Ep. 49 - What is Money?

All right, let's begin then.

We're going to talk a little bit just generally about money before we dive into the history of it.

I think it's fair to say we can't live without money the way that we live currently.

If you're listening to this podcast, you're probably living in a form of life that depends on money.

You are certainly living in a form of life that is dependent on money.

I think there's not many people these days that can get away from it.

And as Christians, many people, maybe even not Christians, but particularly Christians, maybe have a certain level of unease sometimes about money.

We know that Jesus says some pretty difficult things about money.

And as John was saying, money seems to be at the heart of so much that goes on in our world, including many of its big problems.

So it's important that we think about money and we ask questions like, is money neutral? It seems like it can be put to good and bad uses.

Does that mean that it has no inherent moral overtones or undertones? Or is there something more insidious going on with money? Why does Jesus talk the way he does about money? And given we can't live without it, you could even ask, is it irrelevant what money is and how it works and all the critiques we might offer of money because there's no other option? So Jonathan's here to begin untangling some of this stuff for us.

Let's start with what are we even talking about when we're talking

about money? Okay, first thing I want to say about money, because this will sound quite, I think, like we're going to, provide a critique of money okay there's a you know um what's that called a spoiler alert i think most people surprise surprise yeah pretty likely however uh i just want to put up front that i think money is amazing it is the more you know about it the more amazing it is as a thing and the fact that it works at all is amazing so i just want to put that up the front um So a very quick economics 101 definition of money.

So you'll find this in your standard economics textbooks will tell you that money.

It's a very simple thing.

It does three things for us.

It's a medium of exchange.

It's a unit of account and it's a store of value.

So the first one of those, a medium of exchange, means that when I take my car to the mechanics, I don't have to try and negotiate with him to exchange my theological services for him to fix my car, which is going to be probably a difficult job for me to do, depending on who I choose as my mechanic.

Yeah.

Is there any mechanics listening to exchange mechanic services for theology? Let me know.

But instead, I have this thing called money, which he will accept.

And if I can just somehow get people to pay me some of that stuff, theological services.

then, you know, we can do business.

So it's a medium of exchange.