The bold claim of 1 Timothy 6:10 that “the love of money is a root of all evils” is the embarrassing relative in a family of famous biblical passages. Many ministers and theologians either pretend this passage does not exist or find innovative ways of explaining it away. Some force the awkward translation “all sorts of evils,” thus ducking the totalizing implications of the Greek pas. Others describe it as a hackneyed proverb from popular Greco-Roman philosophy that was never meant to be taken seriously as an economic or ethical fact.[1]
Modern exegetes who advocate the latter position view may be right. Aphoristic moral reasoning permits broad leeway for exaggeration, as seen in the wisdom literature of Proverbs, Qoheleth, and the Psalms, all of which feature overstated claims. For example, the psalmist’s bold assertion that “I have never seen the righteous forsaken, or their children begging bread” (37:25 VERSION[MOU3] ) yields a thorny theodicy problem if taken as a universal truth.[2]
This insouciant approach also holds strong philosophical appeal because it seems obvious that there are forms of evil that have nothing to do with money, such as arson or sex crimes. The author of 1 Timothy and the ancient Stoics or Cynics must have been aware of distinctly nonmonetary forms of evil, and thus, we would be misguided to take their formula literally.
However, setting aside strictly exegetical concerns, what if 1 Timothy 6:10 were not an exaggeration? It may seem counterintuitive, but what if the love of money necessitates a love of nonbeing and intentional waste? Could it be that the same love that causes us to treasure money is the point of origin for all evil?
What Is Evil?
If God is the creator of all things, there can be no thing which is inherently bad, or else God must be the creator of badness. This argument is often associated with Augustine during his transition from a Manichean worldview, in which there were eternal entities of evil and good, to a Christian worldview, in which God was not rivaled by any ontologically permanent evil thing. Typically called the doctrine of evil as privation, Augustine articulates it in numerous places, though perhaps most concisely in City of God, where he asserts the following:
There can be no doubt that the fault of wickedness supervenes upon a faultless natural state. Evil is contrary to nature; in fact it can only do harm to nature; and it would not be a fault to withdraw from God were it not that it is more natural to adhere to him. It is that fact which makes the withdrawal a fault. That is why the choice of evil is an impressive proof that the nature is good.[3]
Later Augustine clarifies the theological basis for this proposition, arguing that “God is existence in a supreme degree” and “thus to this highest existence, from which all things that are derive their existence, the only contrary nature is the nonexistent . . . it follows that no existence is contrary to God.”[4] The choice of evil is thus a choice for nonbeing, and evil itself is merely nothing. A desire for evil is thus a desire for scarcity. For example, someone who wants to commit murder is not evil because there is some transcendent evil entity called “murder” being sought but because this person aims to create a scarcity of something good—a human life.
As Charles Mathewes observes, Augustine’s ontologically reductionist perspective on evil has been controversial in part because the idea that evil is merely nothing seems to glibly dismiss the horrific human potential for malice and the imposition of gratuitous suffering. However, the declaration that evil has no being does not imply that the human proclivity to embrace evil may not be forceful, deceptive, and surprisingly recalcitrant. Hannah Arendt’s famous Augustinian analysis of the banality of evil in relation to Nazi crimes demonstrates the paradox that although evil may be nothing, its vacuity may disguise a robust potential impact.[5]
What, then, is the point of saying that evil is nothingness if its allure is very real? In addition to metaphysical coherence, there is one major benefit to thinking about evil as privation or nothingness, one that is especially important for understanding the relationship between evil and money: seeing evil in this way may help us see how it must always appear at the borderlines of good things, emerging always as their negation or their nonexistent counterpart or flip side. To find evil, we must first look for goodness and then identify how this goodness is made scarce. If we try to identify evil as an independent entity apart from some fundamentally good creation, we will chase phantoms. True evil hides much closer to hand.
How does this change our understanding of the love of money? At one level, it means that money itself is not evil because money is a part of material existence. However, it also suggests that money may have a reality-negating dimension that we might inadvertently affirm when we interact with money. This leads us to the second step of the argument, in which we inquire about the nature of money itself.
What Is Money?
Here, I must offer a disappointing disclaimer: I do not have the space to survey the spectrum of different monetary theories in contemporary economics and philosophy, the scope of which would take volumes. It is hard to define money partly because money may be used to signify any market good, and therefore, its effects and corresponding phenomenal qualities are as far-reaching as the commodities that we buy or sell. Money also refers simultaneously to a commodity and a unit of measurement, and it thus straddles the material and conceptual domains of human perception. And, as researchers starting with John Maynard Keynes and culminating with Michael Hudson and David Graeber have shown, the history of money goes back to ancient Mesopotamia and beyond, making its origins remarkably complex—far more complex than the simple barter theory of money customarily asserted in economics textbooks a few decades ago.[6]
In lieu of a comprehensive theory of money, I will instead highlight only one essential feature of money’s ontology, a feature that is crucial for understanding its role, at least as a commodity: to be valuable it must be scarce. Indeed, the value of money is always directly proportional to its relative scarcity.[7] As Georg Simmel put it in his pioneering analysis, money emerges from a widespread paradox in which “objects are not difficult to acquire because they are valuable, but we call those objects valuable that resist our desire to possess them.”[8] Sometimes the valued objects naturally resist our desires through their inherent scarcity—precious stones and metals are a classic example. But in the case of fiat currency, we find a mechanism or entity that humans have intentionally constructed to be scarce and thus valuable.
The fact that money must be scarce distinguishes it from many other consumer goods whose scarcity is less important to their value. Of course, the law of supply and demand observed by Simmel applies to nearly every commodity but not in the same manner as it applies to money. If staples like food and housing become unusually abundant, their value will fall but not to a point where we lose all desire for them, because we must have them for survival. In classical economic terms, they have a use value that money does not have.
Moreover, the contrast between money and commodities with intrinsic use values is entirely oppositional. Although the purpose of bread, blankets, and beer is to satisfy human desires, the primary purpose of money is to frustrate those desires—to be an object of desire that cannot satiate the desires of all those who want it. Money works by serving as a signifier of relatively rare things, of whatever commodities are uncommon enough to stymie the needs and cravings of the community. In a society where all imaginable commodities were plentiful, money itself would become obsolete.
The pivotal dependence of money on scarcity emerges as a central element in some historical accounts of money’s origins. For example, we see this when a monarch or government gives currency to banks or, in ancient times, soldiers and then demands that it be returned by the rest of society through taxation. In this process, it is the act of taxation—rendering the money scarce-yet-needed—that gives value to the currency. If governments simply handed out pieces of metal or paper that nobody was accustomed to treating as money, such items would not become money.[9]
This obvious and yet odd feature of money is not unique to established currencies. As such theorists as Thorstein Veblen, Fred Hirsch, and Robert Frank have shown, there are entire categories of goods whose value is completely contingent on scarcity and thus resemble money even though they may never serve as exchange units. Hirsch dubbed these “positional goods” because their value arises from the way in which they establish the position of their owner vis-à-vis other people.[10] Rare sports collectibles, for example, only confer value to their owner because there are few of them, and the fewer they are, the more valuable they become. “Limited edition” commodities are another example of positional goods. Most consumers know that a company does not need to manufacture limited-edition goods because of an intrinsic scarcity in their components; rather, the limitation is intended to enhance their value by overtly signaling that demand far exceeds supply, making them expensive. This means that their owner demonstrates wealth or class by owning them. If they became commonplace, they would utterly lose their value.
Money’s positional dependence on scarcity also factors into the value of other commodities that have use values, such as houses and land. Two houses with the same features and quality of construction may differ enormously in price, depending on the relative scarcity of housing in the area in which the houses are built. Owning a run-down brick building in San Francisco may make you a millionaire but not in rural Kentucky.
In a sense, then, the positional logic of money permeates the entire economy, affecting the value of housing, clothing, art, cars, and wine, among many other things. Veblen argues that the beauty and the taste we associate with higher-class items emerges from their association with wealthy people, the virtues of whom one might literally taste when sipping from a $900 bottle of chardonnay at a five-star restaurant. This is, after all, why fashion changes constantly: as a style becomes widespread, it loses value in proportion to how easy it is to access, and wealthy trendsetters must find other outlets for their surplus that will serve to set them apart. Veblen’s central insight is that our perception of beauty follows from price (the monetary marker of scarcity) rather than vice versa.
Sometimes my students struggle to understand the concept of positional goods, and so I offer them a simple test: If you want a commodity, ask yourself, “Would this have any value if literally everyone had it?” If not, it is a positional good, and your love for it is ultimately a love for scarcity in disguise.
Of course, though designer watches and signed baseballs are clearly positional, they are not completely such—they have use values as well. Only money is purely positional, and thus it may serve as a paradigm for all things whose value depends on the frustrated desires of others.
What Is the Love of Money?
Attentive readers will detect the logical moves I have made thus far and may think they easily spot my deduction. However, I must hasten to caution against a tempting verbal slippage that would reduce my argument to silliness. To wit, I am not arguing that the love of money is a root of all evils because money itself constitutes scarcity. Money’s value depends on scarcity, but money may also serve the positive purpose of representing being, which is socially necessary. As long as humans live in a world of scarce resources, they will need currency as a mechanism for representing degrees of nonbeing. Thus, I must begrudgingly concur with those hokey homileticians who gleefully declare in their sermons on 1 Timothy 6:10 that “the passage does not say that money is a root of all evils—only the love of money.” The material or unit of measurement known as money, as a part of God’s good creation, cannot be evil.
However, where such preachers fall into error is when they conclude that it is only “loving money too much” or “loving money more than God” that is wrong, or some similar exhortation to internal temperance. This interpretation ignores the crucial ontology of money I have offered above. Money is not like ice cream, which one might love too much but which—when loved to appropriate degrees—constitutes a commodity that logically everyone could enjoy without diminishing its value entirely. Rather, to love money at all, to find within it a source of pleasure or gratification for itself, is necessarily to affirm scarcity, which is the essence of evil.
Critical readers may assume I have enveloped myself in a contradiction: if money is good, how can the love of money be evil? The answer is that money contains within itself a paradox—it represents being and nonbeing at the same time. As Philip Goodchild puts it, “Money, as the absolute sign of wealth, combines the promise of wealth with the threat of poverty.”[11] This threat is inseparable from the totality of what money is. Thus, to affirm or desire money for itself is to affirm the nonbeing upon which money’s value depends and, thus, to love evil. In Arendt’s banal sense, the love of money is a form of contentedness with the world’s lack of being—it is a Panglossian celebration of deprivation.
This paradox might be best explained as the inverse of a paradox explained by Augustine in On the Trinity, in which he argues that when one loves one’s neighbor one also loves God by default. One might object that the neighbor is not God, so how could one love God by loving one’s neighbor? Augustine’s brilliant solution is to point out that this paradox “follows logically, for he who loves his neighbor must also love love itself above everything else” and “God is love.”[12] In other words, to exercise caritas toward another, one must first affirm that upon which the value of loving one’s neighbor depends, necessitating a prior affirmation of God’s being.
Likewise—but in an inverse manner—one cannot love money for itself without affirming that which makes money valuable, thus making scarcity a prior value. Just as the one who loves a neighbor may not consciously assume God-love but cannot avoid doing so, one who loves money cannot avoid affirming nonbeing.
Thus, if money is treated as merely a means to an end that itself is not monetary, one is not loving money for itself but as a signal for that external end. For example, if I were homeless and shivering on the street, I would want money with which to obtain housing. I may not love the money itself when craving it, as the money would only be a tool for acquiring it. The key test that would reveal the true object of my love would be whether I was equally pleased to obtain housing with and without money as a mechanism.
Here, the wealthy reader may sniff what appears to be a loophole in my argument: could not everyone claim to want money only for its use in obtaining other commodities? Only rare neurotic misers are content to sit and watch their bank accounts and investment portfolios grow without using their money for nonmonetary purposes.
However, this escape route, clever as it seems, runs into the dead end revealed by Veblen: After rich people have earned enough money to purchase sufficient intrinsic goods like food, health care, and housing, they rarely donate the rest of their earnings to charity or devote them to further productive investments. Rather, they inevitably turn to positional goods, devising sundry ways of either wasting their excess resources or laying hold of additional rare resources they do not need. Recall that positional goods are marked by the same feature that characterizes money, which is an absolute dependence on scarcity for value. The wealthy consumer who wants more money because she needs it to buy a limited-edition car is ultimately loving money through the entire process. Unless the car would have the same value to her if everyone had it, she must affirm scarcity when loving it.
Because of how positional goodness is intertwined with many commodities and even social practices throughout the economy—vacations, entertainment expenditures, select educational opportunities, and most of what we designate as beautiful, classy, and so on—the love of money vastly exceeds the love of currency as such. Whenever anyone loves something because it is rare, that person partakes in the same love with which one would love money. In other words, it is the type of love that matters, not the intensity or the degree to which the love is directed at a recognized monetary medium. The specific appreciation of currency is therefore paradigmatic of all misdirected loves for nonbeing; ergo, it is the root of all evils.
Implications
If my argument sketched above holds weight, several implications follow, both for practical ethics and the theological analysis of money. I will briefly highlight a few of them.
At the practical level, the idea that the love of money is the love of positional scarcity ought to make ethicists carefully distinguish between economic impulses that have positional (that is, scarcity-dependent) and nonpositional goals—the former of which would correspond to love of money.
For example, consider a home-owning couple who have moved into a new neighborhood and want to increase the value of their home. One way they might do this is by campaigning to prevent the construction of new high-density housing in their vicinity. Such behavior—often dubbed NIMBYism (from the slogan “not in my backyard”)—seeks the maintenance or elevation of home values not by improving the housing itself or the neighborhood but through sustained scarcity. If the couple chooses this economic strategy, their desire for increased wealth corresponds to love of money because it relies on scarcity as its value-added mechanism.
However, imagine that this same couple seeks to raise their home value by improving the house itself, perhaps by adding insulation or installing solar panels. Such behavior reflects a desire not for what is valuable only because others do not have it but for what benefits everyone. Of course, the law of supply and demand still applies, and the extent to which other houses in the neighborhood do not have robust insulation and solar panels will magnify the value of those added amenities, but their value is not strictly dependent on scarcity as such.
This paradigm also applies to broader questions of economic investment. A venture capitalist who invests in a drug company seeking to cure cancer may love money as merely a means to an end: the cessation of death and suffering from cancer. Such an investor is obviously far different from a similar agent who invests wealth in real estate speculation, which only yields a return in conditions of scarcity. Note that the difference between these investors does not hinge on how intensely each loves the returns on the investments made but on the source from which the returns emerge, contra the simplistic moralism of many homilies on 1 Timothy 6:10. The medical-research investor may be passionate about her investment whereas the property speculator may be blasé about his, but only the latter will be logically susceptible to the charge of love of money.
The Veblenian understanding of the love of money also explains why such love is at the root of nonmonetary crimes such as arson. The arsonist affirms a world in which others lose a fundamental condition of well-being (housing or other beneficial structures). It is the loss and frustration created by the fire that invigorates the arsonist, not the fire as such. The arsonist’s love of a burning building is thus the same love with which a real estate magnate loves monopolizing high-demand properties. The only difference is that what the latter achieves by business strategy, the former achieves by fire.
These practical outcomes of the meaning of the love of money may also influence the relationship between theology and monetary theory. In recent years, such theologians as Nimi Wariboko and Devin Singh have charted the historical and theological connections between God and money.[13] Their analyses differ slightly from negative approaches to money like Philip Goodchild’s, because they focus on positive corollaries between God’s relational identity and the relational flows of money (Wariboko) as well as the “sending” of Jesus into the world as a type of currency or loan that establishes divine sovereignty (Singh). Their arguments are thought-provoking and insightful, and I find nothing overtly erroneous in either of them. However, both Wariboko’s and Singh’s amicable or ethically neutral attitudes to money overlook the central ontological feature of money I have explored here, namely, its dependent relationship to scarcity.
To his credit, Wariboko is aware of the positional feature of money. After describing how money connects people and nations, he points out that “money also disconnects . . . every one of its movements toward embrace is denied by a powerful centrifugal force toward exclusion.”[14] Yet when he uses the relations of the Trinity as a foundation for theorizing monetary policies, his argument does not appear cognizant of money’s dependence on scarcity for its value.
The reason this seemingly minor lacuna is important is that money’s positional nature makes it fundamentally different from God in at least one crucial respect: unlike money, God is not subject to inflation. The economy of God—whose being is eternal—consists of unending excess, an infinite cascade of grace the value of which can never fall because of increased supply. This is a major point that future theological analyses of money should not ignore, lest they distort God’s own ontology. There is always more than enough God for everyone.
The same supply-demand-violating quality of God also presents possibilities for an alternative form of economics. If God constitutes infinite being, and God’s goodness is the standard of all value declarations, we must be able to imagine an economy in which scarcity itself plays no role in the increasing values of goods.
Such a vision is possible. There is already a subset of commodities and services that reverse the relationship of scarcity and value found in positional goods like money, goods that become more valuable when shared more widely and equally. For example, humor and jokes, as well as songs and other works of art, produce greater utility when more people appreciate them. Similarly, positive patriotic displays (rather than negative nationalistic exhibitions) and public festivals create compounding levels of enjoyment in which the satisfaction of others creates the basis for one’s own satisfaction. I have elsewhere called these commodities and experiences “sacramental goods” because their paradigmatic form is the Eucharist, in which the body and blood of Christ appear only when the bread and wine are broken and poured out—which is to say, distributed—within the community and in which monopoly destroys their intrinsic function.[15] In the Eucharist, a post-scarcity desire emerges and dissolves the hegemony of supply-demand calculation.
This may be why the love of Christ is the antithesis of the love of money. When you receive the Eucharist or listen to a friend’s funny story, you do not pay for it, and it would somehow be worth less if you did. What if all commodities were like that?
[1] I translate this phrase as a root rather than the root because there is no definite article in front of riza in the Greek. Some interpreters think this is significant for explaining the passage, but I do not. Both translations ask the reader to probe how the thing in question has evil at its foundation, and the presence of a definite article does not exclude the presence of other roots, though it does de-emphasize them. Hence, translating the phrase with or without the definite article is only a matter of rhetorical force. Also, the idea that the author of 1 Timothy 6:10 is quoting popular Stoic or Cynic moral maxims is persuasively argued by Abraham J. Malherbe, “Godliness, Self-Sufficiency, Greed, and the Enjoyment of Wealth,” Novum Testamentum 52 (2010): 376–405.
[2] William Mounce’s commentary is representative of the route most modern exegetes take on this verse. After using elaborate grammatical gymnastics and “common sense” to dismiss the idea that “all evils” means “every evil,” he points out that “it is the nature of proverbs to be inexact and often overstated, much like a hyperbole” (Mounce, Word Biblical Commentary: Pastoral Epistles [Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2000], 346).
[3] Augustine, The City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (London, UK: Penguin, 1984), 11.17.
[4] Augustine, The City of God, 7.2.
[5] See Mathewes, Evil and the Augustinian Tradition (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 65; and Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York, NY: Viking, 1964).
[6] Building on the pioneering work of Keynes, A Treatise on Money (London, UK: Macmillan, 1990), Geoffrey Ingham describes how the breadth of money’s capacities alters our ability to understand it (“‘Babylonian Madness’: On the Historical and Sociological Origins of Money,” in What Is Money?,ed. John Smithin [London, UK: Routledge, 2000], 16–41). In the 1990s, Michael Hudson coordinated scholarly conferences on the complex relationship between money and debt in ancient Mesopotamia; see some of the research findings in David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years (London, UK: Melville House, 2011) or in Hudson, And Forgive Them Their Debts: Lending, Foreclosure, and Redemption from Bronze-Age Finance to the Jubilee Year (Dresden, Germany: ISLET-Verglag, 2018). Together, Hudson and Graeber have by most anecdotal accounts of economists dismantled the simplistic early account of money’s origins as a simple replacement for barter, instead showing that most monetary systems come into being through state power in managing debts.
[7] Note that my claim here that money must be scarce does not conflict with modern monetary theory (MMT), which argues that governments may expand the economy by the prudent creation of money, as long as the new money is invested in necessary economic products that are accompanied by a judicious tax system. Even in MMT, money’s scarcity does not disappear, insofar as the money supply is expanded along with burgeoning economic production so that the money supply does not increase faster than the commodities upon which it may be spent. This basic idea is the reason MMT proponents do not believe that deficit spending by governments necessarily produces inflation. However, MMT defenders freely admit that too rapid and promiscuous money-creation will create inflation, supporting my claim.
[8] Simmel, The Philosophy of Money,trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (London, UK: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 67.
[9] This is what is commonly known as the chartalist theory of money, which has been greatly strengthened by the work of Hudson and Graeber. As L. Randall Wray succinctly describes it, “it is state money which is used as the ultimate means of settlement, and state money is that which the state accepts in payment of taxes” (Wray, “Modern Money,” in What Is Money?, 59).
[10] See Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007); Hirsch, Social Limits to Growth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), and Frank, Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013). Although Veblen is often viewed as the founder of positional analysis in economics, Michael Schneider has documented that the idea of positional goods shows up in earlier thinkers such as Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Stuart Mill (see Schneider, “The Nature, History, and Significance of the Concept of Positional Goods,” History of Economics Review 45 [Winter 2007]: 60–81).
[11] Goodchild, Theology of Money (London, UK: SCM, 2007), 110.
[12] Augustine, On the Trinity, trans. Gareth B. Matthews (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 8.10.
[13] See Wariboko, God and Money: A Theology of Money in a Globalizing World (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008); and Singh, Divine Currency: The Theological Power of Money in the West (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018).
[14] Wariboko, God and Money, 20.
[15] See Andrew Blosser, “The Concept of Sacramental Goods: Addressing Veblen’s Critique of Liturgy,” Studia Liturgica (January 2024): 207–20.