Luther’s reading of the Bible was colored by his outlook at any given time, and in the course of his development between about 1518 and about 1530, this not only remained traditionalist, but also became more and more traditionalist.

Ethical programs of reform have never been of central concern to any of the Reformers. They are not the founders of societies of “ethical culture” or representatives of humanitarian programs of social reform or of cultural ideas. We shall therefore have to be prepared for the cultural effects of the Reformation to be in large measure unforeseen and indeed unwished for consequences of the work of the Reformers, often far removed from, or even in virtual opposition to, everything that they themselves had in mind.

The Austrian Ferdinand Kürnberger in his corrosively witty Portrait of American Culture (1855) summed up the Americans this way: They turn cattle into tallow, and people into money. The essence of this philosophy of avarice is the idea of the duty of the individual to work toward the increase of his wealth, which is assumed to be en end in itself.

When Jakob Fugger was approached by a business colleague who had retired and was trying to persuade him to do the same, as he had “spent enough time making money and should now give others a chance,” Fugger dismissed this suggestion as “pusillanimous,” responding that he intended to go on making money as long as he could. The “spirit” of this response differs in obvious ways from that of [Ben] Franklin: what in the case of Fugger expresses commercial daring and a personal inclination, ethically neutral, has for Franklin the character of an ethically slanted maxim for the conduct of life. This is the specific sense in which we propose to use the concept of the “spirit of capitalism.”

A way of thinking like that expressed by Benjamin Franklin was applauded by an entire nation. But in medieval times it would have been denounced as an expression of the most filthy avarice and of an absolutely contemptible attitude.