Calvin on Work: What a Sixteenth-Century Theology of Labor Can Teach Us Today

Written on 10/13/2026
Jon Balserak

“To work is to survive, not live,” many today will say. In modern popular culture, this complaint is often directed at something specific, namely, the “Protestant work ethic.” Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) drew a direct line from sixteenth-century Reformed theology to modern free-market Capitalism—which has been blamed for […]