Tell a man that his trade is a calling from God, and that he will answer for how he conducts it, and you have changed both his work and his conscience. The Reformation did that to a whole continent.

The Reformation was a return to God in the gospel, and people who received new life in Christ made new life in culture. Nowhere is that clearer, or more commonly misunderstood, than in the world of business. Geneva under Calvin became a bustling forum for commerce, and the economic habits formed there traveled wherever Calvinism went.

Before and After

One measure of a leader is what happens to the place he serves. The change in Geneva across Calvin's ministry can be counted in three occupations. Before his arrival in 1536, the city had some fifty merchants, three printers, and few if any resident nobles. By the late 1550s it was home to about one hundred and eighty merchants, one hundred and thirteen printers and publishers, and at least seventy aristocratic refugees claiming nobility.¹

Some of that growth is simply the arithmetic of refuge: persecuted Protestants with skills and capital came to a city that would have them. But they stayed, and they built, and what they built rested on a set of convictions about work that the medieval church had not supplied.

Every Lawful Trade a Calling

Before the Reformation, vocation was a word reserved for the clergy. A man entered a calling by entering holy orders; everyone else simply had a job. Calvin's teaching that work carries an inherent dignity given by the Creator lifted every lawful trade to the standing of a holy calling. After Calvin, a man could be called to medicine, to law, or to teaching just as truly as a minister is called to serve the church.²

The argument came from the fourth commandment. God commanded rest on the seventh day, and in doing so commanded labor on the other six. Work belongs to what a creature made in God's image is for, and so every calling matters.

André Biéler summarized the consequence as well as anyone: by giving the faith the whole sphere of human activity, which Christians must submit to the Lordship of Christ, Calvin bestowed on work, economic labor, and money a place they had not previously held.³ The sacred and secular division that had organized medieval life was quietly retired, and the effects reached into every trade. It is no accident that men working from a Calvinistic worldview turn up at the head of so many fields in the following centuries. This is the same conviction treated from another angle on the society page.

The Eighth Commandment

Calvin's economic ethics grow out of his exposition of thou shalt not steal, and he began there with an axiom: since charity is the end of the law, the definition of theft must be sought from charity. That principle reaches much further than picking pockets. It classes as thieves not only those who take property secretly but those who seek gain from the loss of others and are more devoted to private advantage than to equity.

Calvin wrote concerning wealth and commerce:

We will duly obey this commandment, then, if, content with our lot, we are zealous to make only honest and lawful gain; if we do not seek to become wealthy through injustice, nor attempt to deprive our neighbor of his goods to increase our own; if we do not strive to heap up riches cruelly wrung from the blood of others; if we do not madly scrape together from everywhere, by fair means or foul, whatever will feed our avarice or satisfy our prodigality.

On the other hand, let this be our constant aim: faithfully to help all men by our counsel and aid to keep what is theirs, in so far as we can; but if we have to deal with faithless and deceitful men, let us be prepared to give up something of our own rather than to contend with them. And not this alone: but let us share the necessity of those whom we see pressed by the difficulty of affairs, assisting them in their need with our abundance.

Moreover, our mind must always have regard for the Lawgiver, that we may know that this rule was established for our hearts as well as for our hands, in order that men may strive to protect and promote the well-being and interests of others. John Calvin

Notice that the commandment is read positively as well as negatively. It forbids taking; it also requires each man to help his neighbor keep what is his. Calvin held that an affirmative precept is always joined to a prohibition, so liberality and kindness function as the antidote to theft.

We are forbidden to pant after the possessions of others, and consequently are commanded to strive faithfully to help every man to keep his own possessions. We must consider that what every man possesses has not come to him by mere chance but by the distribution of the supreme Lord of all. For this reason, we cannot by evil devices deprive anyone of his possessions without fraudulently setting aside God's dispensation.

Let us remember that all those arts whereby we acquire the possessions and money of our neighbors—when such devices depart from sincere affection to a desire to cheat or in some manner to harm—are to be considered as thefts. Although such possessions may be acquired in a court action, yet God does not judge otherwise. For he sees the intricate deceptions with which a crafty man sets out to snare one of simpler mind, until he at last draws him into his nets. He sees the hard and inhuman laws with which the more powerful oppresses and crushes the weaker person. John Calvin

Two things follow. Private property is assumed and protected, since what a man has comes to him by God's distribution rather than by chance. And sharp dealing is theft even when it is perfectly legal, because God judges the intent a court cannot see.

Interest or Usury?

The most consequential thing Calvin did in this field concerned lending at interest, and it is worth stating precisely, because it is regularly overstated in both directions.

Before the Reformation a hyper-literal reading prevailed in most of Christendom: any interest on any loan was usury and therefore forbidden. The word itself carries two senses, and the distinction is the whole argument. Usury may mean charging any interest at any time, or charging a rate so high that it amounts to exploiting the poor.⁴

Calvin condemned the second without condemning the first. Working through Exodus 22:25, he held that the transcultural principle is that brethren who need our assistance are not to be treated harshly, and that a prohibition binding on loans to the poor is not a universal ban on interest. He knew that many forms of commerce can become a mode of extortion, and that crafty men are forever inventing some subterfuge to deceive God. But he also understood the market well enough to see that if interest were absolutely forbidden, no creditor could ever lend money without loss to himself — and that borrowers would exploit such a rule to the lender's harm, which is itself a breach of the eighth commandment.⁵

So lending at interest is permitted where borrowers are able to repay, and forbidden where it would grind the poor. It is difficult to overstate what that settled. Hall and Burton record the judgment that, at least on the point of collecting interest, Calvin's position is absolutely decisive in the economic history of the West.⁶

Praying Before Work

The caricature of Calvin as a cold apologist for gain is answered most simply by the prayer he supplied for use before beginning work, included in the Genevan Catechism of 1562. He led the people to ask:

Calvin went further still, praying that God would diminish their prosperity if He knew they needed a dose of poverty to bring them to their senses. He asserted in the Institutes that any endeavor which ceased to have charity as its aim was diseased at its very root, and warned that luxury breeds great carelessness as to virtue.⁷ The man who unlocked lending at interest also told merchants to beware of becoming rich.

What Weber Got Wrong

Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism of 1905 argued that Calvinists treated material success as evidence of election, and so worked and saved with unusual intensity to reassure themselves. The thesis has shaped a century of textbooks. On this particular point it misreads Calvin badly.⁸

Calvin never equated prosperity with election. His treatment of the eighth commandment calls for contentment with one's own lot, condemns the eager desire to grow rich, warns against trusting in one's own dexterity or in the favor of men, and asks God to lay a curb on ambition. What Weber correctly saw is something different and more defensible: that Calvinism dignified work and callings of every kind, and that this dignity had economic consequences. Work was elevated, not wealth.

An Industry of Ideas

Geneva's most striking business was publishing, and it shows the convictions above working themselves out in an actual trade.

The number of books published in the city rose from three volumes in 1536 to twenty-eight in 1554 and forty-eight by 1561. In the five years before Calvin's death an average of thirty-eight volumes a year came off Genevan presses, a tenfold increase in twenty-five years; the average fell to about twenty a year after he died. By 1563 there were at least thirty-four presses in the city, many of them manned by immigrants.⁹

A distribution network followed. Laurent de Normandie, a childhood friend of Calvin, built a system of agents carrying Genevan books into France and beyond, many printed small enough to hide inside clothing. France banned all Genevan books in 1551, and printers responded by using French type fonts and false addresses. Several distributors were martyred. It is a striking picture of commerce and conviction running on the same rails.

Cautions

Calvin was not an economist and did not write an economic system. What he left is a body of scriptural exposition, pastoral counsel, and occasional judgments on particular cases. Building a full theory of markets on it requires inference, and inference should be labeled as such.

Correlation is not proof. Geneva grew for many reasons, refuge and location among them, and the later prosperity of Calvinist regions has explanations that are not theological. That Calvinism dignified work is well attested; that it caused modern capitalism is a much larger claim.

The uses made of Calvin are not always his. A prosperity ethic grew in soil he had tilled, but he would not have recognized it. The man who prayed that God would reduce his people's wealth if they needed it is a poor patron for the notion that gain is godliness.

Further Reading