Should commerce be tolerated?
Should we merce? Should people be allowed to conduct business, buy and sell, make a profit, and even make their livings doing so? The question appears in, of all places, the monumental Theological Commonplaces of the Lutheran scholastic theologian, Johann Gerhard (1582–1637). Gerhard specifically asks merce ought to be tolerated “in a Christian state”—that is, in a state such as the officially Lutheran one in which Gerhard lived and taught in the early seventeenth century. Gerhard raises the question because...