Christianity and money–
This article provides some very interesting history of the relationship between Christianity and money between the time of Constantine, when Christianity and the Roman state became aligned, up through Aquinas in the Late Middle Ages with a quick peak at the 19th century.
The article confirms my perception of this history that the Church remained wary of the “root of all kinds of evil”, i.e. money well past the time of Constantine. Since that is obviously not the case now across Christendom, when did it change?
Tracing the Church’s attitude toward usury provides an answer. Deep in one of the oldest sections of the Hebrew bible, the Book of Covenant found in the 21st and 22nd chapters of Exodus, is a prohibition against charging interest, also known as usury, to debtors who are poor or fellow Hebrews. (Exodus 22:25-27). By the time one of the last books of the histories was written, a loan charging interest was specifically called massa( מַשָּׁא ), usually translated as “usury.” Moving to the Greek bible, Luke is the preeminent class warrior among all New Testament writers. He has Jesus challenging creditors to not even expect their principle back, much less interest.
The Church took these texts seriously. At the Council of Nicea in 325 CE, the same council that pronounced Arianism a heresy and proclaimed Jesus as “begotten not made,” a canon was enacted prohibiting clergy from charging interest. By the time of the Lateran II council in 1179, regulation of interest on loans was expanded to laypersons who were prohibited from partaking in the sacrament if they engaged in usury.
So if the Church persisted in the long tradition of prohibiting usury, which amounts to prohibiting capitalism, all the way up to the 12th century, when did it change? This bit of history from a answer to a query in The Guardian lays the blame on one person in particular:
The taking of interest was forbidden to clerics from AD 314. It was strictly forbidden for laymen in 1179. The beginning of the end as far as the total ban on interest was concerned came in the sixteenth century. Although Luther and Zwingli still condemned it utterly, Calvin and some progressive Catholic thinkers such as Collet and Antoine argued that interest-taking did not constitute usury, as long as it represented the real difference between the value of present and future sums of money, and was not mere extortion.
The accommodation between the Calvinist branch of Christianity and Mammon was cemented by the Calvinist doctrine of election. Christians have always asked the questions, “Why are some saved and others damned?” Calvin’s answer was “God decides,” in other words, God elected some to salvation and others to damnation as part of his foreknowing at the time of Creation. Wow. So what I think I’ve chosen means little to nothing. What matters is whether God has elected me or not. How can I know? The Calvinists’ answer was, “Check your bank account.” Completely opposite of Luther, who suggested true Christians were the poor and weak in society, Calvinists looked to one’s prosperity as an indicator of God’s favor and election to salvation.
So a religion that is described as “communist” has become, in the form of the Calvinism that has shaped American Christianity more than any other denomination, a faith that finds a rich capitalist as the one most likely to succeed at salvation as well as capitalism. Jesus, who told the rich young man to get rid of his money if he wanted to be saved, had been turned upside down.
