Top Highlights

• If we are accustomed, on the far side of Nietzsche, to saying that “God is dead,” this is not because we lack an ultimate source of value but, rather, because mammon has taken that place.
• “Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s and to God the things that are God’s” (Matt 22:21) is not in this sense a call to divided allegiance but, rather, a critique of state power, one based on the disjunction between God and mammon. Devotion to God, that is, cannot take the form of mammon,
• although Jesus takes the disjunction between God and mammon as absolute, it is not pure: sometimes one must work to undermine mammon from within.
• “the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes”
• God’s death is implied in the disjunction that Jesus institutes between God and mammon. Because it is mammon, and not God, that rules the world, God can be understood, then, as always-already dying—or always-already dead.