Extracts from -- "The FIGHT AGAINST MAMMON" -- [Lecture given in 1923] - by Eberhard Arnold.

Two powers are at work in the world: the power of love that leads people to associate with each other, and the power of death that separates people and destroys the fellowship of love. This power of death poisons the organism of humanity, making it sick and corrupt. It murders and kills. It covets and isolates. It attacks all that holds life together. It destroys the coherence of all living things.

But alongside this power that murders and enslaves, a constructive and creative power is still at work.

Not all who call themselves Christians are connected to the same center, nor are they motivated by the same thing. The religion of many who confess to the name of Jesus Christ has nothing to do with God or the coming kingdom...

Is not the great world organization that names itself after Christ serving a god other than the God whom Jesus confessed? Has not the institutional church sided with wealth and protected it; sanctified mammon, christened warships, and blessed soldiers going to war? Has not this church in essence denied him whom it confesses? Is not the Christian state the most ungodly institution that ever existed? And are not the state and the organized church, which protect privilege and wealth, diametrically opposed to what is to come: God’s new order?

Nobody can serve two masters. Nobody can serve God and mammon. The message of Christ had to do with the “trans- valuation of all values” - the coming kingdom of God. His first witnesses testified to a radically new order, an order concealed from those blinded by the god of this world. This god - the god of greed and murderous possessiveness - stands opposed to the kingdom of justice, unity, and love.

Mammon is the rule of money over people. It means dependence on income and finances instead of on God. We recognize that mammon is the enemy of God, but we cannot apply the lever that lifts it off its hinges: we ourselves are so dominated by it that we lack the strength to rebel.

The deepest human relationships are based not on mammon, but the spirit. No one of us can live in isolation; we are all interdependent. All of us are interrelated in groups, families, classes, and trade unions; in nations, states, churches, and all kinds of associations. And through our humanity we are interrelated in an even deeper way: through the love of God that flows from spirit to spirit and heart to heart, leading to organic, constructive fellowship.

But there is a devilish means that seeks to rob us of heart and spirit and God. This means is money. Money reduces human relationships to materialistic associations. It destroys the highest human goals. At first it may be just a means of barter, but later it becomes a commodity in itself. It becomes power. In the end, it destroys all true fellowship.

Money and love are mutually exclusive. Where mammon rules, the possessive will is stronger than the will to community. The struggle to survive becomes stronger than the spirit of mutual help. Where mammon rules, matter is stronger than spirit, and self-assertion stronger than solidarity. Mammon never motivates people to work in a creative way for a life of fellowship. Instead, it engenders the enslavement of the soul to circumstance. It is the spirit of lying, impurity, and murder, the spirit of weakness and death.

Jesus, the prince of life, declared war on this spirit, and we must declare war on it too. When our inmost eye has been opened to his light, it can no longer respond to what mammon demands. When our hearts are set on the future - when we expect God’s kingdom - we can no longer accumulate property. We will turn our backs on everything present and live instead for freedom, unity, and peace.

Jesus entered the temple with a whip not to strike people, but to show his contempt for money: his father’s house belonged to God, not to mammon. In the Gospel of Matthew, he exhorted the otherwise blameless rich [ruler] to confirm his love by selling everything: “Give all you have to the poor, and come follow me.” And when he was shown the coin of the emperor, he answered, “Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God.”

This attack on the order of mammon resulted in his death. Yet life had the final victory. The men and women who had gathered around him in life waited for something new after his death. They waited for the Spirit. They knew that the spirit of love, order, and freedom was the spirit of God’s kingdom. And this Spirit came upon them, bringing about a church: a fellowship of work and goods in which everything belonged to all, in which all were active to the full extent of their powers and gifts.

This church succumbed to the process that destroys life. Just as individuals die, so this church also died. But in the course of the centuries a new church rose. Time and again small communities were formed in which men and women declared war on mammon and took upon themselves the poverty of generosity. In choosing this poverty, they chose the richest way.

It is self-deception to think we can overcome mammon by violence, for violence is of the same evil spirit as mammon. We cannot drive out poison by means of poison. The new can be born only of the new; only out of life comes life; only of love can love be born. Only out of the will to community can community arise.

And community is alive wherever small bands of people meet, ready to work for the one great goal, to belong to the one true future. Already now we can live in the power of this future; already now we can shape our lives in accordance with God and his kingdom. The kingdom of love, which is free of mammon, is drawing near. Change your thinking radically so that you will be ready for the coming order!