Comerás o teu pão com o suor do teu rosto: Orientações do cristianismo sobre o uso do dinheiro na modernidade

Abstract

The subject of this work is the official orientation of christianity on the use of money and the work payments in modernity, through the analysis of two texts: the sermon "The Use of Money", published by John Wesley (1703-1791) in 1771, and the Encyclical "Rerum Novarum", published by Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903) in 1891. The two documents provide the base for the genesis of the official doctrine of christianity in two branches, Methodist Protestantism, and Roman Catholicism. We try to understand how christianity, in these two versions, responds to the economic conditions of the beginning of capitalism, and in what meaning these christian responses to the context of professional life impact the society of its time. In order to meet this goal, we study each document in its historical, social context and its idealizers, finding the scenario in which they elaborated their orientations. Next, we put the two documents in dialogue, from three axes: capital, the worker's salary and social inequality, trying to find the conditions in which they distance themselves, as well as the line in which they converge towards the understanding of a common positioning face the challenges of modernity