Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
What did John Calvin think about economics?
What did John Calvin think about economics?
Jul 4, 2025 12:49 AM

“It is odd to call someone so famous an ‘underrated thinker’ but indeed Calvin is,” says economist Tyler Cowen. One of the reasons Calvin is so underrated is that he is so often misunderstood. Most people’s perception of Calvin is not based on his work but on the most dour members of the group we now call Calvinists (which includes me, though I’m not crazy about that label).

Calvin was one of the best minds of his day. From an early age, he was a precocious student who excelled at Latin and philosophy. He was prepared to go to study of theology in Paris, when his father decided he should e a lawyer. Calvin spent half a decade at the University of Orleans studying law, a subject he did not love.

Calvin wrote hismagnum opus, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, at the age of 27(!) (though he updated the work and published new editions throughout his life). The work was intended as an elementary manual for those who wanted to know something about the evangelical faith—“the whole sum of godliness and whatever it is necessary to know about saving doctrine.”

Calvin was a bit of a workaholic. During his ministry in Geneva, he preached over two thousand sermons. He would preach almost every weekday, and twice on Sunday, for more than an hour—all without using any notes. And asChristian Historynotes, when he could not walk the couple of hundred yards to church, he was carried in a chair to preach. When the doctor forbade him to go out in the winter air to the lecture room, he crowded the audience into his bedroom and gave lectures there. To those who would urge him to rest, he asked, “What? Would you have the Lord find me idle when es?”

Along with preaching, Calvin was preoccupied with the creation of acollège, an institute for the education of children. Although the school was a single institution, it was divided into two parts: a grammar school called thecollègeand an advanced school called theacadémie. Within five years there were 1,200 students in the grammar school and 300 in the advanced school. The collège eventually became the Collège Calvin, one of the college preparatory schools of Geneva, while the académie became the University of Geneva.

So while Calvin was a theologian and academic, he wasn’t cloistered away in an ivory tower. He was a man engaged with the world and a keen observer of humanity. Not surprisingly, he had a lot to say about economic affairs. (As Cowen says, “If you read John Calvin you will find a great deal of what we now call behavioral economics.”)

My friend Steven Wedgeworth recently wrote an article examining Calvin’s thought on economics:

We will begin by laying out Calvin’s general philosophy of the social nature of humanity and property, then we will examine what Calvin thought about the uniquely Christian duties of charity. We will conclude with Calvin’s mendations for how the church and civil magistrate ought to order these ideals in ecclesiastical and political life.

In his conclusion Wedgeworth writes,

Thus we see Calvin’s “economics.” They were not unique for his day. While Calvin did introduce an interesting and helpful distinction regarding just and unjust forms of interest on loans, he was not a revolutionary thinker. It’s also worth remembering that the population of Geneva never reached more than about 7,000 people in Calvin’s time. So its polity cannot simply be cut and pasted onto larger and more diverse ones.

Still, his ideals and interpretations of natural law and Christian charity are valuable. Seeing how he enacted them in church and state is also a helpful illustration of legitimate applications of those principles. In a time when economic choices are often presented as a variation of Scylla and Charybdis, the older example of Protestant Christendom may help us to find better solutions.

You can read the rest of Wedgeworth’s article here.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Video: Michael Matheson Miller on Technocracy and The Global Political Consensus
The 2016 Acton Lecture Series continued on March 3rd at Acton’s Mark Murray Auditorium with an address by Acton Research Fellow and Producer ofPoverty, Inc.Michael Matheson Miller. Miller’s topic for the day was “Technocracy and The Global Political Consensus.” Many of our current political and social challenges center around the fundamental question of what it means to be a human being, and our understanding of what it means to live an authentic human life. The answers to these questions will...
7 Figures: NPR/Harvard Survey on Patients’ Perspectives on Health Care
A new survey by NPR and Harvard University reports the self-reported experiences of health care consumers across the country, in states that have (New Jersey, Ohio, Oregon) and have not (Florida, Kansas, Texas) expanded Medicaid, and in one (Wisconsin) that did not have to expand Medicare. Here are seven figures you should know from the report: 1. When asked about its effects on the people of their state, more than a third (35 percent) of adults say they believe national...
Race, mass incarceration, and drug policy
With the 2010 publication of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Ohio State University law professor Michelle Alexander, the conversation about America’s exploding prison population singularly became focused on the intersection of race, poverty, and the War on Drugs. According to the narrative, the drug war disproportionately targets blacks in lower munities as a means of social control via the criminal justice system similarly to the way Jim Crow controlled blacks in the early...
How American Protectionism is Like a Foreign Naval Blockade
The evening news reports there has been plete blockade of the U.S. On the East Coast of the United States, Russian forces have instituted a naval and air blockade, similar to the one being imposed by China on our West Coast. A similar blockade has been set up on the borders of Canada and Mexico. The blockade is somewhat porous. People are allowed to pass through freely (but only if they are not trying to enter the U.S. illegally). Exports...
Alabama Church Pays Off Payday Loans
About twenty years ago I made some terrible choices and found myself in a serious financial bind. The amount I needed wasn’t much — about $200 — but without it I wouldn’t have been able to pay my rent. I took out a payday loan that cost me $30 every two weeks. It took about eight weeks to get clear of the loan, resulting in a cost of $120 to borrow $200 for two months. Was I fooling myself thinking...
How to Understand the Folk Marxism of Trump Supporters
The phenomenon that is Donald Trump and his presidential campaign can only truly be understood when you recognize his basic appeal: he’s bringing a brand of folk Marxism to an entirely new audience. Before we unpack what this means, we must first understand what it does not mean. Folk Marxism is not Classical Marxism, much munism. Marxism has so many varieties that even Karl Marx once said, “what is certain is that I myself am not a Marxist.” Folk Marxism...
Is America Too Religious to Be Socialist?
Since its development as a political movement in the 1700s, socialism has spread to numerous nations, especially in Asia and Africa. Yet even when the U.S. government began adopting socialist policies (see: the New Deal), Americans tended to reject any direct connectionsto socialism. Why is that? One possible answer may be that America is simply too religious. As Andrew R. Lewis and Paul A. Djupe of FiveThirtyEight explain: To understand the relationship between socialist values and religion, we used the...
Working for Our Neighbor: A Lutheran Approach to Vocation and Economic Life
“If you are a manual laborer, you find that the Bible has been put into your workshop, into your hand, into your heart. It teaches and preaches how you should treat your neighbor.” –Martin Luther Christian’s Library Press has now released Working for Our Neighbor, Gene Veith’s Lutheran primer on vocation, economics, and ordinary life. The book joins Acton’s growing series of tradition-specific, faith-work primers, whichalsoincludes Baptist, Wesleyan, Pentecostal, and Reformed perspectives. Veith, who describesMartin Luther as “the great theologian...
Hail, GMO Cassava!
Oh, dear! GMO cassava can potentially feed millions on the African continent? Heaven forfend![/caption]If you grew up outside the African and South American continents you can be forgiven for thinking cassava is the latest variation of salsa music or perhaps the funky new energy beverage trendy hipsters are drinking these days. In Africa, however, 500 million individuals recognize cassava as a dietary staple much like the rest of the world enjoys potatoes and rice. Native to South America, cassava was...
How to Understand GDP
What is Gross Domestic Product (GDP)? The definition is rather straightforward: GDP is the market value of all finished goods and services, produced within a country in a year. But that’s not very useful in trying to understand the concept. In this video by Marginal Revolution University, they mend thinking ofthe economy as a giant supermarket, with billions of goods and services inside. At the checkout line, you watch as the cashier rings up the price for each finished good...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved