In my four-blog Protestant Ethics series, I explained Max Weber’s thesis. Soon after he published his three articles between 1904-6, scholars started publishing their critiques. Dr. Robert W. Green (1921-2007), professor emeritus of European History at Pennsylvania State University, edited Protestantism and Capitalism: The Weber Thesis and Its Critics (D. C. Heath and Company, Boston, MA, 1959). In Green’s introduction, he states:
“Almost immediately following their first appearance, these articles attracted the interest of scholars in several different fields because, in its various aspects, the Weber hypothesis cut across the areas of a number of separate scholarly disciplines. Since Weber was himself a sociologist, and in this instance he seemed to be attempting to apply a sociological method to an historical problem, both sociologists and historians became concerned. Because capitalism was involved, economic historians were aroused; and the role Weber assigned to Protestantism drew the attention of both Catholic and Protestant theologians. Some of these scholars attacked Weber’s position; some supported it; some seemed willing to accept a modified or cautiously qualified version of it.” (page vii)
One of Weber’s fervent supporters was Dr. Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923), Professor of Theology at various German universities. He wrote The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches (1912) and elaborates on Calvinism in his chapter on The Economic Ethic of Calvinism. Calvin’s environment differed from Luther’s in that Calvin lived in an urban city while Luther lived in a rural village. “It was just because the economic conditions at Geneva were so bourgeois, and on such a small scale, that Capitalism was able to steal into the Calvinistic ethic, while it was rejected by the Catholic and the Lutheran ethic. … Calvin abandoned the purely consumer’s standpoint of the previous Christian ethic, and recognized the productive power of money and of credit”. (page 22)
Troeltsch supported Weber’s coupling of industrious labor and ascetic consumption. “The exhortation to continual industry in labour, combined with the limitation of consumption and of luxury, produced a tendency to pile up capital, which for its part – in the necessity of its further utilization in work and not in enjoyment – necessitated an ever-increasing turnover. The duty of labour, coupled with the ban on luxury, worked out ‘economically as the impulse to save,’ and the impulse to save had the effect of building up capital.” (pages 23-24)
One of Weber’s more controversial propositions was that capitalistic success was a sign of God’s election, a theory that Troeltsch fully supported. “The Protestant ethic of the ‘calling,’ with its Calvinistic assimilation of the Capitalist system, with its severity and its control of the labour rendered as a sign of the assurance of election, made service in one’s ‘calling,’ the systematic exercise of one’s energies, into a service both necessary in itself and appointed by God, in which profit is regarded as the sign of the Divine approval.” (page 24) Catholicism follows Natural Law and placed secular vocations below supernatural. “Ascetic Protestantism, however, regards the ‘calling’ as a proof, and the ardent fulfillment of one’s professional duty as the sign and token of the state of grace.” (page 27)
One of Weber’s critics was Dr. Hector Menteith Robertson (1905-1984), Jagger Professor of Economics at the University of Cape Town. Robertson argued against the Calvinistic doctrine that economic success was a sign of God’s grace. He quoted Richard Baxter, the Puritan theologian who Weber exampled as a major supporter of the Protestant Ethic. Baxter “seems to have been very far from the belief that to grow rich in a ‘calling’ was a sign of grace.”
“Another thinks he is no worldling because he useth no unlawful means, but the labour of his calling, to grow rich. The same answer serves to this. The love of wealth for the satisfying of the flesh is unlawful whatever the means be.” [Baxter’s quote] (page 72)
Robertson separated Protestant vocational theology from the spirit of capitalism. “The doctrine of the ‘calling’ did not breed a spirit of capitalism. The spirit of capitalism was responsible for a gradual modification and attrition of the Puritan doctrine; and this attrition had barely begun in England before the Restoration.” (page 74) Robertson then goes further and does not differentiate Protestant and Catholic doctrines during the Puritan period. “There was nothing exceptional in the Church doctrines of the later seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Puritans. They were shared by the Catholics, and the encouragement given by them to the capitalist spirit was not the contribution solely of the Puritan and Calvinist sects. They did not develop until the end of the seventeenth century, when they spread both amongst Protestants and Catholics.” (page 76) Robertson was “sharply criticized” for this assertion. (page 65)
Robertson does make one thought-provoking assertion:
“All has gone to prove one point: that the Churches, one and all, have had to accommodate themselves to the extraneous development of a busy commercial spirit; that capitalism has created, or found already existent, its own spirit, and set the Churches the task of assimilating it.” (page 83)
So, which comes first: Church doctrine or economic development? Did the Church adapt their theology to changing economic systems or did Church doctrine drive the commercial spirit? It depends on whether you support Robertson’s critiques or Weber’s thesis.
