God Is Love

A Note on This Argument

This essay is part of the Resistance as Testimony series. The Johannine Letters are the most theologically concentrated of the New Testament writings and the ones that most directly address TLA's central claim: that the deepest human longing — for love, for belonging, for the knowledge that reality is not indifferent to our existence — is not a projection but a perception, pointing toward a God whose nature is love itself.

The Claim That Changes Everything

The declaration “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 4:16) is the most radical theological claim in the New Testament. It does not say that God loves, or that God is loving, or that God has loved — all of which would be true but would fall short. It says that love is what God is: that the category of love is not a description of God’s behavior but of God’s being.

If this is true, then the human capacity for love — for self-giving, for the willing of the good of another, for the joy in the existence of the beloved — is not a merely biological phenomenon or a social construction but a participation in the nature of God himself. And the human longing for love that is not conditional, not exhaustible, not terminated by death, is not a fantasy but a recognition: the recognition of a creature that was made by and for the Love that is God.

What the Test of Love Reveals

The letter’s test for genuine faith — “We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brothers” (1 John 3:14) — is the most demanding criterion in the New Testament. It locates the evidence of genuine encounter with God not in theological correctness or spiritual experience but in the quality of one’s relationships with other people. The person who claims to love God while hating their brother is, the letter says, a liar.

This is a literary-critical claim as much as a theological one. The quality of a person’s love for other people is the most reliable evidence of the quality of their encounter with God. The literature that renders this love — in all its complexity, its failure, its persistence, its cost — is therefore doing theological work whether it knows it or not.

The Seed of the Woman

Genesis 3:15 describes a conflict between two kinds of love: the self-giving love of the seed of the woman, willing to be bruised in the service of the beloved, and the self-serving deception of the seed of the serpent, which uses the forms of love to advance its own interests. The Johannine letters are the New Testament’s most concentrated statement of what the first kind of love looks like and what it demands.

“We love because he first loved us” — this is the grammar of the seed of the woman. The love that is capable of crushing the serpent’s head does not originate in the lover but in the God who is Love, and it flows through those who abide in him into the world that the serpent has tried to claim. Every genuine act of love is a victory of the seed of the woman, however small, however ordinary, however unseen.