M. Weber's Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (10)

The sects developed from the Baptistic movement, or briefly Baptistic Sects, are regarded by Weber as primary and positive in the doctrine as compared to Calvinism, while Pietism and Methodism are thought secondary and passive to Calvinism both in the doctrines and the ascetic ethics. One of the decisive characteristics of Baptistic Sects was just their 'sects' which mean the church originally invisible in heven concreted visible on earth by the genuine Christians with their voluntary will. And the doctrine of these sects was different from that of old Protestantism and also from that of Cathoricism. It was that the bless could be given only by the manifestation i. e. the work of God's spirit within one's soul; - the Renaissence of the pneumatic theory of early Christianism. There were two moments distinct in the religious mind of Baptistic Sects : (1)Bibliocracy and (2)waiting for the manifestation. The first generation of Baptistic Sects thought that only 'the awakened' were the 'brothers of Christ', because they were made of the spirit of God, and held the Bibliocracy in the meaning of esteem and acquirement of the way of the Apostl's life. This was accompanied with aversion to uninevitable intercourse with worldly life - difference from Calvinism - and with repugnance to any appreciation and worship of creature and so of worldly pleasure - alikeness to Calvinism. However, Baptistic Sects had another moment of religious mind strong enough to restrict its Bibliocracy. What had been revealed and described in the Bible was not all but a part of God's words and the words were to be manifested continuously from the past to the present, so that not only the Bible but also the revelation to each conscience of the believers was to be adored. This idea, which prized the 'subjective' conscience, led to complete the liberation from all the magics and so from the salvation by the church - to the same effect of Calvinism. Alikeness with Calvinism is also seen in the doctrine that the bless by God, once given, was never lost because this was the work of God and made the men free from all the sins, and, with some slight difference in this turn, that the bless was to be endowed not to all but to some i. e. to the limited number of 'the grown-up'. As well as in Calvinism, 'good deed' in Baptistic Sects was the inevit- able sign of one's blessed state; but the deed in the early Baptistic Sects was thought to be far from the worldly life and worked passively to the economic occupation. The ethical life in this sense was supposed to be needed in waiting for the manifestation; it meant the preparation for the revelation because the spirit of God spoke only to the soul soothed and cooled by the ethical deed. The idea of coolness was accepted in the minds of broad circle when Baptistic movement spreaded into the regular lives of the worldly occupations, and then the people with these occupations began to controll their very wordly lives by their conscience; - a notable change in the religious mind of Baptistic Sects, I think. The membership of the citizens pressed Baptistic Sects to proceed now on the soil of worldly asceticism prepared by Calvinism. This was forced also by the Protestant notion that asceticism in monkery was adoration of creature and anti-Bible, and stimulated by the rejection of politics and by the hostility to the aristcratic life style. Worldly asceticism in Baptistic Sects was activated more by the spontaneousness in Baptistic Sects which valued the free will of its members instead of the regulation by the church-police which persecuted people with close examination and oppressed their autonomy in asceticism. From all the observations above, Weber concludes that Baptistic Sects did not give any remarkably new contribution to the development of the idea of calling, and so are to be ignored at large in the following stages of his study. But we can not forget the moment of conscience which Baptistic Sects added to Calvinism and brought into the cool and formal legality of the Calvinistic mind some virtues of warmness as seen in B. Franklin