Update on the Theology of Money Book Event

Update: Andy points out that there are two working papers online that may also be of interest.

Following on the success of the Schneider Beyond Monotheism event, we are continuing on with Philip Goodchild’s Theology of Money. We’ll be starting December 1st and will post every weekday as we did in the previous event. Theology of Money (link for Amazon UK) was first published in the UK by SCM Press back in 2007 and has just recently been published by Duke University Press in the New Slant series. (Thanks go to Duke University Press for providing us with review copies.)

The differences between the two editions are negligible (there are some updated economic figures in the US edition), but Goodchild did write a new preface for the US edition that is available online as a pdf. For those unfamiliar with the book I’ve pasted the publisher’s description below (though I think Pickstock’s recapitulation of the thesis actually gets it wrong).

Theology of Money is a philosophical inquiry into the nature and role of money in the contemporary world. Philip Goodchild reveals the significance of money as a dynamic social force by arguing that under its influence, moral evaluation is subordinated to economic valuation, which is essentially abstract and anarchic. His rigorous inquiry opens into a complex analysis of political economy, encompassing markets and capital, banks and the state, class divisions, accounting practices, and the ecological crisis awaiting capitalism.

Engaging with Christian theology and the thought of Carl Schmitt, Georg Simmel, Karl Marx, Adam Smith, and many others, Goodchild develops a theology of money based on four contentions, which he elaborates in depth. First, money has no intrinsic value; it is a promise of value, a crystallization of future hopes. Second, money is the supreme value in contemporary society. Third, the value of assets measured by money is always future-oriented, dependent on expectations about how much might be obtained for those assets at a later date. Since this value, when realized, will again depend on future expectations, the future is forever deferred. Financial value is essentially a degree of hope, expectation, trust, or credit. Fourth, money is created as debt, which involves a social obligation to work or make profits to repay the loan. As a system of debts, money imposes an immense and irresistible system of social control on individuals, corporations, and governments, each of whom are threatened by economic failure if they refuse their obligations to the money system. This system of debt has progressively tightened its hold on all sectors and regions of global society. With Theology of Money, Goodchild aims to make conscious our collective faith and its dire implications.

“The power of the analysis, the energy of the text, the passions it excites in the reader, and its call upon us to think beyond the limits in which most philosophical, theological, economic, and cultural thought is enclosed make Theology of Money an indispensable book.”—William E. Connolly, author of Capitalism and Christianity, American Style

“Well written and very well researched, Theology of Money is a remarkable and very important book; there is nothing else like it currently in print. Philip Goodchild’s thesis is, in a way, startlingly simple: the universal sway of money exists instead of a universal sway of an ethics and a religion.”—Catherine Pickstock, co-editor of Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology

Philip Goodchild is Professor of Region and Philosophy at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of Capitalism and Religion: The Price of Piety and the editor of Difference in the Philosophy of Religion and Rethinking Philosophy of Religion: Approaches from Continental Philosophy.