There Will Be No Economists In Heaven

This week at Bible study we were talking about money. Actually our study is doing a series on it; this was the second study, but I'd missed the first (and will miss the rest due to being overseas - more on that later maybe). The series is about how Christians should relate to and use money. Something caught my eye in the summary of the first study, though. It was this sentence:

God owns all the money.

The statement was made as part of an argument that money (and having money) is essentially good - one of God's blessings. The thrust of the argument was that since God created (and therefore owns) everything, he also owns money, and the fact that we have it is the result of a gift from God. The study notes tried hard to walk a middle ground between prosperity gospel (heresy) and the glorification of poverty (sorry, Franciscans) in maintaining that money is essentially good and that material blessings should be received with thanksgiving but warning that money is also dangerous (because we're sinful and greedy).

The reason why the 'God owns all the money' statement caught my eye, though, was because it created an image in my mind that I wasn't entirely comfortable with: God as the Great Capitalist, the wielder of Ultimate Liquidity, who generously offers you the best possible return on your investment (treasures in heaven, anyone?). I'm probably (okay, definitely) being unfair here, but that was the first thing I thought of. The second thing I thought of was Matthew 22 (here quoted in the NKJV because it is lovely):

Then the Pharisees went and plotted how they might entangle Him in His talk. And they sent to Him their disciples with the Herodians, saying, “Teacher, we know that You are true, and teach the way of God in truth; nor do You care about anyone, for You do not regard the person of men. Tell us, therefore, what do You think? Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?”

But Jesus perceived their wickedness, and said, “Why do you test Me, you hypocrites? Show Me the tax money.” So they brought Him a denarius. And He said to them, “Whose image and inscription is this?” They said to Him, “Caesar’s.”

And He said to them, “Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

When they had heard these words, they marveled, and left Him and went their way.

Now admittedly you can read this text in a number of different ways, but one interpretation that is at least plausible is that Jesus separates God and money (and monetary systems). Money is part of the world; it belongs to and supports worldly power systems ("render unto Caesar what is Caesar's") and is therefore embedded in all sorts of sinful processes and practices.

For these (and other) reasons I tend to lean away from the view that money is good but dangerous and towards the view that money is bad and dangerous. Now I don't want to say that God's blessings are bad, but I think you have to distinguish between things and money. Things like food, shelter, and comfort are God's blessings. Money is a system that exists in a sinful world in order to make the best of a bad lot; given that people are greedy and will always try to take as much for themselves as possible, money is a way to try and regulate those impulses by assigning values to things. Once a thing is valued you can make more or less equal exchanges. However, monetary systems themselves aren't good; it's things that are good. In short, money is a necessary evil in a sinful world.

One way to think about whether something is good in itself that is sometimes (but not always) useful is to ask yourself whether that thing will be in heaven. (This, by the way, is where we enter the land of complete and utter speculation.) Will there be money in heaven? I don't think so. I think things (God's blessings) will be in heaven, but since sin will no longer exist I don't think we'll need to value those things. (If you can't imagine a society without valuation it's either because heaven is incomprehensively strange and amazing or because capitalism has got too strong a hold on your brain, or both.) Heaven obviates the need for money.

Here's another way to think about it: there's an old joke about the professions that won't exist in heaven. No police, no doctors, no theologians. Well, I don't think there'll be any economists in heaven. Economics is the study of a system that's no more than a necessary evil, and so won't be necessary when both necessary and unneccessary evils are swept away.

TL;DR: you shouldn't confuse things (God's blessings) with money (a necessary but not intrinsically good way of regulating those blessings in a sinful world). Let me know if I'm crazy, stupid or just playing with semantics :)