fiit-broschuere2024 - Flipbook - Seite 56
As vice rector of Bonn University, macroeconomist Jürgen von Hagen made a decisive contribution to Bonn’s rise to the ranks of universities of excellence. Bonn is now one of the top four universities
in Germany, after two Munich universities and Heidelberg, and one
of the top one hundred in the Shanghai ranking. With him, insightful collaborations between theology and economics were developed.
The first results were published under the title “Money as God? The
standardized monetization of the market and the effects on religion,
politics, law, and ethics.”
This project was based on the conversion of the barter economy to a
monetary economy in 600 BC in Greece and a century later in Palestine. The Book of Kohelet (Ecclesiastes, something like the Nietzsche of
the Bible) made this development conceptually tangible. The next historically interesting phase was the switch from a coin-based economy
to a credit economy in the form of the invention of paper money in
China in the Middle Ages. Finally, the Reformation is of great relevance because of Luther’s fight against the indulgence economy and the
battle cry “God or Mammon!” This battle cry was quite successful in
the fight against indulgences, but brought with it high consequential
costs, because mammon was demonized and religion was ideologically
dumbed down in relation to economic matters. Not only in theology
but also in sociology, poetry, and so-called common sense, the mindless slogan “money as God” circulates to this day.
Jürgen von Hagen, Michael Welker (Eds.),
Money as God? The Monetization of the Market and its
Impact on Religion, Politics, Law and Ethics (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2014).
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