Christian scripture specifies that the love of money drives sinful behaviour

The argument

In 1 Timothy 6:10, it says ‘For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.’ Throughout 1 Timothy 6:6-12 Apostle Paul details how Christians should desire holy things rather than material goods and wealth. He explicitly warns of the damages that an emotional attachment to money can cause. The love of money can drive one to commit sinful acts driven by greed and other emotions. To love money is to have money at the centre of your actions and is to be motivated by it entirely. Loving money simultaneously reflects a lack of trust in God. Christians need not strive to increase their wealth at the expense of their faith because God provides for all those who believe in Him, who put Him first and who commit their lives to Him. That said, to love money is to put money before God and that is totally against His very word. Christians cannot love both God and money, and to not love the first entails disobeying His commandments and teachings which constitutes a sinful lifestyle.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The verse does not say quite what the argument needs. The Greek of 1 Timothy 6:10 is rendered by most modern translations as 'a root of all kinds of evil' rather than 'the root of all evil' — the King James wording quoted here is the reading modern scholarship generally regards as too strong. On the better-supported translation the passage identifies avarice as one source of many kinds of harm, which is a considerably weaker claim than the one the argument builds on it, and it correspondingly weakens the correction being offered to the proverb. There is also a question about what work a single religious text can do here. The question asked is a general one about the causes of evil, not a question of scriptural interpretation; an argument that settles it by citing Paul is decisive only for readers who already grant that text authority, and the position it supports is stated without qualification. Most of the passage, moreover, is an exposition of Christian teaching about idolatry — that money placed before God displaces trust in him, that one cannot serve both. That is a claim about what Christians should value and where their loyalty belongs. It is not a claim about the causation of evil in the world, and the argument moves between the two without marking the transition. Finally, the distinction between money and the love of money does less work than it appears to. If money reliably produces the attachment — if the institution generates the disposition in the people who handle it — then the disposition's badness is not neatly separable from the thing that produces it. The rival position can grant the distinction in full and still locate the root in money, on the ground that the love of money is what money is for.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Most modern translations render the Greek as 'a root of all kinds of evil' rather than 'the root of all evil', which is a considerably weaker claim than the one built on it; and appeal to a single religious text settles a general question only for readers who grant that text authority. [Rejecting P2] The exposition concerns idolatry and trust in God, which bears on what Christians should value rather than on the causation of evil in general. The distinction also does less work than claimed: if money reliably generates the attachment, the rival position can grant the distinction and still locate the root in the thing that produces it.