Not Believed, Beloved: A Semantic Heresy

   It’s obvious that a check-the-box vote for Mary's son's historic existence is not what the word believe means in Acts 16:31: “Believe in the lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved.” And so, by extension, this can’t be what believe means in the creeds. In Christian mythology, the fallen angels (aka devils) believe that God exists, having been cast out of Heaven by Him. But their ability to check the "true" box doesn't imply that they're saved. On the contrary, deliberate rebellion against a God they believe in makes them more culpable. So Kierkegaard makes sense when he says that a rational proof God’s existence—even of the whole creed down to every comma—would avail nothing more than what is traditionally attributed to devils in Hell.

    So what is meaningful belief? The term translated believe in English has, apparently, been so transformed as to corrupt the sense of ancient religious texts. Wilfred Cantwell Smith details this in his lecture series, Belief and History (U of Virginia P, 1977). Of course, the word believe is used today to indicate personal opinion about things of questionable truth: “I believe in ghosts,” for instance, or, “I don’t believe in evolution.” The term is seldom used when we have conclusive knowledge or experience. I simply say “Her house has a screen porch” if I know it does. If I say “I believe her house has a screen porch,” you understand that I don't really know. I believe marks doubt. I wouldn’t say, “I believe I wrote the last sentence.” In a strict sense, I do—I don’t disbelieve—but the wording is misleading. “Don’t you know? Are you suffering from amnesia?" I believe contradicts I know. A scientist doesn’t say she believes in evolution but knows it from evidence—so statements of belief typically paper over doubt. In idiomatic modern English, a belief is willful contradiction of potential falsehood. Belief houses are built on sand.

    In contemporary English usage, believe often expresses a mild opinion without implying loyalty or personal commitment. My belief that her house has a screen porch is in no way life-altering and is easily falsified or confirmed by a visit to her backyard. My belief in ghosts may be less easily falsified or confirmed, but, unless I become a paranormal investigator or live in an creepy old house, it's not likely to change my life. Such a belief--like, say, belief in UFOs, pyramid energy, Creationism, and Bigfoot--seldom goes farther than box-checking in an opinion poll while acting the same as if I had checked the opposite box. 

    According to a 2018 Pew Research Poll, 80% of Americans believe in God (9% more in a “spiritual power”), with 56% believing in the God of the Bible (itself a spectrum of warring sub-beliefs), which puts in doubt exactly what box-checked belief in God means. Many of those asserting belief—even in the God of Jesus—are registering a reflexive opinion (perhaps the only reputable one in their family and subculture, a shibboleth) while going about their business unaffected--Sunday-morning Christians. This practice is perfectly consistent with the current sense of belief. It may be nothing more than casual opinion, but this was not always the case.

    Wilfred Cantwell Smith points out that in Latin—the mother tongue of western theology and its creeds—the equivalent to modern English believe was a secular term opinor. In Latin, it meant what it looks like—to opine, to “believe” in the sense of entertaining a notion—and opinor was irrelevant to religious faith. In contrast, the Latin credo (misleadingly translated “I believe”) signified giving ones heart, swearing loyalty. Latin credo takes for granted the existence of the person or institution believed in. That isn’t the point. Credo in Deum is a oath of fealty. It's like a marriage vow, not a vote. We should remind ourselves that in ancient and medieval Europe (and beyond) the existence of a creator God, was seldom in doubt. Marcus Aurelius, a pagan Roman emperor, revered this God and called Him Zeus. 

    Christian creeds weren’t about affirming the existence of a creator, but about situating Him in trinitarian orthodoxy and swearing fealty. The English word believe served this purpose until Enlightenment philosophy objectified its meaning. Believe shares an Old Germanic root with love and is related to the adjective, lief, meaning “dear, beloved, willing, and glad.” In its ancient sense, to believe is to belove, a verb that survived into Middle English verb and meant “to love greatly.” When Christians first translated their texts into into English, believe expressed devotion, not opinion.

    Smith is dismayed by the heresy of so-called belief that this word-shift has occasioned: “The English ‘belief,’ which used to be a verbal sign designating allegiance, loyalty, love, commitment, trust, and the capacity to respond to transcendent qualities in one’s environment—in short, faith, the Christian form of God’s most momentous gift to each person—has come to be the term by which we designate rather a series of dubious, or at best problematic, propositions." Rather than kneeling before a transcendent mystery, the heresy of belief is satisfied with verbal assent to an unproven (or unprovable) proposition. Recite the creed (or a Protestant confession) and you’re in the fold. Smith traces the defining of belief as affirmation of dubious would-be fact to David Hume, but it is reflected in Pascal’s Wager.

    Early Christians were punished as atheists for refusing to worship in the Roman gods, and in renaissance England, denying the Trinity constituted atheism, but routine atheism as the denial of any god whatsoever is historically recent. Earlier, the question wasn’t whether you believed in a god—not an question that could be answered by a “proof of God”—but whether you “beloved” the true god. Beloved. Swore fealty. The term signifies radically more than today’s “believed in.” 

    It’s common to belove something invisible, even something that depends on human love for its very existence. Patriotism works this way—a quasi-religious devotion to nations existing only in the collective will and imagination. We imagine that the United States is a real thing, but, if we back off to where all its boundaries can be seen—to the edge of space—those boundaries are invisible. They exist only as artifacts of law and human custom. If mass amnesia suddenly erased the idea of the United States of America, the nation would blink out of existence, its constituent states melting to dirt between the poles. It is a mental artifact. If all allegiance to it failed—if people stopped beloving it— it would fade into history like the Soviet Union. America exists only because it is beloved. Without love—patriotism—it would vanish, and yet, to the extent that this figment of beloved consent governs reasonably, it can bestow concrete gifts deserving love.

    “Why on earth,” I ask myself, have I for sixty years “lingered around nodes of belief when I seem to possess none?” Why, despite foundational agnosticism, have I attended churches regularly, marking the passing of a week with an hour in a pew, where my spirit does somewhat soar and my heart rate slows? (How do I know? My Fitbit tells me so.) If I have not believed, I have beloved. But when I compare the creeds and liturgies of a church to the laws of a nation—both of them creations of finite human wills—I realize that neither one need have referential truth. Their “truth” may be performative. That is to say that they may exist only as frameworks of words (like marriage vows) that yield desirable outcomes—even if, like sausages, they taste better if you don’t think about what's in them. A clutter of messy public agreements—things no more real than synchronized thoughts—yields palpable roads, wars, courts, parks, and prisons.

    Something similar seems to happen in churches. Shared thoughts condense  into consequences as people yearn together. The church is called the “body of Christ" as collocated belovers incarnate invisible divinity. I am reminded of Albert Nolan’s observation that Luke 17:21, usually translated, “The kingdom of heaven is within you,” may be more accurately read from the Greek as “The kingdom of heaven is among you". Something transcendent sublimates from a community of beloving even if this putative body of God in the nave has feet of clay.