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You might say he strips us of both the friends we love and the enemies we cherish, and leaves us naked before the mirrors of Scripture and social science. An approach like that is not calculated to collect votes and cheers. "I'm no great fan of Ellul," Seattle Pacific University anthropologist Miriam Adeney told me recently. Applying another anthropologist's criticism of Claude Levi-Strauss to Ellul, she observed that he exhibits "the tendency to excess of seminal minds."

"But wait!" Professor Gill continues, "Ellul gives it all back with what can only be described as an inspiring vision of hope and freedom. … This approach exemplifies, on the level of contemporary Christian ethical discourse, the pattern of' leaving all, "hating all,' and embarking on the path of radical discipleship to Jesus Christ that is repeatedly given in the Gospels."

How does Ellul "take everything away" in Money and Power? Perhaps he strikes his most stunning blow when he takes Jesus' words at face value and personifies money as Mammon, a demigod, a demon, an idol, a power from which we need liberation.

We look at money as just so much limp green paper in the service of which we have dulled our spirits and calloused our hands. Money can be enervating, in our view, but it is necessary and morally neutral—not the least bit negative. We'd like to have more. The problem isn't money, we say. The problem is that we don't have enough. Or that somebody else has too much.

No, says Ellul. Money is not neutral. "Jesus personifies money and considers it sort of a god. He does not get this idea from his cultural milieu. … This personification of money, this affirmation that we are talking about something that claims divinity . … reveals something exceptional about money, for Jesus did not usually use deifications and personifications" (p. 75).

Ellul explains that in Matthew 6:24 and Luke 16:13 Jesus shows that money is a power, a law unto itself that acts in the material world but with a spiritual orientation. In the Bible, power is never neutral. And it is often personal. Just as Scripture often portrays death as a personal force, so it also portrays money.

The situation is serious. "We absolutely must not minimize the parallel Jesus draws between God and Mammon. He is not using a rhetorical figure but pointing out a reality. God as a person and Mammon as a person find themselves in conflict. Jesus describes the relation between us and one or the other the same way: it is the relationship between servant and master. Mammon can be a master the same way God is; that is, Mammon can be a personal master" (p. 76).

We may claim to use money, Ellul continues, but in reality money uses us, "makes us servants by bringing us under its law and subordinating us to its aims" (p. 76). We simply are not free.

One of the clearest signs that Mammon is a spiritual power is the way we attribute sacred characteristics to money. In the middle class, we may speak of business in someone's living room, but money itself is a forbidden topic. The social embarrassment is a sign of our sense of money's sacredness. The working class shows its reverence in a different way: "It is the widespread conviction that if the money question is solved, all problems of the working class and of humankind in general will thereby be solved as well. It is also the conviction that everything that does not tend to solve the money problem is only hot air" (p. 77).

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April (Web-only) 2007, Vol. 51