In our February 22 webinar – titled “Complicated Wickedness”: Wesley and Systemic Injustice – historian Charlie Self summed up the way Wesley challenges us to rethink our assumptions:
I think it’s important that we realize that Wesley won’t fit into a neat box of “individualism” or “collectivism.” People keep trying to make a libertarian or Marxist Wesley, and he simply won’t fit there. That’s what makes him so dynamic. Volunteerism is a key impetus here. If we’re going to solve problems, it’s not only legislation from above, but it has to be virtue from below. And virtue is not only personal, it’s also social. In fact, every Methodist scholar I have read said that Wesley did not distinguish between personal and social ethics. If you talk about Wesley and ethics, they’re inescapable.
Check out the video below to dive into this provocative discussion, including historian Jennifer Woodruff Tait’s recommendations for (easily accessible and short) reading from Wesley himself to prompt prayer and reflection, as well as some uncomfortably specific thoughts about potential contemporary applications.
And make a note on your calendar today to join us for our next webinar, which also challenges the division between personal and social ethics!
The world of modern finance is complex, but as theological educators, we can’t let that keep us on the sidelines. How can we better understand the opportunities and challenges involved in modern finance as we strive to help cultivate a flourishing world? And how can we get beyond “don’t invest in obviously bad companies” and cast a constructive vision for finance as part of God’s oikonomia of all things?
Join longtime ON leader Scott Rae for a discussion with three Christians who serve as finance professionals:
- Jason Myhre, The Eventide Center for Faith and Investing
- Mary Naber, Sage Stone Wealth Management
- Shane Enete, Biola University
The webinar will take place on Tuesday, March 15 at 1:00-1:45 central (2:00 eastern, 11:00 Pacific). It will be free and there is no registration needed.
Just click this link when it’s time to start.
Put it on your calendar today!
And please spread the word – the webinar is open to the public and all are welcome.
There’s no substitute for a direct encounter with the great historical voices of theology. Woodruff Tait encourages us to prayerfully meet Wesley and absorb his witness:
Charlie has mentioned a lot of areas where we could fruitfully look at, and look to Wesley’s example. I would challenge everyone who’s on this call, and who looks at the recording later, to do one – well, three things, but one thing. Very Trinitarian! To go and find – none of these are hard to find, they are all available online or very inexpensively – the General Rules of the Methodist Societies, Wesley’s sermon “On the Use of Money,” and – this is maybe a little harder to track down, but it can be found – Wesley’s tract Thoughts on the Present Scarcity of Provisions. And I want you to read those three things, and I want you to take them to heart and study them, and pray about what they reveal to you. Because there is a practical blueprint in those documents for combining the personal and social issues that I honestly do not think has been bettered in the last 250 years….Now, are we worried about wearing ruffles? No. Are we worried about if our garments are made in sweatshops? Yes. So I think you will very quickly find very practical advice from Wesley in those documents.
A fruitful exercise for any of us!
You won’t want to miss this video – here are a few samples of the conversation.
Jay Moon on Wesley’s complex approach to social problems:
Wesley was greatly concerned with two big areas. One was, you encapsulate it by the term “holiness,” really meaning the holy love of God and neighbor. And he was actually greatly concerned about the religiosity of his day and the impotency of the church….But he’s also concerned about poverty, and he felt that poverty was this travesty that God was concerned about. And he was convinced, if people did the first step – if they had transformed lives that had this burning holy love of God and neighbor – they would automatically be concerned about poverty as well, that they would make the connection between the two. Now, fortunately, Wesley was not naïve, though. He realized that systems are a lot more than just simple solutions. And in Greg Sen’s recent book on public missiology, he describes how we often take mechanistic solutions to deep complex problems. And he says that there are these thick, complex areas. And we try to, in the church, often have a very simple solution to a problem that’s not very effective, because we don’t take the time to dig into the thickness of it – you know, drawing from Clifford Geertz about thick descriptions, right?…And Wesley was smart enough to realize that these complex issues need to have complex responses.
Jennifer Woodruff Tait on how we can see the dual focus in Wesley’s approach:
With the alcohol issue, you’ll see things like “A Word to a Drunkard” that are very much – and I found it reprinted on like, you know, AA sites today – very much about the drunkard’s individual responsibility not to drink. But there are far more places where he talks about the society’s responsibility not to place temptation in front of the drunkard, and not to make money in this illegitimate way – not to distill liquor, not to sell liquor.
He has this tract Thoughts on the Present Scarcity of Provisions, which is about food insecurity. But one of the big reasons he sees that there’s food insecurity is because corn is being used to make distilled spirits. And so he says, in order to have a society where we combat addiction, we don’t just preach to the drunkard. We need to have different governmental policies on who gets paid for corn and what they do with it. And what penalties or incentives there might be to do different things with the crops, so that we deal with distilling. Charlie mentioned how the General Rules originally forbad slaveholders from becoming members; the General Rules also forbade both drunkards and distillers from becoming members, unless they stopped doing those things. So he’s calling out to people, this is what I want you to do in terms of your personal holiness. But he’s also saying, look, if you have an occupation that is not contributing to the flourishing of society, you can’t be a Methodist and keep doing that. And as Charlie alluded to with slavery, this gets also gets watered down later….
He said, well, people protest that we ought to distill because it brings the king a lot of revenue. And he said: “Is this an equivalent for the lives of his subjects? Would his majesty sell a hundred thousand of his subjects yearly for 400,000 pounds?” So, to Wesley, this is actually what the society is doing. And then he says further to people who are participating in luxurious living in general, including in ways that encourage alcohol abuse: “You injure the poor in the same proportion as you poison your own soul. You might have clothed the naked, but what was due to them was thrown away on your costly apparel. You might have fed the hungry, entertained the stranger, relieved them that were sick or in prison, but the superfluities of your own table swallowed up that whereby they should have been profited.”
Charlie Self on “complicated wickedness” in our world today:
I just thought I’d have a little fun for minute, and mention a couple problems we are in the middle of that Wesley would address, or how he might address them. Right now, we’re in an opioid crisis and recreational drug crisis, and marketing nicotine to kids. And Wesley would, of course, call the addict to Christ, create communities to help the convert and the addict. But he would also declare that when there needs to be a crackdown on the marketing and on the corporations and on the power structures that lead to such awfulness and affliction food and work insecurity. He would call on private and public agencies to work on housing for the poor. And we have friends in Detroit that are doing this right now with rent-to-own small houses, transforming neighborhoods. But he would call on a cooperative venture. He would have churches help the food deserts – not only with charity and relief, but really calling on providers to set up markets in these deserts. By the way, Wesley would find it unconscionable that there’s a food desert 15 minutes from Mar-a-Lago. He would find it unconscionable that you have that kind of situation. Healthcare would be the same. He would labor to end all forms of slavery. We, we talk about workplace and sex slavery today, there’s still chattel slavery, of course, that we know about. But he would work toward that because of his anthropology, and because of his profound conviction. By the way, just a little historic reminder: In 1757, he said that no Methodist can own a slave. And yet a hundred years later, you have Southern Methodist University.
Check out the video above for the full conversation.
And mark your calendar today for our webinar on Modern Finance and the Mission of the Church, coming to you March 15!
