Love and Truth

The Johannine Epistles are governed by a double commandment that the Elder will not allow to be separated: to love one another, and to abide in the truth — the truth being, concretely, the confession of Jesus Christ come in the flesh. For John, love without right confession is no love, and right confession without love is no faith; the two are bound because both are participation in the God who is love and whose Word became flesh. This file draws out the inseparability of love and truth that runs through 1, 2, and 3 John.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle and Evangelist)

The Old Commandment Made New

The First Epistle presents love as both the oldest and the newest of commandments. “Beloved, I am writing you no new commandment, but an old commandment that you had from the beginning… At the same time, it is a new commandment that I am writing to you, which is true in him and in you, because the darkness is passing away and the true light is already shining” (1 John 2:7–8). The commandment is “old” because it is the message heard “from the beginning” (1 John 3:11), rooted in the Lord’s own word at the Supper: “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another” (John 13:34). It is “new” because in Christ it has been given a new measure and a new ground — the love with which He loved, poured out in the Incarnation and the Cross. The Epistles thus make explicit and central what the Gospel had set at the threshold of the Passion.

Love as the Mark of the Children of God

For the Elder, love of the brethren is not one virtue among others but the very test of whether one has passed from death to life. “We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brothers. Whoever does not love abides in death” (1 John 3:14). The negative is stated with equal force: “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen” (1 John 4:20). Love is not allowed to remain abstract or merely felt; it must be enacted: “let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth” (1 John 3:18), and the model is Christ’s self-giving — “by this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers” (1 John 3:16). The Epistle even makes the refusal of practical mercy a refusal of the love of God: “if anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him?” (1 John 3:17).

This love has its source and pattern outside ourselves, in God’s prior love: “In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10); “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). Christian love is therefore not a human achievement that earns God’s favor but a participation in and overflow of the love already shown — the love that is God’s own life (see God Is Love).

Truth as Confession of the Incarnate Christ

Yet the Epistles never let love float free of doctrine. The same letters that command love most insistently denounce false teaching most sharply, and the two are deliberately joined. The “truth” that the Elder commands his children to “walk in” (2 John 4; 3 John 3–4) is not a vague sincerity but a specific confession: “every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God” (1 John 4:2); “Who is the liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, he who denies the Father and the Son” (1 John 2:22). The seceders who had “gone out” (1 John 2:19) had broken both bonds at once: they denied the Incarnate Christ, and in leaving the community they had broken the bond of love. For John these are not two failures but one, because the truth confessed is the love enacted: the Son who became flesh is the very form of God’s love, so to deny the Incarnation is to deny the love, and to refuse the brethren is to refuse the Incarnate love.

This is why the Second Epistle, after commanding love (2 John 5), can in the same breath forbid the reception of teachers who deny “the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh”: “If anyone comes to you and does not bring this teaching, do not receive him into your house or give him any greeting” (2 John 10). To modern ears the juxtaposition of “love one another” and “do not greet him” seems jarring; for the Elder it is consistent, because false teaching about Christ is an assault on the very love it pretends to claim, and to abet it is to betray the brethren. Truth and love are guardians of one another.

The Spirit, the Anointing, and Discernment

The Epistle grounds this discernment not in cleverage or cleverness but in the gift of the Spirit. “You have been anointed by the Holy One, and you all have knowledge” (1 John 2:20); “the anointing that you received from him abides in you, and you have no need that anyone should teach you” (1 John 2:27). This “anointing” (chrisma) is the Spirit given in the mysteries of initiation, by whom the faithful are able to “test the spirits to see whether they are from God” (1 John 4:1). The criterion the Spirit gives is, again, the confession of the Incarnate Christ (1 John 4:2–3) and the love of the brethren (1 John 4:7, “love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God”). Discernment of truth and the practice of love are thus both works of the same Spirit, the Paraclete promised in the Gospel (John 14:26; 16:13).

The Johannine Synthesis

What emerges across the three Epistles is a tight synthesis that has marked Orthodox spirituality ever since: the knowledge of God is inseparable from love, and love is inseparable from the true confession of the Incarnate Word. “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love” (1 John 4:8); and “whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God” (1 John 4:15). To abide in love is to abide in God; to abide in the truth of the Incarnation is to abide in God; and these are finally the same abiding. The Fathers and the later Orthodox tradition received this Johannine union of dogma and love as a permanent rule — that true theology is never cold orthodoxy nor doctrineless warmth, but the love of God confessed in truth and lived in mercy. This is the seed of the conviction, expressed by Evagrius and echoed throughout the tradition, that “the one who prays truly is a theologian,” and that knowledge of God and love of God cannot be torn apart.

See Also

References

  • The First, Second, and Third Epistles of John (cited by chapter and verse); the Gospel according to John 13:34; 14:26; 16:13.
  • Brown, Raymond E. The Epistles of John. Anchor Bible 30. Garden City: Doubleday, 1982.
  • Westcott, B. F. The Epistles of St. John. Cambridge: Macmillan, 1883.
  • Evagrius of Pontus. On Prayer 60 (“If you are a theologian, you will pray truly; and if you pray truly, you are a theologian”). Trans. in The Philokalia, Vol. 1, ed. Palmer, Sherrard, Ware. London: Faber, 1979.