. See "Conversién, hombre nuevo y compromiso" in Duqué, ed., La tradicién
Notes to Pages 120-40 with Wesley's statements about stewardship, since Wesley in any case believes that the law of God takes precedence over any human law. Thus
Wesley's acknowledgment of some property rights in the context of a discussion of political philosophy cannot'be used to obscure the radicality of his theological judgment that the accumulation of excess property or the practice of excess expenditure is a robbery of God and the poor, and that as Christians we are empowered by the same grace that forgives us of sin in order to participate in the practice of pentecostal commun(al)ism for the sake of the poor.
Although Warner correctly notes that "clearly, an emphasis upon economic security as the condition of civil liberty was not intended as an argument for the existing social inequities" (The Wesleyan Movement in the Industrial Revolution, p. 107), he vastly overestimates the place of this alleged emphasis on "economic freedom" (pp. 106-7).
6. Actualization and Controversy . See my essay "The Origin of Methodism" in Methodist History (forthcoming).
. See Letter to a Friend, Oct. 10, 1735, XII:39.
. It is interesting to note that Wesley wrote no tract on abstinence from alcohol, but he did on tea. Had he written one on alcohol, presumably the same principles would have applied: It is an unnecessary expense, and the money saved should be given to the poor.
. While Wesley's anthropology is not adequate for the twentieth century, it was considerably more social than that of the majority of his followers, then or now.
. We should note that Methodists who do not accept Wesley's evangelical economics can scarcely take refuge in the complaint that all this is nothing but adiaphora, nothing but secondary. Although Wesley was indeed sometimes guilty of insisting on adiaphora, this by no means was in itself rejected by the Methodists from a superior vantage point of a concern for the central, as opposed to the peripheral concerns of the gospel.
Methodism has been "distinguished" by its concern for adiaphora, as the various "abstinence" campaigns of nineteenthand early twentieth-century Methodism demonstrate. The reasons for Methodism's refusal of evangelical economics must be sought elsewhere.
. The view that Wesley accepted the given sociopolitical arrangements as being unalterable is clearly unsustainable.
. Credit for this is normally given to Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Scribners, 1958), and R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1926).
. It should be clear that whenever Wesley supposes that the Methodist project is in danger of failing it is because it is failing to actualize his teaching on economics. This will become more evident in chapter 8.
Moreover, it is not the case that these are the musings of a tired old man.
They come from the period of Wesley's greatest theological productivity.
7. Theological Basis of Wesley's Ethic . See "Conversién, hombre nuevo y compromiso" in Duqué, ed., La tradicién protestante en la teologia latinoamericana, p. 208.