Quotes from Being Human (report by the Church of England Doctrine commission) that could act as summaries of large portions of Goodchild’s Theology of Money
p.61 Both the fact and the actual working of the market in money has changed the nature of money. In excess of 90 per cent of the worth of transactions do not related to productivity in the real world at all, but represent speculations about the future value of a specific currency (and by extension, of the valuation – as distinct from the real worth and value – of the economy and of the society that transacts its life through that economy). Money almost entirely freed from a relationship to the value of goods and services in the lives of human beings and their communities has, in effect, been removed from the sphere of human values. Its growth and movement seek the optimization, not of the conditions for human flourishing (or even of wealth creation through production, provision of services or trade), but of its own power to reproduce more of itself. The market in money follows its own laws, oriented on increasing the monetary value of investors’ holding of money – as though money were, not only the arbiter of the worth of everything else, but a good and an end in itself, self-validating and self-legitimating. Money has taken on a life of its own.
p.67 But are we right to assume that our spirit and its desires are self-constituting, shaped in some neutral sphere, expressive of a self and its desires already shaped and constituted apart from its relationship to money? Are we right to assume that we are free in relation to money, free to choose whether and how we associate our lives with it and what meaning it shall have for us? Are we right to assume that money is more like a substance (a tool or an object) than a field of force, an activity or a network of relationships?
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