2017 09 The Light September 2017

September 2017 The
Light 6
anthology Luther and His Progeny - to clarify
just how transformative Protestantism was in
changing the modern world. By separating the
political and economic spheres from the realm
of spiritual consideration, Protestantism not
only inaugurated our secular age; it also helped
- at least in the view of some of its critics - to
give the market free rein. As Brian McCall argues
in his contribution, while in the Catholic vision
“economic works, as well as any other type
of works, will affect not only natural but also supernatural
ends,” the Protestant tradition proposed
that religion and morality remain realms
distinct from that of the economy.
This separation of economic considerations
from spiritual ones had its own political implications.
“The Church and church jurists,” McCall
observes, “were intimately involved in the development
of economic laws that placed restraints
on individual economic freedom up to
the eve of the Reformation.” Thus, by disavowing
those moral constraints on the market,
Protestant countries could reclaim a sphere
that was otherwise still shaped, to some extent,
by the Catholic Church from afar. But when the
authority of the church receded from this newly
delineated political-economic sphere, something
else happened inadvertently: Contract
and property law, now released from adherence
to religious law, shifted over time, and a new social
order began to develop throughout much of
the Western Hemisphere - especially in the English-speaking
North Atlantic. Protestantism did
not create modern capitalism,
but it did clear a
considerable amount of
space for its development.
“Protestant theology contributed to a shift
in the underlying basis of contract liability,”
McCall writes, “shifting from causa to consideration
and promise to bargain.” Catholic jurists
had formerly required that the purpose of a
contract be a just and equitable one in order to
enforce it, and they viewed breach of contract
more as an issue of breaking promises than of
failing to meet the substantive terms of the
agreement. But Protestant theology gave rise to
the idea that contracts were covenants, “which,
Protestantism converged to aid in
the rise of liberal thought in the
18th century . . .
I Shall Love All Mankind.
although freely made, once entered into [were]
absolute.” Thus, by the middle of the 17th century,
Protestant courts had no obligation to try
to bring about a general moral good when they
adjudicated cases on property and contracts.
While much of the jurisprudence in Catholic
countries relied on a view of limited property
rights that might allow their societies to realize
God’s intention for all of His creation to be commonly
held, the moral and legal thought in
Protestant countries more often argued that the
best way to look after the weak and needy was
for each person to become as wealthy as possible
and then give freely of that wealth. As the
Enlightenment progressed, this vision blossomed
into the liberal tradition as we know it,
and into an insistence on ever more absolute
property rights, sacrosanct from intrusion by
church or state (except, curiously, when the
state enforced them), with any means of redressing
social or economic inequality primarily
beholden to a citizen’s own conscience.
Of course, in both strains of Christianity, human
beings can hardly be trusted with the careful
stewardship of limited resources -“The heart
is deceitful above all things, and desperately
wicked,” says the Lord - but the Protestant theology
that followed from this period left little
room for coercion by church or state. Other factors
besides Protestantism converged to aid in
the rise of liberal thought in the 18th century -
shifting economic possibilities, a burgeoning interest
in the sciences,
and the specter and
reality of civil war, to
name a few - but at the
root of it was a perspective
of the world
that centered on the individual. “When no human
power can direct or absolve the conscience,
it is the conscience that becomes the
true sovereign,” Ryrie writes, and the conscience,
more often than not, demands to be left
to its own devices.
Where could the elevation of the individual
conscience and the bifurcation of holy pursuits
from profane politics lead? Enlightenment liberalism
was not, and is not, capitalism; the for-