How to Love a God You Can’t Believe In
One of the things that people find shocking in religion polls, and that I used to find shocking, is that people who don’t necessarily believe in God actually make up a pretty good percentage of self-described religious adherents, including about 1 in 5 Jewish Americans and 1 in 10 Christian Americans. The uncharitable conventional wisdom says that folks who identify this way are hypocrites, or dishonest, or just haven’t thought things through.
But what we think of as believing in God, philosophically, only makes up a small fraction of how the Bible defines love of God. As Deuteronomy 6:5 (NABRE) puts it, “you shall love the Lord, your God, with your whole heart, and with your whole being, and with your whole strength.” This is the same framework Jesus calls back to in his description of the Great Commandment (Matthew 22, Mark 12, Luke 10). In English we think of this tripartite description of love as a rhetorical flourish, but in Hebrew lebab (“heart” or “mind”), nephesh (“being” or “soul”), and meod (“strength” or “might”) each have specific meanings.
Lebab, for example, is not a reference to mere sentiment, as “heart” often is in English. It refers to the core element of your physical, emotional identity as well as the seat of reason; to ask someone to love God with their “whole heart” is to ask something most religious people haven’t already achieved, whether they believe in God or not: a full, integral life of faith in which there are no vestiges of the “old man.” Sainthood, essentially. In Catholic Christianity, this would be the inward process towards which baptism is supposed to direct us; a realization of the theological virtues, so thorough and so seldom visibly achieved that distinguishing between the degree to which an atheist has made this transformation and the degree to which a theist has is petty and superficial, comparable to assessing someone’s skill as a basketball player solely based on how tall they are. If someone asks how close you are to the Grand Canyon when you’re a thousand miles away and you reply “but, unlike this other guy, I’m facing the Grand Canyon!,” you’re probably missing the point of the question. Development of the virtues, active participation in worship, love of Creation—these are all elements of lebab in which an atheist can participate just as fully as a theist.
Nephesh is more difficult to translate; it refers to the subjective self, which in the ancient Jewish world combines pure subjectivity (what we would now think of as qualia) with our wishes and our emotional lives — closer, but by no means identical, to the symbolic English meaning of “heart.” It would be only a slight oversimplification to think of the lebab as the self pointing outward and the nephesh as the self pointing inward. So when we think of nephesh as distinct from lebab we’re thinking of changing what we want as much as we’re thinking of changing what we do. Transcendent mindfulness and reverent contemplation of the created order, of the sort Carl Sagan describes in The Varieties of the Scientific Experience, certainly interacts with nephesh and is a way in which atheists can participate in this element of the mandate. So, too, is ridding ourselves of cruelty and selfishness.
Meod is easier: it refers to active force, power, or effort. So when someone says you should love God with all your meod, they may mean you should act in a way that God would find pleasing — participating in the corporal works of mercy, for example. The limited polling data we have suggests that atheists, on the whole, may actually be a little better at some elements of meod than theists are.
It’s hard to come away from a focused study of the concept of love of God without the sense that those of us who do intellectually believe in God should act with humility, should be willing to learn from atheists and agnostics, and should make an effort to ensure that our religious communities welcome and fully include them. As Simone Weil put it: “Religion, in so far as it is a source of consolation, is a hindrance to true faith; and in this sense atheism is a purification … Among those in whom the supernatural part of themselves has not been awakened, the atheists are right and the believers wrong.”
