You can’t claim to love God if you hate your neighbor, says the first letter of John; love of God is proved in love of neighbor. Nothing in all scripture is truer. But nowhere does the Bible say that neighbor-love is all there is to keeping the Great Commandment. We’re also commanded (first and above all else, mind you) to love God, and love God explicitly. Love for God is inseparable from neighbor-love, but it’s also distinct from it.

The progressive Christian habit, however, has been to collapse God-love into neighbor-love. If you love your neighbor, you’re already loving God—that’s what it means to love God. There’s no urgency (or need?) to love God any other way. Inseparability becomes substitution, and the result is what Jesuit ethicist Ed Vacek calls the “eclipse of love for God.”

Thinking about this scary phrase some years ago, I tried counting the sermons about loving God I’d heard in progressive churches. I couldn’t recall any. I realized that I myself had preached only one. I think you still have to strain to hear the sound of sustained progressive reflection on loving God explicitly and with everything you’ve got. In our wing of the church, Vacek’s eclipse is a near-silent one.

A pew-mate of mine once noticed this hush. After sitting attentively through yet another hortatory sermon about Christian obligation to the neighbor and social justice action in the world, this faithful old layman leaned in my direction and sighed, “You know, Mary, I think I know by now what God wants me to do. What I’d really like is to know is who is the God who wants me to do it?”

“Who is the God who wants me to do it?” This wasn’t a question about book-learning or theological concepts. It was a question about intimacy, a question about mystery, a question about prayer, a question ultimately about surrender; it arose straight out of a heart that longed somehow to love as well as to obey.

The habitual evasion of this question makes for an earnest, vague, and potentially joyless Christianity that aims only to make the world a better place, or else. Surely Jesus hoped more for the church than to be the delivery system of an incessant moralism that has us believing our world is so bad and our causes so urgent that the exhaustion, outrage, and bitterness we feel are justified—even a badge of honor. Surely Jesus showed us a God we could love, not the one we often project, who is as wired, anxious, workaholic, self-righteous, and unhappy as we are.