max weber the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism

Even if for the present we quite ignore the questions, of government and organization which do not interest us here, the facts are just the same. It is true that both the mass of the adherents and especially the staunchest champions of that ascetic movement which, in the broadest sense of a highly ambiguous word, has been called Puritanism, did attack the foundations of Anglicanism but even here the differences were only gradually worked out in the course of the struggle. As Pietism shows, the transition to Lutheranism is also gradual, and the same is true of Calvinism and the Anglican Church, though both in external character and in the spirit of its most logical adherents the latter is more closely related to Catholicism. And, even in the Independent sects of England and Holland at the beginning of the seventeenth century the transition was not abrupt. But in the Baptism of the latter part of the seventeenth century they were in close contact. Calvinism and Baptism were at the beginning of their development sharply opposed to each other.

Only the faction dominated by Zinzendorf, and affected by lingering Hussite and Calvinistic influences within the Moravian brotherhood, was forced, like Methodism against its will, to form a peculiar sort of sect. Though the dogmatic adjustment was not entirely satisfactory, it remained a movement within the Lutheran Church. It remained loosely connected with orthodoxy, shading off from it by imperceptible gradations, until at the end of the seventeenth century it was absorbed into Lutheranism under Spener’s leadership. Pietism first split off from the Calvinistic movement in England, and especially in Holland. Only in the course of its development, especially in its extension to America, did it become separate from the Anglican Church. Methodism, which first arose in the middle of the eighteenth century within the Established Church of England, was not, in the minds of its founders, intended to form a new Church, but only a new awakening of the ascetic spirit within the old. None of these movements was completely separated from the others, and even the distinction from the non-ascetic Churches of the Reformation is never perfectly clear. In history there have been four principal forms of ascetic Protestantism (in the sense of word here used): (1) Calvinism in the form which it assumed in the main area of its influence in Western Europe, especially in the seventeenth century (2) Pietism (3) Methodism (4) the sects growing out of the Baptist movement. The Religious Foundations of Worldly Asceticism Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

Max weber the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism