The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
co-operation or could be connected with achievements or qualities of their own faith and will. At the time of Luther's greatest religious creativeness, when he was capable of writing his Freiheit eines Christenmenschen, God's secret decree was also to him most definitely the sole and ultimate source of his state of religious grace.[11] Even later he did not formally abandon it. But not only did the idea not assume a central position for him, but it receded more and more into the background, the more his position as responsible head of his Church forced him into practical politics. Melancthon quite deliberately avoided adopting the dark and dangerous teaching in the Augsburg Confession, and for the Church fathers of Lutheranism it was an article of faith that grace was revocable (amissibilis), and could be won again by penitent humility and faithful trust in the word of God and in the sacraments.
With Calvin the process was just the opposite; the significance of the doctrine for him increased,[12] perceptibly in the course of his polemical controversies with theological opponents. It is not fully developed until the third edition of his Institutes, and only gained its position of central prominence after his death in the great struggles which the Synods of Dordrecht and Westminster sought to put an end to. With Calvin the decretum horribile is derived not, as with Luther, from religious experience, but from the logical necessity of his thought; therefore its importance increases with every increase in the logical consistency of that religious thought. The interest of it is solely in God, not in man; God does not exist for men, but men for the sake of
