Jesus and the Politics of Mammon

Hollis Phelps

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781532664496
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

In Jesus and the Politics of Mammon, Phelps uses contemporary critical theory, continental philosophy, and theology to develop a radical reading of Jesus. Phelps argues that theological traditions have on the whole blunted Jesus' teachings, particularly in regard to money and related concerns of political economy. Focusing on the distinction between God and Mammon, Phelps suggests instead that Jesus' teachings result in a politics that is anti-money, anti-work, and anti-family. Although Jesus does not provide a specific program for this politics, his teachings incite readers to think otherwise with respect to these institutions.

Chapter 1

Mammon and the Problem of Desire

The most obvious, yet also the best, place to begin when discussing how Jesus understands money, wealth, and related matters is the well-known opposition between God and mammon. In Matt 6:24, the opposition comes to us as part of a series of sometimes-disparate sayings lumped together in the so-called Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5–7):

No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth [mammon].

In Luke, the opposition appears in the midst of a series of parables. Specifically, the claim occurs immediately after The Parable of the Dishonest Manager, although on the surface the link between the two is not immediately clear:

No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth [mammon]. (Luke 16:13)

Save for context, the sayings in Matthew and Luke are virtually identical.13 In both cases, and irrespective of context, Jesus institutes a clear opposition: that one cannot serve two masters simultaneously means that one must, it seems, side with either God or mammon.

Despite the clear either/or logic that governs Jesus’ statement, the overwhelming tendency of the theological and ecclesiastical traditions has been to blunt its force, as an idea but also when it comes to practical matters. Because of its apparent harshness, especially in a world governed by money, the statement goes through all manner of qualifications so as to avoid the dichotomy it introduces. It is common, for instance, to claim that the opposition has more to do with primacy than competition, with the priority we give to one over against the other. To use temporal and spatial metaphors, what Jesus really means, so this line of thinking goes, is that we should serve God before or above mammon. Doing so usually involves a two-pronged approach, at the very least. On the one hand, it is necessary to shift the locus of one’s desire away from mammon and toward God. To continue using the spatial metaphor, the idea is that one should detach from the things of this world, as a means of reorienting desire upwards, toward God and what God desires. On the other hand, this reorientation of desire frees up mammon itself, making it available for beneficent ends. Combined with a reconstituted desire, mammon can be used for God and what God desires, rather than for the sort of self-serving motives with which it is normally associated. The opposition between God and mammon, then, is not necessarily antagonistic. Any antagonism is the result of subjective orientation and misuse, rather than any essential quality of mammon as such and its operation in the world.

Understanding the opposition in such terms is certainly a more congenial way to parse what Jesus is saying, but it tends to reduce the force of the opposition to a rhetorical ploy. Jesus himself doesn’t qualify the opposition but simply states it, without any apparent ambivalence: one can choose to serve God or mammon, but not both. Moreover, even if we grant some amount of rhetorical license to the opposition, when lined up with similar distinctions, statements, and actions, it is clear that the opposition cannot be reduced to a simple figure of speech. This is not to say that how the disjunction between God and mammon plays out in practice is straightforward or one-dimensional. It is just to say that the choice itself as presented represents a clear decision on the distinction between the two. That decision is, of course, severe, but severity should not function as an excuse for downplaying the opposition between God and mammon. It should, rather, lead us to ask why Jesus institutes this disjunction in the first place. The opposition represents an opportunity for thought, an opportunity that is obviated once it is approached as qualified in advance. What is it about mammon, then, that makes it God’s antagonist and, by implication, God’s competitor?

Who, or What, is Mammon?

The Greek term mamōnas is usually translated as “money” or “wealth.” The exact etymology of the term is uncertain, although it may come from the root amn, which means “that in which one trusts”; or from the root mon, which means “food, maintenance, provisions.”14 There has sometimes been speculation that mamōnas was a Syrian deity, but there is little credible evidence to support that idea. Nevertheless, the etymology of the term, although telling in its own right, is less important than its use. The Aramaic term māmōn does not appear in the Hebrew Bible, although it and related terms do occur elsewhere in later rabbinic literature. Its use in the New Testament is confined solely to Jesus, specifically in and around the passages discussed in the previous section. When Jesus does use the term, moreover, he does so negatively and, ultimately, personifies it: Mammon is set over against God as a substantive force.

In what follows, I use the term mammon broadly to refer to money, wealth, and related notions, such as the market and finance; it also, in my usage, extends to matters related to work and family, as these are inseparable from economic matters. Such terms are, of course, not exactly synonymous, and in certain contexts it is important to draw distinctions between them. Nevertheless, the terms and their related concepts do overlap considerably in practice and, taken together, carve out a specific sphere of influence, or economy. Indeed, as we will see throughout what follows, mammon for Jesus names a broad problematic, the sense of which is lost if we confine the term narrowly to money or wealth. Given its etymology and use, then, using mammon in this expansive sense seems warranted: it does not just designate money or wealth individually but names an entire economy, one that Jesus opposes to God. Using the term in this sense also helps to avoid the pitfall of interiorizing mammon as greed or avarice, which ultimately limits the analytical and political potential of what Jesus says about it.

Understanding in what sense mammon is opposed to God is the task of all that follows. Nevertheless, on a side note it is worth pointing out that certain streams in later Christian theological and literary traditions continue this line of thought, that is, conceiving mammon as a substantive force. Mammon is set over against God, and often equated with the devil. In a commentary on Jesus’ statement in the Sermon on the Mount, Augustine, for instance, states:

But he who serves mammon certainly serves him who, as being set over those earthly things in virtue of his perversity, is called by our Lord the prince of this world. . . . For whoever serves mammon submits to a hard and ruinous master: for, being entangled by his own lust, he becomes a subject of the devil, and he does not love him; for who is there who loves the devil? But yet he submits to him; as in any large house he who is connected with another man’s maid-servant submits to hard bondage on account of his passion, even though he does not love him whose maid-servant he loves.15

Similar identifications can be found throughout the medieval period up to the present, though one of the most literarily striking is Milton’s in Paradise Lost, where mammon is personified as a fallen angel:

Mammon led them on— Mammon, the least erected Spirit that fell From Heaven; for even in Heaven his looks and thoughts Were always downward bent, admiring more The riches of heaven›s pavement, trodden gold, Than aught divine or holy else enjoyed In vision beatific. By him first Men also, and by his suggestion taught, Ransacked the centre, and with impious hands Rifled the bowels of their mother Earth For treasures better hid. Soon had his crew Opened into the hill a spacious wound, And digged out ribs of gold. Let none admire That riches grow in Hell; that soil may best Deserve the precious bane. And here let those Who boast in mortal things, and wondering tell Of Babel, and the works of Memphian kings, Learn how their greatest monuments of fame And strength, and art, are easily outdone By Spirits reprobate, and in an hour What in an age they, with incessant toil And hands innumerable, scarce perform.16

It is all too easy to downplay such personifications as mere subjective metaphors with limited utility. The equation of mammon with a substantive force, with the devil himself, has theological, rhetorical, and moral effect, in this sense, but only because it represents a subjective disposition. Mammon may be pictured as evil itself, but we should remember that it is really “the love of money [that] is the root of all evil” (1 Tim 6:10, KJV). Exaggerated representations of mammon, Jesus’ included, are in this line of thinking really just stand-ins for the nature of unbridled, disordered desire. Hence, although Augustine attributes to it a particular power, he also emphasizes in the quotation above that it is through our “own lust” that we submit to mammon as master, through which we become a “subject of the devil.”

I discuss the notion of individual desire in relation to mammon in more detail below, but it is worth pausing for a moment to consider the notion of personification, specifically as it relates to mammon. Campbell Jones has recently called attention to the function of prosopopoeia, the attribution of speech to otherwise non-speaking things and abstractions, and personification more generally, in relation to the market. Drawing on numerous examples, Jones argues that we personify the market—ascribing to it an interior life with a reason, will, and emotions—in numerous ways and for different purposes. Jones seems to think that prosopopoeia and personification go hand in hand with language itself, so it is not a question of if we should or should not ascribe human characteristics and qualities to non-human realities. Doing so is simply an innate feature of the symbolic and representational activities of human beings. The question is, instead, a matter of what purposes such attributions serve and how they function. From a psychoanalytic perspective, one important function of prosopopoeia and personification is to externalize desire, to locate desire in and have it recognized by and through the symbolic order. In the case of the market, Jones notes that there is “a raising up of market rela...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A Radical Christ
• Chapter 1: Mammon and the Problem of Desire
• Chapter 2: Exchange, State, and Debt
• Chapter 3: Against Work and Family
• Chapter 4: Excess Against Asceticism
• Bibliography