This abridged excerpt from Salt and Light (Plough, 2025) is based on a lecture series Plough’s founding editor, Eberhard Arnold, gave in Germany from October 1923 to January 1924 under the heading “The God Mammon.” His audiences were still coming to terms with Germany’s defeat in World War I and the horror and pointlessness of that conflict. The subsequent economic collapse had led to hyperinflation, unemployment, and malnutrition, resulting in a rise in political violence from extremist factions both fascist and socialist, though few could have anticipated the coming atrocities of Nazism and Stalinism. Many were ready to write off a Christianity that had blessed imperial conquest and, with rising inequality spawned by industrialism, sought to appease the poor with the promise of heaven. Knowing all this, Arnold demonstrated how the teachings of Jesus were directly applicable and relevant – as they are today, despite another century of war, capitalist excess, and Christian complicity. —The Editors

Whenever we look for a way to ­consecrate our lives, whenever a longing for devotion arises in us, whenever people seek religion, they are faced with an either-or, with the question of God or mammon.

But it is an error to think that everything religious engenders unity, and that everything irreligious belongs to the other side. To depict the truth of the matter in a deeper sense, one would have to draw a very different dividing line, one that cuts right across the religious and the nonreligious.

Everything that goes by the name of religion is related to a power that carries on its activity independently of us humans. And yet it must still be asked whether all relationships relate to the same center or essential content. With many who call themselves Christians and confess to the name of Jesus Christ, it is questionable whether their religion has anything to do with God, the Father of the Messiah, and his coming kingdom. In fact, one must ask if their religion is not really that of the antigod. Isn’t religion, including Christianity, permeated by demonic powers of the abyss that have brought about the disintegration of all human solidarity? Is the great world organization that names itself after Christ not serving a god other than the God and Father whom Jesus confessed, the God of a totally different order? Hasn’t the world church, which in practice has sided with wealth and protected it, sanctified mammon, christened warships, and blessed soldiers going into war, in essence denied him whom it confesses with words? And isn’t the Christian state the most anti-divine institution that ever existed? Isn’t it clear that a government that protects privilege and wealth as well as the organized church is diametrically opposed to the future that God will bring about when Jesus establishes his order of justice? …

It is relatively unknown that early Christianity recognized in all sharpness that the religiosity of the present world epoch is actually hostile to God. The message brought into the world by the first witnesses of the Christ was the message of a completely different kingdom, built on the transvaluation of all values.1 The first Christians bore witness to this message of the totally new order to come, calling it the message wrapped in mystery, concealed from those who are lost, since their minds have been clouded, and their eyes blinded, by the god of this world (2 Cor. 4:4).

In opposition to the God of the beginning and the end – the God of the future who will establish the coming kingdom of Jesus Christ, with its justice, unity, and love – stands the interim god, the god of this age. This god is the spirit of this world, the earth spirit, brought close to us today in modern literature.2 This god of greed, of murderous possessiveness, of grasping and holding, is the spirit of this world. By contrast, the first witnesses of Jesus testify that in receiving him, we have not received the spirit of this world, but the Spirit that searches the depths of God, the Spirit that none can know unless they are known by him (1 Cor. 2:10–12).

Nobody can serve two masters; therefore no one can serve both God and mammon (Matt. 6:24). Jesus defined with utmost sharpness the nature of this mammon spirit. He unmasked the religiousness of the propertied classes and showed how those who live in this sphere worship a spirit of death and murder. It is through this spirit that wars break out; through this spirit lust becomes a tool of commerce.…

Even a blind person can see that we have reached a historic juncture where the flowering of the mammon spirit spells incessant death – the death of hundreds and thousands of people. It is because of the deceitful powers inherent in this spirit that it is possible for big business to predominate as it does. Just as we experienced during the war that lying belongs to murder, as its twin, and just as it is impossible to wage a war without a basic level of mendacity – in the same way, a capitalistic society can be maintained only by lying, by duping the public.… 

If we really turned our attention to the problem, if we saw how common and widespread injustice is – without the world’s conscience being aroused by it, let alone rising up against it – we would instantly realize the real situation. In a single flash of recognition, we would see that capitalism by its very nature involves injustice, and that recognition would be enough to set off an uprising against the greatest deception of humankind in world history.… 

Mammon is money ruling over people. Subjected to the dominion of money ourselves, we lack the strength to rebel against its rule. Whenever life is dependent on income and finances, that is mammon. And because we are dependent in precisely this way – because our personal lives are broken by our enslavement to mammon – we are not in a position to apply the lever that lifts the locked door off its hinges. And yet we are able to recognize that money is the real enemy of God.

God or mammon. Money or spirit. This is the question. As spirit, God is the foundation of our deepest relationships, the innermost fellowship of everything that is alive. All people have an ongoing mutual relationship with other people; no one lives in true isolation. All are interrelated somehow – in groups, families, classes, professions; in nations, states, churches, and all kinds of associations. But these are not their only connections; simply by virtue of being human, they are also interrelated in a much deeper way, as members of the great, growing communion of humankind.

God can grant us the richest relationships imaginable, relationships of love between person and person, spirit and spirit, heart and heart – ­relationships that lead to organic, constructive fellowship. But there is a devilish means of robbing even the most spiritual relationship of God, and switching off the flow of love, as it were, from heart to heart. That means is money.

Money is the objectification of all human relationships. Money redirects relationships until finally the only value left is money. Property and money are the means used by the satanic power to destroy our highest goals in life. This fact makes itself felt more and more as money becomes a commodity in itself instead of a means of barter; in the end, all we have left is money itself: money as power. Money acquires significance because so many people are connected with each other solely through it, with no trace of any deeper relationships. Money basically excludes all true fellowship. Banking takes its place.

Money and love are mutually exclusive; money is the opposite of love, just as the sexual defilement of bodies is the opposite of love; just as killing in war is the radical opposite of giving life; just as lying is the opposite of telling the truth.

When mammon rules, it rules soul and spirit. It would be impossible for big business to have such power to enslave and murder, except for the dominion exerted by the mammon spirit. Under this dominion the possessive will is stronger than the will to community; the struggle for survival expressed in mutual readiness to kill is stronger than the urge to love, stronger than the spirit of mutual help; destructive powers are stronger than constructive ones; matter is stronger than spirit; things and circumstances count for more than God; self-assertion is stronger than the spirit of solidarity that brings about fellowship. Instead of setting people in motion and inspiring them to work in a creative way for the life of fellowship, the mammon spirit has engendered an enslavement and scorn of the soul that has made us more subject to circumstance than religious people have ever been subject to God. Because of this reality, everything concerning the god of mammon becomes a thoroughly religious question. In truth, this spirit – the spirit of lying, impurity, and murder – is the spirit of weakness and death.

Jesus declared war on this spirit. He conquered it by overwhelming it; by healing victims of sickness and decay with his power. Jesus, the prince of life, declared himself the enemy of death. He lived among us to take away death’s power and to destroy it, as the devil’s work (1 John 3:8). Here death is overcome by the Spirit of life that proceeds from Christ and brings about the fellowship of all living things. Christ was so conscious of this that he exclaimed, “Now is the judgment of this world; now the prince of this world will be cast out” (John 12:31). And the Holy Spirit convinces us that this prince has been defeated (John 16:11).

We are now compelled to ask how Jesus conducted this fight. Did he not say, “Make friends for yourselves through unjust mammon” (Luke 16:9)? Did he not say, “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s” (Matt. 22:21)? How can we reconcile these commands with these other words of his: “Do not lay up treasures for yourselves on earth” (Matt. 6:19), “Woe to you who arerich; woe to you who are full” (Luke 6:24–25); and, “If someone sues you for your coat, give him your cloak as well” (Matt. 5:40)?

To examine each separate saying would lead us too far afield. It must suffice to recognize the sum total of Jesus’ stand. As soon as we side with him, we will be ready to give up mammon, to declare war on it, and to overcome its power in our lives. When our inmost eye has opened to the vision of Christ’s light, our eyes will stop yielding to mammon’s beck and call (Matt. 6:22–23). Once our hearts are set on the new future and on the hope that God will establish a new kingdom, we will no longer want to amass property. We will strive only for this one thing and turn our backs on everything else. We will live for the future – for the freedom and unity and peace of all humankind. Then the saying, “Make friends for yourselves through unjust mammon,” will be truly fulfilled – because in giving away our money, we will gain the love of friends who will have fellowship with us forever.

When that pure-minded rich youth, who was not aware of having done anything wrong, came to Jesus, Jesus loved him at first sight and asked him whether he loved God and his neighbor. The youth thought he had done as he ought in every way. “Good,” said Jesus, “If this is really so, then what you must do now is to make this love real. Go and sell everything you have, give it to the poor, and come with me” (Matt. 19:16–21).

When Jesus entered the temple, the god he encountered was not his God, but mammon – the god of cattle and cattle dealers, banks and bankers. And Jesus made a whip, not to strike people, but to forcibly overturn the tables and show his contempt for money by dashing it to the floor. He testified that the temple should not belong to mammon but to God (Matt. 21:12–13). And when a trickster showed him a piece of money, the coin of the emperor, the head of the state, and asked him what to do with it, he answered that we should give to Satan what belongs to Satan: “Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God.”

When the itinerant disciples needed someone to keep and manage their common purse, it was Judas who was chosen – Judas, whom Jesus knew would become his betrayer (John 12:6). The murderer from the beginning was thus exposed in the very company of Jesus’ disciples (John 8:44). And he met his end as every murderer must. He disclosed the secret of Jesus’ messiahship by revealing him who, when asked by the political and religious authorities, “Are you the Messiah, the son of the Highest?” stood his ground and answered, “I am; you shall see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power, and coming on the clouds of heaven” (Mark 14:61–62). Jesus was put to death on the basis of this revolutionary confession.

After this dramatic attack on the mammonistic order, the Spirit-born community was seemingly destroyed, since its leader had been killed and eliminated. Among religious and irreligious people alike, the power of money seemed to triumph; the will of mammon and of death seemed to have gained the upper hand.

Yet through the very execution of the leader of this new order, through the grave itself, life won out. From the downtrodden people of Judea, young men and women gathered and waited together for something new – for the spirit of love, order, and freedom that they knew to be the Spirit of God’s kingdom. And the Spirit came upon them and formed a church, a fellowship of work and goods, in which everything belonged to all, and all were active to the full extent of their varied powers and gifts (Acts 2: 43–47).

And yet even this fellowship succumbed to the deadly process that destroys life. Just as individuals die, so this church also died. But over the course of centuries, new church communities arose. Time and again, small communities were formed in which men and women together declared war on mammon and together took upon themselves the poverty of generosity. In actual fact, by choosing such poverty, they went the way of true wealth. People filled with this urge of love can be found through the centuries. We hear their voices, we join hands with them across the passage of time. We feel a kinship of faith with them – faith for the future.…

We can have no part in violent revolution. Whichever side sheds blood is on the side of the father of lies. People are deceiving themselves if they think they can overcome mammon by arming themselves, relying on the same spirit of the abyss as mammon itself. The new can only be born of the new. You cannot use poison to get rid of poison. Life can only be born of life. Love can only be born of love. Community can arise only out of the will for community.

Our way to the goal is the communal way of brotherliness, where, as we walk, we will meet other small bands of people, ready to be merged in the one goal, to belong to the one future.

Already now we can live in the power of this future. Already now we can shape our lives in the presence of the coming God, and in accordance with his kingdom. The victory of the Spirit is already manifest through the church community. The kingdom of love, free of mammon, is approaching this earth; it is very close. And so we must change our thinking radically – we must change radically, so that we are ready for the order of things to come.

Come now, you rich people, weep and wail for the miseries that are coming to you. Your riches have rotted, and your clothes are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have rusted, and their rust will be evidence against you, and it will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure during the last days. Listen! The wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. You have lived on the earth in luxury and in pleasure; you have nourished your hearts in a day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the righteous one, who does not resist you.

Be patient, therefore, brothers and sisters, until the coming of the Lord. (James 5:1–7)

Footnotes

1. The phrase “transvaluation of all values” is from Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist.
   
2. The silent film Erdgeist (Earth Spirit), based on Frank Wedekind’s play of the same title, was released in the same year Arnold was writing.