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Calvinism Helped To Set the Stage For Modern Capitalist Usury Which Exalts Making Money
Posted : 5 Aug, 2012 05:10 AM
Calvinism Helped To Set the Stage For Modern Capitalist Usury Which Exalts Making Money
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvinism
"One school of thought attributes Calvinism with setting the stage for the later development of capitalism in northern Europe. In this view, elements of Calvinism represented a revolt against the medieval condemnation of usury and, implicitly, of profit in general.[citation needed] Such a connection was advanced in influential works by R. H. Tawney (1880�1962) and by Max Weber (1864�1920).
Calvin expressed himself on usury in a 1545 letter to a friend, Claude de Sachin, in which he criticized the use of certain passages of scripture invoked by people opposed to the charging of interest. He reinterpreted some of these passages, and suggested that others of them had been rendered irrelevant by changed conditions. He also dismissed the argument (based upon the writings of Aristotle) that it is wrong to charge interest for money because money itself is barren."
From our view in 2012, with the long recession due in large part to the power, lack of morality and greed of big usury bankers and their deceptive practices, including loan amortization, God's moral law opposing usury is a very good thing. Ol Calvin was wrong on this issue, though he was right on Romans 11: 25-26.
The early German sociologist Max Weber in his "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" said that capitalism got going in the northern European nations under Calvinism which encouraged large numbers of people to work hard many hours a day to make money.
The Calvinist "calling" which is a calling to devote one's life to hard work in an occupation contributed to the Protestant work ethic which was necessary to build a capitalist industrial economy.
I have not read Weber's book on the rise of capitalism due to Protestant or Calvinist theology in Northern Europe (and in England). But it is true that the Catholic nations continued to oppose usury. Usury was necessary for the development of capitalism, and guess who liberalized the older Christian prohibition on usury?
Over the centuries since capitalism began in the protestant nations of Europe, usury has become the major instrument for the ruling elite, which is largely the financial elite of big usury bankers, to control the masses of people and to rule over them. Without usury the elites could not have the power they have.
Though usury is not mentioned in Revelation 18, Revelation 18: 10-11 says "Standing afar off for the fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas, that great city Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come. And the merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn over her; for no man buyeth their merchandise any more:"
Merchants, from emporos, are like our world traders, or international corporations.
Then Revelation 18: 23-24 says "...for thy merchants were the great men of the earth; for by thy sorceries were all nations deceived. And in her was found the blood of prophets, and of saints, and of all that were slain upon the earth."
The Babylon of prophecy has its economic and financial side, and it runs on usury. The "circulation" system of the first beast of Revelation 13: 1-10 is money. And the metaphor of Babylon points to the same international system run by money, which empowers the "King of the North" in the modern timeline of Daniel 11.
The northern command of nations, the industralized nations of the North, are now in conflict with the mostly Islamic nations of the South, who have not gone in for usury as much as the nations of the North. There are no "good" and "bad" players in the North versus South seen in the present day reality of world affairs and in Daniel's eleventh chapter. The nation of Israel is likely to be a trigger for World War III which will be between the international North and the South. And - you are not a "good" guy by supporting the North and the country of Israel against the Islamics. But the Islamics are one manifestation of the spirit of anti-Christ, and are not the "good" guys either.
And - John Calvin and his theology liberalizing usury helped to make all this possible. It did increase the standard of living for many in the West. But now usury is a key to totalitarian domination by the financial ruling elite - and its going to get worse.
In addition, the Calvinist or Puritans of the Northeast in the U.S., or many of their descendants, moved toward becoming a money elite. It was this money elite in the period right before the war of 1861-65 which clashed with the southern planter elite. The Radical Republicans were led by this former New England Calvinist money elite to use the federal government under Lincoln to diminish and destroy the rival southern elite. And the slave holding states of the south, not all of whom withdrew from the Union in 1861, that is, the eleven Confederate states had only 9 million people, including 3.5 million black slaves, while the 23 states of the Union had a population of 21 million (http://www.ushistory.org/us/33b.asp).
And the Union had the industrial northern states and the New England states plus New York which held the money elite. The Confederacy was impulsive, while the Union states of the Midwest and East were more deliberate in wanting to defeat the South. As the war went on, the Union Armies were increased greatly by conscription and by putting newly arrived immigrants from Ireland and Europe into the federal army to go South and fight the Southern army which had no means of vastly increasing its numbers.
Followers of Christ do not engage in a war to kill others they consider their enemies. Christ came to bring life not death. Of course,many of the New England Calvinists had left their former zeal for Christ's doctrines had become legalistic, and were more worldly and driven by the flesh. But it was their particular Calvinist theology that helped drive their lust for power and more money.
A different form of Calvinism, that of John Knox and Samuel Rutherford in Scotland, formulated a theology that supported revolution by the common people to overthrow an evil totalitarian government. This theology of Knox and Rutherford was secularized by John Locke and Jefferson made it into the Declaration of Independence, one of our two founding documents which does briefly state a political ideology.
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