Money – “A Life of Its Own?” 

“We invented money and we use it, yet we cannot either understand its laws or control its actions. It has a life of its own which it should not properly have.” (Lionel Trilling)

Why does money have “a life of its own which it should not properly have?”

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A Quaint Idea?

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Social Gospel theologian, Walter Rauschenbusch, noted an inconsistency in the life of those Protestant churches which claim allegiance to the Christian Scriptures. “The New Testament,” he wrote, “puts lasciviousness and covetousness on an equal footing of guilt. Does the church do the same? I have heard of many exclusions from church fellowship for causes of impurity [sexual misconduct]. But though I have made continued inquiry, I have so far heard of but three cases of exclusion for covetousness.”

In the early years of the twenty-first century, Rauschenbusch’s lament seems quaint. We refer not to his one choice of words in referring to sexual behavior but to the very notion of an “exclusion” from church fellowship “for covetousness.” Of course the fierce arguments over sexual ethics continue unabated. But an “exclusion for covetousness?”

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Conversion of the “purse?”

“The Reformers did not deny the biblical warnings about wealth (Luther saw three conversions necessary for the believer: conversion of the heart, the mind, and the purse.).” (John R. Muether)

The notion of a sequence of three conversions – mind, heart and money – has surfaced now and then in the history of Protestantism. In the middle of the nineteenth century, for instance, Abel Stevens, an American Methodist leader spoke of the Reformation as a three phase movement from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century (See Resources 4.6). First came the Reformation of “truth” in the age of Luther and Calvin. Next was the “Awakenings” of the heart during the eighteenth century – John Wesley in England and Jonathon Edwards in colonial New England. Finally, the time for the climatic Reformation, the conversion of the churches to giving money, was arriving in the nineteenth century.

Why this particular order of sequence? Does it imply that the conversion of money can not come before the other two Reformations? Is it perchance because the third Reformation offers the greatest challenge? Some might believe that the transformation of mind and heart is incommensurably more significant than the grubby business of money. And your response?