Predestination

Predestination

Is central tp Calvin’s doctrine. According to the protestant ethic. The fact that it was impossible for Calvin’s followers to know if they belonged to the select few or not caused “religious anxiety” among them and was generally experienced as “intolerable”. The response to this situation was an unrelenting attempt by the Calvinists to control their behavior as well as a search for “signs” that they were not among the damned. Success in the business was interpreted as such a sign or as a “confirmation”. “inner-worldly asceticism and the disciplined quest for salvation in a vocation pleasing to God were the sources of the virtuosity in acquisitiveness characteristic of the puritan”. In his sociology of religion weber notes that one would expect predestination to lead to fatalism, but that it also may inspire the believer to great activity, in an attempt to realize God’s design on earth. The reason for this, according to weber, had to do with the fact that “the Mohammedan idea was that of predetermination, not predestination and was applied to fate in this world, not in the next”. Finally, predestination constitutes one of the three consistent forms of theodicy. It is clear that predestination is at the very center of weber’s argument in The Protestant Ethic, and it is also clear that weber presents no empirical evidence on how the believer’s methodical behavior in religious matters spread to his or her behavior in economic matters. According to weber, behind the Calvinist predestination of mystery lies the absolutization of God and disempowerment of the human agency, which generates “an unimaginably great ethical chasm between the transcendental God and the human being continuously enmeshed in the toils of new sin”. God’s Providence is so absolutely transcendental and his will so inscrutable that they lie completely beyond the reach of human comprehension. Trying to make sense of God itself indicates an insufficient faith, and at best, only a...