Each time money is used, an epistemology, a metaphysics, a politics, an ethics, and even a theology is evoked. Money condenses the spirit of capitalism. Money did not create capitalism—the early factories and mills were rarely funded by bank loans—yet money transmits, propagates, and vivifies it.

This thought-provoking quotation (p. 20) is from Theology of Money, an insightful philosophical inquiry into the nature and role of money. In this lucid book, Philip Goodchild reveals the significance of money as a dynamic social force by arguing that under its influence, moral evaluation is subordinated to economic valuation. His rigorous inquiry opens into a complex analysis of political economy, encompassing markets and capital, banks and the state, class divisions, accounting practices, and the ecological crisis.
Engaging with Christian theology and the thought of Carl Schmitt, Georg Simmel, Karl Marx, Adam Smith, and others, Goodchild develops a theology of money based on four contentions. First, money has no intrinsic value; it is a promise of value, a crystallization of future hopes. Second, money is the supreme value in contemporary society. Third, the value of assets measured by money is always future-oriented, dependent on expectations about how much might be obtained for those assets at a later date. Since this value, when realized, will again depend on future expectations, the future is forever deferred. Financial value is essentially a degree of hope, expectation, trust, or credit. Fourth, money is created as debt, which involves a social obligation to work or make profits to repay the loan. As a system of debts, money imposes an immense and irresistible system of social control on individuals, corporations, and governments, each of whom are threatened by economic failure if they refuse their obligations to the money system. The essence of these arguments, the energy of the text, and Goodchild’s call upon us to think beyond the limits in which most philosophical, economic, and cultural thought is enclosed make Theology of Money definitely worth-reading.
In his second book Credit and Faith Goodchild offers a critical account of the faith structures within economic life and institutions. Covering the theological roots of the way economic life was, and is, articulated, the philosophical roots of value and debt and the economic roots of credit and creation, this book charts the emergence of early theories of capital and banking through a consideration of credit. It draws on Jules Lagneau, Simone Weil, the early Marx and of Nietzsche’s genealogy, as well as the Kantian problem of freedom and necessity; through this Goodchild explains how the Financial Revolution was able to conceal the credit economy which was its foundation and foster the pursuit of self-interest instead of the common good.
This innovative interweaving of theology, philosophy, political economy and sociology of money, reflected in Goodchild’s thinking and writings, constructs a new critical framework to understand the socio-economic life, institutions, practices, and ethics in the a world haunted by — and morally depleted by — the specter of (financial) capitalism.

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