When Theology Starts Speaking in Dollars: How Our God‑Language Quietly Shapes Our Economics
The most widely published book in human history tells us we are created in the image of God.
That is the framing of my show, Created in the Image of God, and the framing of my own life’s questions. If that declaration is true, then every system we build—our politics, our courts, our prisons, our healthcare, our economies—should, in some way, reflect that image.
But we live in a world where, very often, it feels like we are created in the image of mammon.
Last night’s episode of the show was titled God, Mammon, and Exchange. My guest, Dr. Devin Singh—an associate professor of religion at Dartmouth and a leading scholar at the intersection of theology, economics, and social ethics—has spent years studying how Christian theology and money have shaped one another.
Somewhere in the middle of our conversation, a penny finally dropped for me. Pun fully intended.
Devin made a simple, disquieting observation: much of our theology speaks the language of money. And if we’re not careful, that language doesn’t just explain God to us—it actually trains us to see money as godlike.
Let’s walk through that together.
When God “Lisps” in Financial Metaphors
The Christian story tells us God is beyond our comprehension, and yet we are commanded to know Him, love Him, worship Him.
How does a Being outside of time and space communicate with creatures bound inside time and space?
My conviction is that God necessarily limits Himself to language and concepts we can understand. Jesus spoke in parables. Scripture uses concrete images—seed, bread, light, shepherd, king. God “lisps” to us, to borrow John Calvin’s phrase, speaking in baby-talk so His children can grasp something of the infinite.
It should not surprise us, then, that Scripture also speaks in economic language:
- “You were bought with a price.” (1 Cor. 6:20; 7:23)
- “The Son of Man came… to give his life as a ransom for many.” (Mark 10:45)
- “In Him we have redemption through His blood.” (Eph. 1:7; Col. 1:14)
Redemption, ransom, payment—these are fundamentally terms from the world of money and markets.
In my conversation with Devin, he reminded me that for the first few centuries of the church, one of the dominant ways Christians understood salvation was through what’s called ransom theory. Humanity was in debt or bondage; Christ paid the ransom, purchased us back.
This is where his work in his first book, Divine Currency, becomes so important. He shows how early Christian theologians, working in the Roman world, actively borrowed the categories of the Roman economy—coins, images, exchange, debt—to explain who God is and what God has done.
They spoke of:
- God as a kind of cosmic creditor.
- Sin as an unpayable debt.
- Salvation as a debt being settled, a price being paid.
- Humanity as coins minted in the image of God, just as Caesar’s face was stamped on imperial coins.
On one level, this is understandable—even beautiful. God stoops down into our world and says, “You understand value, exchange, cost, sacrifice. Let me use that.” It’s a mercy that God speaks in a vocabulary we already know.
But there is a danger here.
If we forget that this is metaphorical language—if we forget that this is God lisping to us—we start to treat the metaphor as the reality. And then the economic vocabulary we used to describe God begins to bleed back and sacralize money itself.
When the Metaphor Becomes the Master
In last night’s episode, I asked Devin where his focus lies: Is he more concerned with individual attitudes toward money, or with the systems and structures?
He answered that much of his work focuses on systems and structures—precisely because our theological metaphors don’t just stay in our heads. They shape the world we build.
Think about it:
If week after week we sing and preach about:
- Jesus “paying the price,”
- our sins as “debts” that must be “settled,”
- souls as something that can be “bought” and “owned,”
then we are, at a very deep level, training ourselves to see reality through transactional lenses.
We begin to instinctively think:
- Everything important has a price.
- Justice is fundamentally about balancing accounts.
- Relationship with God is something like servicing a spiritual loan.
Now add Jesus’ warnings about wealth into the mix:
- “No one can serve two masters… You cannot serve God and mammon.” (Matt. 6:24)
- “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?” (Mark 8:36)
- “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” (Matt. 19:24)
“Mammon” is a fascinating word. Scholars debate whether it simply means “wealth,” or whether it refers to a kind of spiritual power or even a deity associated with wealth. Either way, Jesus doesn’t treat it as neutral. He calls it a rival master.
And yet the very language we use about God is full of the grammar of this rival.
If we’re not careful, we attach to money the qualities that belong only to God: omnipresence (“money is in everything”), omnipotence (“money can do anything”), and, in a twisted way, even omniscience (“the market knows best”).
Devin has argued that over centuries, as Christian leaders used monetary metaphors to speak about God, they unintentionally legitimized and sacralized emerging monetary systems. When the church became wealthy, when it needed patrons and funders, when it helped develop instruments like the mortgage and church-run credit facilities, these metaphors did not remain innocent.
The language we used to describe God returned to us—with interest.
Is Money Just a Tool, or a Test?
At this point, someone will say, “But money itself is just a tool. It’s neutral. It’s our hearts that are the problem.”
There is truth in that. The New Testament text is often misquoted as “Money is the root of all evil.” What it actually says is: “The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.” (1 Tim. 6:10)
But tools can be forged in ways that shape their users. A scalpel and a sword are both tools, but they invite very different uses and produce very different cultures.
On the show, I shared a Bahá’í saying that condenses this entire dynamic into a single sentence:
“With fire we test the gold, and with gold we test our servants.”
Gold is both a refined good and a refining test. The same is true of money more broadly.
So what does this mean theologically?
If we speak of God in monetary metaphors, then money becomes more than a neutral tool. It becomes a kind of training ground—or battleground—for worship. It reveals which master we truly serve.
Jesus drives this home in the “eye of the needle” passage. There is debate about the historical details—whether there was literally a gate in Jerusalem called the “needle’s eye” through which a camel, stripped of its load, had to squeeze. But however you read it, the image is the same:
To enter the kingdom, something has to be stripped away. The loads we carry—our possessions, our sense of control, our claims on others—must be laid down. Wealth, which we treat as an enabler, Jesus exposes as a potential ball and chain.
The problem, then, is not merely that we “have money.” The problem is that we live inside a monetized imagination—one that has been reinforced, in part, by our own theological language.
We have become so fluent in the economics of salvation that we risk becoming illiterate in the economics of the kingdom.
Whose Image Is on the Coin?
In one famous encounter, Jesus is handed a denarius and asked about paying the imperial tax.
“Whose image is this?” He asks.
“Caesar’s,” they reply.
“Render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” (Matt. 22:20–21)
Standing behind our show’s title—Created in the Image of God—is another question:
If coins bear Caesar’s image, what bears God’s image?
Genesis gives us the answer: “Let us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness…” (Gen. 1:26)
Devin’s research shows that early Christian thinkers leaned into this connection. They described humans as if we were coins minted in God’s image. Just as Rome’s currency carried the emperor’s face, creation carries the face of its Maker.
Now consider the world we’ve built.
The modern economy mints its own “coins”: brands, platforms, financial products, digital identities. Our politicians are elected “in our image.” Our corporations are chartered “for our benefit.” Our financial systems are justified as expressing our “freedom” and our “rational choices.”
If we are honest, we must ask:
Whose image do these systems really bear?
- When Jesus says we cannot serve God and mammon, but our calendars, budgets, and anxieties are dominated by the pursuit and protection of wealth, whose image is governing us?
- When our churches proclaim a Savior who “paid our debt,” but remain largely silent about predatory lending, exploitative wages, and crushing household debt, whose interests are we protecting?
- When nations are judged in Matthew 25—not on their liturgies, but on whether they fed the hungry, gave water to the thirsty, clothed the naked, and visited the prisoner—what does that say about the economic “image” that matters in the end?
The language we use about God is not a side issue. It is forming—or deforming—the people and the systems made in His image.
Redeeming Our Language, Not Just Our Souls
So where does this leave us?
I am not suggesting we throw out the language of redemption, ransom, or debt. Scripture uses those words; they are part of the inspired record of God’s self‑communication. They have carried the gospel to billions.
But we need to handle them as metaphor, not mechanism.
- When we say Christ “paid the price,” we should remember: God is not a cosmic accountant, trapped by a balance sheet more powerful than Himself.
- When we speak of sin as “debt,” we should remember: in the Mosaic law, debt had strict limits. Every seven years, debts were released (Deut. 15). Every 49 or 50 years, in the Jubilee, land returned to its families, slaves were freed, and the economic order was reset (Lev. 25). Debt never had the final word; mercy and justice did.
- When we proclaim that we are “bought with a price,” we should remember: that price was paid to liberate, not to bind us to another, harsher creditor.
What Devin’s work presses us to see is that theology and economics are already intertwined—whether we acknowledge it or not. Our God-language can either:
- Expose mammon as a false master and relativize the power of money,
or - Sanctify mammon by treating its categories as the deepest truth about God.
The task before us, as people created in the image of God, is to reorder this relationship.
God is not simply “like” an economic actor. The economy must become more like God.
That means:
- Systems that recognize the inherent dignity of every person, not merely their “market value.”
- Practices that place limits on debt, accumulation, and exploitation, in line with the spirit of Sabbath and Jubilee.
- Communities that treat money as a servant of human flourishing, not a master of human destiny.
In the weeks ahead, we’ll continue this exploration—returning to my conversation with Devin, and to the Mosaic economic vision that has shaped my own life, to ask what it would mean for our economies, our politics, and our churches to truly reflect the image of God rather than the image of mammon.
For now, I’ll leave you with this:
If we are indeed created in the image of God, then no amount of money—no balance sheet, no debt ledger, no GDP figure—can tell us who we are or what we are worth.
But the language we use about God can either remind us of that truth… or quietly train us to forget it.
Let’s choose our words—and our master—carefully.
Next week on Created in the Image of God, we’re going to keep pressing into the collision between faith, money, and the systems that shape our lives.
If tonight’s conversation with Dr. Devin Singh pulled back the curtain on how theology has spoken the language of money, next week we’ll turn the lens around: how do our modern economic and political structures speak back into the church—and into our souls?
We’ll look at questions like:
- What does it actually mean, in practice, that we’re “created in the image of God” inside a global economy that often treats people as disposable?
- Can nations that call themselves “Christian” defend systems that leave the hungry unfed and the sick uncared for—and still expect a favorable verdict in the Matthew 25 judgment of the nations?
- And what would it look like to begin re‑aligning our economic life with the Mosaic patterns of Sabbath, Jubilee, and justice?
We’re going to move from theory into the laboratory of real life—policies, practices, and possibilities.
Join me next week as we ask: if God is reclaiming His image in us, what must change in the way we handle wealth, power, and each other?
