58 - 1Jn 4:7
Ἀγαπητοὶ, ἀγαπῶμεν ἀλλήλους, ὅτι ἡ ἀγάπη ἐκ τοῦ Θεοῦ ἐστι, καὶ πᾶς ὁ ἀγαπῶν, ἐκ τοῦ Θεοῦ γεγέννηται, καὶ γινώσκει τὸν Θεόν·
Hitherto St. John has exhibited the confession of the Son of God manifested in the flesh as the principle of the divine life in man: the foundation he lays, therefore, is not anything that is in us, but something that God has done for us. Similarly, he places— this is the meaning of the paragraph from 1Jn 4:7-12—the ground of our love to the brethren not in ourselves; he makes it only the reflection of the divine love to us, therefore the result again of what has been wrought for and upon us. Thus when he begins with the hortatory ἀγαπῶμενἀλλήλους [“love one another”], we are to regard this only as the introductory form, the sentence of transition; the essence of the section is not an exhortation, but, so to speak, a physiology of love. We ought to love, for ἡἀγάπηἐκτοῦΘεοῦἐστι [“love is from God”]: it has its home, its primal dwelling-place, in God; thus where there is love, there is somewhat that must have come from Him. Hence, therefore, he who loveth is born of God, and he is a partaker of the divine nature; to him God hath revealed Himself, and he on his part knoweth God. Γεγέννῆσθαι ἐκτοῦΘεοῦ [“to be born of God”] and γινώσκειντὸνΘεόν [“to know God”] are related as principle to result, as gift and appropriation of the gift. We have here once more the same fundamental principle which in 1Jn 3:2 is so clearly prominent, that all knowing pre supposes a spiritual likeness to the person known; and that knowledge of the divine rests upon a possession of the divine. If, accordingly, the knowledge of God is a result of divine regeneration, and this again is discernible by the evidence of love, it follows that the absence of this token allows the conclusion to be drawn, that there is a lack of the knowledge of God. But here it is also shown clearly that to the apostle the γινώσκειν [“to know”] is something very different from a thinking based upon merely logical categories. It is indeed perfectly possible that a man may understand all the teaching of Scripture concerning God, and receive it into his mental being, without having any real love. But such a fact as that does not contradict the apostle’s assertion. For he who knows all plants by their scientific names, classes, and orders, but has never seen any of them, must be held to be far from knowing the plants. In like manner, he who professes to know God without love has no spiritual perception, no experience of Him; because his ideas are only constituent elements out of which he seeks to produce a living unity. He therefore proves that his idea of God is a false one, since God is not a substance compounded of marks and attributes. Only from experience, that is, from devotion, can there be any γινώσκειντὸνΘεόν [“to know God”]; since love, which is here represented as the token of a divine birth, is supposed to be the pure copy or mere effluence of the divine love, we, of course, must not limit it to the love of the brethren, but must understand it in its widest meaning.