The Seven Money Types

Tommy Brown

• Publisher: Zondervan
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780310335450
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Finance

"A unique approach to understanding how you innately relate to handling money. A fascinating concept!"

– Gary Chapman, author of The 5 Love Languages

True financial well-being involves more than getting out of debt and accumulating wealth. It's about discovering how you're wired by God, and how that wiring influences the way you think about, feel toward, and handle money.

Discovering your money type – whether you are an Abraham (hospitality), an Isaac (discipline), a Jacob (beauty), a Joseph (connection), a Moses (endurance), an Aaron (humility), or a David (leadership) – will bring greater self-awareness, reduce internal financial tension, help you resolve financial conflict with others, and help you grow financially from a faith-based perspective. As you walk with Pastor Brown through the Scriptures you'll find holistic financial pathways that lead you to a place of increased awareness and confidence related to money.

In The Seven Money Types, Pastor Tommy Brown leads you on a journey of personal discovery as he reveals the seven money types found in Scripture, helps you identify the type that best fits you by means of a 35-question assessment, and coaches you on understanding, affirming, developing, and enjoying your unique approach to money.

CHAPTER 1

THE SEVEN BIBLICAL MONEY TYPES

For the better part of a decade, I talked with friends, pastors, professors, and financial planners about my theory that God created every human being with a unique money type. That is, God designed each person in his image to relate to resources in general, and money in particular, in a distinct way. I took stabs at identifying what those money types were and, as a pastor seeking ways to convey these important truths to others, I extensively explored the Scriptures in search of the biblical characters who best represented the particular money types I saw in my everyday work in the area of faith and finances.

As I taught financial management courses, both at the congregational and collegiate levels, I dialed in to the unique ways people feel, think, and act concerning money. I noticed how often people felt guilty for not thinking the way someone else thought about money. I often heard phrases like “I’m just ‘bad’ with money.” Conversely, I recognized how regularly some people felt superior because their way of relating to resources more closely resembled the prevailing culture’s attitudes toward what was defined as financial success. They were “good” with money.

Interestingly, most people seemed to think there is only one—or maybe two—“right” way to handle money. But I believed there were more “right” ways to relate with money, and that it had everything to do with how God designed us. I began reading and studying about this topic in earnest.

Eventually my theological studies required that I take a course on Judaism, which transpired in Falls Village, Connecticut. There, unaware he is one of today’s leading Jewish thinkers, I met Rabbi Arthur Kurzweil, and he became a dear friend and dialogue partner. Our hearts connected immediately, and within a few hours I shared my belief that God designed humans in his image and that the unique way each of us is designed in God’s image affects how we handle money.

Rabbi Kurzweil listened and smiled. I didn’t know whether his smile meant he thought I was a complete heretic and that he was about to destroy my theory or that I was in fact onto something. When I shared with him my thesis that biblical characters such as Abraham, Moses, and David served as money types who embody and clarify certain aspects of what it means to be made in God’s image, he leaned in and whispered, “The characters you’re looking for, they’re already picked. They were selected long ago. You’re not crazy.” Now he had my full attention.

We talked late into the night. I learned not only that my intuitions and research were valid, but that for ages many people of Jewish faith have held as part of their faith tradition that distinct aspects of God’s image are revealed through seven biblical characters: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Aaron, and David. These individuals are so prominent and memorable within the Scriptures because each of their lives represents something significant about what it means to be human, to be made in God’s image. They represent what we aspire to attain.

Streams of the Jewish tradition affirm that, through their lives and stories, each of these individuals leads us into a clearer understanding of one aspect of what it means to be made in God’s image. At this intersection their tradition merged with and informed my theory and experience in financial management and coaching. The seven biblical characters who represent seven aspects of God’s image are the seven money types, because, as you’ll soon discover, Scripture teaches that to be made in God’s image is to properly steward creation and its resources, including money.

As a Christian, some of my views surrounding these traditions are certainly different from those of the Jewish tradition; nevertheless, I was able to discern areas of commonality and truth in this Jewish construct that enlightened my approach to clarifying and understanding the seven money types.

Over the following years, I studied the lives of these seven characters, selecting and drawing upon principles that aligned with my faith and experience in the Christian tradition. Viewing these seven biblical characters through the lens of money types affirmed my experience in pastoral ministry, financial coaching, and my biblical studies: people relate to the world around them (including how they relate to money) in seven primary ways, and these seven ways are modeled by these seven figures. Individually, each of the seven biblical figures inspires us to embrace the fullness of what it means to be made in God’s image, especially in the ways we relate to money. When held together, they compose a breathtaking and inspiring picture of God’s image—a life with God we’ve always dreamed of.

Now I’ve discovered the key to financial well-being is to cease striving for what you do not have and to reach deeper into who you are, into who God designed you to be, and to start your journey there. Then as you continually mature as a person of faith, your experience of how you handle money will deepen. And as you handle money differently, your faith experience will also deepen. Each makes an impact on the other because money matters are a primary space where we learn to trust God. God and money will begin to work together to give voice to your soul’s longings as God uses your relationship to money to bring hope and healing into the world.

The Seven Money Types and God’s Image

This journey to discovering your money type and experiencing financial well-being originates in a most familiar part of Jewish and Christian history. The ancient Jews safeguarded a story that reveals how God created humans as what we’ve come to call imago Dei, the image of God.

Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness . . .” So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” (Gen. 1:26–28 NRSV)

Astoundingly, humans are made in the image of God. The microcosm of human life reflects the macrocosm of divine reality; in other words, the smallness of our lives somehow depicts the bigness of God. This is mystery, and yet it is precisely where we must begin, from a biblical standpoint, if we hope to discover how we are designed to relate to the world around us, especially to money.

The assignment of God-imaged humans was to multiply and care for creation and its resources, which has come to include money. Forevermore, human fulfillment—a sense of peace and wholeness—would be wrapped up in how well we carried out this assignment. Thereby, the imago Dei would fill the whole earth, with God’s love and light all over the place, all the time.

This image, however, was marred as our first parents transgressed God’s ways by using resources (who can forget that forbidden apple?) in a manner incongruent with their souls’ deepest desires—to know and love God forever. The way they handled resources affected their relationship with God. Since that time, God has worked to restore the imago Dei and make the world whole again, using humanity’s relationship to resources to form faith in God and as an expression of God’s love and care for the world. Jewish writer Leonard Fein thoughtfully expressed our challenge when he wrote, “We are called to see the beauty through the blemishes, to believe it can be restored, and to feel ourselves implicated in its restoration. We are called to be fixers.”¹

The story unfolds, and over the course of hundreds of years, God used seven individuals to shepherd his people and lead them back into his ways: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Aaron, and David. Through their lives and teachings they carried a special message into the earth to remind humanity of what it’s like to do life with God; indeed, what it’s like to be made in God’s image. Each of these seven characters revealed one of the seven aspects of what it means to be made in God’s image. They guided God’s people into their future, which was really a restoration of the best of their past, of what was lost in Eden.

Individually, each one highlights a unique aspect of what it means to be God-imaged:

Abraham offers God’s hospitality.

Isaac demonstrates God’s discipline.

Jacob reflects God’s beauty.

Joseph depicts God’s connection.

Moses manifests God’s endurance.

Aaron embodies God’s humility.

David influences with God’s leadership.

While each of their lives demonstrated one aspect of God’s image in a unique and clearly recognizable way, no single character fully embodied all aspects of God’s image to the utmost degree. They all provided glimpses; none fully represented the totality of what it means to be made in God’s image.

If the fullness of each of the seven aspects of God’s image were realized, we’d behold the fullness of human potential. In both the Christian and Jewish traditions, this is realized in the personhood of the Mes...