Pulse
20 March 2023
Money is arguably one of the most neglected topics in the Church today. Some readers may find this observation rather strange since there is so much reference to it in the Church’s liturgies (the offering), preaching (on tithes and stewardship) and in its occasional appeal for funds for various projects.
Although it’s true that money seems ubiquitous in this sense, what is often missing is a rigorous theological reflection on what it is and on its spiritual significance. Surveying the literature over the past couple of decades, we find that very few books on the theology of money have come off our Christian presses, compared to other topics.
Perhaps this is the reason why there is so much confusion about money and how Christians should relate to it in our churches today.
One the one hand, we have the prosperity gospel, which is spreading like wild fire in large swathes of conservative Christianity, and which portrays God as being more interested in the material wealth of believers than in their eternal security. And on the other, we have Christians who are advocating voluntary poverty.
Needless to say, these two approaches are animated by radically different (even antithetical) theological understandings of the meaning and significance of material possessions and wealth.
As recently as 2009, Philip Goodchild could remark in his excellent book Theology of Money that: ‘A true theology of money, a systematic inquiry into the force of money as a system for universal evaluation, has perhaps never been undertaken.’
‘The history of Christian reflection on money,’ he elaborates,
is of limited service insofar as it concentrates on subjective attitudes towards wealth; the history of economic science is of limited service insofar as it concentrates on an objective science of money as a functional instrument. Money as a source of evaluation transcends distinctions between subject and object, and problematizes what we have come to expect from science. Our method must be philosophical, and a philosophical digression on the nature of modern reason is required to orient our image of thought so that it may become capable of disclosing the theology of money.
Such an ambitious undertaking is obviously beyond the scope of this short article. But it is an undertaking that is sorely needed in the Church, and Goodchild has led the way with his excellent contribution to this complex inquiry.
The purpose of this article is considerably more modest. It seeks to reflect on the phenomenon of money, its meaning and significance, and why Jesus was so suspicious of it.
NOT JUST A COMMODITY
We begin, then, with the question: ‘What is money?’
The most basic answer to this question, whose history can be traced to the advent of money and which is still widely accepted today, is that money is a form of commodity. As David Goacher describes it in 1993, money is ‘any generally acceptable medium of exchange.’
As a commodity, or, as Frederic Mishkin describes it in The Economics of Money (2007), as ‘anything that is generally accepted in payment for goods or services or in the repayment of debts,’ money can come in many different forms – silver, metal, paper.
For much of its history – at least until the emergence of the capitalist system in the late Middle Ages – money has been understood in this way. Christian thinkers from the Patristic era onwards have in the main also accepted the commodity theory of money.
However, as early as the 4th century B.C., the great Greek philosopher Aristotle had expanded the concept of money by recognizing it as a social creation, while at the same time regarding it as a commodity. Thus, in Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle offers this truly penetrating insight:
All goods to be exchanged, then, should be measurable by some standard coin or measure … In reality, this measure is the need (or demand) which holds all things together; for if man had no needs at all or no needs of a similar nature, there would be no exchange or not this kind of exchange. So, a coin is a sort of substitute (or representative) for need (demand) and came into being by convention … (but) this money too is subject to the same fluctuation in need (demand) for its worth does not always remain the same.
Following the ancient philosopher’s lead, the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas likewise acknowledged the fact that money is a social creation which was brought into existence for a specific purpose. In the context of his discussion of usury, Aquinas maintains that money ‘was invented chiefly for the purpose of exchange.’
Fast-forward to the present, many philosophers have shown that the commodity theory on its own is an inadequate account of the nature of money. For example, Georg Simmel, in his Philosophy of Money (1912), argues quite convincingly that apart from being a medium of exchange, money also signifies economic value. ‘As a visible object,’ Simmel writes, ‘money is the substance that embodies abstract economic value.’
In his extensive reflection on the theology of money, Philip Goodchild similarly underscores the fact that money is not simply a commodity or a medium of exchange. He argues that a ‘monetary purchase is not simply a physical exchange of goods. It also has a social dimension that is compressed into the actual values agreed while obscured by the notion of value itself.’
Goodchild explains further that besides being a commodity, money is also a unit of account. ‘Unit of account theories of money’, Goodchild writes, ‘explain money in terms of its extrinsic imposition on the market by a political agency such as a state.’
All this simply means that money never exists in isolation. As a human creation, its very existence is the result of a confluence of social and cultural factors, and these very forces continually shape its meaning and significance.
This complex understanding of money is excellently captured in the 2003 publication of the Doctrine Commission of the General Synod of the Church of England entitled Being Human:
Notes and coins are money, but they are not what money is … ‘Money’ is much more like a verb than a noun; it names activity or function rather than a set of discrete objects in the world. Money is dynamic; it is activity; it is function. What makes notes and coins money is not some quality or intrinsic property they have in themselves, but the functions they perform in human society … For the notes and coins (figures on accounts) to function as money requires a set of social, cultural and political, as well as economic, arrangements. Money is a human and social reality, not something that can be abstracted from specific human contexts.
MONEY AS MAMMON
In 1844, Karl Marx wrote an article entitled ‘The Power of Money in Bourgeois Society’ in which he describes, with remarkable perceptiveness, the powerful grip that money can have on human lives:
By possessing the property of buying everything, by possessing the property of appropriating all objects, money is thus the object of eminent possession. The universality of its property is the omnipotence of its being. It is, therefore, regarded as omnipotent.
Jesus alluded to this aspect of money – its ability to dominate and control – when he famously said: ‘No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money (mammon)’ (Matthew 6:24).
The Aramaic ‘mammon’, which appears only four times in the New Testament (Matthew 6:24 and Luke 16:9, 11, 13), and which Matthew and Luke did not see the need to translate into Greek, has a negative connotation here in this passage. Jesus is clearly suspicious of mammon, and even sees it as a possible rival to God himself in its ability to elicit loyalty and devotion.
Consequently, Jesus here emphasizes that it is impossible for the believer to properly serve both God and money (mammon). As W.D. Davies and Dale C. Allison explain:
God commands an exclusive allegiance and obligation which must transcend all other claimants for a person’s soul; while mammon, once it has its hooks in human flesh, will drag it where it wills, all the time whispering into the ear dreams of self-aggrandizement. The marching orders of God and of mammon are in entirely different directions.
In his provocative book Money and Power – which was published in 1950 but was translated into English only in 1984 – the French Christian philosopher Jacques Ellul argues that here Jesus was ‘not using a rhetorical figure, but pointing to a reality … He is speaking of a power which tries to be like God, which makes itself our master.’
Ellul therefore personifies money, presenting it as a powerful spiritual force that can so deceive and enslave its user as to alienate him from the true God. He writes:
Do we really believe that if money were only an object with no spiritual significance Jesus would have gone that far? To love money, to be attached to it, is to hate God. We can now understand why St Paul says that the love of money is the root of all evil. This is not a hackneyed bit of popular morality. It is an accurate summary of this conflict. Insofar as the love of money is the hatred of God, it certainly is a root of all the evils that accompany separation from God.
As a power which shapes human lives, money also has the ability to foster an ethos or culture that can be described as dehumanising.
In its brief but helpful publication entitled On the Theology of Money (2016), the General Synod of the Anglican Church of Canada discusses the assumptions about human nature upon which the market economy depends. ‘Market economics’, it states, ‘depend upon certain assumptions about the human person, and the unavoidable force of market economics serves to shape the human person in the market’s own interest.’
In the money economy, the human person is not regarded as having his own intrinsic value. Rather a person’s value is measured by his ability to participate in and contribute to the economy.
Consequently, those who are unable to participate fully due to age, illness or disability are subjected to discrimination and exclusion, even if they are partially accommodated.
The money economy has also led many to believe that money is the primary, if not the only, measure or marker of value. As the Anglican publication emphatically puts it:
Money, and acts of material consumption, can come to represent importance, status, value, safety, and security, even love. Basic human interactions are reduced to exchanges of money and goods, and we can become increasingly unable to engage in, or even represent to ourselves, relationships with other human beings or with God, except through some version of monetary exchange.
Unreflective immersion in the money economy can turn these assumptions about human beings and human relationship in which it is grounded into culture-shaping imperatives – mindsets and patterns of behaviour that are embraced as the norm.
All these do not in any way play down the many great and noble uses of money or its importance in modern society.
But the warnings that are sounded in Scripture, especially in Jesus’ teaching discussed above, show that as a cultural, social and political reality the power of money, its propensity towards ‘omnipotence’ (Marx), must never be left unchecked and unbridled.
Dr Roland Chia is Chew Hock Hin Professor at Trinity Theological College (Singapore) and Theological and Research Advisor of the Ethos Institute for Public Christianity.