Spi-noza‟s emphasis on the revelatory function of scripture and despite his claim that there is only one method of reading it, he intently and distinctly undermines this very hermeneutics as unre-liable and incompatible with both reason and truth. The text follows the central intuition that for Spinoza, this insuffiency of hermeneutics accounts for its political potential, as a means of uncoupling politics and theology.
