God Is Love

“God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God in him” (1 John 4:16). This confession, found nowhere else in Scripture so directly, is the heart of the Johannine theology and one of the deepest words ever spoken of God. It is not sentiment but the disclosure of the inner life of the Holy Trinity, revealed in the sending of the Son and poured out in the commandment to love. This file sets out the Johannine theology of love and its Trinitarian ground.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle and Evangelist)

The Confession

Twice in the First Epistle the Beloved Disciple makes the astonishing statement that defines his theology: “Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love” (1 John 4:8); and “So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him” (1 John 4:16). The grammar is deliberate. John does not say merely that God is loving, or that God loves, but that God is love (ho Theos agapē estin) — love is not one attribute among others but the very name of the divine being as it turns toward us and as it is in itself. This is the highest reach of the whole Johannine corpus, the inner name disclosed by the disciple who lay on the Lord’s breast, and it has governed Orthodox theology and spirituality ever since.

Love as the Life of the Trinity

The confession “God is love” is not a statement about a solitary deity but, in the Church’s reading, a disclosure of the Trinity. For love is not love unless it is love of another; an absolutely solitary monad could not be said to be love from all eternity, for there would be no beloved. That God is love eternally means that within the one divine being there is the eternal Lover, the eternal Beloved, and the love that unites them — the Father who eternally begets and loves the Son, the Son eternally beloved and loving in return, and the Holy Spirit as the communion of their love. The Fathers and the later tradition read the Johannine “God is love” precisely as a window onto the Trinitarian life: the love we are commanded to share is a participation in the very love that the Persons of the Trinity eternally are (on the dogma, see The Holy Trinity). The Gospel’s farewell discourse and high-priestly prayer say the same in narrative form: the Father loves the Son “before the foundation of the world” (John 17:24), and the disciples are drawn into that love, “that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them” (John 17:26).

Love Revealed in the Sending of the Son

This eternal love is not left hidden but is shown forth in the economy of salvation. “In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. 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 4:9–10). The Gospel gives the same in its most famous verse: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). The Incarnation and the Cross are thus the historical disclosure of the eternal truth that God is love: the eternal self-giving of the Father and Son within the Trinity is made visible in the Father’s giving of the Son for the world and the Son’s giving of Himself unto death. Love is defined, for John, not by our feeling but by this act: “by this we know love, that he laid down his life for us” (1 John 3:16). The abstract confession and the bleeding Cross are the same truth.

The Commandment and the Likeness

Because God is love, and because we are made to abide in Him, love is laid on the disciple as the commandment that sums up all others. “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. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:34–35). The measure is no longer “as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18) but “as I have loved you” — the measure of the Cross. And this love is the way we are made like God and come to know Him: “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God” (1 John 4:7). To love is to be born of God and to know God; to refuse love is to remain in ignorance of God and in death (1 John 3:14; 4:8). Love is thus, for John, both the content of salvation and its evidence — the means by which the invisible God becomes visible, for “no one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us” (1 John 4:12).

Love and the Fear of Judgment

John draws a striking consequence: the one who abides in love is freed from the fear of judgment. “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love” (1 John 4:18). This is not a denial of the judgment but its transfiguration: the one united to the God who is love stands before the judgment not as a cowering slave but as a beloved child, “that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world” (1 John 4:17). Orthodox spirituality has drawn deeply from this — the movement from the fear of the slave, through the hope of the hireling, to the love of the son, by which the soul comes to serve God for love alone. The Johannine “perfect love casts out fear” stands behind the whole ascetic tradition’s account of the purification of the heart from fear into love.

The Inheritance of the Tradition

The Johannine theology of love became, through the Fathers, the inner pulse of Orthodox theology and spirituality. It stands behind Maximus the Confessor’s Centuries on Love, behind the desert tradition’s account of love (agapē) as the crown of the virtues and the goal of the ascetic life, and behind the hesychast vision of union with the God who is light and love. It is no accident that the Church gave the title “the Theologian” to John, to Gregory of Nazianzus, and to Symeon the New Theologian — for in the Orthodox understanding true theology is never separable from love, and the knowledge of God is the knowledge of the One who is love (see The Theologian Among the Three). “God is love” is not the conclusion of Johannine theology but its source and summit, the word in which the disciple of love gave the Church the inner name of its God.

See Also

References

  • The First Epistle of John 3:11–18; 4:7–21 (cited by chapter and verse); the Gospel according to John 3:16; 13:34–35; 17:24–26.
  • Maximus the Confessor. Four Hundred Texts on Love, in The Philokalia, Vol. 2. Trans. Palmer, Sherrard, Ware. London: Faber, 1981.
  • Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. London: James Clarke, 1957.
  • Symeon the New Theologian. Hymns of Divine Love. Trans. George A. Maloney. Denville: Dimension Books, 1976.