Friday, December 5, 2014

Money Wisdom #316

"Jesus inverted the relation of mastery between people and wealth - your heart is where your treasure is, not your treasure is where your heart is - by inverting the normal relation between the eye and light: 'the eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!' (Matt 6.23) Service is enacted through time, attention and devotion. The object of one's attention is used as the material for forming the perspective through which the world is to be seen. One forms a perspective expressed in metaphysics. If one does not turn attention to God, the source of the value of values, then one's evaluation will be shaped by the world. True power consists here in a perspective of evaluation. Hence, the modern notion of autonomy is an illusion, since it is always a perspective, a source of evaluation, that one serves."

Philip Goodchild Theology of Money (2009) p.202-203