Of course, there is great gain in godliness combined with contentment, for we brought nothing into the world, so that we can take nothing out of it, but if we have food and clothing, we will be content with these. But those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains. But as for you, man of God, shun all this; pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, gentleness. Fight the good fight of the faith; take hold of the eternal life to which you were called and for which you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses. In the presence of God, who gives life to all things, and of Christ Jesus, who in his testimony before Pontius Pilate made the good confession, I charge you to keep the commandment without spot or blame until the manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ, which he will bring about at the right time—he who is the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords. It is he alone who has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see; to him be honor and eternal dominion. Amen. As for those who in the present age are rich, command them not to be haughty or to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches but rather on God, who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment. They are to do good, to be rich in good works, generous, and ready to share, thus storing up for themselves the treasure of a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of the life that really is life.
1 Timothy 6:6-19
When questioned by a Catholic priest who asked him to return to the church of his baptism, Hāmiora Tumutara, a prominent tohunga (expert in traditional Indigenous knowledge) hailing from Aotearoa New Zealand’s East Coast, replied: “I have an ancestor of my own. You keep to your ancestor and I will keep to mine … Rangi is my ancestor, the origin of the Māori people. Your ancestor is money.”
Tumutara lived through some of the most violent and most egregious periods of his land’s colonisation under the British Empire, including the enormous confiscation and theft of native land during the New Zealand Wars of the mid-nineteenth century. Initially a devoted Catholic—at one point even taking the name Pio Tuaiwa in honour of Pius IX—Tumutara eventually followed the path many other Māori during this period did. Given the church’s silence about or even complicity within processes of land alienation, many within the Māori world retreated from their relationships with settler missionaries. They saw that the dominant practices of the settler church did not lead to a “life that really is life” (1 Timothy 6:19).
Tumutara’s rebuttal strikes to the core of what the author of 1 Timothy here identifies: the love of money is a root of evil (1 Timothy 6:10). It is money that has tempted and entrapped those in this early Christian community and so plunged them into “ruin and destruction.” In an evocative turn of phrase, the members of the community have “pierced themselves with many griefs”—a profound metaphor for the anguish hidden in Tumutara’s own words. The ancestor of the Christian settler is money itself; a genealogy of ruin and destruction indeed. As Hana Pera Aoake writes,
Tumutara lived through a time where he was able to witness the dispossession of Māori land through a process Marx described as primitive accumulation. This process entailed taking land, enclosing it, expelling a resident population to create a landless proletariat, and then releasing that land into a privatized sphere of capital accumulation. Through dodgy land court deals, the confiscation of 1.3 million hectares of Māori land across large parts of the North island, and a number of pieces of legislation, settlers in New Zealand and the Crown were able to dispossess Māori of huge swaths of their land. … Not unlike other British colonies, the introduction to land titling systems in Aotearoa diminished ways of relating to land that were not informed by capitalism. Once imposed, this was intended to destroy Indigenous relationships to land which are based upon reciprocal kinship to all living beings, rather than productivity and land use value.
If you’ll forgive the brief interlude of Marxist terminology, Aoake’s analysis usefully identifies the multilayered effects and intentions of the process of settler colonialism in contexts like New Zealand. At stake in the settler quest for land is not simply the monetary enrichment of private individuals (though it is certainly not less than this) but the comprehensive replacement of an entire way of life. It is Indigenous life itself—its genealogical connections, its networks, its histories independent of Europe—that threatens the Christian settler in his hunger for the earth. The effects of this hunger are enormous; as Willie Jennings (p. 39) observes of the colonial project: “Peoples different in geography, in life, in different worlds of European designation—Africa, the Americas, Europe, [Oceania, etc.]—will lose the earth only to find it again in a strange new way. The deepest theological distortion taking place is that the earth, the ground, spaces, and places are being removed as living organizers of identity and as facilitators of identity.”
The love of money, then, is the root of the evil of our contemporary world, one which continues to be ravaged by the virulent effects of settler colonialism today. We witness the depths of this evil in the horrors of a justice system in Aotearoa which disproportionately criminalises and incarcerates brown bodies, in a healthcare system which continues to fail Indigenous communities, in an education system which colonises the mind of the native and settler alike. We witness it in the removal of our very selves from land, from space and context, from animal, plant, and bush.
These systemic injustices have a root: the root of a colonial system designed to supplant Indigenous life. They have a genealogy, a history, a process: their ancestor is money and their descendants are death.
We who are counted as settlers are still largely deterred from critically reviewing the whitewashed narratives of our history. We are still overwhelmed by dominant colonial accounts of the “successful domestication” of Indigenous New Zealanders. We are still largely pursuing “foolish and harmful desires,” chasing a dream of Antipodean success and security even as today both are being seriously eroded.
We live under the shade of an invasive tree with deep roots—roots which are now understood as bitter to the taste and toxic for the soil. We thus have a choice: to ignore this toxicity, and so allow its destructive elements to spread, or to reorder our environment so that new life may take root. The process of upturning any tree is a disruptive one—necessary so that its underbelly may be exposed. Yet without such disruption, the land and its inhabitants will continue to wither.
The remedy our passage proposes is a “godliness combined with contentment” (1 Timothy 6:6). The archetypal image of the Christian settler is certainly not content: its hunger for money and land consumes all. Despite modish acknowledgments of land or increasing calls for decolonisation in the church and academy, the reality is that Indigenous land still remains largely out of Indigenous hands. The greed of settler colonialism continues.
The wisdom of Tumutara offers a different image: that of a responsible descendant. To live as a responsible descendant means to acknowledge the painful history to which one belongs. At the same time, it also involves rejecting this history in an attempt to unbelong from it—to not let the insatiability of this legacy determine how we live today. Perhaps then—content with who we are, yet refusing inherited logics of death—we might rebuild “a good foundation for the future” and so finally “take hold of the life that really is life” (1 Timothy 6:19).
I am grateful to Jenny Te Paa-Daniel, Caleb Haurua, and Michael Toy for their insights and guidance in shaping this reflection.
