Money as Sacrifice
Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash
The convention in this world is to see money as “the bottom line”, a tangible foundation to reality that is as firm as the ground beneath our feet. In a world that has become increasingly financialised, we have become conditioned to give money a determinative quality. So determinative, in fact, that we are often told to accept the evaluation of a venture solely by reference to the venture’s financial impact.
In attributing these determinative qualities to money, many often forget another attribution of money. This is the Gospel’s attribution of money as “that tainted thing” (Luke 16:11). It is not a passing reference by Jesus (as if anything by Jesus merely “passes”), but mentioned twice in the same discourse. Indeed, in the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus lays out the blueprint of a new covenant, Jesus goes as far as to call money a Master that vies with that of God Himself (Matt 6:24).
Not only is money as a “tainted thing”. It also has the ability to taint other things as well. This can be seen in two respects.
In the first place, Philip Goodchild argues that money is not just an infinitely flexible form of exchange within society, but can also become an organiser of society, bound by a common theology. When money becomes the foundation for social organisation, it will fundamentally transform and even dissolve the ties within that organisation. We see the Gospels give witness to this dynamic, money became the foundation for an act of betrayal by one of those Apostles, and setting in chain the abandonment of Jesus by the rest. For more contemporary examples, we do not need to look too far beyond the television series Breaking Bad to see the effect that money has on the family ties in Walter White’s household (it must be remembered that Walter’s involvement in the drug trade only came after his concern over where he was going to obtain the money to feed his family and treat his cancer).
Indeed, money’s flexibility and the ability to reshape social structures stems from the fact that, as Goodchild observed in his Theology of Money, the heart of money is a metaphysics of pure abstraction. In gazing upon the power of money as an instrument, we often forget that money is first and foremost the embodiment of a metaphysics. In scholastic terms, the metaphysics of money is what John Milbank has called the priority of potentiality (what things could be) over actuality (what things actually are). This priority is an inversion of the Thomist priority of actuality over potentiality.
Put another way, a world organised by money is a world that cannot stand things as they are, standing in the way of what things can be. Because of this, a world organised by money is a world that wants to sacrifice actual things, eviscerating them and tearing them apart to release purer strains of potential, ever advancing and never resting on any one thing, whether these things are persons, unborn persons (remember that abortion is justified not on the basis of actuality but on the basis of risk), families into which persons are born, the sex that makes those families possible, the economies that is supposed to sustain those families or the polis that is the foundation of the economy (rather than the other way round).
This metaphysical point brings us back a theological point, which revolves around the not-too-subtle caution by Jesus in letting money be treated as a god. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, a God which Thomas Aquinas described as “pure actuality”, paradoxically negated sacrifice through the single sacrifice of His own actuality in the form of His son. Conversely, the god of money, of pure abstraction, will never stop sacrificing, will never be satisfied with any one sacrifice or even a whole score of sacrifices of actual things or people in the name of “progress” or “potential”. In other words, a person that ends up serving God and money will end up sacrificing God in the service of money.
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