Godliness and Greed: Shifting Christian Thought on Profit by Skip Worden

conventional scholarship usually issues to the Calvinists and Max WeberOs writing at the Protestant ethic because the catalysts to altering Christian attitudes relating profit-seeking and wealth. writer bypass Worden argues that the seeds of this transformation happened centuries previous. From the start of the industrial Revolution to the fifteenth-century Renaissance, he exhibits that the foremost Christian proposal on economics went via a primary shift, turning into favorable towards profit-seeking and wealth-holding. Worden discusses this dramatic swap and explains how the overall antagonism towards the pursuit of wealth prior to the industrial Revolution remodeled into Protestant theologians' struggling with opposed to the existing view of a pro-wealth paradigm throughout the 15th century. Worden contends that the shift clear of the Patristic view of wealth happened good sooner than the addition of the Calvinist spirit of capitalism and the Puritan paintings ethic into Christian financial vernacular. Drawing on Plato, Cicero, and Augustine, early Protestant theologians unsuccessfully sought to examine the emerging dominance of the pro-wealth Christian paradigm, which they believed were driven too a ways. those theologians of the 16th and 17th century felt it used to be too with reference to advocating love of achieve itself, whatever too with reference to the sin of greed. How good the Reformation succeeded may be assessed via WordenOs insightful concluding learn of John D. Rockefeller, the ascetic steward of GodOs Gold within the type of monopoly.