The Christian Work Ethic

The widespread youth revolt against the work ethic now prevalent in Western capitalistic society is encouraging a new look at the contemporary view of work. Recently the Conference on Faith and History, a scholarly society of evangelical historians, devoted an entire day’s discussion to the Protestant work ethic.

Some modern secularists readily attribute all the distasteful aspects of our wayward work world to Christianity. Unless some balanced perspective is offered, the uncritical masses may rally to recently projected alternatives.

Calvin seems to attract the brunt of the “blame” in the current scorn for evangelical work attitudes. Weber contends that capitalism is an irrational and immoral system, and that Calvin was its psychological stimulant. Yet the Reformation work ethic probably owes more to Luther than to Calvin, and attitudes scornfully attributed to Calvinism were later commended also by many Roman Catholics.

Not a few elements now often associated with a Calvinist work ethic really have their roots elsewhere. That time is money, that money-making is life’s ultimate purpose, that one does his duty and glorifies God by the increase of wealth—these ideas find support in the outlook of deists like Benjamin Franklin rather than that of the Reformers and the Puritans.

Critics who find the assurance of divine election in worldly success or make earthly accumulation the evidence of genuine faith, who identify God’s will with material acquisition and dignify labor for money and things as one’s calling, hardly give an unbiased reading either of Calvin or of the later Puritans. Instead, they superimpose Enlightenment notions on evangelical sources.

From such modern critics one gains the impression that it required Calvin and the Puritans to get covetous materialists to do what their fallen nature already inclined them to do. Were wealth the evidence of predestination, the unregenerate world could surely be counted on to hunger and thirst after Calvinism. The Protestant Reformers are now invoked and blamed by a variety of ideological partisans. Some writers find inspiration in them for the worst in lassez-faire capitalism, while others trace so-called Christian socialism back to Calvin, which remarkably alters the premises.

The nineteenth-century American “success ethic” is more deeply rooted in the Horatio Alger myth than in the sixteenth-century Protestant ethic. One student of “holy Horatio” literature, Professor Gerald C. Tiffin of San Jose Bible College, contrasts the character of this legendary wonderboy both with the self-made free-enterprise tycoon and with the successful New Testament saint. On the one hand, Horatio is not really a common man to begin with but is somewhat above the average; yet his success depends on amazing chance encounters with benevolent patrons more than on potential greatness and self-reliance. Even so, he does not rise to the top but gains moderate economic security as a white-collar worker. Yet he neither adulates wealth nor equates material prosperity with spiritual success; he does not correlate honest money-making with “preaching the Gospel,” nor connect economic success with Protestant morality. In fact, Horatio has as little interest in transcendent spiritual claims as in the accumulation of vast business empires; his religion consists of personal piety and a sentimental confidence in benevolent providence.

What the Alger stories do reflect, however, are such traditional economic values as industry, self-sacrifice, good manners, honesty, humility, and thrift. Although these emphases are scarcely the essence of the Reformation ethic, they are not without some solid basis there.

Over against the growing repudiation of work, Scripture underlines the morality of a good day’s work. To reduce the biblical work ethic or Calvinistic work ethic to such emphases, however, is to ignore the fact that modern Japan is indebted neither to Calvin nor to Christianity for its effective work morality, even if, like modern Germany, it may presuppose some scripturally approved values unawares.

Other populations have often willingly worked hard even in the face of poverty and yet have been unable to succeed economically. Professor Edward Coleson of Spring Arbor College has said that not even piety is a substitute for technology, although where moral attitudes are right the machinery can be handled more properly.

Calvin’s work morality was subsumed under something higher, a view of God and of man responsibly related to God and his world. The Reformation realities produced a new character type; for good reason New Testament virtues are correlated with faith and new spiritual life.

Yet the youth counterculture today strikes hard against many evangelicals as well as non-evangelicals in indicting material aggrandizement, corporate prestige, and/or business power as prime goals of work. Such achievements, to be sure, are no longer considered evidences of divine election or of regeneration; yet they are emulated just as they are within a secular society whose work ethic is almost entirely severed from Christian roots. Although the Bible does not assign priority to material things, do not many modern churchgoers? Do not many Christians consider a substantial bank balance the sign of an invisible and spiritual grace? Why, some ask, have Geneva and Amsterdam become financial capitals of the world? If Weber misrepresented Calvin, could he nevertheless have drawn his conclusions from Protestant Christians?

To what extent did the Reformation plea for personal decision and trust soon become allied with an illegitimate secular self-reliance? Did Christian capitalists regard wealth as a symbol of spiritual achievement, being thus tempted to justify virtually every means of multiplying money—even if they were not misled by love of money as the ultimate lure of life and did not consider themselves free to spend profits selfishly?

The Bible work ethic is now increasingly indicted on the cheap supposition that the divine assignment to man of dominion over the earth legitimizes depletion of natural resources, pollution of the earth, and the depersonalization of life and culture by empirical scientism. Nothing could be further from the truth. In its radical rejection of Christianity and Reformation theology the mounting post-Christian ethic is motivated more by spiritual rebellion than by ethical earnestness. But Christians must grapple with the work principles the Bible actually gives us, and must square their outlook and behavior with these claims.

CARL F. H. HENRY

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