by Elton Gahr

Created on: April 15, 2009

The most misquoted verse in the bible is 1 Timothy 6:10. This verse is quotes as "Money is the Root of all Evil.", but in truth it says "The love of money is a root of all all kinds of evil." This distinction may seem unimportant but when discussing the ethics of money it is the entire discussion. The Pursuit of profit is not evil, the pursuit of profit is perfectly moral. Yet there are important philosophical points to be made both on how you should pursue money and how to deal with it.

The point of 1 Timothy is that greed will lead to every type of evil. Anyone in the modern day knows this. From a motive to murder to the willingness to cheat lie and steal to get more money the big examples of greed are everywhere as are the examples of where they lead. Yet we do not have to be wealthy for the pursuit of money to become a liability. Most theft in this country is committed not on those large scales but on far smaller scales. People lying on insurance forms, people lying on their taxes or just fudging their numbers somewhere else a bit. And it is this small scale cheating which is the cause of money of the economic problems of this country, not the much larger examples.

On the other hand charity itself is not the answer. There is another store in the bible, of a rich man who brought in coins and donated them to the temple. He made a large show of putting in the coins so everyone could see what he was doing. A few moments later an elderly woman came into the same temple and quietly put to coins into the same box. There are many points that can be made out of this story but the ultimate point is the relationship these people had with their money. For the wealthy man the charity was simply a way to buy respect. For the woman these coins were the last she had and this was an act of faith. The question of morality is not in giving money but in the attitude towards money.

The final story is the one people are most familiar with. Jesus, upon visiting the temple for the first time found moneychangers. Angry he drove them out of the temple. But why was this? Many assume that this was some biblical problem with capitalism, but most who study this do not. The truth is that the problem with this situation was two fold. One, gentiles were in the temple. This was against Jewish law. The real problem though was that these people were cheating those who came to worship.

These three stories hold important lessons no matter your biblical beliefs. Money, of itself is not bad or wrong and neither is the pursuit of it. There is a great deal of good that can be done with money, and many of the leaders of the early Jewish religion were wealthy men, but the attitude towards money can become problematic until the money owner becomes the slave to money.

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