1
Let us say that we “struggle . . . not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Eph 6:12). Let us say that what is most adversarial against, most opposed to, most satanically obstructing the way of Jesus (cf. Mark 8:33), the one whom we are to follow—we, “the crowd with his disciples” (34)—is not some palpable physicist’s object obtruding across our path. Let us say that what blocks our way are claims that were made on us before any of us took a first breath, claims that have beguiled us, that have from the beginning told us what to see and what not to see, that have determined “how we choose to live,” that yet “constitute our world and us,” that “are embodied in, and exercise their power through, societal institutions and structures: economics, politics, culture, race, religion, ethnic affiliation, familial roles and expectations. . . . [and there tell us our] standing in the human and cosmic scheme of things.” Let us say that these structures “correspond to our deepest and most definitive sense of ourselves, commanding our imaginations and thoughts and hopes and feelings, keeping us awake at night or allowing us to sleep the sleep of the just . . . .” Let us say that “they are our absolutes.” How, we might ask, does money, the money of a thoroughly monetized economy such as ours, how does this money threaten to trample us all under its boots? How might an inquiry into its claim on us throw back the curtain that would conceal the “principalities and powers” against which the Paul of Ephesians would have us wrestle?
2
In part one of his book The German Ideology, at the beginning of his critique of Ludwig Feuerbach’s account of human consciousness, Karl Marx states his own contrasting “premises.” They are that human beings are “real individuals” who in their “activity” live under certain “material conditions . . . , both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity.” What “distinguishes” human life from other animals, he says, is that we distinguish ourselves—by our work, both by what we produce and how we produce it. Indeed, we produce the means by which we stay alive and the shape that life takes. Similarly, in his Upon Our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, IV, John Wesley, in his critique of the Moravian Quietists, places work at the heart of the task to which God—the creator and redeemer—has in all things given us precarious human beings to perform. Wesley’s vision of work in this sermon combines his convictions “that Christianity is essentially a social religion” (I.1) and that God is “well pleased with all that outward service which arises from the heart,” “particularly” “with the sacrifice . . . of our bodies” (III.1), to “love [God], to delight in [God], to desire [God] . . . both in thought and word and work” and thus to “glorify [God] . . . with our bodies . . . , to buy and sell, to eat and drink to [God’s] glory” (III.4). Thus both Marx and Wesley understand human life to be economic, to be concerned with the way we together lay hold of what is before us, mold and shape it, and then let it go, the way we build, hunt, gather, confer, eat, drink, dig, harvest, shelter, make, teach, repair, revise, and plan. It is what a household does and must do in order to move well into another day, week, month, or year. No one—as Marx reminds Feuerbach and Wesley reminds the Quietists—no one has the option in life to disengage from concrete social labor.
3
When we imagine life in ancient Israel, both before and during the time of Jesus, it is helpful not first to think of cities. Life in ancient Israel was lived almost entirely in very small villages, particularly before 1300 B.C., but even after the emergence of monarchical rule and of cities, 90% or more of Israel’s population would have been rural. “Nearly all people were peasants; their livelihood came from gathering what grew wild around the village, tending animals in small flocks, and farming crops. . . . These small villages varied in size, but a population of about fifty people was typical.”
Life in those villages was terribly hard. Villagers would have lived “hand-to-mouth,” their labor certainly “cooperative,” but also “back-breaking,” taking “a substantial toll on each person . . . . The most frequent causes of death . . . would have been accident, plague, and starvation, especially for men. Malnutrition would have been widespread . . . [with] multiple periods of severe undernutrition during their lifetimes. . . . For women, the leading cause of death was complications arising from pregnancy and childbirth. . . .” The vast majority of ancient Israelites would have lived perhaps 20 to 25 years, in villages so isolated that one might be born, live, and die without ever having encountered a stranger.
Life in ancient Israel is best imagined without trade and certainly without barter or coinage.
4
Human beings, long before 600 B.C., knew how to calculate. They added, subtracted, multiplied, and divided, even if with less precision and anxiety than accounting demands of us. There was some wealth, here and there, of various usable kinds. There were luxury goods in the hands of a few, such as raw or crafted gold, silver, or electrum. There were occasional exchanges of goods. There were, especially in the rare cities, encounters with strangers, to whom a resident population felt little obligation. There were desire, envy, greed, possession, and possessiveness, as well as generosity, hospitality, graciousness, and cooperation. There were fleeting moments of disregard for the concreteness of occasions of celebration and other delights or for the urgency of injury or hunger or disease and the demands of the impending future. There were competition and expectation. There were systems of authority enforced by the threat of violence within certain vaguely defined boundaries. There was the sharing of goods acquired by conquest. There were goods more routinely gathered—meat, say—then ritually sacrificed to gods and communally consumed. And, of course, there was work, often grueling, overwhelmingly difficult work.
But there was no money. Money was born in Greece at about 600 B.C.
Money is by no means simply one or more bits of precious metal, perhaps embossed, used in exchange for goods. A monetary unit, such as a coin, bears a unique mark that thus authorizes it to be economically useful in a certain way, regardless of the beauty, kind, or purity of the metal or other material bearing those marks. The economic power of a coin is independent of the palpable material that passes from hand to hand. Thus a coin’s composition requires no special attention in an exchange, e.g., by an assayer. The value of a coin comes from its manner of participation in an abstract system of value, of acquisitive power, i.e., one that significantly transcends the transience of time or the vagueness of objects about which empirical perception would instruct us.
In order for an object, such as a bit of metal, to be monetary, it must perform all four of the following social “functions”: (1) It must store wealth. (2) It must in fact be useful as a means of payment for goods. (3) It must be able to be exchanged for goods. (4) It must be a “measure of value.” That is, concrete, practically useful goods (e.g., food) must be accepted during the process of exchange as equivalent to otherwise abstract, impractical tokens of economic power. These tokens, these “coins,” having changed hands, are authorized to be exchanged at a later time for other concrete, practically useful goods. Thus in the course of exchange, goods that in themselves would count as one’s concrete wealth—such as food or tools or livestock or olive oil—are translated into abstract units of value and exchange. Those units (represented by coins in your pocket or in a locked box) store what was and again will be concrete wealth. They do so, and thus are money, because they are widely accepted within a locale in exchange for desired objects.
Stamped pieces of metal became efficient in this way, e.g., in Greece, when the administrators of the state needed to provide tokens for the acquisition of goods for services rendered to the state by builders of civic structures, by the administrators themselves, by those rendering judicial service, by pensioners, by those who supplied meat to be sacrificed to the gods, and—above all—by soldiers, who traveled and needed portable economic units that they might use throughout a district, say, on the way to or upon return from battle.
Goods and services are determined to be of worth in this way by the number of units of stamped metal that one is authorized to exchange for them. It is the system thus that determines the importance of those goods and services precisely by determining the abstract units with which they are acquired. This system becomes the determiner of the goodness, and so, the function, of previously concrete tools, nutrients, building materials, human relations, indeed, any of the things that a population might desire and then obtain, say, in Athen’s agora.
“Monetization” is the process by which money comes to dominate the economic relations of those living together in a particular locale. It is at the same time the process by which the practical and theoretical imagination of a particular people—say, a village or larger group—is subsumed under that system. More precisely: monetization is the “development towards a single entity (money) whose only or main function is to be a general means of payment and exchange and a general measure and store of value.”
Prior to the advent of money in c. 600 B.C.—and long after for the vast majority of human beings in the world—economic relations were almost entirely face-to-face and between members of a household or of adjoining households in a tiny village. People worked together and depended on each other for all the goods that made life possible. They built, hunted, gathered, herded, and tended to each other cooperatively. Everyone worked—all but the youngest children or the adults made feeble by disease, injury, or general decline. Nobody had the luxury to sit out the workday. The intimacy and urgency of a precarious interdependent subsistent sociality, in which no one could imagine anything approaching independent existence, meant that there was absolutely no occasion in which money could be significant—unless imposed from the outside. Indeed the conquering armies of monetized empires did precisely that. Goods were ripped out of the hands of desperately poor peasants and coins were thrown at them in exchange. Those coins were later to be used by them to pay taxes to the agents of the empire, under threat of severe punishment, perhaps death. However, day to day, year to year, life was lived not within an abstract, monetized system, but by “interpersonal solidarity.”
The history of longstanding pre-monetized “interpersonal solidarity” made money possible in ancient Greece. Money functions as a means of social interaction, after all. But “when [money] became a general means of payment and exchange,” solidarity fractured. What replaced it were “impersonality and . . . the autonomy of the individual.” “The individual with money, although he may find useful and desirable the personal relations of kinship and friendship (reciprocity) as well as participation in collective sacrifices (redistribution), can frequently do without them, relying instead on the impersonal power of money.” With the advent of money who and whose you are diminishes in importance, tending toward disappearance. Monetary exchanges breathe the air of an abstract world of value, which turns neighbors into strangers, friends into autonomous, competing economic agents. Even the goods exchanged for money become less and less what they are concretely good for and more and more emblems of a disembodied, quantitative monetary order. “With money in his pocket any individual can, roughly speaking, acquire whatever he wants from any supplier, wherever and whenever he wants. And what he acquires by money may seem to be more fully his own than what he acquires as a gift, which—besides requiring reciprocation—may seem to be invested with the identity of the donor, and [what he acquires by money may seem] more fully his own even than possessions inherited with the household, such as the land with the tombs of his ancestors. Coined money—portable, concealable, durable, storable, impersonal—lends itself to individual possession. Money may accordingly inspire unlimited desire . . . , and isolate even members of the same household from each other.”
5
The depth and pervasiveness to which monetization worked its way into the “Greece” that gave birth to the “mind” of Western Civilization is extraordinary. This is above all to be seen in that the case can be and is made that it is precisely the logic of money that is at work at the heart of those thinkers whom even now we call “the first philosophers.” What we call “philosophy,” beginning with Thales and the other Presocratics and continuing through Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, et al., was born, appeared for the very first time in the history of the world, at the very moment and in the very locale that the world’s first thoroughly monetized economy came to stand.
Such a bold declaration must strike us, creatures of the twilight at the dusk of modernity though we be, as scandalous, too great a relativization not only of our most foundational truths, but also of the optics by which we lay eyes on those truths. Yet we, too, are children of a thoroughly monetized economy and it should be no surprise to us that we feel so quickly at home when we peruse the texts of the “golden age” of Greece, when and where monetization with such totalizing power captivated the day to day life in those city states—from birth to death—in the sixth, fifth, fourth, and third centuries, B.C., and—of course!—beyond. “We have by now thoroughly internalized the metaphysics of money—at its crudest consisting of two beliefs: firstly the belief that money is a thing (rather than a social convention) and that as a thing it must, like the weather, constrain our sense of what is possible, and secondly the belief that we are primarily individual agents and only secondarily (if at all) members of a larger entity, whether defined by kinship, politics, religion, or anything else.”
6
From the beginning, the gospel of Mark hints that tragedy awaits the Jesus whose “good news” it performs. His baptism, his healing of the paralytic, lowered by four pallbearers through an earthen roof into his “home,” the feeding of the 5,000, his walking upon the “sea,” etc., all this signifies, however indirectly, that this “son of God” will be crucified and that his crucifixion is something neither he nor these peasants who hear this gospel will ever get over. And, of course, the peasants who have heard this gospel performed again and again at little village assemblies and who knew every syllable of its script by heart, also know by heart how it ends. However, it is in Mark 8 that Jesus declares explicitly for the first time that everything that he and his “good news” entail will with great import come down to enormous suffering and dissolution.
Jesus is in the gospel of Mark, however, no tragic hero; nor is he a scapegoat, the payment of a debt, or a moral exemplar. He is the one who “sat at dinner . . . with tax collectors and sinners” (2:15–16), who touched and was touched by the defiled and defiling (5:22–43), who breathed the same air and touched the same bread and fish, the same bread and wine, as those destined to fail at life (6:35–44; 7:1–2). The crucifixion he foretells in chapter 8 is continuous with every moment of his work in this book. The gospel is the scandalously good news of Jesus’s solidarity with the suffering peasants of Galilee—and then with all suffering people, the 5,000 and the 4,000. From the beginning Jesus is driven by the Spirit into the wilderness, where nothing grows, where the harshness of life drains away the future above all of the poor. The gospel from the beginning has Jesus, the wonder worker, mobbed by desperate crowds who see in him a glimmer of hope. These are not characterless opportunists looking for a quick fix to momentary inconveniences. They are broken, hopeless people, people sick, hungry, injured, and afflicted by the merciless armies of an empire and their collaborators, well fixed in the temple hierarchy of Jerusalem, who would bleed them dry. These, that is, are crucified people, the crucified people of Galilee.
Those of us who have been well disciplined by the economics of money, the economics that has conquered our world, find it easy, oddly, to imagine—indeed, to live in the dream—that life can be lived non-economically. The more money has captivated our imagination, the more we have been thereby isolated, individualized, and thus dissociated from hard, flesh and blood labor—the labor of hands and backs and brains and lungs and the fruit it bears—the more we assume that our true selves are disembodied spirits floating above such things, ghosts held for a while in these mortal coils. The poor—not the “temporarily embarrassed capitalist,” but the desperately poor—have no such illusion. It is to them that Jesus speaks, among them that Jesus lives, with them that Jesus works. What he calls them to, what he calls us to, is not an escape from life’s troubles. That is what money promises us. What he calls us to is intimate solidarity with one another, to bear each other’s infirmities and carry each other’s diseases. This is an economic calling, but one otherwise than monetized. The point is not to slip away from a world where people are crucified. The point is to move in with the crucified people, the ones again and again shoved off the page of this present evil age, to move in with them and struggle with them, day in and day out. Perhaps the greatest scandal of the gospel is that—though liberation from suffering, liberation from crucifixion, remains a good to be pursued, a goal for which to work—the good news is that there is a liberation that need not first put crucifixion aside, but which takes root precisely where roads are lined by peasants dying—and thus cursed—upon trees. And in the gospel this is no invitation to condescend. Those who could condescend are not addressed by Mark’s gospel. Jesus addresses the poor, the poor who go about day after day as crucified people, the people who—to those with eyes to see—“look like trees, walking” (24). Jesus calls them to rise when it is impossible to rise, to rise and go with him where he goes, because that is where the Reign of God even now is breaking in. The crucified people are the ones whom Jesus commands, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it” (34–35). That is, Jesus calls the poor—and with them you and me—not to flee from the sorrows of labor, of the economy of concrete bodily work, not to rise above this world, e.g., as spirits untouched by such things, but to plunge into them.
It is easy to understand why Peter found Jesus’s hard word at Caesarea Philippi so offensive. And it wasn’t just that Peter could not bear to think that his beloved Jesus would suffer, that he would be seized and slammed against the wall by the agents of Rome and Jerusalem, and then killed. Certainly that Jesus would be treated so badly would have deeply troubled Peter, but the ignoble demise of Jesus would also entail an ignoble end for any of his co-conspirators. And so, Peter abruptly ceased following Jesus, stepped rather in front of him, turned, faced him in opposition, and, standing his ground, refused to have any of it (32). Jesus in turn responded immediately and harshly. He looked at his disciples and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things” (33). Peter in refusing to follow, in blocking the path Jesus must walk to his bloody end, in obstructing Jesus’s way, makes himself quite literally Jesus’s “satan,” his adversary. In slapping him with this harshest of names, Jesus is telling Peter to cease his opposition, to cease his counterfeit discipleship, “counterfeit,” from the Latin “contra-facere,” “to make in opposition or contrast.”