John: the apostle of divine love
1 John 4:7-14
Part 8 of our series on 1 John.
4:7 My dearest friends, let’s love one another; because Love is of God, and every lover has been born of God and knows God. 8 The non-lover, has not come to know God, because God is Love. 9 God’s love has been manifested by this: that God sent his siblingless son into the cosmos, that we might live through him. 10 In this is love: not that we loved God, but that he himself loved us and sent his son, a propitiation for our sins.
11 My dearest friends, if God so loved us, we in turn ought to love one another; 12 no-one has ever laid eyes on God; if we love one another, God remains in us and his love, brought to completion, is in us. 13 We know that we remain in him and he in us, by this: that he has given to us of his spirit. 14 And we laid eyes on and attest that the Father sent his Son, rescuer of the cosmos.
When I read this section of the letter, two thoughts come immediately to my mind. Firstly, that John is rightly called the Apostle of Divine Love. No other author soars with such a description of love, one that infuses his writings throughout, and this passage above all takes us to the heights. Secondly, that it is incredibly difficult to translate these verses in a way that is not ‘traditional’. There just isn’t much to work with, and it’s hard to ‘foreignize’ the text to make it sound less familiar, while still delivering something accurate. I’ve tried!
4:7-10
John has several times exhorted us to love one another (1 Jn 3:11, 23; 4.1, and it of course derives from Jesus himself (John 13:34) but here he begins to really draw together the theological rationale, and the connections between God’s divine love for us, and our love (divine by participation) of each other.
As before, John characterises things as being ‘of God’ or not, and Love certainly is ‘of God’. More than that, verse 8 makes the bold claim that God is Love. The proposition isn’t reversible, e.g. “Love is God”, but rather if we want to understand Love, we are understanding the character, quality, attribute of God himself. This is why, too, the word ‘Love’ struggles so hard under the weight that it bears here. I’m reluctant to substitute in “Agape love” or “Charity” (whose meaning has shifted far enough from Caritas to mislead us), but I do think that John’s use of agape creates its own semantic space. Divine Love is on view here.
The ethical imperative is also an ontological one:
The person who loves, is a person who has been born of God and knows God (v7)
The person who does not love, does not know God (v8).
John has spoken twice already of the person who does not love, in 3:10b and 3:14. In both those cases it is the person failing to love their fellow Christian, and the concomitant fact is that they are not ‘of God’ but that they ‘remain in death’. The practice of Love, evidenced primarily in love for fellow believers, is the inevitable fruit of knowing God, who is Love. To not love others, is a damning evidence that one in fact does not know God. In this, I think John is cut from the same cloth as the rest of the New Testament. James thinks the idea that you can have faith that isn’t expressed in deeds is ridiculous nonsense. Matthew makes clear that the mercy, grace, and forgiveness extended to us is to be extended to others. Even Paul sees this direct line of transformation, from Christ’s love to our love, as in Ephesians 5.1-2.
God’s Divine Love towards us is uniquely, effectively, and paradigmatically revealed in one (complex) event. He sent his siblingless son into the world. I have argued at length elsewhere for ‘siblingless’ as an awkward yet accurate rendering of monogenes (rather than ‘one and only’, ‘unique’, or ‘only-begotten’). Jesus has no brothers or sisters of the same kind, in the same way, which is another reason the author John uses tekna when talking about us as God’s children, and reserves the word huios (son) for Jesus alone. The sending of Jesus finds its full account in John’s Gospel, but its purpose and result here is that we live through him, and that new life results in love (3:14).
Natural ‘human’ love is neither the love that John is calling us to, nor the measure of love. As right as (in Lewis’ taxonomy) philia, storge, and eros are, human affection and treating others nicely isn’t what John has in view. Divine Love is, by John’s definition, first and foremost the act of God, prior and unconditioned by us, in loving us by sending his son, and the whole point of the Son’s mission is to deal with sin. This act of love works on so many levels to make our love divine (and possible): it removes the power and effect of sin, and replaces it with the transformative presence of God dwelling in us; makes it possible for us to love God in response, and in turn to love others; it motivates us to do so; it teaches us how to do so; it is paradigmatic for our own love. In short, God’s love for us can, does, and will call forth our love in response to his love for us.
4:11-14
Repeating the address ‘my dearest friends’ (often translated “my beloved”, because it derives from the agape word group), John repeats the call to love one another, but this time as the consequence of God’s love. If God has loved us like this (sending his son as sacrificial gift for sin), which he has, then we are to love one another. We can view this as both being freed to love one another, and yet simultaneously we are under obligation to do so. This is why Paul in Romans 13:8 can use the same language, of our ongoing debt to love one another.
Why does v12 bring up the fact that no-one has ever seen God? John 1:18 makes almost the same point, but takes it in a different direction. The two verses together remind us that God, by nature, is Spirit, is not material, is not like human beings; a thread that runs through the Old Testament. How then do we know him? John 1:18 makes clear that the revelation of God is fully realised in the incarnation of the Son, whereas v12 here teaches us that the practice of divine self-giving love carried out by Jesus’ followers in some sense actualises and manifests God’s love in the world, and thus in one sense God’s presence. Which carries us forward into the second half of this verse which picks up two other threads of John’s thought: God’s remaining/abiding/dwelling in us, and the completion/perfection of love. What does it mean for God to dwell among us? Among many other things we could say, one thing it must mean is that the love of God (both his love for us and our love for him) are realised in our common life together, our love for one another. This is the fulfilment, the wholeness of divine love lived out by Jesus’ disciples.
How can we be sure of the mutual indwelling of God in us and we in him? Among other such assurances, v13 points to the gift of the Spirit (cf. Rom 5:5). I would think that to understand how John understands the Spirit’s work and ministry, we’d have to do a deep dive into the upper room discourse (John 13-17), but in short the Spirit continues and extends the words and work of Jesus, by pointing to the words and works of Jesus. In terms of the love commandment, the Spirit is the gift of the Father through the Son, a gift given in love, that attests and verifies to the Father’s love in the Son.
The final verse of this section grounds all this teaching in the apostolic witness, reminding us of the opening of the letter. John, in apostolic company, saw Jesus with his own eyes, and in doing so is a faithful witness of the significance and implication of the Son’s mission. That is, the Son is the rescuer of the cosmos (more traditionally ‘saviour of the world’). John thus reminds us in other words of what he just said in v11: the basis for our love is God’s salvific love for us. The God who is love sends the saviour who loves and makes love possible. And the breadth of that salvific love has no less bounds than the created world itself.
