But those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains. -1 Timothy 6:9-10
For everything the Bible says about money and possessions, its message can be ambivalent. As Walter Brueggemann puts it, “One can find in Scripture almost anything on the topic one wants to find,” and the Bible’s discussions of wealth and possessions are “complex and diverse in a way that refuses any systematic summary.”[1]
On the one hand, there are many explicitly negative accounts of money. For instance, Jesus commands the rich young ruler to give away all of his possessions so that he may have “treasure in heaven” (Mark 10:21 NRSVUE). The young man’s possessions appear to be in conflict with his salvation. Elsewhere, Jesus says that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” (Matt. 19:24). Many advocates of a plain reading of the biblical text are at pains to avoid such a reading here, explaining that this verse refers to a small side gate entering into Jerusalem, a gate through which it was difficult but not impossible for camels to pass through. But there is no archeological evidence of such a gate. The text seems to mean what it says: it is impossible for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, and a rich person cannot enter God’s kingdom.
On the other hand, the condemnation of possessions is by no means total. It was out of the wealth of Joseph of Arimathea, a disciple of Jesus, that Jesus’s tomb was furnished (see Luke 23:50–56). The man after God’s own heart, King David, had an incredible fortune. And for all of the sharing that is modeled in the early church in the book of Acts, many heroes of the faith—Abraham, King Solomon, Joseph—held massive amounts of wealth, which are often explicitly described as blessings from God. These individuals demonstrate at least a compatibility between wealth and faithful service to God, if not implicit or outright support for the potential moral goodness of wealth.
This ambivalence has led many readers to try to find an ordering principle that can provide a coherent framework for addressing the Bible’s claims about money and wealth. One frequent way of resolving this ambiguity is an appeal to the Scripture that says “the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil” (1 Tim. 6:10). In other words, some might emphasize that the Bible does not say money is evil; it says the love of money is evil. This approach provides a consistent interpretative lens that is capable of handling the otherwise diverse descriptions of wealth in the Bible. The issue, so the argument goes, is not wealth per se but a matter of one’s loves and desires. Ethics around money and wealth are a matter of the heart.
This argument can be quite compelling, especially for anyone influenced by the Augustinian tradition, because it highlights that persons are “bundles of loves.” We are what we love, and we are shaped by our desires.[2] Augustine describes sins as disordered desires and leads us to think about ordering our lives to the proper hierarchy of goods. Imagining excessive desire for money as the key to these verses fits nicely within this Augustinian approach.
Shifting the focus of discussions of wealth and money to the love of money thus provides a coherent framework for understanding many biblical passages that otherwise may seem at odds with each other while also resonating with an important way in which sin has been handled conceptually in the Christian tradition. The intuitive way in which this argument addresses these fundamental problems often leaves it unchallenged. The love of money is a private affair, an internal issue we must wrestle with in our hearts.
Yet there is something odd about resolving the biblical discussion of money in this way. It makes any amount of wealth that one holds irrelevant to spiritual matters. Judgments about the morality of wealth and money, as a result, have little—or perhaps nothing—to do with money or possessions. Discussions about money and the possible connections between money and sin are reduced to questions about desires and loves. This is strange because when our focus becomes the love of money, it is not clear that anything is demanded regarding our use of possessions. The demand to have a well-ordered life and desires becomes internalized and privatized.
The real potency of this argument, I suggest, is not that it leads us to attend to our desires and loves. I do not wish to discount the importance of desires, particularly when it comes to money. But a more subtle and significant shift occurs when the love of money is invoked, and it is that shift that needs to be addressed. Love, in this argument, is assumed to be a matter of interior affect, a kind of emotion evoked. This, of course, aligns with our modern notions of romance where we fall in and out of love. The proper ordering of our desires, however, involves far more than just our interior affect. Whether I do or do not love money is more than the presence or absence of warm fuzzies when I reflect upon it.
The rhetorical force of the argument to focus on the love of money when talking about an ethic of money relies upon the assumption that we can easily and clearly break apart our interior life (i.e., our emotions and desires) from our exterior life (i.e., our actions). A person’s private, interior life is bifurcated from her public, exterior life. What my heart desires seemingly cannot be known through what my hands do. It is private because matters of the heart are distinct from matters of the hands. This, as I will show, is a conceptually flawed approach to thinking about human persons, actions, and desires. By reattaching our interior and exterior lives—our desires to our actions—attending to the love of money no longer leaves wealth and money irrelevant to the discussion.
Public or Private Intentions
I am going to do what may seem an odd thing and look to arcane mid-twentieth-century arguments about action theory in order to bring clarity to our thinking about the Bible’s descriptions of the love of money. The debates that engulfed English moral philosophy at that time, particularly in the work of Elizabeth Anscombe, were not centered on wealth but on the distinction between intentional and voluntary action and the moral significance of foreseen and unforeseen consequences.
A Catholic philosopher who studied at and later taught at both Oxford and Cambridge, Anscombe was a bold, contrarian voice in the mid-twentieth century who argued that Oxford philosophy was corrupting the youth.[3] She also opposed the Oxford University dons when they convened to bestow Harry Truman with an honorary degree in 1956. Anscombe suggested that when “a man is known everywhere” as a “notorious criminal”—Truman, as we have been reminded recently by Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, was the president who decided to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—“it is sycophancy to honour him.”[4] It was an unpopular, uncompromising, and stunning judgment. That the Oxford dons desired to, and in fact did, honor Truman with a degree was, to Anscombe’s mind, exemplary of the emaciated state of what she called modern moral philosophy.[5] But to what did she attribute this flawed moral reasoning?
Anscombe argued that the dominant forms of moral philosophy were making (at least) two significant mistakes when it came to the category of intention and that both mistakes were creating now-pervasive dubious moral reasoning. The first mistake she highlighted was most clearly seen in the work of the nineteenth-century moral philosopher Henry Sidgwick who constrained ethics to the category of voluntary action and, in doing so, conflated a person’s intention with foreseen consequences. This defines a person’s intention as the predicted outcome of the action. Truman’s intention for dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for example, might be described as ending the war. Anscombe remarks that this definition of intention makes “the intrinsic badness” of an action irrelevant; the only concern is the intended result of the action. The foreseen consequences of ending the war—and not the massive number of innocent casaulities—was the crux upon which the ethical question of dropping bombs hinged. Anscombe claims that this renders it “stupid” to ask what the right thing to do was in any given situation. One need only act and be judged based upon foreseen consequences. Of course, if one miscalculated the consequences of the action, “it will appear that he was not responsible for the consequences, because he did not foresee them.” [6] A person’s intention is the expected result of their action.
The second mistake goes hand in hand with the first. Anscombe argues that one’s intention is not private or a matter of internal affect. She puts this directly, saying, “A man’s intention in acting is not so private and interior a thing that he has absolute authority in saying what it is.” A person’s intention cannot be reduced to a “mental state” in which a person finds herself when she acts. Rather, “we can simply say, ‘Look at a man and say what he is doing’—i.e. say what would immediately come to your mind as a report to give someone who could not see him and who wanted to know what was to be seen in that place. In most cases . . . you will be reporting not merely what he is doing, but an intention of his.”[7]
The implications of Anscombe’s point are striking when it comes to the discussion of the love of money. For Anscombe, a person’s actions are of the utmost significance. We do not need to try to access a hidden, private object (e.g., an intention, desire, or love). If redirecting conversations about wealth and money to the love of money makes what one does with money irrelevant, Anscombe’s argument reverses this move by placing priority upon a person’s actions. Rather than intention being an interior emotion or mental state such that a person’s actions are of the least importance, Anscombe argues that actions are most important.[8]
The two central mistakes of modern moral philosophy as described by Anscombe thus manifest themselves when the love of money is invoked as a moral hermeneutic that privatizes and interiorizes discussions of wealth. For when the love of money is invoked with the assumption that it is a private affair—a matter of the heart—what a person does is no longer of utmost importance, but, rather, the foreseen consequences are treated as most important. When we see a person act, we frequently say, “But I do not know their intention,” by which we mean that we do not know what they hope to bring about. This results in what Anscombe describes as “the absurd thesis which is sometimes maintained: that a man’s intended action is only described by describing his objective.”[9] The objective is the hoped for, or foreseen, consequences of the action, and only by being privy to this internal knowledge can we know whether someone loves money.
Publicly Loving Money
I have suggested that Anscombe gives us reason to think that a person’s love of money is “not so private and interior a thing that he has absolute authority in saying what it is.”[10] I am not trying to argue that the love of money is unimportant for reflection. Scripture says it is, and I do not think we should abandon working to properly order our desires and loves. My argument instead is that we need to attend more closely to the implied distinction that often accompanies appeals to the love of money. Our ethic of money cannot merely focus on interior affect and abandon focus on our actions. We must recognize that what our hands do with money is a reflection of our heart’s relationship to money.
If one is hesitant about applying Anscombe’s description of intention to this discussion, there is a parallel argument based upon the final commandment in the Decalogue—to not covet—that provides good reason to think I am on the right track. The commandment not to covet clearly deals with the realm of desires and loves. However, just as I have argued that the love of money should not be reduced to an interior sentiment, Brueggemann points out that coveting “concerns not only an attitude of wanting but also an action of taking.” Although it may appear that the tenth commandment deals with desires as opposed to the other nine commandments, which address action, that is not the case. Brueggemann notes, “The prohibition concerns the acquiring of what belongs to another. The combination of wanting (desiring) and seizing (acquiring) produces an acquisitive system of money and possessions that is self-propelled until it becomes an addiction that skews viable social relationships so that no one is safe from predatory eagerness.”[11] In other words, one need not ask someone who is addicted to predatory acquisition what their intention is or whether they covet their neighbors’ possessions in their heart. It is not a question of interior affect or mental state. A person’s covetousness is visible in their acquisitive action. Anscombe’s somewhat counterintuitive argument is, thus, right in line with the foundation of biblical commandments on possessions, desire, and action. Having articulated this important connection between our interior and exterior lives, I want to outline two ways in which this argument practically cashes out (if I may be permitted a cheeky pun).
If Anscombe is right, then the first point to make is that what one does with money provides access to knowing whether a person loves money. If one has a lot of money, spends a lot of money on oneself, does not share money and possessions with others, and devotes the majority of one’s time, energy, and resources toward making money, then one’s intention is clear. I have just described a person who loves money (and is covetous).
I spent years as an accountant. For some people whose tax returns I prepared, I could look at the income they earned, their credit card statements, mortgages on their multiple houses, and the charitable donations they gave (or did not give) and could know whether or not they loved money. I did not need to ask these people about their intentions with money. As Anscombe says, in describing the person’s actions, I have described their intention. I did not need to hem and haw around thinking about whether or not that person, upon reflection, saw their life as driven by acquisitiveness or greed. If you have the house, the cars, the camper, the boat (need I say yacht?), the airline status (need I say private airplane?), etc., etc., it is time to quit thinking that one’s affair with money is private. It is, in fact, rather quite public.
The second implication concerns those who suggest that all of this money ultimately contributes to a good purpose. They say that although the raw amount of wealth and spending may seem like a lot, we need to consider whether it is good stewardship of the resources that have been given.[12] Anscombe helps us see that good outcomes do not justify unjust actions or that giving away vast amounts of wealth does not justify its covetous acquisition. This is precisely the mistake that Anscombe points out as “the absurd thesis which is sometimes maintained: that a man’s intended action is only described by describing his objective.”[13]
To be clear, one may have a job that one enjoys, that contributes an important service to society, that pays well, and that leads one to give away large amounts of money. The giving in that instance is a good action, but notice that the intention of working is the enjoyment of the work itself or the good that it provides; the intention is not making money nor some other downstream objective. The opposite example is the person who engages in work that is exploitative or predatory, unfairly renumerates others for their work, acts detrimentally to the environment, erodes the common good, supports and sustains others in exploitative acts, or provides little value to society, even as it is highly paid—how many of the highest paid jobs were not identified as “essential work” during the pandemic? The objective of altruism in making money does not justify those unjust actions. Rather, when one sees exploitative practices, one need not wonder about the interior mental state of that person. Their covetous acquisition demonstrates the love of money even if their stated objective is altruism.[14]
Do I Love Money?
Anscombe is careful to admit that there are indeed some instances where a person’s actions may not fully indicate why they act in the way they do, but she does not want us to assume this as the default. In the United States, it is well documented that people do not like to discuss money. Thus, it may be difficult to even know what someone does with their money or how much they make. Most of us are not accountants reviewing others’ financial details. Perhaps this is for the better—I mean, can you imagine a world where everyone was an accountant? Indeed, I am not suggesting we should all mouse around in other people’s lives judging. A verse about specks and planks comes to mind.
My point is rather that the love of money is not, solely or primarily, an internal affair of the heart. This, as I have shown, has implications for arguments by those whose actions demonstrate a love of money even as they claim private intentions and desires that sound well ordered.
Perhaps the greatest force of this argument, however, is when it is turned upon ourselves as it also has implications for those of us who do not have vast amounts of wealth. Jesus, unsurprisingly, has made the moral standards around money more expansive, not less so. One does not actually need vast amounts of money to love money or be consistently engaged in acquisitive action.
If I possess a moderate or even small amount of money, I can still be swept up in the demands of this ethic of wealth. And so, if I make more than most, spend more than most, or spend more time, energy, and resources than most attempting to make money and yet I give very little away, I should be wary of internal reflection in which I find myself identifying the “true heart behind” my actions. As Anscombe delightfully, though incisively, puts it, “The idea that one can determine one’s intentions by making such a little speech to oneself is obvious bosh.”[15] Such speeches are appeals to private loves even though my affairs are quite public. My love is apparent based upon what I do with my money. Perhaps we would all be better off just asking our accountants, “Do I love money?” Or asking our neighbors, “Do I covet your possessions?”[16]
[1] Walter Brueggemann, Money and Possessions (Westminster John Knox, 2016), 1. Nevertheless, Brueggemann unambiguously concludes that each of the six themes he identifies in biblical discussions of wealth and possessions “contradicts the uncriticized wisdom of market ideology” (9).
[2] For an example of this, see James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit (Brazos, 2016).
[3] See G. E. M. Anscombe, “Does Oxford Moral Philosophy Corrupt Youth?” Listener 57, no. 1455 (1957): 266–271.
[4] Anscombe quoted in Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman, Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life (Anchor Books, 2022), 4.
[5] See Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy 33, no. 124 (1958): 1–19.
[6] Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,”12, but see the entire work to absorb Anscombe’s full critique. For a more complete analysis of the effect of Sidgwick on the field of ethics and Anscombe’s and others’ critiques, see D. Stephen Long, On Teaching and Learning Christian Ethics (Georgetown University Press, 2024).
[7] Anscombe, Intention, 2nd ed. (Harvard University Press, 1957), §22, 36, and §4, 8–9. Although Anscombe, and the commentator John Schwenkler, both note that it is possible that the intention around some actions may have interior elements, this should not always be assumed to be the case or even the standard; see Anscombe, Intention, §25, 44; and Schwenkler, Anscombe’s Intention: A Guide (Oxford University Press, 2019), xxiii–xxxiv, emphases in original.
[8] Anscombe, Intention, §4, 9.
[9] Anscombe, Intention,§25, 45, emphasis in original.
[10] Anscombe, Intention,§22, 36.
[11] Brueggemann, Money and Possessions, 16–17 and 17, emphases in original.
[12] For a critical reflection that brings to light some of the issues with the category of stewardship that are adjacent to my argument, see Kelly S. Johnson, The Fear of Beggars: Stewardship and Poverty in Christian Ethics (William B. Eerdmans, 2007). This line of thinking can also be seen in what is known as effective altruism. For an extreme though interesting example of this line of thinking, see how this spurred on the work of Sam Bankman-Fried; see Michael Lewis, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon (W. W. Norton, 2023).
[13] Anscombe, Intention, §25, 45, emphasis in original.
[14] As a practical matter, according to Rob Reich, “Contrary to popular impression, the distribution of charitable giving does not predominantly benefit the poor. And in some cases philanthropy actually produces or exacerbates inequality.” He summarizes some recent statistics saying, “As an empirical matter, therefore, charity is really not much about caring for the needs of strangers, providing for the poor and disadvantaged.” He continues, “As a descriptive matter, charitable giving seems to be more frequently about the pursuit of individual projects, a mechanism for the public expression of one’s values or preferences, rather than a mechanism for redistribution” (Reich, Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better [Princeton University Press, 2018], 69, 92, and 93, emphasis in original).
[15] Anscombe, Intention, §25, 42.
[16] I am grateful for helpful comments made by Tyler Womack on an earlier draft of this essay.