Christianization of Usury in Modern Europe

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The Christianization of Usury inEarly Modern Europe

MARK VALERI

Professorof ChurchHistory

Union Presbyterian Seminary

In the early seventeenth century, the beginning of Europe's commercial revolution forced reconsiderations

of the use of credit in longdistance trade. Unlike their Catholic competitors, Protestant regimes depended

on the exchange of paper securities and other credit instruments. Protestant moralists developed rational

izations for usury as a concerted effort to protect the Protestant interest in the context of imperial warfare

and colonial settlementBythe end of the seventeenth century, these moralists had made modern, mar-

ket-oriented conceptions of usury commonplace in the Chnstian West

In 1611,the chaplain to the Lord High Chancellor of England, also a member of the committeethat produced the King James Bible that same year, completed a lengthy study of usury. RogerFentorsA TreatiseofUsunebecame an authonty for Anglican and Puntan readers alike. Fentonbegan with a complaintLondoners practiced usury at every point in business. Wildly mixing meta

phors from England's woolen industry, nascent manufacturing, and a newly fashionable taste for

watches, Fenton asserted that usury was ". . . so woven and twisted into every trade and commerce,

one moving another, by this engine, like wheels in a clocke, that it seemeth the very frame and courseof traffick must needes be altered before this can be reformed."1 Given its importance to all facets of

trade, Fenton argued, usury ought not to be analyzed as merely a technicality of interest rates, loan

contracts, and investment fees. It ought to be condemned wholesale and unequivocally as the rot at the

core of England's economic corruption.

Fenton compiled one text upon another to the same effect any lending for profit, any use of

credit as a commodity, any fees or interest attached to any loans whatsoever, amounted to sin. The

standard scnptural passagesfrom Exod 22, Lev25,Deut23,Ps15,and Ezek 18said so Ancient

moralists and the Patnstic authones confirmed the point Moreover, the great theologians of the Pro

testant Reformation all condemned usury out of hand: Luther and Melanchthon, Calvin and Bucer,

Junius and Zanchi. Fenton dwelled on Calvin, who blasted French merchants for creating complicated

measures to profit from loans, yet avoided the technical term "usury." By Fenton's reading, Calvin

decned usury as uncivil, inhumane, and obnoxious Case closed.2

Some eighty years after Fenton's pronouncements, an even more popular and more widely pub

lished Anglican divine, Archbishop of Canterbury John Tillotson, preached several sermons on Chns-

1Roger Fenton A Treatise of Usurte (London 1611) 2


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APRIL 2011 Interpretation 143

tian calling, or economic vocation. Like Fenton, Tillotson warned against avarice and covetousness.

Yet, quite unlike his predecessor, the archbishop had nothing unkind to say about usury. Tillotson dis

missed OT prohibitions against the practice, explaining that they applied only to primitive agricultural

economies. He urged London's merchants to use any profitable tactic as long as they minded their

manners and kept their hearts pure. Tillotson was not alone. Other Anglican moralists in London,

Dutch reformed ministers in Amsterdam, French Calvinist pastors in exile, and Puritan preachers in

Boston all had come to the same conclusion by the last decade of the seventeenth century. Usury no

longer deserved to be called a sin.3

AN ECONOMIC REVOLUTION

Fenton's and Tillotson's writings suggest two opening observations on the history of Christian

teaching about usury. First, few topics aroused such extensive debate from the mid-sixteenth through

the seventeenth centuries as did usury. Economic counselors to the French and English crowns, pro

pagandists for overseas trading companies in the Netherlands and England, humanist essayists

throughout Europe, municipal officials in the North American colonies, writers of devotional tracts,

preachers, authors of formal thologieeveryone wrote about usury.

Usury sparked such debate because it represented an economic revolution. The exchange of

credit for profit held together an ensemble of new economic practices that made the western market

system during this period. Widespread commercial networks depended on an expanding number of

instruments to transfer wealth: minted money (specie) and paper money to be sure, but also book

debts,private notes of credit, printed merchants' notes, bonds, mortgages, and insurance policies.

Just as one might associate "capitalism" today with controversial financial instruments, such as hedge

funds or derivatives, that divide moral commentators into critics and supporters of a free market, so,

too,with usury. Those like Tillotson, who legitimated usurywho discarded ancient prohibitions,

replaced moral invective with technical economic recommendations, or merely omitted critique of

loan practicesunderstood the emergent economy as a means of national prosperity and social inte

gration. Those like Fenton, who blasted usury with Scripture and tradition, interpreted the market

system as a threat to the economic order and tool for selfish individualism. When commentators

pulled the thread of usury, they unraveled the fabric of the whole commercial order.

In the midst of such transformations, moral commentators through the seventeenth century

faced a genuine dilemma. What had been a consensus across major Christian movementsusury was

in all respects a sinfractured into qualifications, judgments that varied according to circumstance, and

downright contradictions. The very term "usury" stood for an ever-changing array of exchange tech

niques: taking any interest on loans, making loan contracts that embedded fees or late payments, charg-

3John Tillot on Th W k f th M t R dJ h Till t (London 1712 [p bli hed po th mo l ] 259 88) See for


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144 Interpretation APRIL 2011

ing more than the legal limit on loans (typically from 5% to 8%), raising prices for rent or other neces

saries taken on credit, making commercial deals that in any effect guaranteed a profit to the lender, and

manipulating exchange rates for payment in foreign currency. Apart from Catholic teaching (and here,

too,there were differences among ecclesiastical and theological officials), no tradition developed an

authoritative rule for such a plethora of lending practices. Seventeenth-century Christians confronted

"usury" with different definitions, justified some forms of it while rejecting others, changed opinions,

and expressed as much ambivalence, if not confusion, as they did moral certainty.

The difference in perspective from Fenton to Tillotson suggests a second observation: during the

seventeenth century, the dominant teaching in Christian Europe about usury changed. Despite contin

uing redefinitions and moral deliberation, this is clear: at the beginning of the century, most Western

Christians read Scripture to include strictures against the exchange of credit for profit, and at the end

of the century, they read Scripture to allow for it Divines such as Tillotson and his contemporaries

dismissed over 1500 years of Christian prohibitions against usury. They represented the Christianiza-

tion of an economic practice that has since become known as modern, rational, and unavoidable.

This remarkable transition has often been portrayed as the result of the Protestant, and particu

larly Calvinist, Reformation. So, the story often goes, ancient and medieval moralists inhabited an

Aristotelian economic universe where consumable commodities and money occupied quite different

spaces.4Commodities could be sold for a profitfor more than the cost of producing or procuring

them. This was the case because they kept their value when transferred between seller and buyera

bushel of wheat or gallon of wine were worth no less when sold than before. Indeed, they were worth

more because of the added value of the seller's labor. Money, however, functioned in theory as a mere

sign of value. It was an empty marker, its only worth lay in its power to effect exchange. As a mere

medium for trade, then, by necessity it could not increase in value during business transactions. The

use (Latinusura,fromwhich we get "usury") of money as a means of profit in and of itselfto make

money merely from lending moneywas a misuse. It imputed to money real value past the point of

exchange. It moved the medium of exchange into the realm of commodity. In the process, it changed

the meaning of what ought to have been a constant sign. Making money from loans was akin to using

a ruler to measure cloth while changing the length of an inch every time a measurement was made.

That was why Scripture unequivocally condemned it It was not merely that moneylenders often op

pressed poor borrowers. The poor could be oppressed by any number of other means, including high

prices orrents.Usury was especially perverse because it was all a ruse. It was sheer theft.

According to this commonly received narrative, Catholic moralists maintained that usury was

unconditionally and universally wrong. Humanists of the Renaissance, along with a few of the earliest

4For one e ample of thi common narrati e ee Norman Jone "U r " EH NetEnc clopedia U r


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USURY Interpretation 145

reformers trained in Catholic moral theology, such as Luther, condemned usury, even as Venetian and

Baltic merchants began to discover the vast profits to be made by lending money for overseas trading

ventures or for the creation of domestic markets. The Roman Catholic church accordingly maintained

anti-usury rules through this period and beyond. A 1745 papal edict reasserted the unlawfulness of the

practice. Only in the mid-nineteenth century did the church loosen its prohibitions, chiefly through a

series of rulings by the Roman Congregations that never officially rescinded the 1745 decree, but that

nonetheless narrowed the definition of "usury ' to overly oppressive interest rates inflicted on impov

erished debtors.5

Reformed Protestants, especially John Calvin, supposedly broke the Catholic framework6They

observed that in fact, the value of money changed through time, despite medieval theory. In the ex

panding commercial milieu of Protestant, urban centers, price inflation rendered a pound worth so

much grain one year, and less the next The creditor who loaned one pound in 1555 and received a

pound in return in 1557 might in fact lose money. Some interest merely kept pace with price inflation.

More importantly, the opportunity for long-distance exchange transformed money into a means of

production. Merchants invested in trading ventures rather than in agriculture or manufactures, and

deserved a return on i t Given such assumptions, Aristotelian conceptions of the "sterility' ' of money

appeared to be outdated. There remained little reason to interpret Scripture on usury to mean any

profit from a loan.

Writers such as Calvin accordingly distinguished between a legitimate increase on credit andegregious or uncharitable returns on loans, especially to poor debtors. Calvinists sometimes called the

latter "usury" in the sense of necessarily vicious (they referred to OT prohibitions againstnsk,trans

lated as ''biting usury") Their arguments were altogether different than those made by the Catholic

schoolmen. Informed by a Protestant emphasis on faith and a personal appropriation of Scripture,

they defined commercial ethics by the standard of internal motive rather than by the canons of eccle

siastical authority. Intention, in other words, often marked the line between good and bad loan prac

tices. The Reformers, according to this reading, had deconstructed medieval objections to usury and

opened the way for modern commercial uses of credit

It took a generation of Protestant moralists to realize the implications of this innovation and to

overcome medieval scruples, but overcome they did. Calvinists thus led the way through the seven

teenth century. Puritan divines, their parishioners in London, and their devotees in New England built

small trading firms and whole colonial economies out of the exchange of credit. Huguenot financiers

chafed against Catholic teaching and, exiled by French royal persecution, moved throughout the Atlan

tic world to create long-distance mercantile networks. Dutch Reformed bankers transformed Amster

dam and Leiden into fiscal powerhouses, the envy of other European cities. By the time Archbishop

5h


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Tillotson came along, Reformed leaders had created a new Protestant economic mentalityfocused

on individual conscience rather than external regulation, ready to dispense with traditional teachings on

exchange, and eager to profit from newly established commercial networks held together by credit.

Tillotson merely gave formal Anglican recognition to a widespread shift in moral perspective.

This Protestant-as-opposed-to-Catholic reading of usuryismisleading. Many Catholic moralists

anticipated the supposedly Calvinist argument long before Calvin. As early as 1467, the papacy had val

idated Italian "charity banks" that charged interest on loans to Venetian merchants and used the profits

for charitable purposes. Late medieval theologians suchasJean Gerson, Gabriel Biel, and John Eck

(who was deeply indebted to the Fugger banker family) explicitly criticized the ancient assumption that

usury was fraudulent by nature. They reasoned that long-distance trade and banking had changed the

meaning of money, from a mere measure of exchange value to a means of investment in commercial

ventures. Thatis,even pre-Reformation schoolmen recognized that the new function of money justi

fied interest on credit within legal limitsan opinion that did not, they argued, contradict scriptural

and traditional prohibitions against oppressing debtors.7

Moreover, Protestant teaching was not as lenient as the standard narrative claims. Fenton's cri

tiques reflected a widespread Protestant assumption through the early seventeenth-century that mak

ing a profit from credit often violated scriptural norms for justice, despite the fact that most Euro

pean states, including England, legalized interest rates from 6% to 8% on domestic loans and 10% on

overseas credit

CALVIN AND GENEVA

Calvin serves as a telling case in point8In a city so dependent on trade as Geneva, he could

hardly condemn all new credit practices. He promoted the establishment of a public bank and sup

ported a 5% revenue on loans given to traders who used the funds for business ventures. His earliest

writing on usury, a 1545 letter to Sachinus, a conscience-stricken German merchant operating out of

Baltic ports, explained that making a such a profit was not illicit if the creditor shared the risk of the

venture. Thatis,if the project produced no profits, then the creditor was due no increase. Calvin's

advice followed Genevan precedent and Catholic teaching already in placethe allowance for a mod

est income from loans given as commercial investments. He effectively affirmed an emerging distinc

tion between what we now call commercial credit and consumer credit The former was allowable

within strict limits. The latter, which included any loans not immediately used for speculative ventures,

was usurious in the sense of illicit and deplorable. Scriptural prohibitions, thatis,applied especially to

consumer credit or personal loans between individuals.

7See John T Noonan The ScholasticAnalysis of Usury (Cambridge Mass : Harvard University Press 1957) There are


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Historians eager to describe Calvin as a promoter of modern credit practices often cite his letter

to Sachinus, but Calvin's understanding of usury was relatively conservative. He grew critical of city

merchants who, without using the term "usury," deployed various tactics to gain from needy immi

grants or indigent Genevans. They lent money to farmers during the winter and demanded repayment

when grain prices reached their highest levels, reaping profits of as much as 30%. They levied spurious

fees on loans, such as penalties for late payments or charges for currency exchange or drafting con

tracts. They hid high interest rates by fixing contracts so that the debtor agreed to a 5% annual interest

rate, yet was obliged to pay the principal and a year's interest within the first month of the loan, mak

ing for a 60% annual rate. During the 1550s and early 1560s, Calvin's criticisms of such practices rose

to a condemnation of nearly all forms of usury. Eventually, he turned against even legally sanctioned

uses of commercial credit He filled his social commentary with denunciations of financiers and their

abuse of credit,finallyconcluding that a well-run commonwealth would outlaw usury completely.

Calvin matched his rhetoric with practical discipline. The Genevan Consistory, with the reformer

as its leader, conducted a near witch hunt for usurers during periods of economic strain in the city. It

hounded suspected usurers, from small-time loan brokers to large-scale grain merchants. Devoting

over one-fifth of its disciplinary trials to various forms of usury, the Consistory issued dozens of pun

ishments, ranging from verbal admonishment to excommunication and, ultimately, to civil fines and

expulsion from the city. Calvin's admirers in late-sixteenth and early seventeenth-century Europe re

membered him as a fierce opponent of the new forms of usury fueling Europe's growing commercial

economy.

Geneva was not unique in this regard. Taking its cue from Calvin (indeed, quoting him at length),

the Reformed Church of France issued national edicts from 1559 to 1567 that condemned usury.

They forbade bankers from taking communion, linking those who made money from credit to pirates

and hucksters. The Dutch Reformed Church did its French counterpart one better. National synods

from 1574 through 1620 listed lombards, or bankers, not only alongside pirates and hucksters, but also

acrobats, clowns, and prostitutes. The synods banned lombards from the Lord's Supper and suspended

high-flying financiers such as Isaac LeMaire for their usurious practices. Academic divines such as

Gisbert Voetius and city preachers suchasJacobus Triglund legitimated this discipline with detailed

accounts of the corruptions of Amsterdam's financial exchange, the cupidity of merchants, and the

intrinsic evil of commodifying credit at every opportunity.9

Calvinists in England adopted the same teaching. Puritan pastors and divines urged severe restric

tions on loan practices through the mid-seventeenth century and wielded church discipline against vio

lators. True enough, they allowed small rates of interest that kept pace with inflation. They also per-

9S Th "A t D i i d D " f th R f d Ch h f F d i thi i d i t d i J h


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mitted commercial investment for profit, as long as the creditor bore the risk of investment This

allowance, however, did not preclude prohibitions against contracts that guaranteed profits to creditors

and thereby took unfair advantage of debtors who alone bore risks but shared rewards. Puritan au

thorities such as William Perkins, William Ames, and John Cotton, along with lesserlights,condemned

merchants' increasing reliance on guaranteed interest on loans.10

Social commentators and moralists in London, such as the humanist jurist Thomas Wilson, the

economic writer Gerard de Malynes, Anglican divines such as Fenton, and Puritan preachers decried

the various schemes by which creditors made profits without active production and labor, as though

the mere elapse of time enhanced the value of their money. like today's financial wizards, England's

early modern usurers appeared one step ahead of moral critics, always innovating ways to sell credit.

Landlords raised rents for those taking room on credit Shopkeepers inflated prices for goods sold on

credit. Financiers accepted mortgages for collateral and received rents from the mortgaged land on

top of repayment for the original loan. Merchants devalued securities with future redemption dates

or attached insurance fees to bonds. By the 1620s, usury had become, for its critics, a synecdoche for

nearly every form of avaricious dealing.11

Resistance from the Crown prevented these Anglicans and Puritans from enacting formal ecclesi

astical censure against usury, but Puritan immigrants to New England seized the opportunity to model

a Genevan-style discipline in the New Worid. During the first decades of setdement in Massachusetts

Bay, Puritan churches worked in concert with the civil government, or General Court, to punish mer

chants who charged interest on consumer loans or profited from indigent debtors. The court enacted

a 5% ceiling on commercial interest Pastors during the 1630s and 1640s brought suspected offenders

before church courts for censure or excommunication.

Yet even in Massachusetts, anti-usury sentiment faded by the end of the 1680s. Preachers such as

Boston's Samuel Willard, New England's most accomplished theologian before Jonathan Edwards,

attacked medieval restrictions as hopelessly irrelevant to modern commerce. In 1699, Boston pastor

Cotton Mather informed New Englanders that Puritan ministers no longer regarded usury as sinful.

Meeting as the Cambridge Synod, they had determined that usury, or "anAdvanceon any thing lent bycontract" (thatis,as a guaranteed fee or interest rate) was legitimated by the T)ivine Law" of the OT,

given "countenance" in the NT, 'Justified" by economic "Necessity and Utility," mandated by the ethi

cal principle of equity, and congruent with the moral "Law of Charity." The changing nature of

money rendered the old distinction between commercial and consumer credit philosophical nonsense.

As Mather put it, money was indeed a commodity:"Moneyisas reallyImprovablea thing as any other;

and it rather more than, less productive [sic]"so that "there can be no reasonable pretence that should

bind me to lend my Money for nothing, rather than any other Commodity whatsoever: nor can a

10N J G d d th M l d U d E i E l M d E l d (O f d O f d U i it P


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Contract in this case by more blameable, than in any other." Treating credit as a commodity, to be sold

on the market for the going pnce, was not only acceptable but a moral mandate. Mather and his col

leagues imagined usury to be a means of sociability, prospenty, and the common good.12

Similar accounts can be given for the Reformed churches in the Netherlands and France. Dutch

church leaders relied on the advice of progressive theologians suchasJohann Knex and Claude de

Saumaise, who dismantled the old objections against usury during the 1650s and 1660s. After Sau-

maise produced a lengthy treatise that defended usury and trading in secunes, the synods of Am

sterdam and Leiden removed restrictions on lombards, effectively giving sanction to modern credit

practices. The Reformed Church in New York grew wealthy by establishing a real estate and banking

business funded with high interest rates. We have no parallel accounts from the Reformed Church in

France because the Crown outlawed its synods after 1600. Yet we do have evidence of change from

Huguenot churches abroad. The Reformed French Protestant Church in Charleston, South Carolina,

for example, served that colony's most potent financiers, who became church elders and loan brokers

with no apparent sense of contradiction during the 1680s.13

To be sure, Mather and his contemporanes condemned ruthless treatment of impovenshed

debtors. Likewise, no moralist countenanced interest rates, such as 30% or more, that violated com

mon standards of decency.14

Yet from the end of the seventeenth century to the present, Protestant

commentators have sanctioned the modern protocol for lending practices: market factors determine

interest rates, fees, and other charges for pnvate loans, consumer banking, and commercial investment alike.

CHANGES IN TEACHINGS ABOUT USURY

How was it that by the end of the seventeenth century moral theologians had abandoned their

fulminations against usury and removed ecclesiastical restnctions against bankers^ How did it come

about that Tillotson and others not only justified usury in the limited technical sense of making an

investment in a commercial venture with a 5% or even 10% return at best, but also in an expansive

sense of allowing a guaranteed profit from any kind of loanincluding consumer loanswith inter

est rates that rose and fell by market demand? What sparked this immense change?

The answer has little to do with a supposed Protestant ethic embedded in Calvinism: the notion

that Reformed theology sanctified capitalistic impulses by elevating pnvate intention over traditional

rules.The history of Calvinist objections to usury through the 1640s belies that assumption. The an

swer lies instead in the relationship between the commercial revolution of the seventeenth century

12

The decree was recorded by Cotton Mather and published in hisThirty ImportantCases (Boston, 1699), 5113For the synods, see W CKnttel, ed,Acta der Particulire Synoden vanZmdHolland, 1620-1700 (6 vols Granvenhage

M Nijhoff, 1908-1916), esp 4 13 For the progressive theologians and usury, see Jelle C Riemersma,Religious Factorsin EarlyD h C l i i 1550 1760 (Th H M t 1967) 79 80 S i ' k D U i Lib (B t 1638) F


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the growth of overseas trading lines, expansion of domestic markets, and creation of a consumer cul

tureand what contemporaries perceived as a worldwide struggle between Catholicism and Protes

tantism. Protestants transformed the morality of credit as a means of protecting their churches in the

midst of a transatlantic contest for empire that began during the 1650s. Catholic dynasties such as

Spain and France competed with Protestant regimes in England and the Netherlands for commercial

riches that funded new state bureaucracies, supported a growing military, and protected colonial ven

tures. Money, the means of war, came to serve the interests of godliness in the early modern world.15

To begin with the economyitself,we should note that Protestant and Catholic powers relied on

different forms of money to facilitate trade. Spain ran its transatlantic commerce on the fuel of Mex

ican gold and Peruvian silver, minted in vast amounts and transported to Europe. France relied on

Spanish specie imported (and re-minted into French coins) through the sale of massive amounts of

agricultural produce. The value of this specie was relatively stable, fixed to the actual amount of pre

cious metal in each coin. With little access to gold and silver, England and the Netherlands represented

an altogether different monetary system. They and their colonial dependencies depended on the power

of paper money and transferable securities (notes and bonds) to facilitate trade. The imperial market

systems of western Europe's Protestants rested on complicatedsome economic historians employ

the term "abstract"instruments at nearly every transfer in an ever-expanding series of exchanges.16

The most widely used of these instruments were called bills of exchange. Merchants in London,

Amsterdam, Boston, and New York wrote and received these signed notes (somethinglike

IOUs) thatpromised payment in goods or cash by a set date and prescribed penalties for late payment They also

included interest, or a prescribed increase over time, which was a form of payment for the use of such

funds. Thatis,the merchant who signed a bill of exchange over to another merchant was remunerat

ing the recipient for the use of credit in a commercial transaction. More importantly for the history of

usury, perhaps, was the way in which these bills became substitutes for money in all forms of transac

tions. In the absence of specie, shopkeepers, farmers, fishermen, peddlers, and artisans all began to use

bills of exchange for everyday business. When they did so, they engaged in a practice that previously

had been called usury, but that passed in their day as a necessary means of business.17

In the complex nexus of the expanding market, effective exchange required rapid, impersonal,

and legally accountable measures to transfer credit and assure some penalty for delayed payment Re

cipients of bills of exchange often transferred them to other creditors, indebting its original signer to

someone whom he had never known. In such cases, it was practically impossible to follow the custom

ary religious mandate to refrain from taking interest from a poor debtor, to distinguish between com

mercial and consumer credit, or to monitor one's motives so that debtors were not used as means of

15F th P t t t i t t i thi d Th S Kidd Th P t t t I t t N E l dAft P it i (N


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profit One may have never met one's debtor. Bills of exchange in effect made usury a commonplace

without an explicit reference to high interest rates on personal loans.

The widespread circulation of bills of exchange eroded many previously held rationales for anti-

usury sentiment Even the most conservative critics of usury found themselves at a loss to analyze the

specific meaning of usury amidst multilayered and indirect exchanges, the unavoidable treatment of

credit as a commodity, new accounting measures, fiscal rationalizations for interest, and complex debt

litigation.

Formal economic theory, attached to international politics and nationalist agendas, provided the

patriotic sanction for this expansive commodification of credit A new genre of social commentary

published from the 1660s through the 1690sbeginning in London but soon spreading to other

Protestant territorieslegitimated free-floating interest rates and rising loan fees as an economic necessity and national mandate. Advisors to Parliament and advocates for England's overseas trading com

panies gradually assembled a body of literature that derived economic principles from technical analy

ses of market exchange and the overall, long-term production of wealth. Sometimes classified under

the rubric "mercantilist,'' economic writers such as Sir William Petty addressed the nation's economic

problemsshortage of coin, depression in the cloth trade, scarcity of goods, unemployment, and ris

ing povertywith proposals to enhance exports and the overall exchange of goods. They sometimes

offered contradictory advice on interest rates, but they all rested their arguments on fiscal analyses,

trade statistics and other empirical data, mathematical reasoning, and comparisons especially withEuropean competitors.

18

In their advice to the English government, these proto-economists excluded customary moral

and religious objections to usury. They rejected earlier commentators who assumed that prices should

be stable, specie had an unchanging value, and usury corrupted credit transactions. Money had no

fixed value, they argued; its worth changed as it facilitated different market transactions. The practical

effect of monetary policy and innovative credit schemes eclipsed abstract arguments about the nature

of money. Higher interest rates in fact encouraged investment in overseas ventures and expedited

commerce.

Analysts such as Petty suggested that the sooner that English policy makers learned that lesson,

the sooner they would encourage English merchants to adapt to rather than resist currency fluctua

tions, compete in the exchange of credit, allow their prices in commodities (including money) to rise to

the greatest profit level, andhere was the payoffenhance England's balance of trade. The mer

chant and financier who understood the market and maximized returns from it served the public

good. Here was Western Europe's first thoroughgoing legitimization of usury, appearing in a flood of

18For this and the next two paragraphs see Joyce Oldham Appleby E i Th ht d Id l i S t th C t


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economic pamphlets during the second half of the seventeenth century. Popular Anglican theologians

such as Tillotson submitted to such logicif usury was good for England, then it was good for Pro

testantism. They could hardly condemn it

It did not take long before Dutch and Huguenot merchants adopted similar arguments: usury

was good also for the Netherlands, and for a French Protestant diaspora completely reliant on long

distance mercantile exchange. American Puritans, along with their counterparts in New York and

Philadelphia, followed suit They all joined intense devotion to the Protestant cause to the economic

well being of their respective nations. They came to understand what previous commentators had

condemned as usury to be divinely appointed instruments to best the Spanish and French in trade.

Enhanced national prosperity followed, along with the means to fund national armies that restricted

the powers of the Catholic antichrist in Europe and limited its spread across the New World. To be

sure,Rome had its economic resources: agricultural output in Italy and France, the gold of Monte

zuma, and the silver mines of Potosi.19Late seventeenth-century Protestants knew, however, that the

supply of precious metals would eventually dwindle, and that real commercial power could outpace

agricultural production. They were right The English and the Dutch owned the future. By their judg

ments, a brisk trade in credit, making money from money, enhanced the very cause of liberty and

godliness in the worid. It was no wonder that men such as Archbishop Tillotson found predecessors

such as Roger Fenton to be hopelessly out of date.20

From our perspective, we might well question whether these seventeenth century moralists hadthe story just right We ought not to doubt their impact They made for a modern interpretation of

usuryone that overcame ancient and medieval tradition, and that helped to form economic sensibili

ties to this day. Yet we can also recognize that the imperial agendas and religious polemics of their day

distorted theirvision. The early modern apologists for usury conformed the Bible to their peculiar

needs and aspirations. Their understanding of history and the potential of a free market in credit to

abet the true church might appear anachronistic, perhaps even dangerous, to us. It was a peculiar

seventeenth-century preoccupation.

The Chnstianization of usury thus provides a case study of the limitations of a highly contextu-

alized reading of Scripture. If we find the conclusions of the apologists for usury troublesome, then

we might ponder the problems of interpreting the Bible through the lenses of contemporary social

situations. Such interpretations can produce surprising innovations. They might appear morally uplift

ing. Yet, when our contextual readings obscure the textitself,they can also inhibit the power of the

Word to challenge our assumptionsto speak against the political and social agendas that shape our

worldview

19J H Elliott Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spam m America 1492 1830 (New Haven Connecticut: Yale


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Christianization of Usury in Modern Europe

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