Surely, Not All Evils!
(circa 2000)
St. Paul wrote a letter to a young Christian, and said that the root of all evil is the love of money. (I Timothy 6:10) This is an amazing claim.
Perhaps too much love for too much money we could go along with, or perhaps we could agree that it is the cause of some evils... maybe even a lot of evils. But to just come right out and say that all love for any amount of money is the cause of all evils is a bit much for most people to take.
You only need to quote the verse as it is written, to get a reaction from the average churchgoer. Try it, and see if they don't say something like, "It's the love of money, mind you, not money itself." They then go on to tell you how they know of a lot of rich people who have accomplished a lot for God.
What is happening when they respond like this? Let's change the issue slightly to make it clearer. Suppose someone says that drug addiction is ruining Western society, and a reaction comes back, stating that it's not the drugs themselves, but addiction that is the problem. Suppose they go on to inform you that they know of many people who take drugs regularly, but that they are confident that these friends are not addicted, and that taking drugs does not affect their ability to live a happy, normal life. Why do you suppose the person would react in such a way? There is a line from Shakespeare which says, "Me thinks thou dost protest too much." In other words, when someone feels heavily convicted by the truth in a statement, they tend to overreact, and this overreaction (or "protesting" too much) actually gives away their guilt.
Modern Bible translators have had a problem with this verse, because they know it is offensive to most church people. The King James Version faithfully expresses the thought of the passage. The original Greek does say that greed is the source of all evils. So how could the translators soften it and still avoid being accused of distorting the original message? The Bible Society came up with an ingenious solution for the Today's English Version. They wrote: "The love of money is a source of all kinds of evil." Apart from the dishonest use of the word "a", they have technically used the word "all". The problem is that they have used it in a phrase which has an idiomatic meaning that is rarely taken literally. "All kinds of" just means "lots". It does not mean "all" at all.
Surely, if greed is the root cause of all other evils, then it should be the fundamental target of any campaign to bring righteousness to the world. It stands to reason that if we could rid the world of the root of all evil, then the eventual consequence would be a world without any evil in it at all. But where is the church, denomination, or religion that is waging such a campaign against greed? The truth is that the entire topic of greed, and especially greedy people (presumably the rich) get very light treatment from religions everywhere.
But let us start by taking the more popular approach to this passage, which is that for one reason or another, Paul never intended to say what he is recorded as having said in I Timothy 6:10. Let us assume that the love of money (while harmful if overdone) isn't all that bad, and certainly is not the cause of all the problems in the world. Let us assume that the I Timothy 6:10 passage slipped into the Bible by mistake, or that it was placed there by an overzealous monk in the very early days of the church.
If that is so, then we would expect the subject to be dropped. We should not be bothered by other passages promoting such an extreme teaching. We would certainly not find Jesus or the apostles teaching such nonsense. The battle between good and evil for them would be more of one between God and the devil, perhaps with something like pride or a lust for power (and not greed) being the real source of evil in the world.
In the gospels, Jesus tells us that we have a choice between good and evil, and we cannot "serve" both "masters". The picture is that of an employee, or servant, trying to work for two employers or bosses at the same time.
Presumably one employer would be God, and the other would be the Devil. Right? But no, that is not how Jesus describes them. He does say that one employer is God, but he says that the other employer is (wait for it) money, or "mammon" (mammon is a term for money which also includes the material things that money can buy). Jesus says that we cannot work for God and work for money at the same time. (Matthew 6:24, and Luke 16:13) How amazing! He goes on to say that we are going to end up despising or hating one emplo
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