Episode 92 - God & Mammon with Andy Crouch
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Andy Crouch, best-selling author and a partner of theology and culture at Praxis, is a leading voice in the Faith Driven movement. Andy spoke at a recent Faith Driven Investor Conference on a topic that many faith driven investors are wrestling with regularly: God and money, we cannot serve both. How do we balance out Jesus’ teaching and our calling as Faith Driven Investors? Listen to what Andy had to say for some insights and inspiration.
Episode Transcript
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Andy Crouch: I want to talk about two mysteries relating to Jesus most famous words about money. And of course, you know what they are. You cannot serve God, and most modern translations will say money. So the first mystery is why not? Why couldn't you serve God and money each in their appropriate way, the way Jesus said you could God and Caesar. So Caesar's, the pagan emperor of the Roman Empire, people pressed Jesus on the question of whether they should even pay taxes disease. Is there any says, well, render to Caesar what Caesar's and render God wants God. So serve Caesar in a proper ways. Don't serve Caesar the way you serve God. Don't treat Caesar like a God. But you can serve Caesar in his appropriate way and serve God. Why does Jesus never say you cannot serve God and Caesar? But he does say you can't serve God and money. And then what exactly does Jesus say? Because older translations have Jesus saying You cannot serve God and Mammon? What does that word doing there, and what would it mean that Jesus said, You cannot serve God, not just in money, but God and Mammon? So first question first, why? Why is money more powerful than Caesar? I want us to justice because money, especially in large quantities, gives you a power that Caesar does not have. What is money? You learned it in economics. It's a medium of exchange, a unit of account and a store of value. And this means that money is fungible, countable, storable power. Power, the ability to get things done in the world. The ability to get what you want in the world. The ability to get that and get things done, perhaps even without other people wanting that to get done. That's power and money gives you a form of power that's fungible, countable and storable. So fungible it can be exchanged for other things. So this this obviously is one of the key things about money. It's actually a very little use all by itself, but you can turn it into whatever you want. Not true of most forms of power, including Caesar's. Caesar has a great deal of power as the Lord of the Roman Empire, but he can only exercise his power in that office in that land. He's not the emperor of China. He can't just arbitrarily decide he wants something totally different or wants to exercise his power in somewhere totally different. His power has to be used in a particular context because most power is contextual, but money allows you to use power wherever you want anywhere that legal tender is accepted. You can exchange it into anything. That's power that Caesar doesn't know, at least doesn't know because of his role as emperor, then it's accountable. You know how much you have of it, and this is definitely not true of most kinds of power. How much power exactly does the CEO of a company have? Well, certainly some. But if you've ever been in that role, you know, it's hard to know exactly how much you have. There's certainly no way to count it, but you can measure money, you can count money. You can know how much is on your balance sheet, how much is available to spend, and you can't really do that with power. There's an uncertainty to other kinds of power, but not with the kind of power that we call money. And maybe most powerfully, you can store it. It's storable, a store of value. You can save it for later. And most kinds of power have to be exercised now at the moment that you have it because you may not have it later or it may not be given, except in a given moment. I'm I have a certain amount power as speaker at FDE. I've got this moment. I've got the power to speak to you right now, but I can't save it for next month or next year. I've got to use it now. But if I have money at a time of my choosing, I imagine at least I can use it. And all of these kinds of power are kind of Caesar doesn't have. And all of them add up to a power that is not dependent. There is no dependance in the power of money in the way there is in most other forms of power, even political and military power. Caesar only had his role because he was the adopted or sometimes biological son of a powerful man. It was a relationship that gave him power. Even in our modern democracies, people get power through the consent of the governed. But if you have enough money, the honest truth is you can get whatever done you want without anyone really having to know or care or even validate who you are because money talks without you having to be a person, it's impersonal power. This is a power greater than any other in the world. And if you have it or had it or can imagine having it, why would you need God? Who needs God? When you can get what you want, whatever you want, when you want it, when you know how much you have, you can store it and you don't have to be any particular kind of person to get what you want. Who any God? When you add money. So this is the first reason you can't serve it, because this is a the most direct rival to God in human affairs. And the reason people come to you and the reason you and I live with anxieties about money with hopes for money is because of the kind of power we imagine that will give us. But there's also a deeper thing going on, and it gets to the word that Jesus used. Jesus was speaking Aramaic the way he probably did his whole life. His biographers, the gospel writers, translate his words into Greek, and then we translate in case of English speakers into English so we can understand. But every once in a while, the Gospels will leave an Aramaic word untranslated, and they do so in this case. They write down in Greek, you shall not. You cannot serve God, and they just leave it on translate mammon. It's a Semitic word that roughly means money or assets held in trust or the create trust. Why is why do they not translate this word? Well, what kinds of words do we not translate the most common kind of word? We don't translate our names. You don't translate a name from one language, although you just transliteration that name. And that's what the gospel writers do here. And the early church concluded that the reason they did this is they understand they understood something that Jesus was saying, which is that we're not talking about an ordinary noun here. We're not talking about even just a principle or an idea. We're talking about a quasi personal name, mobile power in human affairs that intends something that has a will in the world that is opposed to the will of God. And the ordinary way we talk about this ordinary, extraordinary way is that we are talking about a demonic power. The early church concluded that Mammon was not just an idea or a principle, but the name of a being in service of the enemy of all that is good. The opponent of all of God's works in the world that we sometimes call Satan or the devil. That Mammon is this demonic force at work in history with a kind of quasi personal ability to whisper and speak to human beings and to arrange and distort human affairs in a particular direction. And what is it that man and wants to get done in the world wants the opposite of what God wants. God has made this good, beautiful, abundant material world. He fills it with persons. He says this world is already very good, but now I want you to feel the Earth multiply and bring forth all the possibility and all the value out of the world. As the world is filled with persons that will become full of the knowledge and love of God and the knowledge and love of one another, and in some ways, the knowledge and love of the world itself. While Mammon being aligned with the demonic, being part of the demonic forces that work in history hates all of these things. Of course it hates God. It wants us never to depend on God. Mammon hates creation itself, doesn't like the material. World wants an immaterial world that's purely spirit. And think about how money functions as a as as it gets more advanced, it becomes less and less metaphysical. We don't carry around gold anymore. We just account in our minds the imagination of how much we have. And Mammon hates persons. It wants you to operate impersonally. It actually wants to turn persons into things. In fact, one mammon really gets its grip into a human society as it had gotten its grip into the Roman Empire as it got its grip into capitalism that built our western world. The result is treating persons like things, treating persons impersonally. This is what slavery is. It's treating a person like property. It's treating a person like a thing. And while God wants the world to be filled with persons so that the whole world will be known and loved and God will be known and loved and everything Mammon wants to empty the world of persons want Mammon wants everything to be impersonal so that there's no one and nothing. No one left only things and ultimately not even material things, just an immaterial world that is devoted to pure power without dependance. You cannot serve a demon that wants to destroy a person's relationships creation itself. And also serve the true God who wants to reunite persons, restore relationships and liberate creation from its bondage to decay. You cannot serve God and Mammon and this demonic power called Mammon. Besides our world, our modern world in an absolutely unique way in history. How can you doubt this is the principle that is driving human events in a way that wasn't even true in Jesus Day wasn't even true a thousand years ago, but is incredibly true today. You cannot serve God and Mammon. And so I've started to think that what's Faith Driven Investor? I mean, investing is about the deployment of many kinds of resources, but especially financial ones, especially in our modern world. Money based resources. Is our job just to sort of do that with Christian principles, kind of, you know, obviously not violate Christian principles, but just do things with money in the world and maybe make money in Christian ways in the world. I think that is not nearly deep enough for what we're actually called to do. We are actually here insofar as we are people who operate proximate to money and the whisperings and power of Mammon to take back territory from this demonic power and from these false promises of fungible, storable, accountable power. And reclaim territory for the relational creation loving God, who has placed us here to tend his world. So we're going to do that. We're gonna need to do two kinds of things. We're going to need to have some detox moves and some creative moves or creative resistance, let's say, to the empire moment. The first thing we're going to have to do is just thoroughly dethrone Mammon and this imagination of money as power, without relationship abundance, without dependance, we're going to have to dethrone that from our lives. So just two quick detox ideas that I think all of us need to take super seriously. The basic way to dethrone money and mammon is generosity. It's giving because most ways we use money give us control and safety, but giving releases control by definition, when you give you no longer have control giving is risky. By definition, when you give, you're giving up some store of value. You could have held on for some other use. And you're just you're just saying, I release it. It is the basic detox activity. The Christian Church has often taught a kind of principle of tithing on income, and I think that's a really good thing, though I think many of us should probably aim for a higher percentage than ten. I just want to say what what has been absolutely transforming for my own life and our family in the last 10 years is twice now we have felt God leading us to tithes, not on our income, which we continue to do and a graduated way, but to tithe on our assets. So we calculate our net worth, all the things that are entrusted to us that we know how to value, and we find a way to liquidate 10 percent of that and give it away to the purposes of God's kingdom and the good of our neighbors. I will tell you, I don't know if you've ever tried this. If you try it first, it is incredibly hard to pull the trigger in that way. It feels really risky in a way that tithing on your income doesn't because you can't know that income is coming in. But this store of assets I have I mean, this is my store for the future. This is my promise of security for the future of options, for the future. And 10 percent is enough to hurt, at least for us. And once you do it, the joy and freedom you feel with relation to money is just unbelievable. It has been the thing that has just truly emptied me, especially having done it twice now in the last 10 years, just emptied me of the fear and love of money as near as I can tell, and my life is just gone. It's just not part of my anxieties. And instead, I'm joyfully anticipating the next time I got to give away this level at this level in my life. The second detox was so generosity is the first. The second would be something I'm not really going to model here so directly, but it's transparency. If we were together in person and I do this with many, many groups, have you been part of it? And I do it with many individuals. Rather than just talking about our family's generosity in percentage terms, I would put up graphs and tables that have numbers on them. They show you how much we make in a given year our family, our household, how much we have been entrusted with our net worth, how that's changed over time, how we've given, how we've spent, how we've saved all with real numbers. And when I do that consistently, people say I have never, ever heard a fellow Christian outside of some kind of confidential fiduciary relationship. Tell me how much they have and how much they make. Brothers, sisters, this should not be so this secrecy that we have around these numbers that are are the most immaterial thing about our lives is a sign that Mammon has its grip on us. And a very powerful way to detox is to open up your books. Not in a willy nilly way, and I don't do it when it's virtual and online because it's severed from our relationship right now. But in any kind of relationship, I'm happy to share the complexities of what what God has entrusted to our family and how we're trying to be faithful with it. Why is this not normal in the Christian community? Because we are trying to serve God and money. We're trying to serve God in heaven at the same time. If we detox, if we are so lavishly generous for so openly transparent, what will we be free to do? What will become possible for us to strategies of creative resistance to man? And the first is we will be able in every transaction, every investment, every business decision to prioritize not money, but people to prioritize people, relationship with people, connection with people. The primary question we will ask about every deployment of our assets, including our spending as well as our saving and our investing and our giving is what will this do to strengthen relationship, to create capacity of love and dignity and respect for other people so that we can all do in the world what we were made to do? Only those who are free of mammon can realize that every transaction is actually an opportunity for love, to grow, for love, to be expressed in the world and a secondary byproduct is whatever accounting we may make of. The value that we can trust will be created as we operate a loving and people prioritizing where a person prioritizing where in the world. And then the second strategy of creative resistance to Amen, amen is that we can learn to be just ridiculously patient, ridiculously patient, ridiculous. That is to mammon. Because Mammon is in a hurry. Mammon wants you to make more of that money. Fast Mammon wants you to move so fast you don't notice the people you're running over to make it. And we learn from our Lord Jesus, and we learned from God's own way with his creation that there's this incredible divine patience that's available to us. We are not in a hurry, so we will think less and less about IRR, more and more about what you know, some people call MLA multiples on investment. God is in the world. God wants us to be in the world to create multiples on investment, for sure. But our timing, how fast the velocity of money that's ultimately up to God. That's not the most important, not the most important thing. And this will lead us to have a thousand generation vision for our lives. If you give yourselves over to madmen, give yourself over to mama and you act and all the exploitive ways that madmen would have you act in order to get more of that countable, storable fungible power. You will do a lot of damage, but we know exactly. Or we know, according to God, how long that damage will last. God says if you enter into that kind of iniquity and mammon leads us to iniquity, it will do damage unto the third and fourth generation. This is Deuteronomy five nine. But the interesting thing is, even if you operate very ethically in the way that we're taught to in modern investment in business, the truth is that the results financial and otherwise of of even our best investments, even our best enterprise building also probably will last about three or four generations. Honestly, most family wealth is kind of exhausted after three or four generations deluded. Most businesses don't last more than that. Most of the work you and I do in our daily work, let alone the financial investments we place. I mean, realistically, it's only going to last three or four generations. Picard says to those who love me and keep my commands and walking my way, I visit blessing to the thousandth generation. That is not going to be measured primarily in any kind of financial return that is measured in the flourishing of persons in the transmission of a love in the creation of redemptive possibility in the world. And it's only available when we are completely serving God. We've completely detoxed from serving money. Any use of money is simply to serve this God on on whom we are completely dependent. Can we do that? Can we live in this world that mammon rules in a totally different way? Can we totally dethrone its power from our lives so that all of our workers, investors and spenders and savers and givers? Is devoted to God and God's ways, prioritizing people. Pursuing patients, it's as easy as a camel going through the eye of a needle, right with human beings, it's impossible. But with God, all things are possible. Thanks.