The pantheism controversy (German: Pantheismusstreit), also known as Spinozismusstreit or Spinozastreit, refers to the 1780s debates in German intellectual life that discussed the merits of Spinoza's "pantheistic" conception of God. What became a wider cultural debate in German society started as a personal disagreement between Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi and Moses Mendelssohn over their understanding of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Spinozist beliefs. The difference of opinion became a wider public controversy when, in 1785, Jacobi published his correspondence with Mendelssohn. This started a series of public discussions on the matter.

Benjamin Crowe of Boston University stated in a 2008 paper that: "The leading luminaries of late eighteenth and early-nineteenth German letters, people such as Herder, Goethe, Hegel, Schelling and Schleiermacher, all, in one way or another, were shaped by the ‘Pantheism Controversy’." And in Michael Forster's own words (2010), "During the last quarter or so of the eighteenth century and then well into the nineteenth century a wave of neo-Spinozism swept through German philosophy and literature: in addition to Lessing and Herder, further neo-Spinozists included Goethe, Schelling, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Hölderlin, Novalis, and Friedrich Schlegel. This wave was largely a result of Herder's embrace of neo-Spinozism in God: Some Conversations (and in Goethe's case, Herder's sympathy with Spinozism even before that work)."