Methodists are already fallen; many are falling at this very time;

Actualization and Controversy But it appears that Wesley took to heart the necessity of insisting more strenuously on this theme in his sermons. In his sermon "On the Wisdom of God's Counsels," Wesley has shown that Christianity first fell with Ananias and Sapphira and that this fall had been ratified on that catastrophic day "when

Constantine first called himself a Christian." But with the reform of the sixteenth century, doctrine and worship began to be purged, and with the beginning of Methodism Christian life and discipline too began to be purified. So far we are on ground familiar from "The General Spread of the Gospel." But the old enemy that first struck through Ananias and Sapphira now menaces:

They gain all they can, honestly and conscientiously. They save all they can, by cutting off needless expense.

. But they do not give all they can; without which they must needs grow more and more earthly-minded. Their affections will cleave to the dust more and more; and they will have less and less communion with God. Is not this your case? Do you not seek the praise of men more than the praise of God? Do not you lay up, or at least desire and endeavour to "lay up, treasures on earth?" Are you not then (deal faithfully with your soul!) more and more alive to the world, and, consequently, more and more dead to God?

It cannot be otherwise. That must follow, unless you give all you can, as well as gain and save all you can. ("The Wisdom of God's Counsels,"

V1:332) And in even more severe terms, he writes: "Do you give all you can? else your money will eat your flesh as fire, and will sink you to the nethermost hell! O beware of 'laying up treasures on earth!' Is it not treasuring up wrath against the day of wrath?"

(Ibid., VI:334). He concludes with one of his increasingly frequent appeals to God:

Lord I have warned them! but they will not be warned, what can I do more? I can only "give them up unto their own heart's lusts, and let them follow their own imaginations!"

19. By not taking this warning, it is certain many of the Methodists are already fallen; many are falling at this very time; and there is great reason to apprehend, that many more will fall, most of whom will rise no more! (Ibid., V1:334)

Good News to the Poor This diagnosis, this warning, and this complaint to God about the Methodists all become regular features of Wesley's writings in the last two decades of his leadership.

In his sermon "On Obedience to Pastors," Wesley complains that the Methodists do not obey his instructions regarding dress, which, as we have seen, serve as the focal point for Wesley's attack on the ethos of consumption (VII:115-16).

And to those who complain that he is insisting on trifles, he exclaims: "There can be no little sin, till we can find a little

God!" (VII:116) One of Wesley's most vigorous attacks on the Methodists comes in his sermon "On God's Vineyard." Here he recounts all the benefits the Methodists have received with regard to both doctrine and discipline. They have, he complains, brought forth

"sour grapes." After briefly instancing enthusiasm and judgmentalism (things that have not entirely disappeared from our ranks), he turns to his main complaint: The Methodists have increased in goods, have sought happiness in prosperity, and have failed to restore "to God in the poor" all that they can spare

(see VII:211-13).

The same theme is enforced in the sermon "On the Causes of the Inefficacy of Christianity" (1789). Here he cites his ill-fated rule concerning the gaining, saving, and giving "all you can," and complains:

But how many have you found that observe the Third rule, "Give all you can"? Have you reason to believe, that five hundred of these are to be found among fifty thousand Methodists? And yet nothing can be more plain, than that all who observe the two first rules without the third, will be twofold more the children of hell than ever they were before. (VII:285-86)

It is plainly becoming increasingly clear to Wesley that his movement is faltering. Fully 99 percent of Methodists have failed to heed his warnings, his reproaches, his calling God to witness on his behalf and against the Methodists. One of his last sermons, "On the Danger of Increasing Riches" (Sept. 1790), seeks for a final time to sound the warning: "After having

Actualization and Controversy served you between sixty and seventy years; with dim eyes, shaking hands, and tottering feet, I give you one more advice before I sink into the dust" (VII:361). A careful reading of Wesley's last sermons would put an end to the smug complacency of the endless books, articles, and especially speeches at Annual and General Conferences, about the glorious heritage of Methodism. Wesley, it is clear, had a more somber view.

But Wesley did more than warn and plead and exhort and threaten.

He also tried to understand.

The thesis that Protestantism results in middle-class prosperity has been one of the "discoveries" of modern social history.' Writing more than a century before this idea gained currency, Wesley proposed his own view of the theory:

Wesley's diagnosis of the problem is clear: The renewal of Christianity, whether in the reform of the sixteenth century or the revival of the eighteenth century, seems to beget riches by encouraging the virtues that result in the: accumulation of wealth. But he could not regard this as a simple fact to be noted; it was a betrayal of the gospel. Thus the practice and theory of evangelical economics is the only way of rescuing Christianity from its own tendency to self-destruct. It is easy to see that we are not dealing here with something peripheral to Wesley's

Good News to the Poor concern, but with the central question of the possibility of Christianity as such.

CONCLUSION

Wesley developed a clear and forceful view of evangelical economics and sought to actualize this view in his own life and in the corporate life of his societies. By citing personal and communal examples, by showing its relation to the history of the church, by answering objections and ferreting out evasions, he sought to persuade the Methodists to practice this economics.

With warnings and pleas, he increasingly exhorted them to flee what he regarded as the tempter's snare. Yet, more and more he sensed that the revival of scriptural Christianity was floundering and would fail. This failure owed not to declining enrollments or to loss of influence. On all these fronts Methodism was the success story so beloved of triumphalist Methodist self-congratulation. For Wesley what mattered was not the creation of another more or less successful institution, but the renewal of scriptural holiness. And with increasing urgency he warned that this was what would and must be lost the more Methodists succeeded in other respects.

In 1786, Wesley wrote the last of his retrospective essays on the history of Methodism, which was then, by his calculation, fifty-five years old. The essay begins with one of Wesley's most-quoted lines:

I am not afraid that the people called Methodists should ever cease to exist either in Europe or America. But I am afraid, lest they should only exist as a dead sect, having the form of religion without the power. (Thoughts Upon Methodism, X111:258)

Many quote this line to introduce their own diagnosis of the malaise of Methodism, usually having to do with the loss of a certain "evangelical fervor." But what is Wesley worried about here? What is the absence of power that threatens to leave

Methodism as only a dead sect?

Wesley begins with a review of the rise of Methodism (as usual

Actualization and Controversy this means its origin in 1729 at Oxford, with no mention of the "Aldersgate experience"). He warns that "if ever the essential parts should evaporate, what remains will be dung and dross"

(XIII:260). Then he comes to the point:

It nearly concerns us to understand how the case stands with us at present. I fear, wherever riches have increased, (exceeding few are the exceptions,) the essence of religion, the mind that was in Christ, has decreased in the same proportion. (Ibid.)

What threatens the "essence" of Methodism, the "power" of religion, is not a loss of membership, not a lack of emphasis on personal conversion, but prosperity. The people called Methodists are rising into the middle class:

For the Methodists in every place grow diligent and frugal; consequently, they increase in goods. Hence they proportionably increase in pride, in anger, in the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, and the pride of life. So, although the form of religion remains, the spirit is swiftly vanishing away. (Ibid.)

It is precisely this rise in worldly success that imperils the Methodist movement. What others regard as the sign of God's favor, Wesley sees as the destruction of "true religion." And the only remedy is that Methodists must rid themselves of this prosperity:

What way, then, (I ask again,) can we take, that our money may not sink us to the nethermost hell? There is one way, and there is no other under heaven. If those who "gain all they can," and "save all they can," will likewise "give all they can;" then, the more they gain, the more they will grow in grace, and the more treasure they will lay up in heaven. (Ibid., XIII:260-61) In this and the preceding chapter, we have seen that Wesley means by "give all you can" not the practice of prudential philanthropy, but a commitment to the evangelical economics that places the welfare of the poor at the center of all economic activity. It is the failure to do this that is already, in Wesley's view, destroying the Methodist movement. Methodism was

Good News to the Poor growing, but at the cost of its commitment to scriptural holiness.* ) We are the inheritors of this debacle. We can take small comfort in our relationship to Wesley, for this relationship is, in large part, one of forgetfulness if not of outright betrayal. The very measures of our "success" are the yardstick of our decline.

Wesley is not simply the founder of Methodism. He is also its most severe judge. In a note he added to the text of A Farther

Appeal in 1746, Wesley pronounces what we may call a curse upon the Methodists. It comes at the point of his discussion of the Quakers' attempt to promote simplicity of life in order to be able to relieve the poor of their own number. But when there ceased to be poor Quakers, instead of continuing to insist on the practice of an evangelical economics in order to commit themselves to the poor generally, they relaxed their adherence to these precepts and so forgot the poor. Here stands Wesley's curse, which falls, I fear, on us:

Lay this deeply to heart, ye who are now a poor, despised, afflicted people [the Methodists]. Hitherto ye are not able to relieve your own poor. But if ever your substance increase, see that ye be not straitened in your own bowels, that ye fall not into the same snare of the devil. Before any of you either lay up treasures on earth, or indulge needless expense of any kind, I pray the Lord

God to scatter you to the corners of the earth, and blot out your name from under heaven! (A Farther Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion, VIII:187, Wesley's note of 1746)

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE THEOLOGICAL BASIS OF

WESLEY'S ETHIC

e have already seen that for Wesley the practice of a new economics was a matter of ultimate concern, that salvation itself was at stake. But in order to understand how this was so for him, it is necessary for us to see the connection between evangelical economics and the soteriological themes of justification and sanctification, of grace and faith, of love and holiness, which are generally recognized to be at the heart of Wesley's thought and practice. Is this evangelical economics really central and necessary from the perspective of these themes, or is it, in spite of Wesley's rhetoric, only adiaphora after all?

Our task in this chapter, then, is to review the dominant themes of Wesley's proclamation in order to see how they do or do not entail the transformation of economic relations, which we have discussed in previous chapters. In order to do this it will be necessary to sketch these themes in such a way as to see their relevance to the economic question. Obviously, we cannot provide here a detailed study of Wesley's soteriology. That would be the task of another book! But we can attempt to show how some of the major themes combine in such a way as to make plausible Wesley's sense of the centrality of a transformed economics as being essential to the practice of faith. Perhaps also in this way we may see some of these themes in a new light, as we view them not as an abstract dogmatics but as a reflection on transformed and transforming praxis.

Good News to the Poor

THE HOLINESS PROJECT

From at least 1725 until the end of his days, Wesley was committed to the realization of holiness of life. Despite all vicissitudes of formulation and expression, this was the aim of his life, the organizing center of his thought, the spring of all action, his one abiding project. This meant becoming a creature worthy of the Creator, a finite representative and image of the divine subject.

Such a correspondence to the divine life meant a rupture with the world, a transformation of life that separated the new from the old, the spirit from the flesh, the life of faith from the world.

The possibility of such a project was based on the divine self-revelation that provided a paradigm and clear instructions for the actualization of this holiness.

The first Methodists (Wesley, his brother Charles, and a few of their friends at Oxford) sought to realize this project. From the very first it entailed a new economic practice, a dedication of all resources to the poor on the basis of the instructions of the Gospels. Some of the other aspects of the practice of the first

Methodists were later modified. The adherence to the rubrics of the Church, for example, was later relaxed. But the practice ofa new economics, consciously opposed to the economics of "the world," remained despite all changes in interpretation and explanation.

This holiness project itself remains constant. But on the basis of detailed discussion with the Moravians, and especially Peter

Wesley comes to be persuaded that the foundation of this project must be reconceived. It must be understood as flowing from grace. Thus, as José Miguez Bonino has correctly affirmed, Wesley comes to proclaim sanctification through grace by faith.' This change affects neither the content nor the aim of Wesley's project, but it does alter its basis. Holiness is no longer merely an outward correspondence to an external law. It is a glad and peaceful (not alienated) correspondence to the same "law" now internalized.

Grace does not, then, provide a dispensation from holiness but serves as the capacitation for holiness. In one sense nothing has changed. The insistence upon holiness and the necessity of

The Theological Basis of Wesley's Ethic following the divine instructions to the letter do not vary a hair.

In another sense everything is changed in that the basis of this correspondence to the divine is an inward appropriation made possible by grace.* But if grace is the basis of this transformation, then consequences for the manner of realizing holiness follow. It is no longer necessary to retire from the world to be holy. Grace is available not just to an elite but to all. Therefore, even those who had before been utterly given over to sin could be utterly renewed by grace. The cloister of Oxford could be exchanged for the fields, the streets, the marketplace, even the gallows.

Anyone could become holy in life through the operation of grace."

Thus the holiness project is unleashed upon the world. All people everywhere, and not only contemplative scholars or mystics, were called to correspond to the divine nature, and the grace that would make such a correspondence actual was freely offered to all.

But note that this grace is the grace that makes us really and effectively holy. The good news is that we can become holy, not that we have been made exempt from holiness. But holiness is transformed from an elitist to a populist project by the power of grace.

THE EFFICACY OF GRACE

The introduction of grace into the project of holiness entails a critical reconstruction of the understanding of grace. Since the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation, grace has often been understood in such a way as to menace its reality. The insistence on "grace alone" has bid fair to empty grace of its efficacy.

Whether we think here of what Bonhoeffer called "cheap grace" or of a residue of nominalism or of a justification that is merely juridical, the result is a grace that changes nothing, or at least nothing visible.

This was not the sort of grace in which Wesley was interested."

For Wesley, grace really works. It really changes things, people, relationships, and the world. God is not in the business of

Good News to the Poor changing names while leaving the things themselves untouched.

God is not a nominalist. God really does transform, change, do.

When it is said that God justifies the ungodly, this does not mean that the ungodly remain, to all intents and purposes, ungodly.

It means that they become just. Sanctification produces holiness. Justification makes us just. We are not merely declared to be so, but are made to be so. Simul justus et peccator, as normally understood, is fancy Latin for open defiance of God. To say that justification leaves sinners still in the grasp of sin as before is like saying that resurrection leaves the dead in their graves. If God's declaration of us as justified does not result in our really being just, then God is a liar and faith is illusion. Wesley will not accept an illusory faith, a phantom grace, or a deceptive or impotent God.

Wesley's rejection of phantom grace is the leading edge of his rejection of all forms of Deism, which excludes God from real agency in the world. He is even prepared to defend ghost stories so as not to yield an inch to the Deists! His talk of particular providence that sees the hand of God in the stilling of the wind when Wesley is about to preach, or the failure of rocks hurled by a mob to find their target, is all of a piece. Wesley will not surrender the competence of God. Whatever we may think of some of Wesley's ways of defending divine agency, we cannot ignore the fact that this is a unifying theme of his thought. And this theme finds its most cogent expression in the insistence upon the real efficacy of grace.

If grace is to be real, then it must have real effects. And these effects must be palpable, visible. No Barthian geometry will persuade Wesley of the reality of the ineffable. When the divine enters the world, it produces changes everyone can see, not invisible craters, but manifest "monuments of mercy."

Here we may see why it is that experience plays such an important, if frequently misunderstood, role in Wesley's thought. The effects of the divine action must be palpable. Just as the Creator produces a visible creation, so also the Redeemer produces a manifest redemption, a visible salvation. Despite

Wesley's hope for a salvation beyond this world, his emphasis always lies in present salvation. Without the latter, the former is a pipe dream. Present salvation is the evidentiary basis of the

The Theological Basis of Wesley's Ethic hope for a future salvation. And evidence must be perceptible, experimental. The "evidence of things not seen" must itself be visible, seen, or it is no evidence at all.

Wesley often focuses on the "internal witness of the Spirit" because this evidence is indisputable to the experiencing subject. The subject immediately senses a change in "feeling."

Where before there was fear, now there is peace and joy. Where before there was animosity and resentment, there is now love.

One can't have peace and joy and love without knowing that one has them. It is empirical evidence. One has only to compare this to some interpretations of the Protestant tradition, which state that one cannot even know if one has faith, that faith is invisible even to the believing subject, to see what a difference is here.

But the indisputable self-evidence of immediate self-awareness is by no means the only sort of experience involved here.

Faith that is manifest to the subject in the transformation of "tempers" is manifest to all in the transformation of behavior.

Grace produces this visible transformation immediately and not indirectly. Otherwise the divine grace evaporates into meaningless abstraction. If there is no permanent and radical and visible transformation of behavior, then grace has vanished.

Unacceptable anthropological conclusions would also follow from a restriction of the efficacy of grace to the inward sphere.

This would divide the subject into an inward and an outward self, producing a disembodied "soul" and an inert matter incapable of redemption. This is, of course, the tendency of Luther's "two kingdoms" theory as well as the well-known

Cartesian dualism. Wesley firmly and explicitly rejects both. He rejects them because all forms of gnosticism are repugnant to him. The Creator created the whole creature. The Redeemer thus redeems the whole subject.

The transformation of inwardness is immediately expressed as the transformation of behavior. A conversion that left unchanged my manner of relating to my neighbor would be an imaginary conversion, an exercise in irreality. Grace produces real effects, visible, publicly testable effects, or it is not the grace of God the Creator.

If Wesley emphasizes the inward it is not because this is somehow more real or important than the outward. It is because

Good News to the Poor an inward transformation must produce an outward one. It is one thing to hang a few apples on a pecan tree. It is quite another to grow apples on an apple tree. The latter is a more reliable source of apples.®° Thus the regeneration of the apple tree, which then produces apples of itself and of natural necessity, is the best, indeed the only way to get apples. But those who claim to be apple trees without producing apples are kidding themselves. Wesley emphasizes inward transformation because he is so earnestly interested in outward behavior. We may contest this strategy, but we should not suppose that Wesley emphasizes inwardness because he is relatively disinterested in outward transformation.' Such a view would be possible only on the basis of invincible ignorance of Wesley's writings.

In this light, we can understand Wesley's struggle to come to terms with the problem of "sin in believers." This is a problem because it constitutes counterevidence to the real efficacy of grace. Once Wesley had identified grace as the basis of holiness, he maintained that conversion (justification/regeneration) produced sinlessness.* This was subsequently modified to allow for inward, but not outward, sin.® Finally it was necessary to separate perfection (as the "great salvation") from regeneration while still maintaining that perfection was available in this life and by faith alone—that is, as a gift. Then Wesley had to wrestle with the apparent (visible) loss of perfection, and so on. All of these "epicycles" on the view of holiness as produced by grace through faith are attempts to insist on the real efficacy of grace within the sphere of concrete experience.

Efficacy and experienced (visible) transformation entail each other.

The idea of a progressive growth in grace is an attempt to simplify the system. But Wesley did not abandon the apparently contradictory notion of a sudden transformation with respect both to "justification" and to "entire sanctification," despite the way this tended to produce "epicycles," or odd complications in his view of the Christian life. He was aware of the danger that an unmodified "gradualism" of grace threatened to abolish the gracious character of grace and so vitiate this as the foundation of holiness.

When Wesley speaks of the importance of experience he normally means it in the way that we might say a farmer is

The Theological Basis of Wesley's Ethic experienced in the growing of apples or wheat. Religious experience is the lived and reflected history of those who engage in the project of holiness. It is not a question of extraordinary and essentially private moments, but of a clear and visible pattern and progression of behavior. Thus the experience of regeneration is the evidence of lives that demonstrate holiness.

Wesley knows by experience that grace is efficacious because he sees that it produces altered patterns of life. He knows by experience that some of the tenets of the Moravians are false because they do not produce the requisite changes, the appropriate alteration of patterns of behavior. The reality of grace entails visible empirical alterations in the life-form of the believer. This empirical and experimental reality is then thematized as experience. Of course, where the real efficacy of grace is not understood in this way, then religious experience becomes the opposite of empirical. That is the way we all too often carelessly employ this concept. Wesley knew better.

Wesley then seeks to accept the Reformation view that grace—from the side of God—and faith—from our side—constitute the foundation of Christian life. Unlike many of the classic Protestant formulations of this idea, Wesley's view insisted on a real grace, an efficacious grace, a grace that produced real evidence and visible effects.

The proper meaning of experience, then, is something that one can see and touch. The experience that counted was the lived faith that produced visible holiness. Wesley put little stock in what we often call religious experience today. He was interested in something far more "empirical." Therefore, a life that was unchanged in behavior was a life without faith, a life in which whatever measure of grace had at one time been received was squandered, frittered away, lost. The experiential evidence of faith is a fundamentally transformed life.

THE NEW SUBJECT

The real efficacy of grace entails the transformation of the believing subject. And this transformation entails that the

Good News to the Poor! (30 ie subject becomes a partner in the saving work of grace. Grace energizes the subject, makes the subject one who is a participant in salvation. This participatory salvation is a consequence of taking grace seriously!

All of this runs against the grain of those who are schooled in classical Protestantism, for there we are led to suppose that the "sovereignty of God" or of "grace alone" entails the abrogation of the subject's responsibility. It is as though agency were a scarce good. The more one side has, the less the other can claim.

But the result of this manner of thinking is that what begins by magnifying the divine agency must end in making it nugatory, without any real effect. Now one can simply throw up one's hands and claim paradox, or one can rethink one's view.

Perhaps agency produces agency instead of destroying it.

Perhaps we should think of it like love. It is not the case that the more I love my wife, the less she can be permitted to love me.

Love provokes love. Divine agency provokes human agency.

The more I ama recipient of a real and not imaginary grace, the more I become a responsible agent, a participant in working out my own salvation. In this way my action becomes the visible proof of God's action, not a denial of it.

Wesley does not work out his position in exactly the terms I have employed. I am not repeating Wesley, but am attempting to disclose the logic of his position. The more one insists on the reality of grace, the more one must insist on the agency of the believing subject. That is the ground of Wesley's "Arminianism." That is why Wesley so vigorously opposed Calvinism and quietism. Both rendered the human subject inert and so made grace null and void.

The participation of the believing subject in the project of salvation takes the form of appropriating the grace that is proffered and investing this grace in the transformation of life.

The latter is only possible on the basis of the former. Life can be transformed only on the basis of grace. But grace is efficacious in that it does enable me to live a transformed life. This occurs through cooperation with grace. Thus Wesley can even think in terms of a quantification of grace. The more I use, the more I get. The less I use, the less I get, and the littie that I have, I lose.

If I am really converted, but do not work at being a new person,

The Theological Basis of Wesley's Ethic then the grace I received will be withdrawn. I am, then, "not saved" any more than I was prior to my conversion. Indeed, I am worse off, for now I have betrayed grace itself. When the converted do not exhibit transformation, Wesley does not need to contest the assertion that they were justified. He can simply say that they have failed to "improve" the grace that was then given.

God then will neither save nor condemn without the participation of the subject. I can't be damned for what I didn't do. I can't be saved without doing something.

Is this salvation by works? Wesley believes that it is not, since salvation is not something my works can merit, nor am I capable of any "good works" apart from grace. Wesley struggled with the question of good works before regeneration. Early on he denies it as being incompatible with the sole efficacy of grace, but later, with the aid of the idea of prevenient grace, he was able to reincorporate works as based on grace even outside the "Christian dispensation." If we don't get lost in slogans, we can see that Wesley does want to emphasize the fact that no one can be saved who is not holy, but that the basis of this holiness is grace. This grace is not imaginary, but real, producing a new subject who is then able to participate in the divine project of salvation by exemplifying holiness.

The new subject produced by grace is the "restored subject" of the creation. The subject created by God is the whole human being. The subject constituted by grace Is, likewise, the whole human being, the image and likeness of God. This means that grace does not constitute an epiphenomenal subject, a religious one, but a whole subject. The newness of life is a newness in every dimension of that life. To countenance a division between the religious effects of grace and the rest of life (say, economic life) is to deny the Creator, to render the work of grace as impotent as the work of the Deist's god.

Thus the grace that makes one holy is the grace that is the basis of all of life, of every dimension of the created subject. This is why Wesley will not accept practical atheism in politics or economics any more than he would accept it in worship. The new subject becomes a participant in the divine project of

Good News to the Poor salvation. This means that the new subject is holy. That which corresponds to God is by definition holy.

The participation in the divine project of salvation is not limited to working out our own salvation. Rather it includes becoming an agent in the salvation of others. Thus God helps through the instrumentality of renewed human subjects. While this divine aid certainly includes the proclamation of the gospel, it entails as well help in every form of distress and affliction.

Salvation is holistic because the Savior is also the Creator. The subject energized, set in motion, by grace is the agent of the one who announces good news to the poor, who heals the broken, who releases the captives.

A subject who is not set in motion is a subject in which grace has no effect, no efficacy, no reality. But a subject who does in this visible and concrete way become a participant in the divine project is a "monument of mercy."

AGAINST THE WORLD

Holiness does not only mean corresponding to God, but it also means standing over against that which is opposed to God.

Whether this be called sin, flesh and blood, the world, worldliness, or Satan, the basic structure is the same. The choice of the metaphor of holiness serves to emphasize this distinction between the new and the old.

Holiness is not, then, grace perfecting nature. It is grace overpowering sin. Such a view may, but does not necessarily, produce an ontological dualism. Everything depends on how certain propositions are co-ordinated. Wesley believes strongly in creation. But the created world is also the fallen world. It is because it is fallen that it needs salvation, it is because it is created that it can be saved. The same is true of persons as it is of creation as a whole.

Wesley's emphasis on the Fall—which is the theme of his longest book, The Doctrine of Original Sin, According to Scripture,

Reason, and Experience (1X:191-464)—serves to make clear the necessity of salvation while at the same time providing a kind of

The Theological Basis of Wesley's Ethic negative description, or description by contrast, of the scope of that same salvation. If the fallen world is characterized by war, oppression, and injustice, then the world that God created and will renew is characterized by peace and love and justice. The fallen world is the negative index of the magnitude of the divine project.

We must not forget the proper function of a doctrine of original sin. It does not provide an alibi for continued sin in believers.

It shows the necessity, not the impossibility, of redemption. To say that holiness cannot be realized because we are sinners is to say that there is no remedy for sin. The use of "original sin" to claim an exemption from the demands of the gospel is theologically incompetent. Wesley had his full share of faults, but he was not an incompetent theologian.

The theme of holiness is well adapted to express this relationship, since holiness suggests both correspondence to God and opposition to the world, within the world. Phenomenologically, holy things (shamans, mountains, chalices) are always things of the world, separated from the world, still remaining in the world, pointing beyond the world.

To speak of holiness, as Wesley constantly does, is to emphasize that the reality that corresponds to God is different from the simply given reality of the world. There is much peril here, for this can lead, and in Wesley does sometimes lead, toa kind of separatism from the world. But this is normally prevented by the principle of the efficacy of a grace whose source is the Creator.

To be holy is to be different. Wesley vigorously insisted that to be a Christian is to be singular. The efficacy of grace produces a real, indeed a vast, difference from the sort of life that is characterized by unbelief. Thus Wesley can oppose "worldliness" or "worldly prudence" as the way in which we render grace nugatory, of no effect. The efficacy of grace is measured by the difference between the old life and the new.

This difference must be manifest in all spheres of life if it is not to be reduced or limited and so denied. Holiness means difference, striking difference, from the form and structure of the old. Holiness is not just touching up the details of a pretty good portrait. It is a radical restoration.

Good News to the Poor

THE LIFE OF LOVE

The singularity of Christian life is not only capable of a negative description by way of contrast with the world, but it may also be described positively as love. The divine love made manifest in Christ does not remain without effect. It is "shed abroad" so as to become the basis of a new life. The efficacy of the divine love is such that it awakens love in the one who receives it. This subject then becomes not only the loved subject but also the loving subject. Wesley regards this pure disinterested love for every human being as rational religion—rational because it corresponds to the true character of the created subject, rational because it corresponds, as that subject must, to the divine subject.

This love is, then, in one sense the most natural possible activity for the created subject. But it is startlingly different behavior for the fallen and distorted non-subject, the one who despite all activity can never be an agent of life but only of destruction for itself and others. Love is the opposite, then, of worldliness. It is the abolition of the captivity to self-preoccupation (pride) and self-aggrandizement (avarice). It sets itself apart from the world, which operates on a very different principle. But it does not abandon the world, for it is love. Thus it invades the world, summoning the world to a new identity.

The temptation inherent in the holiness project to withdraw from the world is overcome by the identification of that project as love. As the religion of love, scriptural religion is necessarily social. In this way Wesley is delivered from the mystics, and from Oxford, too. As a student he tried to avoid the parish, saying it was impossible to be holy if one had to deal with sinners!'° But the theme of grace made clear that the holiness of God consisted precisely in caring for sinners.

Wesley still managed to escape the parish, but not the world.

To be holy as God is holy is to enter the world, to contest the rule of sin and pride and greed. The holiness project cannot consist in retiring from the world but rather in an assault upon the world. It is for all that the assault of love. It is the relentless calling of the world to a life commensurate with love.

The disciplines of holiness, then, are the disciplines of love.

The Theological Basis of Wesley's Ethic The societies are constituted so that Christians can watch over one another in love, rooting out all forms of lovelessness in their behavior and in their "tempers." But this love cannot be simply encapsulated in the internal life of the community any more than it can be closed up in the interiority of the individual. Like the divine love, it reaches out, and does so concretely and visibly.

Just as grace must produce concretely visible effects, so also must love. Love seeks the benefit of the other. Of course, the other's benefit must mean that the other as well comes to live the life of love made possible by grace. But the love of the neighbor cannot restrict itself to some specifically religious sphere any more than the divine love does. To say that we should care only for our neighbor's soul would be an imitation of some other God than the one Wesley knows.

This is, for Wesley, the importance of his notion of "particular providence." Whatever the defects of this notion, it makes clear the fact that God is not the prisoner of the "spiritual" sphere but is active in all of life, healing, feeding, and responding to all sorts of human distress. An imitation of this love will also direct itself to the relief of every form of human distress.

If love is the imitation of God, then a purely "spiritual" love would be an imitation of the Deist's god, the god who abandons the world. But if God is the one who hears the distress of the afflicted, then the imitation of God will likewise respond concretely to human affliction in whatever form.

Wesley was aware that the failure of Christians to behave in this way constituted evidence for atheism. This is why he was so vigorous in his attack on the forms of injustice, practiced by those who called themselves Christians. And this is why he could also suppose that if Christian love were to take the form of a pentecostal community of goods and redistribution of wealth, all the unbelievers (and other believers) would be converted. The visible and dramatic realization of love in the everyday world is the only proof that there is a God who is love.

Rout

Good News to the Poor

THE HORIZON OF HOLINESS

While Wesley emphasizes the transformation of life in the present, this project must be viewed in terms of the wider horizon of creation and new creation. From the very beginning of his reflection on holiness, Wesley employed elements of eschatology and protology (creation) in the clarification of the meaning of holiness. Thus his most frequent characterization of holiness is the "renewal of the whole image of God." This was always seen in terms of an apocalyptic struggle against the forces of Satan, the world and sin. Thus this wider horizon is a constant feature of Wesley's reflection.

It could scarcely be otherwise for one who was as committed as Wesley was to the vindication of the creator and preserver of the world. His struggle against Deism in every form is a struggle for this wider horizon, a refusal of the diminishment of God, the restriction of divine efficacy. This wider horizon of faith is what makes it possible for the travelling evangelist to write a long textbook on natural science.

Even though this horizon is present—necessarily—from the very beginning of Wesley's reflection on the holiness project, it is increasingly clarified and made the subject of explicit reflection.

Thus the second and third series of sermons engage in a much more explicit discussion of both protological and eschatological themes than we find in the so-called "Standard Sermons."

Indeed Wesley's theological imagination is such that he wrestles with such questions as the place of comets in the created order, the sort of weather the renewed earth will have (rather like Camelot, it seems), and the eschatological future of dogs and cats. Whatever we may think of the quaintness of some of these speculations, they show that the horizon of holiness was the whole world, created and recreated.

This theological realism (one is tempted to say, theological materialism) prevents the holiness project from evaporating into an invisible "spiritual" mist, not to say mysticism. Holiness is firmly embedded in the material world of visible relations and patterns of conduct. The restoration of the person launches the restoration of the earth. Thus the transformation of the human heart is the turning point in the transformation of the face of the

The Theological Basis of Wesley's Ethic earth, the beginning of cosmic transformation. It is because of this immediate relation between the transformation of the individual and the transformation of the cosmos that the former can serve as evidence for the latter.'' When this connection is severed, as it is in some of Wesley's followers, then holiness is abandoned for pseudo-holiness, the sort of "outward" religiosity that Wesley opposed as being pseudo-Christianity.

Thus Wesley can see the Methodist project of "spreading scriptural holiness" as entailing the transformation of the economic and political order, the establishment of pentecostal commun(al)ism, and the abolition of war. The sort of holiness in which Wesley was interested was a holiness that stood within the horizon of creation and new creation and so was embedded in the concrete reality of the world. In this way it could be thought that the realization of this project must entail the transformation of all of life, of the nations, of the very earth itself.

THE ECONOMICS OF THE GOSPEL

This brief sketch of Wesley's soteriological theology shows that for all that he was a practical theologian, he had a system.

The various themes have a tight logical relationship to one another such that one could develop a summary of Wesley's theology from any of these themes. They entail one another. I have not sought to trace the development of any one of these themes (that would be a different book), but to suggest their interrelation, the logical structure of their relations.

It remains, then, to show how all of this is brought to bear in such a way as to make evangelical economics an integral part, an essential element, of Wesley's project of scriptural holiness. In order to see this, it is only necessary to see how Wesley could suppose that the failure to instantiate evangelical economics could menace the whole holiness project, whose superstructure

I have just sketched.

Wesley most often tackles this question in terms of worldliness. Economics is the point at which worldliness most evidently threatens holiness. This is not the way worldliness is most often

Good News to the Poor deployed in "evangelical" rhetoric. There, worldliness is often associated with the failure to comiply with strictly religious duties. But this was impossible for Wesley, since he was contesting a pseudo-Christianity that engaged in the outward observation of religious duties, but produced no true or evident holiness. Thus his conception of the holiness project was far closer to the prophetic denunciation of the religiosity of Israel, or to Jesus' denunciation of the Pharisees. (To be sure, Wesley sometimes seems to lose sight of this, but that is another story.)

That Wesley could not identify holiness with outward religion meant that he was free to see that worldliness was precisely where the Bible located it, in the sphere of unregenerate economics. Themes like not laying up treasure on earth, the impossibility of serving God and mammon, the choking of the seed of faith by "the cares of the world," the notion that the love of money was the root of all evil, that the desire for material security is a snare of the devil—all could be appropriated in a way as to give concreteness to the idea of worldliness and so to the notion of holiness.

Therefore, holiness cannot consist in religious observances.

These can only be means of grace, not the aim or goal of grace.

They are helps to holiness, not the marks of it or the content of it. Holiness must consist in a reversal of the worldliness of economics. It must, then, be the practice of an evangelical economics.

Any attempt to withdraw faith from this sphere is a surrender to worldliness, a repudiation of the divine claim to be the true lord of the earth. Thus Wesley enforces his view of stewardship by reference to the rights of the Creator. It is the task of holiness to render to God that which is God's. This must mean the whole of life, and especially the economic sphere, which is where we interact with the material creation. Mammon is this economic sphere in rebellion against God. It is the expropriation of creation from the Creator. Stewardship is the practice of the agents of the new creation. It is giving creation back to the Creator.

The holiness project depends on the efficacy of grace. Apart from grace, I am hopelessly entangled in worldliness. But if grace is real, it produces a visible transformation of my

The Theological Basis of Wesley's Ethic relationship to worldliness. This means that a transformed economics is testimony to the efficacy of grace, and an untransformed economics is counterevidence to the gospel.

Since transformation must be visible to be real, must be publicly certifiable to be convincing, then my behavior in the sphere of visible interaction with the world must be changed. It is in the sphere of economics that avarice becomes quantifiable, that pride takes on the tactile properties of silk, that self-centeredness is blatantly obvious. It is also here that generosity of spirit, that humility, that benevolent love of every creature of God becomes visible, countable, empirical. If grace is to be said to produce effects, it is here that we may look for evidence.

It is here, too, that we see that a spiritualizing of grace, a false emphasis on the sovereignty of grace, leads to a denial of the efficacy of grace. A grace that allegedly saves my soul while leaving the concrete and visible relations of my life unaffected is merely illusory, whatever metaphysical compliments we may pay it.

Similarly, we may say that economics is the sphere of human agency par excellence. It is precisely here that we are most active in working, gaining, spending, and giving. Thus it is here that we are most driven by the forces of necessity. But it is also here that the new subject as agent, and not merely object, must come to expression. A transformation of the subject, which left untouched the very sphere of constant activity, would be an illusory transformation.

Finally it is here that the question of a real imitation of the divine love comes most concretely into question. This love is the opposite of a selfish self-regard; it is freely self-giving. It is the opposite of an economic exchange of robbery, or even an economics of strict accounting; it is gracious, generous. It seeks the good of the other without seeking to preserve itself. It chooses the least rather than the greatest. It sides with the poor and becomes as one of the poor. The life of love that imitates the divine love is, then, a reversal of worldly economic values. A love that does not reverse these values is a lie and illusion.

This rapid sketch should at least indicate the plausibility of Wesley's view that a failure to actualize evangelical economics would mean the collapse of the Methodist holiness project. This

Good News to the Poor is the test case of the visible efficacy of grace, the demonstration of love, the victory of the creator, the agency of the new subject.

It is not fortuitous that Wesley hits upon economic reality as the norm of holiness; it grows naturally out of his principal theological commitments. More precisely, Wesley's evangelical economics and his soteriology grow together, mutually implicating, reinforcing, and clarifying each other."

CHAPTER EIGHT

WHY DID WESLEY FAIL?

[T Wesley failed—on his own terms—is indisputable.

The movement he launched in the hopes of spreading scriptural holiness throughout the land did not escape the snare of material prosperity. Indeed, it abounded in it. The practice of an evangelical economics had already nearly disappeared in Wesley's last years, and after his death it was expunged from the collective memory of Methodists. Wesley saw it happening and knew all too well what it implied for his own movement and for the project of scriptural Christianity as such. Why then this failure, which Wesley himself seemed incapable of reversing? Wesley puts the question in all sharpness:

I am distressed. I know not what to do. I see what I might have done once. I might have said peremptorily and expressly, "Here I am: I and my Bible. I will not, I dare not, vary from this book, either in great things or small. I have no power to dispense with one jot or tittle of what is contained therein. I am determined to be a Bible Christian, not almost, but altogether. Who will meet me on this ground? Join me on this, or notatall. .

. ." But, alas! the time is now past; and what I can do now, I cannot tell. ("Causes of the Inefficacy of Christianity," VI1I:287-88)

The question of the failure of Wesley's project is thus not one that comes from outside. It is indelibly inscribed in the thought

Good News to the Poor of Wesley himself. No study of Wesley's social ethic, and especially of what I have called his 'evangelical economics, can dispense with an attempt to take this question seriously.

But it is important to get clear just what is involved in this question. We are not concerned here to dispute the very possibility of this project. Undoubtedly there are many who would argue on theological or exegetical grounds that the attempt to actualize what Wesley called scriptural Christianity is doomed to failure because the gospel makes no such demand or claim. While I believe that contemporary liberation theology provides a strong case to answer this charge—especially as it concerns the central elements of solidarity with the poor, the demystification of wealth and power, the protest against injustice, and the practice of an alternative economics—a discussion of this would take us far from the immediate question of Wesley's own thought and practice.'

Still less can the critique of Wesley begin with the point of view that however well-based Wesley's view of evangelical economics may be in the New Testament, it is nevertheless a fool's dream that cannot be taken seriously. Such a view would no doubt be expressed by many of the secular proponents of various forms of "communism" and capitalism who suppose that faith has nothing important to say regarding what they are pleased to call

"the real world" of political economy. While this point of view would have to be answered by a contemporary reformulation of evangelical economics, it would be entirely too facile to use this as the basis of an evaluation of Wesley.

Other questions might be raised from the point of view of contemporary advances in the science of biblical hermeneutics or theological anthropology, or the analysis of the contemporary character of human oppression and exploitation. These are essential for the constructive task of generating an adequate social or economic ethic for our time, and they are being ably pursued by theologians on all continents—especially in Latin

America. Still it does not seem altogether fair to begin a critique of Wesley by employing perspectives and theories, analyses and experiences, that are new for us and to which Wesley can hardly be held accountable.'

What we must content ourselves with here is an internal

Why Did Wesley Fail? critique that takes Wesley's project seriously, indeed as seriously as he seemed to do, and on that basis seeks to understand how it could have happened that his social ethic appeared to fall on deaf ears.

To raise the question in this way should not lead us to suppose that a critique of Wesley somehow will let the Methodists off the hook. Undoubtedly Wesley's failure was not his alone, but that of the Methodists in general. Indeed, it would be an interesting and illuminating historical study to inquire just how it was that the Methodists justified to themselves their non-compliance with Wesley, how they managed even to forget that there ever was such a thing as a demystification of wealth, a solidarity with the poor that made their welfare the litmus test of action, a stewardship that aimed at the redistribution of wealth and the abstinence from consumerism, and so on.

Itis, perhaps, time that someone wrote this history of decline, of failure, of subversion and betrayal, if only to expose the triumphalist self-deceit of so many histories of Methodism.' But this would be a question about Methodism and not about Wesley, the Wesley whose relationship with Methodism became increasingly polemical in the last years of his leadership.

What I instead propose to do here is to look for clues to the failure of his project in the evidence that Wesley himself provides. This is an exercise in the sort of "plain speaking" that Wesley himself so often called for. It is the essentially friendly attempt to observe and to expose the mistakes that lead the sister or brother to enter into the sort of self-contradiction that imperils his or her own project of realizing what he or she takes to be essential to the Christian life. The point of such an exercise is to discover the pitfalls of an attempt to develop an evangelical economics against which we may be both forewarned and forearmed.

HEDGES AND QUALIFICATIONS

We will first consider some of the ways Wesley may have so qualified and hedged his presentation of evangelical economics

Good News to the Poor as to make it possible, if not excusable, for the Methodists to hear what they wanted to hear and ignore the more challenging thrust of Wesley's position. Ata number of points we may notice a certain hesitancy in Wesley, a hesitancy that, to be sure, is always corrected, but appears to leave room for the hearer or reader to squirm out of the application of Wesley's position to her or his own circumstance. A few instances may indicate the character of this hesitancy.

And it is no more sinful to be rich than to be poor. But it is dangerous beyond expression. ("The Rich Man and Lazarus,"

VII:250) It is true, riches, and the increase of them, are the gift of God. Yet great care is to be taken, that what is intended for a blessing, do not turn into a curse. ("On the Danger of Increasing Riches," VII:355)

He does not affirm this absolutely of the rich. .

. But he affirms it of .

. those who desire or seek to be rich. Riches, dangerous as they are, do not always "drown men in destruction and perdition;" but the desire of riches does. ("Sermon on the Mount, Discourse VIII,"

V:369) Now, in each of these cases Wesley's position seems clear and balanced. But the tendency of a reader not antecedently convinced of Wesley's evangelical economics is to read here only that it is not sinful to be rich, that riches are the gift of God, and that all is well so long as we aren't too greedy. Thereafter it is an uphill battle for Wesley to persuade people that they really have set their hearts on riches, that riches are for them a curse, and that the only way to escape the threat is to give abundantly more to the poor. That he exerts himself to persuade them of all this is quite true. But meanwhile they are wriggling out of the loopholes in the rhetoric.

Another sort of difficulty arises from Wesley's attempt to show that he is nota dreamy idealist, that he does know the value of money.

Not that money is an evil of itself: It is applicable to good as well as bad purposes. But, nevertheless, it isan undoubted truth, that "the love of money is the root of all evil;" and also, that the possession of

Why Did Wesley Fail? riches naturally breeds the love of them. ("The Mystery of Iniquity," V1:265) Above all, he has committed to our charge that precious talent which contains all the rest,—money: Indeed it is unspeakably precious, if we are wise and faithful stewards of it; if we employ every part of it for such purposes as our blessed Lord has commanded us to do. ("The Good Steward," VI:139)

Let the world be as corrupt as it will, is gold or silver to blame?

"The love of money," we know, "is the root of all evil;" but not the thing itself. The fault does not lie in the money, but in them that use it. It may be used ill: And what may not? But it may likewise be used well: It is full as applicable to the best, as to the worst uses. It is of unspeakable service to all civilized nations, in all the common affairs of life: It is a most compendious instrument of transacting all manner of business, and (if we use it according to Christian wisdom) of doing all manner of good. It is true, were man ina state of innocence, or were all men "filled with the Holy Ghost," so that, like the infant Church at Jerusalem, "no man counted any thing he had his own," but "distribution was made to every one as he had need," the use of it would be superseded; as we cannot conceive there is any thing of the kind among the inhabitants of heaven.

But, in the present state of mankind, it is an excellent gift of God, answering the noblest ends. In the hands of his children, it is food for the hungry, drink for the thirsty, raiment for the naked: It gives to the traveller and the stranger where to lay his head. By it we may supply the place of an husband to the widow, and of a father to the fatherless. We may be a defence for the oppressed, a means of health to the sick, of ease to them that are in pain; it may be as eyes to the blind, as feet to the lame; yea, a lifter up from the gates of death! ("The Use of Money," V1:126)

The bulk of this is unexceptionable as it stands. But why the need to reassure readers and hearers of what they know only too well and already ardently believe? Why an entirely gratuitous praise of the virtues of money? Of course, any reader, not only of Wesley as a whole, but also of these very sermons, will know that for Wesley the only justification for having money is that we may do the sort of good he has mentioned in the last quotation.

Wesley in every case immediately supplies all those qualifications that open up the themes of his evangelical economics. But by demonstrating his sophistication about money, he opens the

Good News to the Poor door, if only a crack, to those who suppose that they too know the value of money and that there is no need to make such a fuss about the misuse of something so obviously beneficial. It is as if Wesley is giving something of a double message, despite his clear intention to sound the trumpet for a truly evangelical economics, which does more than echo worldly wisdom.'

Even more serious are those points at which Wesley's evangelical economics is compromised by a traditionalist interpretation of Scripture, which leads him to propound notions that are "pleasing to flesh and blood," but that are in fundamental tension with what he otherwise sees to be the case.

Anillustration of this is the interpretation of the story of the rich young ruler. While Wesley wants to take seriously the position that a rich person is prevented by the fact of wealth itself from entering into the kingdom of God, and that the only remedy for this is giving all surplus (all above what is necessary for food and raiment) to the poor, he nevertheless adopts the traditional evasion that seeks to limit the applicability of this story to a particular case. Thus he writes:

God doth not say to thee, "Sell all that thou hast." Indeed, he who seeth the hearts of men saw it needful to enjoin this in one peculiar case, that of the young rich ruler. But he never laid it down for a general rule, to all rich men, in all succeeding generations.

("Sermon on the Mount, Discourse VIII," V:370; see V:376) It is quite extraordinary for Wesley to thus limit the applicability of an episode from the Gospels to just the particular case in the past. I know of no other instance of this in Wesley's biblical interpretation. He is clearly repeating the common wisdom of the tradition he has inherited, a tradition formed by the very Constantinianism he is so concerned to expose. Moreover, the interpretation Wesley proposes here is not only contradicted by Luke 14:33 and 18:32, but it is also contrary to Wesley's own view of the gravity of the problem of wealth and of the necessity of giving one's substance to the poor as the only remedy—theses which this sermon develops at some length. Unfortunately, then, the appearance of this interpretation of the story of the rich young ruler in one of Wesley's

Why Did Wesley Fail?

"Standard Sermons" provides those who wish to use Wesley to overturn Wesley with an irresistible opportunity.

A similar opportunity is provided by Wesley's interpretation of the teaching in the Sermon on the Mount about anxiety over material security (Matt. 6:25-34). Concerning this, Wesley writes:

It is the will of God, that every man should labour to eat his own bread; yea, and that every man should provide for his own, for them of his own household. It is likewise his will, that we should

"owe no man anything, but provide things honest in the sight of all men." But this cannot be done without taking some thought, without having some care upon our minds; yea, often, not without long and serious thought, not without much and earnest care.

Consequently this care .

. our blessed Lord does not condemn.

Yea, it is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Saviour.

("Sermon on the Mount, Discourse TX VE585) Whatever one may think of this as prudent advice, it is manifest that it is a total contradiction of the plain meaning of the text. Of course, Wesley does not invent this particular interpretation. It is the staple of tradition. But it is nonetheless false for all that. Moreover, Wesley sees that it is false in a practical sense as he berates, in the same sermon, those who use the question "What will we eat?" as an excuse to evade the necessity of obeying the instructions of this text: "They throw away their poor souls, lest they should, some time or other, fall short of what is needful for their bodies!" (ibid., V:390)

Clearly there is a fundamental tension here between an attempt to apply the text in a penetrating way so as to insist that a preoccupation with worldly goods 1s destructive of faith, and, on the other hand, an attempt to accommodate the prudential ethos of the reader. Thus the way is opened again to the sort of worldly prudence that Wesley wanted to oppose.

A final illustration of this tension in Wesley's exposition comes in his discussion of diligence in work to provide what is necessary for life.

We ought, therefore, to use all diligence in our calling, in order to owe no man anything; this being no other than a plain law of

Good News to the Poor common justice, which our Lord came "not to destroy, but to fulfil." ("Sermon on the Mount, Discourse VIII," V:366-67)

We should note first that Wesley here uses two biblical passages as mere slogans with no regard for their context. "Owe no man anything" (Rom. 13:8) has nothing to do with financial solvency but with the command to love. The law that Jesus came

"not to destroy but to fulfill," according to Matthew, has nothing to do with "common justice" but with the Old Testament. This superficial use of biblical texts is quite common in Wesley's earlier sermons and diminishes in the later ones. Much of the rest of his discussion of the aim of diligence in our work has the same character.

This also it is our duty to do, even upon principles of heathen morality. Every man ought to provide the plain necessaries of life, both for his own wife and children; and to put them into a capacity of providing these for themselves, when he is gone hence and is no more seen. I say, of providing these; the plain necessaries of life; not delicacies; not superfluities .

. it is no man's duty to furnish them, any more than himself, with the means either of luxury or idleness...

Lastly. We are not forbidden, in these words, to lay up, from time to time, what is needful for the carrying on our worldly business, in such a measure and degree as is sufficient to answer the foregoing purposes. ("Sermon on the Mount, Discourse VIII,"

V:367) Who can doubt that Wesley has here opened up enough loopholes for those who desire accommodation to the world to drive through an entire caravan of camels? What amount of "laying up treasure" cannot be justified by the necessity of providing for our families or, especially, keeping our "worldly business" solvent? To be sure, Wesley tries to hold the gates against wholesale surrender with strictures about luxury and idleness, but it is to no avail. Even the Gettys and the Rockefellers can get past this one by training their heirs to be industrious as well. Moreover, Wesley has placed all this evasion on the footing of an obligation, the obligation of "heathen morality." Is it any wonder that he has so much subsequent

Why Did Wesley Fail? difficulty in persuading the Methodists to take a different course, to choose a different way?

THE THREE RULES

The hedges and qualifications we have observed in some of Wesley's sermons appear to give license to those who search for ways to avoid the radical direction of Wesley's thought. The bulk of these passages are isolated fragments of Wesley's early sermons. None of these early sermons acquires the normative status of Wesley's sermon "On the Use of Money," which is also referred to by Wesley as the sermon "On the Mammon of Unrighteousness" because of the text from which Wesley launches the discourse (Luke 16:9).

It is here that one encounters Wesley's "three rules" of gaining, saving, and giving

"all you can." We have already encountered a number of texts in which Wesley refers to this sermon and laments that Methodists have proven all too willing to gain and even save, but have failed utterly to give with the same willingness.' Because these rules serve as one of the ways in which Wesley measures the failure of Methodism, it may be useful to take a closer look at the sermon to see to what degree it serves to permit the failure of which Wesley complains.

It does not require exaggerated attention to exegetical detail to see that, for Wesley, the aim of the discourse is to emphasize the necessity of giving to the poor. He says at the introduction to the third rule: "All this is nothing, if a man go not forward, if he does not point all this at a farther end" (VI:133). Clearly, for Wesley, the end of gaining and of saving is giving. The goal of diligence and frugality is the capacity to serve the poor. But the willful reader may say: "Here are three rules, and if I obey two .

. well, two out of three ain't bad." Wesley will say that two out of three will make you "twofold more the children of hell" than you were before ("Causes of the Inefficacy of Christianity,"

VII:286). But it will not be persuasive to those who fail to see (or refuse to see) the point of this evangelical economics.

Good News to the Poor Now, if we recall Wesley's own later diagnosis of the apparent self-contradiction in Christianity, we will see how this sermon plays a key role in the demise of the project of original

Methodism. That diagnosis was as follows:

Does it not seem (and yet this cannot be) that Christianity, true scriptural Christianity, has a tendency, in process of time, to undermine and destroy itself? For wherever true Christianity spreads, it must cause diligence and frugality, which, in the natural course of things, must beget riches! and riches naturally beget pride, love of the world, and every temper that is destructive of Christianity. Now, if there be no way to prevent this, Christianity is inconsistent with itself, and, of consequence, cannot stand, cannot continue long among any people; since, wherever it generally prevails, it saps its own foundation. ("Causes of the Inefficacy of Christianity," VII:290) The question, then, is, in the first place, whether Christianity does necessarily produce that diligence and frugality that produces riches and catastrophe. What case does Wesley make for this diligence and frugality? What is the reason for encouraging Methodists to gain all they can? One is immediately struck by the fact that Wesley does not provide any real justification for this at all! Indeed, the bulk of this section of the sermon is devoted to qualifying the instruction so as to restrict it to forms of work that do no damage to one's own or one's neighbors' body, mind, or soul. Now all of this is quite appropriate and has served as the basis for some of the most important aspects of the Methodist Social Creed, for here we encounter the basis in Wesley's thoughts for the reform of the conditions of labor that go far beyond anything explicitly developed by Wesley himself. For example, the view that labor should not damage the mind or body can serve as the basis for opposition to child labor, to the abominable working conditions of miners, and so forth. The importance of this should not be underestimated. But at the same time we must ask, "But what is the basis for seeking to 'gain all'one can' in the first place?"

We have already seen that Wesley regarded it as a duty to try

Why Did Wesley Fail? to earn enough to provide the necessities of life for oneself and one's household. To be sure, this view itself is impossible to justify on the basis of the Sermon on the Mount or any other text from the four Gospels. But even if we waive this objection, how is this supposed duty in any way appropriately described as "gaining all you can"? Earning what is needful is not the same as gaining all you can. Wesley's use of a catchy phrase produces a ringing rhetorical effect.

It also produces a catastrophic misunderstanding. Earning what you need does not produce riches. Gaining what you can does. Perhaps it is not Christianity

(even the sort that encourages one to provide for one's family), but Wesley's rhetoric, that self-destructs.

The second rule is "save all you can." In other sermons, Wesley emphasizes that this means "Don't spend on yourself what God gives you to aid the poor." But here the emphasis falls on avoiding needless expense so as to hold oneself free of the sort of self-indulgence that leads to sin. The result is that the instruction about saving is here divorced from its ground in evangelical economics. It thus seems to stand apart from the subsequent instruction to give.

Although in Wesley's overall view gaining and saving are carefully related to the principles of his evangelical economics, that is not the case here. It is already too late when he attempts to show the necessary relationship between the first two rules and the third. He has himself developed them independently. The reader can understand what he says here about the first or second without referring to the third. Thus, despite Wesley's clear intention, it looks as if three independent rules are held together only by the theme of money.

On the whole, then, despite the virtues of some of what Wesley has to say about work, this sermon must be regarded as the source of most of Wesley's problems with the Methodists. It produces the very situation that Wesley so heartily laments: that Methodists increase in riches and so decline in holiness. The attempt to present Wesley's economic ethic using this sermon as its basis or outline is doomed to failure, for this sermon does not represent the center of Wesley's position, but an uncharacteristic deviation from it.°

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