Becoming Militants of Reconciling Love: 1 John

3:1–3 and the Task of Ethical Formation

MIC H AE L J. R HO D ES
Carey Baptist College, New Zealand

ABSTRACT | The renewed interest in moral formation among theological ethicists has
elicited strong critiques from those concerned with an alleged overemphasis on hu-
man agency in character development. While such concerns cannot be brushed aside
lightly, the solution is to situate human agency within a larger theological frame. As
John Webster suggests, theological ethics should begin talking about the self and its
agency by offering a “moral ontology” that includes a “moral anthropology” of human
agents within the “drama of human nature, origin, and destiny” and the moral “field” or
“space” of selfhood and action. Drawing on recent studies of Johannine ethics, I argue
that 1 John 3:1–3 provides a programmatic description of just such a moral ontology.
I then consider the epistle’s account of imitation in light of this ontology. Drawing on
a second-person Thomistic virtue ethic, I argue that, for John, imitation serves as a
second-person practice of moral formation whereby believers actively seek to purify
themselves as Jesus is pure (1 John 3:3). Such theological interpretation adds support
to the recent recovery of Johannine ethics and suggests that such an ethic may make
serious contributions to contemporary discussions of moral formation.

KEYWORDS | 1 John, theological ethics, virtue, civil rights movement, John Webster,
theological interpretation, character ethics

The exhibit “This Light of Ours” presents black-and-white photos of the Amer-
ican civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s.1 In one particularly striking
image, a group of young people, both black and white, can be seen lying in
the grass in a circle, each curled up into something like the fetal position.
One stands in the middle, giving instructions. The caption on the image iden-
tifies this as a session during which college students were trained to protect
­themselves if attacked during nonviolent direct action.

1. For details of the exhibit, see https://www.brooksmuseum.org/this-light-of-ours.

doi: 10.5325/jtheointe.15.1.0079
Journal of Theological Interpretation, Vol. 15, No. 1, 2021, 79–100
Copyright © 2021 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

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 80 JOURNAL O F THEOLO G IC AL IN T E RPRE TAT ION

In 1956, James Hudson, an African American theologian, described the “road

to victory” for this civil rights movement as “militant reconciling love.”2 More
recently, Cheryl Sanders has argued that the movement then and now depends
in part on unpacking such love through a militant reconciling ethics.3 I want to
suggest that the photograph of those young college students training for non-
violent action brilliantly captures one task of such an ethics, the task of moral
formation. The civil rights movement did not simply describe militant reconcil-
ing love; it invited people to become militants of reconciling love. The movement
did not simply identify non-violence as the goal, means, or duty of the move-
ment; it invited people to lie down in the grass and learn how to take a beating
in the course of nonviolent direct action. And while contemporary Christian
ethics has grown increasingly vocal about the need to “let justice roll down like
waters” (Amos 5:24), it has far too often failed to ask how Christians so deeply
complicit in injustice might become militants of reconciling love and justice.
Yet it is precisely around questions of moral formation—questions bound
up in human agency, moral growth, virtue, character, and the like—that fierce
debates in theological ethics rage. In this essay, I will offer a theological in-
terpretation of 1 John 3:1–3 that draws recent discussions in theological ethics
into dialogue with biblical scholars’ recent recovery of ethics within the Johan-
nine literature. Based on this interpretation, I argue that 1 John 3:1–3 provides a
programmatic account of Christian moral formation as the Triune God’s work
whereby God’s people are empowered to become militants of reconciling love.

Framing Formation: A Theological Account of Moral Transformation

and Recent Trends in Johannine Ethics

Theological accounts of moral formation and character ethics have seen a

­remarkable resurgence in recent years, not least through the work of philos-
opher Alasdair MacIntyre and theologian Stanley Hauerwas. This resurgence
emphasizes both the importance of Christian character and the role of human
agency in forming such character. For character ethicists, then, what Christians
do shapes who they are. Moral growth occurs as Christians engage in morally
formative practices, seek to live their lives in light of the community’s central
stories, imitate moral exemplars, practice the virtues, and participate in the life
of particular ecclesial communities.4

2. Larry O. Rivers, “ ‘Militant Reconciling Love’: Howard University’s Rankin Network and
Martin Luther King, Jr.,” Journal of African American History 99 (2014): 223.
3. Cheryl Sanders, presentation delivered in 2017 as part of a teach-in held by the Memphis
Center for Urban and Theological Studies in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Dr. King’s
assassination. https://vimeo.com/239391565.
4. See in much greater detail: Michael J. Rhodes, “Formative Feasting: Practices and Economic
Ethics in Deuteronomy’s Tithe Meal and the Corinthian Lord’s Supper” (PhD diss., University of

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 Becoming Militants of Reconciling Love 81

At the same time, critics (especially those influenced by Barth), certain

strands of Lutheranism, and the recent emphasis on “apocalyptic” in theology
push back on a variety of fronts. Some argue, for instance, that character ethi-
cists who emphasize moral growth fall into the trap of works righteousness, in
part due to an alleged overdependence on Aristotle’s account of how the virtues
are habituated through practice.5 Others argue that a focus on moral forma-
tion inevitably leads Christians to focus on themselves in problematic ways. For
such critics, the liberation of the gospel is not “from vice to virtue, but from vice
and virtue to the grace of Christ.”6 Indeed, perhaps the very idea of ongoing
moral growth suggests a far too stable and progressive picture of Christian dis-
cipleship.7 Such critics complain that theological accounts of moral formation
mistakenly imply that the life of discipleship is one of uninterrupted, linear
progress towards holiness. They argue, instead, that we should understand the
moral life as one of constant “return and renewal” rather than one of progress
and growth.8 For all of these critics, recent discourse on moral formation is too
focused on human agency, on what humans do.
These objections cannot be brushed aside lightly. Yet the solution is not
to reject a robust account of human agency in moral formation, but rather to
situate such agency within a larger theological frame. John Webster suggests
theological ethics should begin talking about the self and its agency by offer-
ing a “moral ontology” that includes a “moral anthropology” of human agents
within the “drama of human nature, origin, and destiny,” and the moral “field”
or “space” of selfhood and action.”9 In order to instruct the church in becom-
ing militants of reconciling love, in other words, Christian theology must first
­explain the “who,” “where,” and “when” of moral formation.

Aberdeen, 2019), 1–114. https://www.academia.edu/41956322/Formative_Feasting_Practices_and_

Economic_Ethics_in_Deuteronomys_Tithe_Meal_and_the_Corinthian_Lords_Supper.
5. See, for instance, Nicholas M. Healy, Hauerwas: A (Very) Critical Introduction (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 2014), 128–29.
6. Philip Ziegler, “Completely within God’s Doing: Soteriology as Meta-ethics in the Theology
of Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” in Christ, Church, and World: New Studies in Bonhoeffer’s Theology and Eth-
ics, ed. Philip Ziegler and Michael G. Mawson (New York: T&T Clark, 2016), 109. Ziegler explicitly
identifies this claim with Luther.
7. See, for instance, Ziegler, “Completely within God’s Doing,” 111–14; Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Eth-
ics, trans. Neville Horton Smith (New York: Touchstone, 1955).
8. See Nolan’s account of Barth on this point. Kirk J. Nolan, Reformed Virtue after Barth: De-
veloping Moral Virtue Ethics in the Reformed Tradition, Columbia Series in Reformed Theology
(Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2014), 89. Note, however, that Nolan is one of a series of recent
scholars who offer an account of virtue compatible with Barth specifically and Reformed theology
more generally.
9. John B. Webster, Word and Church: Essays in Christian Dogmatics (London: Bloomsbury
T&T Clark, 2006), 283.

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This need to frame the human effort involved in becoming militants of rec-
onciling love by way of a larger theological account is part of what makes the
Johannine literature such a promising place to start. For while until recently the
scholarly consensus was that this literature either lacked an ethic10—or worse,
displayed a sub-Christian one—new scholarship has argued that these writings
are in fact deeply ethical. Moreover, much of this current work has highlighted
the way the Johannine literature presents an “ethos” or “implied ethic.”11 One
element of this ethos is the description of the drama of God’s relationship with
human creatures, a drama that reveals the moral space and moral anthropology
that Webster suggests is the beginning point of theological ethics. Moreover,
since the moral telos of the Johannine literature is human participation in the
life of love that overflows from the Triune God’s own life,12 such literature may
prove particularly helpful in exploring what it might mean to become militants
of reconciling love. To explore this possibility, I will examine 1 John 3:1–3 as a
programmatic statement on moral ontology, understood as the moral anthro-
pology, space, and time within which humans participate in moral formation. I
will then consider how imitation serves as a morally formative practice within
this large Johannine account.

Moral Ontology in 1 John 3:1–3

“Look at what sort of love the Father has given to us, that we might be called
the children of God! And that is what we are!”13 In this outburst of praise in
3:1, the author—who, for reasons of convenience, I will refer to as “John”—­
summarizes two aspects of his moral anthropology. First, he declares that his
audience shares an identity as God’s children. John highlights the implications
of this incredible claim in the immediately preceding verse (2:29), declaring
that everyone born of God will do the “righteousness” or “justice” (δικαιοσύνη)

10. Jan G. van der Watt and Ruben Zimmermann, “Intro,” in Rethinking the Ethics of John:
“Implicit Ethics” in the Johannine Writings, ed. Jan G. van der Watt and Ruben Zimmermann
(Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), ix; Christopher W. Skinner, “Introduction,” in Johannine Ethics:
The Moral World of the Gospel and Epistles of John, ed. Christopher W. Skinner and Sherri Brown
(Minneapolis: Fortress, 2017), xix.
11. Van der Watt and Zimmermann, “Intro,” x. See also Ruben Zimmermann, “Is There Ethics in
the Gospel of John?,” in van der Watt and Zimmermann, Rethinking the Ethics, 62.
12. Michael Gorman has argued that such participation may best be understood through the
category of theosis or christosis. See Michael Gorman, “John’s Implicit Ethic of Enemy Love,” in
Skinner and Brown, Johannine Ethics, 138; Abide and Go: Missional Theosis in the Gospel of John
(Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2018). Stephen Smalley is more cautious, suggesting that John’s language
“grazes the edge of deification, but stops short of it.” Stephen S. Smalley, 1, 2, 3 John, WBC (Waco,
TX: Word, 1984), 139.
13. Translations throughout are my own, unless otherwise indicated.

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 Becoming Militants of Reconciling Love 83

that defines God’s own character.14 “Being a child of God and acting that way,”
then, stands at the heart of Johannine ethics, as van der Watt notes. 15 For John,
the moral anthropology of believers is grounded in their identity as children of
God. This new familial identity entails “a new mode of conduct, corresponding
to the divine family ethos.”16
Second, the source of this identity is the lavish love of God expressed in
his begetting of his people as his children (2:29). The result of such gratuitous,
unlooked-for love, though, is no less real for all that; as John immediately re-
minds us, children whose existence is grounded in God’s love is “what we truly
are” (3:1b).17
Already in 3:1b, however, John pushes us to look more closely at this moral
anthropology by examining the moral space within which these children of God
exist. Thus 3:1c moves immediately from identifying John’s recipients as children
of God to the claim that it is “because of this” identity that the “world” (κόσμος)
does not “know” believers, namely because it also did not “know” Jesus.
John’s use of κόσμος language is notoriously slippery, shifting back and forth
between “the physical or earthly reality people live in, all human beings, human
beings not believing in God, and the ungodly reality that stands in opposition
to God.”18 This complexity is tied directly to the fact that both the Gospel and
the letters’ use of such language describes the κόσμος in light of a “cosmological
drama” characterized by “apocalyptic traits.”19 Several features of John’s under-
standing of this apocalyptic cosmology as the “moral space” of Christian life are
important for our purposes.

14. Indeed, for John there is a real sense in which those born of God are not able to sin (3:9),
although of course he qualifies this assertion throughout the letter. For a review of interpretive
options for understanding this tension, see Benjamin E. Reynolds, “The Anthropology of John and
the Johannine Epistles: A Relational Anthropology,” in Anthropology and New Testament Theology,
ed. Jason Maston and Benjamin E. Reynolds (London: T&T Clark, 2018), 133.
15. Jan G. van der Watt, “Ethics in 1 John: A Literary and Socioscientific Perspective,” CBQ 61
(1999): 494. Already we can see the importance of a “character ethic” for interpreting Johannine
ethics more generally.
16. Cornelis Bennema, “Moral Transformation in the Johannine Writings,” In die Skriflig 51.3
(2017): 4. See also van der Watt, “Ethics in 1 John,” 496.
17. Smalley rightly notes the way the syntax of the statement states this truth as “absolute and
emphatic . . . the stress is on the present fact of the Christian’s status with the father . . . and this
offsets the future character of the faithful.” Smalley, 1, 2, 3 John, 137. Brown suggests that τέκνον here
“is the technical Johannine term covering divine sonship/daughterhood,” since son language “is
reserved for Jesus in relationship to God.” Raymond E. Brown, The Epistles of John: Translated, with
Introduction, Notes, and Commentary, ABC (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1982), 388.
18. Jan G. van der Watt, “Cosmos, Reality, and God in the Letters of John,” In die Skriflig 47.2
(2013): 2.
19. Van der Watt, “Cosmos,” 7.

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First, 1 John bears witness to an understanding of the κόσμος as the physical

world created good by God. Although this meaning is more muted in the letter,
both the epistle’s witness to Jesus’s bodily incarnation in the world (4:2)20 and the
important role the “goods of the world” play in loving one’s siblings in Christ (3:17)
suggest that the letter shares the creational theology of the Gospel’s prologue.
But second, and more dominant in the letter, John recognizes that this
good κόσμος—including those individuals who deny the truth of Jesus—has
been overtaken by and lies under some control of the devil (cf. 3:8; 5:18–19).21
Here the “intimations of apocalyptic” become acute.22 For within the moral
space that John describes, humans do not face what J. Louis Martyn calls a
two-agent drama—consisting of a “self-limiting divine agent and the human
agent who is competent to choose”23—but rather a “three-actor moral drama”
comprised of God, morally incompetent human agents, and the devil and other
dark supra-human forces whose influence renders humans incompetent.24 In
terms of John’s moral ontology, then, humans do not start out belonging to an
unclaimed, uncommitted human family and then somehow gain special en-
trance into the “spiritual” family of God. No, for John, all humanity is already
“claimed” humanity.25 All who have not become children of God are children
of the devil (3:10), an identity that John equates with being “of the world” (2:16;
4:5a). The character of this worldly family is derived from its demonic parent;
unjust, unrighteous, and sinful deeds overflow from the unjust, unrighteous,
and sinful character of those like Cain, “who was of the evil one” and murdered
his brother (3:10–12). Thus, the moral space of John’s theological ethics is com-
prised of the good creation and its human inhabitants invaded and overrun by
the devil and his brood of dark powers and false prophets (cf. 4:1; 2 John 1:7).
Moreover, as Wink suggests in his translation of κόσμος as “system,” we
should not think of the devil’s influence here in a reductionistic spiritual sense;

20. As Hays argues, the incarnation is the validation of creation over and against a gnostic
conception of the material world as evil. Richard B. Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament:
Community, Cross, New Creation (San Francisco, CA: Harper, 1996), 142.
21. Andreas J. Köstenberger, “The Cosmic Trial Motif,” in Communities in Dispute: Current
Scholarship on the Johannine Epistles, ed. R Alan Culpepper and Paul N. Anderson (Atlanta: SBL
Press, 2014), 159.
22. This language is drawn from Catrin H. Williams and Christopher Rowland, eds., John’s
Gospel and Intimations of Apocalyptic (London: T&T Clark, 2013).
23. Martyn wrote these words in relation to Pauline ethics, but they are equally appropriate
for the sort of Johannine ethic explored here. J. Louis Martyn, “Epilogue: An Essay in Pauline
Meta-Ethics,” in Divine and Human Agency in Paul and his Cultural Environment, ed. John M. G.
Barclay and Simon J. Gathercole (New York: T&T Clark, 2008), 175.
24. Martyn, “Epilogue,” 178.
25. Philip Ziegler, Militant Grace: The Apocalyptic Turn and the Future of Christian Theology
(Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018), 10.

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 Becoming Militants of Reconciling Love 85

to speak of the world as lying “in the power of the evil one” (5:19) is to recognize
that socioeconomic and political systems are also under demonic influence.26
The cultures and systems that we fallen humans create under the influence of
sin, death, and the devil ultimately “steal, kill, and destroy” (John 10:10). This
perspective on the “world” recognizes that the problem is not simply an aggre-
gation of individual sinners but rather “the systemic defiance of God’s lordship
over the world” and the “structural refusal by human authority” to recognize
Jesus as the world’s rightful king (cf. John 18:28–40).27 It is because John under-
stands the κόσμος as a system under the reign of the Evil One that the desire
and love for the things of the κόσμος are seen as antithetical to the will of God
(2:16–17)28 and that the κόσμος can be described as that which must be over-
come by faith (5:4–5).
Yet for John the dismal reality of the devil’s influence in the world is still not
the most fundamental determinant of moral space. The Father sends the Son
because he loves the κόσμος,29 and the “incarnation of the Word” in the κόσμος
“decisively alters the manner by which creation can relate to God.”30 Out of his
own overwhelming love, the Father sent his beloved Son to “destroy the works
of the devil” (3:8) and provide an atoning sacrifice “for the whole world” (2:2).31
The incarnate Lord liberates the devil’s children by begetting them anew and
granting them new life lived “through him” (4:9).32

26. Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination
(Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 55–57.
27. Brian K. Blount, Then the Whisper Put on Flesh: New Testament Ethics in an African Ameri-
can Context (Nashville: Abingdon, 2001), 110.
28. Frey connects the language of 2:16–17 with sociopolitical divisions amidst the community,
divisions that, in John’s apocalyptic perspective, are bound up in the devil’s influence on the “sys-
tem.” Jörg Frey, “ ‘Ethical’ Traditions, Family Ethos, and Love in the Johannine Literature,” in Early
Christian Ethics in Interaction with Jewish and Greco-Roman Contexts, ed. Jan Willem van Henten
and Joseph Verheyden (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 178–80.
29. Van der Watt, “Cosmos,” 2.
30. Sherri Brown, “Believing in the Gospel of John: The Ethical Imperative to Becoming
­Children of God,” in Skinner and Brown, Johannine Ethics, 14; John Ashton, “Intimations of Apoc-
alyptic,” in Williams and Rowlands, Intimations of Apocalyptic, 13.
31. Thus Judith Lieu is wrong to suggest that the “world . . . has no substantive existence in the
symbolic universe that the author constructs.” Judith M. Lieu, “The Audience of the Johannine
Epistles,” in Culpepper and Anderson, Communities in Dispute, 137. Indeed, even those who have
gone out under the influence of the Antichrist still stand within the world for which Jesus’s death
provides atonement (2:2).
32. Indeed, Jutta Leonhardt-Balzer goes so far as to argue that, far from the typical understanding
that there are no exorcisms in the Johannine corpus, “whenever someone comes to believe in Christ,
the power behind the denial of Christ and God is driven out, which is an exorcism in itself . . . the
apocalyptic victory of God’s Spirit over the spirits.” Jutta Leonhardt-Balzer, “The Ruler of the World,
Antichrists, and Pseudo-Prophets,” in Williams and Rowlands, Intimations of Apocalyptic, 199.

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The children of God, then, have been transferred from the “moral space”
overwhelmed by the devil to the “moral space” of life lived in union with Jesus.
It is this relocation—which is both social and ontological—that “initiates a pro-
cess of moral transformation.”33 In this process, God does “something unheard
of:” he “changes human agency itself.”34 Those formerly enslaved to the devil
and his works are both forgiven their sins and cleansed of their injustices, and
transferred into the realm of the God who is Light (1:5). The believer’s new
moral anthropology situated within this new moral space makes meaningful
ethical action possible.35
In short, the Christ-event creates new “ontological and cosmological pos-
sibilities for” humanity and creation itself, as van der Watt argues.36 What hu-
mans are depends on where they are in relationship to Jesus: either they remain
in and of the world of sin, injustice, and the devil that is passing away, or they
are liberated into and born of the world of love, righteousness, and justice inau-
gurated in the conquest of the “Savior of the world.”37

33. Bennema, “Moral Transformation,” 1. Van der Watt denies an ontological or mystical in-
terpretation, at least in relationship to the language of “abiding.” This rejection is based on his
interpretation through the lens of family ethics in the ancient world. See van der Watt, “Ethics in 1
John,” 503; elsewhere, however, he argues that Jesus’s divine incarnate life changes the “ontological
and cosmological possibilities of people” (van der Watt, “Cosmos,” 6). Despite the insight that such
a lens brings, to describe abiding in Christ as simply a “qualitative and functional union on the basis
of shared status, conviction, and custom as members of the same family” (van der Watt, “Ethics
in 1 John,” 503) strikes me as problematically reductionistic. Such language seems to fall short of
the seriousness of John’s apocalyptic rhetoric about the drama between God and the devil, as well
as of the language of the Spirit’s work. Rabens similarly suggests that van der Watt’s account is, at
points, too “functional,” and that it should be supplemented by an account of transformation’s de-
pendence on “the experience of divine love in an intimate relationship.” Volker Rabens, “Johannine
Perspectives on Ethical Enabling in the Context of Stoic and Philonic Ethics,” in van der Watt and
Zimmermann, Rethinking the Ethics of John, 115–23.
34. Martyn, “Epilogue,” 180.
35. Jan G. van der Watt, “Reciprocity, Mimesis and Ethics in 1 John,” in Erzählung und Briefe
im johanneischen Kreis: Studien zum Corpus Johanneum, ed. Uta Poplutz and Jörg Frey (Tübingen:
Mohr Siebeck, 2016), 199–200. This interpretation of John’s ethical perspective is only strength-
ened by proposals that 1 John describes the new intimacy of communion with God (1:3), the love
command, and the Spirit’s anointing. This renders teaching in some sense unnecessary (2:26–27)
as the fulfillment of the OT’s prophecy of the new covenant, and especially the “explicitly interior
aspects of the New Covenant promises . . . namely, the law written upon the heart, the new heart,
and the indwelling presence of God’s own Spirit, [signifying] a profound and lasting change in the
recipients of such gifts.” Edward Malatesta, Interiority and Covenant (Rome: Biblical Institute Press,
1978), 23–24.
36. van der Watt, “Cosmos,” 6.
37. Reynolds, “Anthropology,” 121.

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Yet this description of moral anthropology and moral space raises a third
question, the question of moral time.38 If the Christian life is grounded in the
unfolding drama of God’s transformation of his creatures, then when are Chris-
tians? Once again, 3:1–3 provides a programmatic statement. Thus while 3:2a
declares emphatically that we are God’s children now, the second line of the
verse immediately complicates this temporal picture: those who are children
now do not yet know what they will be (3:2b). The full revelation of their iden-
tity is utterly bound up in the full revelation of Jesus’s own identity in his second
coming, because “when he is revealed, we will be like him, because we will see
him as he is” (3:2c).39 Because the telos of redeemed human life is nothing less
than becoming like Jesus, the moral ontology of human agents is not static;
humans are what they are in the light of both what they were and what they will
be.40 The fact “that God calls us children of God inaugurates a reality that will be
brought to its fruition at a future time.”41
The moral ontology of the letter, then, is determined by a “now/not yet”
distinction in moral time.42 It is only because the darkness of the world (cf.
2:8b, 17) under the influence of the devil (5:19) is passing away and the true light
that has broken in at the incarnation is already shining (2:8c) that believers can,
ought to (cf. 2:6), and indeed will (2:28–29) live lives of righteousness, justice,
and love, walking in the light as he is in the light (1:6–7).43 Meanwhile, 3:2 holds

38. Webster argues for a deep relationship between moral space and moral time, understood as
subcategories of moral ontology, writing: “Put formally: moral ontology is concerned not only with
moral space but also with moral time; or perhaps we might say that moral space is not a bounded
sphere populated by a set of inert objects possessed of a certain nature, but a setting for discursive
agency. Moral ontology concerns the creature’s appointment to be a certain kind of being, the crea-
ture’s being moved in order to engage in a certain movement. Yet that moral movement is imper-
fectly undertaken without apprehension of moral nature, without intelligence of who and where we
are, and of by whom we are met.” John Webster, Virtue and Intellect, vol. 2 of God without Measure:
Working Papers in Christian Theology (New York: T&T Clark, 2016), 14.
39. Smalley makes clear that the language suggests the vision of Jesus is the cause of the trans-
formation, rather than seeing the transformation as the prerequisite. Smalley, John, 139. He does
note, however, that there is no conflict between these two concepts. Aquinas maintains, in part
by citing this text over against no less than sixteen objections, that this eschatological vision of
God is a vision of his essence (ST Suppl., q. 92, a. 1). Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologica of St.
Thomas Aquinas, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 2nd ed. (London: Burns Oates
& Washbourne, 1920–1935).
40. Webster, Virtue and Intellect, 14.
41. Marianne Meye Thompson, 1–3 John (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press), 87. While
“being children of God is a present affair . . . sonship finds its fulfillment in the future.” Rudolf
Bultmann, The Johannine Epistles, Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1973), 48.
42. Smalley, John, 137.
43. O’Donovan speaks of “a certain impossibility: he cannot sin,” but clarifies that this is
an “eschatological impossibility rooted in the ‘seed’ which now dwells in the believer.” Oliver

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this “already” dimension in tension with the “not yet” reality that Christians
cannot yet imagine the extent to which they will be transformed into the image
of Jesus at his return.44
This now/not yet dimension checks the human autonomy, control, and
overconfidence, which constantly threaten any account that is as serious about
human transformation as 1 John’s. If 3:1–2 sketches the moral ontology within
which human transformation can and must occur, the obscurity of the believ-
er’s final end in Christ combined with the conviction that this obscurity must
remain until he returns, checks any human overconfidence at the door, whether
in terms of moral performance or epistemology.45
The theological frame of John’s account of human transformation, then, be-
gins and ends with the hope believers have because of their genuine ontological
transformation resulting from God’s apocalyptic reclamation of the cosmos in
Christ. Ethical transformation, from now until the eschaton, at which point
such transformation will attain its end, is utterly dependent on God’s gracious
work to transform his people.

Becoming Militants of Reconciling Love in the Meantime

How does this account of divine transformation affect John’s understand-

ing of human agency in the moral life? Given John’s emphasis on the abso-
lute necessity of divine intervention for human transformation, it comes as
something of a shock when his very next line declares that “all who have this

O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order: An Outline for Evangelical Ethics, 2nd ed. (Leicester:
Apollos, 1994), 261.
44. While a final verdict on the question lies beyond the scope of this essay, this, I believe, is the
context within which we should understand the epistle’s famous apparent contradiction between
the frank claim in 1:8–2:2 that Christians will continue to sin and the equally insistent claim in
3:6–8 that “everyone who remains in him does not sin.” For a summary of options, see Reynolds,
“Anthropology,” 133. For those that emphasize the language as primarily rhetorical, see D. J. van der
Merwe, “Understanding ‘Sin’ in the Johannine Epistles,” Verbum et Ecclesia 2 (2005): 551; van der
Watt, “Reciprocity, Mimesis and Ethics,” 217–19; Dietmar Neufield, Reconceiving Texts as Speech
Acts: An Analysis of 1 John (New York: Brill, 1994), in its entirety. For those who emphasize the
apocalyptic or eschatological element, see Rudolf Schnackenburg, The Moral Teaching of the New
Testament (New York: Seabury, 1965), 338–43. Bogart, believes that these tensions mirror different
factions within the community representing an “orthodox” and a “heretical” perfectionism. John
Bogart, Orthodox and Heretical Perfectionism in the Johannine Community as Evident in the First
Epistle of John (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1977), 42.
45. I thus disagree with Lieu, who argues that in 1 John “there is no space for change or for
growth; the call is to abide. Although the future may hold out the unknown, ‘what we shall be,’ it
is not unpredictable (3:2). Neither is there any consequent sense that in the present we only ‘see in
part.’ ” Lieu, “The Audience of the Johannine Epistles,” 137.

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 Becoming Militants of Reconciling Love 89

hope in him purify themselves as he [Jesus] is pure” (3:3).46 The language of

purifying oneself seems at first glance to be theologically problematic in the
extreme; surely it is God who does the purifying!47 For John, however, the
Triune God’s liberating love changes human lives by “altering the conditions
they exist under,”48 freeing God’s people to exercise their own agency in purs-
ing moral and spiritual growth.49 Indeed, the language of “purifying oneself ”
suggests not simply that Christians who have become God’s children will
freely and spontaneously perform good deeds that flow out of their trans-
formed status but rather that self-consciously pursuing a continual process of
moral formation is a constituent part of what it means to live as a liberated
child of God awaiting his return.50 God’s agency in human transformation,
in other words, demands and enables our own efforts at moral formation.
“Johannine ethics is about what one does in the in-between-time,”51 and 1
John 3:3 makes clear that moral formation—the “disciplined and serious lay-
ing-hold of that mode of existence which is [ours] already”52 in Christ—is a
central part of what one does.
How are we to understand the disciple’s work in moral formation in light of
our discussion of God’s work in moral transformation? I suggest that here virtue
ethics might prove a useful dialogue partner. Furthermore, while several recent
treatments of Johannine ethics have looked to the virtue ethics of Aristotle for

46. Van der Watt suggests the present tense of the of verb here “seems to focus on the contin-
uous nature of the activity.” Van der Watt, “Reciprocity, Mimesis and Ethics,” 215 n. 48. Thus, this
practice remains ongoing in the life of faith until the return of Christ.
47. While it may seem problematic to us, Yarborough rightly notes that the thought and rhet-
oric are very similar to Paul’s in 2 Cor 7:1. Robert W. Yarbrough, 1–3 John, BECN (Grand Rapids:
Baker Academic, 2008), 179.
48. John Webster, “Eschatology, Ontology and Human Action,” TJT 7 (1991): 13.
49. This provides an explanation for why the epistles seem to place “a greater emphasis on hu-
man agency” compared to the Gospel. Reynolds, “Anthropology,” 135–36. Schnackenburg suggests
that “the need for human collaboration is never in doubt” in 1 John and that “the conditions for
continuance in fellowship with God are impressed on the recipients of the epistle,” with an insis-
tence “equal to that” of the epistle’s emphasis on God’s presence with us. Schnackenburg, Moral
Teaching, 341–42.
50. Van der Watt, “Reciprocity, Mimesis and Ethics,” 216. While the verb ἁγνίζει is in the indica-
tive, it functions paraenetically, summoning John’s audience to pursue such purification. Bultmann,
1 John, 49. While the verb ἁγνίζω and adjective ἁγνός can refer to ritual purity, they can also clearly
refer to moral purity in the LXX and broader NT (cf. Ps 19:9; Prov 15:26; 20:9; 4 Macc 5:37; 18:7–23;
Phil 4:8; Jas 3:17; 4:8; 1 Pet 1:22; 3:2), as is clearly included in the meaning here. More importantly, the
LXX’s deployment of such language to describe both the ritual and moral purity required to meet
with God suggests the interrelatedness of such concepts (cf. Exod 19:10; Num 8:21).
51. Francis J. Moloney, “God, Eschatology, and ‘This World’: Ethics in the Gospel of John,” in
Skinner and Brown, Johannine Ethics, 216.
52. O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order, 260.

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such dialogue, 53 I want to argue that Thomas Aquinas proves an even better
interlocutor.54
Aquinas maintains that, at salvation, God transforms the believer’s character,
in part by giving the believer the infused virtues. These virtues are habits “by
which we live righteously, of which no one can make bad use, which God works in
us, without us.”55 For Aquinas, as for John, when God adopts his children, he gives
them a transformed character out of which they then live transformed lives.56
Yet, for Aquinas, as for John, these virtues nevertheless involve human
agency in a variety of ways. Actions in line with these gifted, virtuous habits
strengthen the virtue in question by causing it to take greater root in one’s life
and heart.57 Moreover, the sinful dispositions a person has habituated within
themselves—such as those acquired through living in the fallen and rebellious
κόσμος—can make living out the infused virtues difficult.58 Aquinas therefore
maintains that believers grow in the infused virtues by actively seeking to live
out those virtues and putting to death those bad habits that might get in the
way of them doing so.
Moreover, Aquinas recognizes that the believer’s ongoing relationship with
God is central to this process. At salvation, God provides believers both with the
infused virtues and the gift of a relational disposition or stance towards God. 59
Andrew Pinsent describes this gift as a second-person disposition, an I-Thou
orientation to be moved by God in the context of a relationship. To e­ xplain this,
Pinsent offers the phenomenon of joint attention as described in social cogni-
tion studies as an appropriate analogy.60 For instance, studies ­explore the way

53. Cornelis Bennema argues for a virtue ethic approach to John’s ethics and specifically high-
lights Aristotle as a dialogue partner. Cornelis Bennema, “Virtue Ethics and the Johannine Writ-
ings,” in Skinner and Brown, Johannine Ethics, 264–66. Other differences of emphasis between his
essay and the present one are largely due to my emphasis on virtue formation. See also Bennema,
Mimesis in the Johannine Literature (New York: T&T Clark, 2017), 144; Jeffrey E. Brickle, “Transact-
ing Virtue within a Disrupted Community: The Negotiation of Ethics in the First Epistle of John,”
in van der Watt and Zimmermann, Rethinking the Ethics of John, 340–49.
54. For a more thorough treatment of the virtue ethics of Aquinas, see Rhodes, “Formative
Feasting,” 13–27.
55. ST 1a2ae, q. 55, a. 4 (italics added).
56. See Stanley Hauerwas and Charles Robert Pinches, Christians among the Virtues: Theologi-
cal Conversations with Ancient and Modern Ethics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,
1997), 68–69; Brickle, “Transacting Virtue,” 345.
57. ST 2a2ae, q. 24, a. 4. Although even this is the result of the Holy Spirit’s work, as Aquinas
makes clear in 2a2ae, q. 24, a. 5.
58. ST 1a2ae, q. 65, a. 3.
59. Andrew Pinsent, “Aquinas: Infused Virtues,” in The Routledge Companion to Virtue Ethics,
ed. Lorraine Besser and Michael Slote (New York: Routledge, 2015), 149.
60. Andrew Pinsent, The Second-Person Perspective in Aquinas’s Ethics: Virtues and Gifts, Rout-
ledge Studies in Ethics and Moral Theory (New York: Routledge, 2012), 42.

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 Becoming Militants of Reconciling Love 91

a child prefers to play with and pay attention to objects to which their parents
are also paying attention.61 Both the child and parent’s attention to the object
is changed by the fact that they are attending to it in the presence of another
person with whom they have a relationship. During joint attention “a person
appropriates the psychological orientation of [another] person” in a way that is
neither coercive nor mechanistic.62 To use another example of the phenome-
non, the joint attention that occurs between musicians playing jazz together, for
instance, does not mean that the musicians “cause one another to play the next
note” but rather that each is moved by the other, in relationship to one another
and to the music.63
This second-person Thomistic account proves helpful in exploring the eth-
ics of 1 John. This is so not least because John’s description of the new rela-
tionship between God and believers seems to suggest that the relationship itself
elicits both effort towards and conformity to the character of God in the life
of the believer. In 1 John, it is as Christians abide in Jesus as their very “sphere
of existence” that they come to desire to “purify themselves as Jesus himself is
pure” and indeed are enabled to do so.64 Seeking to grow in the virtues one has
received as gifts, on this account, occurs coram Deo, before the face of God, and
this makes all the difference. To explore this further, I will consider imitation
in 1 John as one morally formative second-person practice whereby John sum-
mons believers to pursue moral growth, purifying themselves as Jesus is pure.
Focusing on imitation is appropriate for two reasons. First, while imitation
has often been neglected in Johannine studies, Bennema has recently provided
a monograph-length treatment of imitation in both the Gospel and epistles,
demonstrating compellingly that “mimesis is at the heart of Johannine ethics,”65
Johannine mimesis aims at “ethical or moral transformation,”66 and indeed that
the “goal of mimesis is virtue.”67
Second, recent developments in social cognition identify imitation as a
crucial second-person practice, making Johannine imitation ripe for an ex-
ploration in dialogue with a second-person account of Thomistic ethics. Thus,
studies demonstrate how infants begin imitating the facial expressions of their

61. Pinsent, Second-Person Perspective, 42.

62. Pinsent, Second-Person Perspective, 49.
63. Pinsent, Second-Person Perspective, 73.
64. Chrys C. Caragounis, “ ‘Abide in Me:’ The New Mode of Relationship between Jesus and his
Followers as a Basis for Christian Ethics,” in van der Watt and Zimmermann, Rethinking the Ethics
of John, 263.
65. Bennema, Mimesis, 23.
66. Bennema, Mimesis, 36.
67. Bennema, Mimesis, 205.

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parents within the first hour of birth.68 Such imitation is “programmed deeply
into our brains;”69 indeed, some scientists present evidence for the existence
of “mirror neurons” that fire in the same way whether a person is perform-
ing an action or observing someone perform an action, expressing an emotion
through facial expressions or observing others “expressing their emotions.”70
These studies demonstrate that imitation is an essential practice whereby hu-
mans gain new skills and habits, develop emotional empathy, and acquire a
“meeting of the minds” or shared disposition with the one they so imitate.71
Turning again to 1 John 3:1–3, the very idea of “purifying oneself ” is bound
up in the imitative task captured by the phrase καθὼς ἐκεῖνος ἁγνός ἐστιν, “as
he is pure” (3:3). Here John presents what van der Merwe calls a “καθὼς -ethic,”
an ethic of imitation with the “motivation” and “manner” derived from the ex-
ample of Jesus.72 At the same time, the text makes clear that this imitation is a
deeply interpersonal act. In 3:1 John calls his audience to look at what great love
the Father has given in creating for himself a human family. While sometimes
lost in translation, the imperatival form of the verb ὁράω nearly always refers
to actual sight.73 Thus John’s summons to look at the love of God embodied in
Christ’s example and to long for the final transforming vision of Christ at his
royal return is intended to inspire his audience both to gaze upon Christ and
to embrace the imitation of their beloved that such contemplation inspires.74
One way we purify ourselves as Jesus is pure, then, is to fix our gaze on him and
exercise our renewed agency in imitating the purity we behold there. 75

68. Istan Czachesz, “From Mirror Neurons to Morality: Cognitive and Evolutionary Foun-
dations of Early Christian Ethics,” in Metapher-Narratio-Mimesis-Doxologie: Begründungsformen
frühchristlicher und antiker Ethik, ed. Friedrich Wilhelm Horn, Ulrich Volp, and Ruben Zimmer-
mann (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016), 274.
69. Czachesz, “From Mirror Neurons to Morality,” 273.
70. Czachesz, “From Mirror Neurons to Morality, 274.
71. Czachesz, “From Mirror Neurons to Morality, 274–75; Pinsent, Second-Person Perspective,
46–49.
72. Dirk G. van der Merwe, “ ‘A Matter of Having Fellowship:’ Ethics in the Johannine Epistles,”
in Identity, Ethics, and Ethos in the New Testament, ed. Jan G. van der Watt (New York: de Gruyter,
2006), 547, 554. Bennema argues that καθὼς language indicates mimesis twelve times in the Johan-
nine corpus. Bennema, Mimesis, 40.
73. See Brown, The Epistles of John, 387; Smalley, 1, 2, 3 John, 133.
74. The fact that such sight is nevertheless imperfect, that we do not yet see him fully as he truly
is, is crucial. Cf. O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order, 247. This reality must introduce a deep
sense of humility and dependence in our attempt to imitate Jesus, as well as the recognition that any
growth that occurs through our own agency is nevertheless at the same time a divine gift.
75. The call to look forward depends of course in part on the call to look back. While disciples
await the day when they will see Jesus “as he is,” they could not long for that day nor obey John’s
instructions if they had not already seen Jesus “in part.” Compare Smalley, 1, 2, 3 John, 138. Mar-
shall similarly suggests a continuity between the believer’s experience of Jesus now and his second

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 Becoming Militants of Reconciling Love 93

Bennema argues that mimesis is always, at heart, “a relational concept,” and

1 John 3:1–3 demonstrates the extent to which imitation requires the imitator to
“rely on the one who shows the example.”76 Indeed, based on the social cogni-
tion studies explored above, we can agree with Susan Eastman that such “mi-
metic movement is intersubjective movement. The movements are mine, but I
am also moved.”77
This connection between looking to Jesus and imitating him in the context
of a transforming relationship may be further illuminated by the Greco-Roman
tradition that relational proximity with virtuous exemplars, often mediated
through sight, contributed to the transformation of one’s character.78 Thus in
the ancient world, both philosophers and kings79 could be understood as liv-
ing embodiments of the divine law, who, by their embodied example, effected
a powerful transformation in the lives of their subjects.80 Plutarch writes of
Numa that the “shining example of virtue in the life of the ruler” led to the
people walking in wisdom’s ways “of their own accord.”81 Philo similarly claims
that Joseph’s virtuous example “shines on us [as] we behold as in a mirror our
misbehavior and are ashamed,”82 while Moses serves as a “living law precisely
so that others may imitate him and implant his image in their souls.”83 “Thus it
was the very presence of the virtuous, law-observant king that was thought to
inculcate law-observance within his subjects,”84 not least as they looked upon
him and mimetically conformed their conduct to his.

coming in this text. I. Howard Marshall, The Epistles of John, NIGTC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
1978), 167. Meanwhile, Kruse is right to recognize that the “future seeing spoken of in 3:2 is of a
different order.” Colin Kruse, The Letters of John, PNTC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 116.
76. Bennema, Mimesis, 113.
77. Susan Eastman, Paul and the Person: Reframing Paul’s Anthropology (Grand Rapids: Eerd-
mans, 2017), 68.
78. I am grateful to my friend Julien Smith for alerting me to the importance of this tradition.
79. See Susan Eastman, “Imitating Christ Imitating Us: Paul’s Educational Project in Philippi-
ans,” in The Word Leaps the Gap: Essays on Scripture and Theology in Honor of Richard B. Hays, ed.
J. Ross Wagner, C. Kavin Rowe, and A. Katherine Grieb (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 431–33.
80. See Joshua W. Jipp, Christ is King: Paul’s Royal Ideology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015),
­43–76; Julien C. H. Smith, “The Transforming Image of the Ideal King: Paul’s Apostolic Defense
(2 Cor 2:14–4:6) in Light of Greco-Roman Political Ideology” (paper presented to the Scripture
and Hermeneutics Seminar at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, Boston,
18 November 2017); “Unity in Christ: Virtue and the Reign of the Good King in Colossians and
Ephesians” (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, Boston,
18 November 2017).
81. Plutarch, Num. 20.8.
82. Philo, Joseph 87.
83. Jipp, Christ is King, 52.
84. Jipp, Christ is King, 66.

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1 John 2:28–3:3 may well be read in light of this tradition, given the emphasis
on sight throughout the passage. John draws on both the royal appearing lan-
guage of the parousia85 and calls believers to “look at” the Father’s love incar-
nated in Christ. Most tellingly of all, of course, John declares that the vision of
Jesus “as he is” will be the means by which believers will be transformed into his
likeness when he returns (3:2).86
In any case, John clearly understands imitation as a second-person practice
of moral formation that believers exercise in the context of and empowered by
their relationship with God. It is an imitation in which “Jesus’ love for them is
not only the model but also the enabling force of their love.”87 Because of this,
the imitation that John calls them to is “far deeper and more self-involving than
a ‘free individual choice’ to follow another’s example.”88 When the disciples imi-
tate Jesus, they “participate in the very life of God.”89
For John, the primary way to imitate Jesus is by imitating his sacrificial
love.90 1 John 3:16 grounds the believer’s understanding of love in the story of
Christ’s self-giving death for the disciples’ sake,91 and summons them to imitate
that love in laying down their lives for each other.92 This mimetic command
to love one another depends on God’s own prior demonstration of his love for
them (4:19). Once again, a second-person, Thomistic virtue ethic proves illumi-
nating for understanding the mechanics of moral formation at work here, and
that in at least three ways.
First, Aquinas argues that while God transforms our character at salvation,
the bad habits and moral dispositions that remain from our life apart from
Christ can make it painful to actively imitate Jesus in line with that transformed
character. Similarly, after declaring that members of the community know the
Father (2:14), have experienced forgiveness from sins (2:12), and conquered the
evil one (2:13, 14c), John nevertheless demands that the church must actively
reject love for the “things in the world” (2:15). John defines such love in 2:16

85. Marshall, Epistles of John, 165.

86. Kruse, John, 116. Compare also Bultmann, Johannine Epistles, 49.
87. Rabens, “Johannine Perspectives,” 120.
88. Eastman, Paul and the Person, 144–45.
89. Rabens, “Johannine Perspectives,” 125.
90. Bennema argues for the centrality of the love command in a Johannine ethic of mimesis in
relation to the foot-washing scene in the Gospel. Bennema, Mimesis, 93–105.
91. Thus the story of Jesus gives shape and content to the virtue of love (on which, see Blount,
Whisper, 101).
92. Indeed, the example of Jesus’s own cruciform love enables us to know what divine love is and
to live human lives of love that flow out of that love (cf. 4:11, 19). Thus, what makes the old com-
mandment to love a new commandment (2:7–8) is that the incarnate Christ has provided an exam-
ple of and power for love previously unimaginable. O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order, 242.

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 Becoming Militants of Reconciling Love 95

as “the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life,” and sets
these affective dispositions in total opposition to the love of the Father that has
created the community of the saints (2:15b, 16b).93
As we have seen, the Johannine community is comprised of those who have
been transferred from the world under the influence of the devil into the fam-
ily of God. They have received a new moral anthropology within a new moral
space. Yet John recognizes that work still remains! Moral growth in that new
character requires them to mortify their previous loves, those habituated dispo-
sitions associated with the world that is passing away.
Second, in 3:11–18, John again reminds his audience of the apocalyptic con-
text of mimetic love. The options that face the community are to follow in the
footsteps of Cain who, as a child of the devil, murdered his brother, or to receive
the love of God through Jesus’s sacrificial death and imitate that sacrifice by
loving their siblings in Christ (3:16). John thus summons his audience to imi-
tate the love of Christ demonstrated at the cross by creatively and contextually
applying that same love to the socioeconomic realities within the community.
In other words, because they are called to imitate Jesus who died for them, they
must embrace a practice of costly economic self-sacrifice within the commu-
nity of faith.94 John characterizes this as imitation, indicating that such mimesis
is no mere mindless copying; rather, it is creative action that emerges from a
second-person encounter with the one imitated.95 The imitation of Jesus leads
to a “shared stance” or “meeting of the minds” whereby one is able to love as
Jesus loved in a new time and place.
Third, just as Aquinas sees virtue as a holistic disposition to see, feel, and
act rightly in line with the virtue in question, 3:17 makes clear that imitating
Jesus’s love requires a certain kind of seeing, feeling, and acting. Thus 3:17 draws
attention to the moment of seeing someone and recognizing them as a brother,
thereby implying all the familial obligations expected in the ancient world.

93. William Loader has persuasively argued that John here refers to a trio of vices encompassing
sexual immorality, over-indulgence, and greed and that these vices have their obvious home in the
“abuses of the rich.” William R. G. Loader, “The Significance of 2:15–17 for Understanding the Ethics
of 1 John,” in Culpepper and Anderson, Communities in Dispute, 224–33.
94. Commentators who see such economic sharing as a disappointing or lesser expression of
sacrificial love have therefore misunderstood the significance of 3:16–17. For example, C. H. Dodd,
The Johannine Epistles (New York: Harper & Row, 1946), 86–87; and, more pointedly, Judith Lieu,
I, II, III John, NTL (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2008), 151. North rightly argues that “to
suggest that this is a descent to banality or a softening of martyrdom’s stringent demand is to mis-
construe the nature of this verse.” Wendy North, “ ‘Handsome Is . . .’: Profiling the Children of God
in 1 John,” in Muted Voices of the New Testament: Readings in the Catholic Epistles and Hebrews, ed.
Katherine M. Hockey, Madison N. Pierce, and Francis Watson (New York: T&T Clark, 2017), 151.
95. Bennema, Mimesis, 102.

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Moreover, the language draws attention to the affective dimension of love in the
reference to someone κλείσῃ τὰ σπλάγχνα αὐτοῦ ἀπ᾽ αὐτοῦ, literally “closing
their bowels” or “heart” from their poor brother. Of interest here is not only the
language of emotion, but also the idea of exercising agency in relation to one’s
emotions. What is forbidden is closing one’s affective life from one’s sibling in
Christ, with the obvious implication that disciples should actively seek to foster
the affection of love precisely so they can imitate Jesus by loving in “deed and
truth” (3:18).
John’s rhetorical question in 3:17b suggests that if anyone does not demon-
strate this holistic, character-forming mimesis of Jesus’s sacrificial love, it is
because God’s love does not remain in them.96 The proof of who they are as chil-
dren—whose moral anthropology depends on their being begotten by the God
who is love—is their own ongoing imitation of that love embodied in Jesus.
Such imitation is by no means a solitary effort. For John, in the ongoing
battle with the defeated-but-still-active devil, the “antidote to the encroaching
κόσμος [is] κοινωνία.”97 This κοινωνία is a foretaste of the κόσμος that is on the
way in Christ. In other words, the community is the place where one “jettisons
[one’s] socialization” into the hostile world and instead experiences a resocial-
ization by the Spirit in the community of faith.98 This happens very practically
as one turns from the vices associated with greed in 2:15–17 and instead em-
braces the practice of communal sharing required by the imitation of Jesus (cf.
3:17). At the same time, this resocialization also includes helping our siblings
mortify sin in their walk with Jesus. Thus 5:16 addresses a situation in which
one believer sees another sinning and comes to the aid of their sibling in their
war against sin by praying to God on their behalf. For John, moral formation
is truly a team sport that occurs in part through the community’s corporate
practice of imitation.

Conclusion

In this essay, I have argued that a theological account of moral ontology—­

understood in terms of moral anthropology, moral space, and moral time—
must frame any attempt to describe human agency in moral formation, and
that 1 John 3:1–3 provides us with a programmatic sketch of just such a frame.
Second, I have argued that because John believes Jesus has reclaimed the moral
space of the κόσμος, transformed the moral anthropology of his disciples,
and set moral time on a trajectory culminating in his triumphant renewal of

96. Bennema, Mimesis, 102.

97. Brickle, “Transacting Virtue,” 346.
98. Wink, Engaging the Powers, 55–56.

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 Becoming Militants of Reconciling Love 97

all things, he maintains that believers can, will, and must exercise their own
agency in human acts of moral formation, “purifying themselves as Jesus is
pure.” Third, I have argued that imitation serves as one key formative practice
of purifying oneself as Jesus is pure, and that a second-person Thomistic virtue
ethic can provide useful heuristic tools for understanding the way such imita-
tion “works” in the epistle.
To imitate Jesus, on this account, is to willingly live into the dawning real-
ity given to us in Christ99 because the “powerful possibilities of the end time”
now “reside in the present.”100 The result of such a practice is not navel-gazing
self-obsession, but rather the formation of a community that bears witness to
the justice, love, and liberating power of God amidst a world system whose
demonic domination is being overturned by the invading power of Jesus. We
might even say that by imitating Jesus’s love in the apocalyptic space opened up
by the Christ-event, such a community participates in the Son’s destruction of
the devil’s work (3:8) and stands as a declaration of Christ’s victory over the Evil
One (2:13).101 “The eschatological act of God that has taken place encounters the
world . . . as a historical, social fact, the community where love is practiced.”102
Such a community will itself, in some sense, “be the gospel,” offering the world
“the alternative of eschatological life, begun now in communion with the one
who is the resurrection and the life.”103
This dynamic is clearly on display in John’s bold declaration that “nobody
has ever seen God” (4:12a). This declaration replicates precisely the first half of
the final line of the prologue of John’s Gospel:104 “Nobody has seen God ever.
God, the Only One, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known” (John
1:18). In 1 John 4:12, the premise is the same, but the conclusion is different:
“if we love one another, God abides in us and his love ἐν ἡμῖν τετελειωμένη
ἐστίν.” While most English versions render this something along the lines of
“his love is perfected in us” (RSV) or “made complete in us” (NIV), Rensberger

99. K. R. Harriman, “Take Heart, We Have Overcome the World: Participatory Victory in the
Theological-Ethical Framework of 1 John,” EvQ 88 (2016): 311.
100. Blount, Whisper, 100.
101. Blount, Whisper, 103. Indeed, Köstenberger argues that the epistle as a whole “particular-
izes, at the ecclesial level, the universal cosmic trial of the Gospel.” Köstenberger, “Cosmic Trial,”
162.
102. David K. Rensberger, Johannine Faith and Liberating Community (Philadelphia: Westmin-
ster, 1988), 128.
103. Rensberger, Johannine Faith, 150. See also Hays, Moral Vision, 147.
104. Such a reading depends on rejecting scholarly suggestions that 1 John never quotes the
Gospel. Udo Schnelle, “Ethical Theology in 1 John,” in van der Watt and Zimmermann, Rethinking
the Ethics of John, 322. Köstenberger argues that 1 John was written after and with an awareness of
the Gospel. Köstenberger, “Cosmic Trial,” 176–77.

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translates “if we love one another, God abides in us and his love has been
brought to its completion in us.”105 Such a translation rightly seeks to capture
the sense of God’s love “attaining its end” in the community of faith. While the
Gospel prologue emphasizes the invisible God as a way to call attention to the
incarnate Son who makes God visible to the people of God, the epistle identifies
the community that practices the love of God in imitation of the incarnate Son
as the tangible place that makes the perfected love of the Triune God visible.
John’s love ethic is, then, according to Blount, an “ethics of active
­resistance . . .because it advocates the creation of a visible community whose in-
tramural love sets it apart and makes it a viable, recognizable alternative to the
traditional ways of being and living in the world.”106 Because such “intramural
love” is a response to and imitation of the self-sacrifice of Christ for his enemies,
it is also intrinsically missional.107 The love of God for the world fueled the Fa-
ther’s sending of the incarnate Son on a mission of salvific love. The Johannine
community’s embodiment of that divine love in the world through the commu-
nity of faith participates in the Triune God’s ongoing mission of redemption;
indeed, it is one of the primary ways the community receives the risen Lord’s
commission: “as the Father has sent me, even so send I you” (John 20:21).
All of which brings us back to where we started, and that branch of the
civil rights movement that embodied an ethic of militant, reconciling love. For
Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, James Lawson, and many others, the civil
rights movement represented a “struggle between an already completed divine
event—the promise of deliverance signed and sealed on the Cross—and the

105. David Rensberger, “Completed Love: 1 John 4:11–18 and the Mission of the New Testament
Church,” in Culpepper and Anderson, Communities in Dispute, 249.
106. Blount, Whisper, 112. This intramural love, as Hays argues, may not be the last word in
Christian ethics, but it may well need to be the first. Hays, Moral Vision, 146.
107. Contra that tradition of scholarship which sees the Johannine literature as entirely sectar-
ian and unconcerned with the world. For recent reiterations of this theme, see Michael Labahn, “It’s
Only Love—Is That All? Limits and Potentials of Johannine ‘Ethic’—A Critical Evaluation of Re-
search,” in van der Watt and Zimmermann, Rethinking the Ethics of John, 42; Lieu, “The Audience,”
136. Against this, Skinner points out that limiting Johannine love requires either ignoring the uni-
versal statements of that love or depending on “form-and-redaction-critical speculations about the
text.” Christopher W. Skinner, “Love One Another: The Johannine Love Command in the Farewell
Discourse,” in Skinner and Brown, Johannine Ethics, 38; see also Lindsey Trozzo, “Genre, Rhetoric,
and Moral Efficacy: Approaching Johannine Ethics in Light of Plutarch’s Lives and the Progymnas-
mata,” in Skinner and Brown, Johannine Ethics, 235; Gorman, “Implicit Ethic,” 154; Christos Karako-
lis, “Semeia Conveying Ethics in the Gospel according to John,” in van der Watt and Zimmermann,
Rethinking the Ethics of John, 209. Indeed, we can apply Moloney’s argument about the Gospel
directly to the epistles at this point: if the Johannine literature were simply a “sectarian tract . . . we
would not have it as part of the Christian canon. It would have disappeared . . . But in fact . . . [it]
has been publicly proclaimed for almost two thousand years.” Francis J. Moloney, Love in the Gospel
of John: An Exegetical, Theological, and Literary Study (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013), 210.

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 Becoming Militants of Reconciling Love 99

promise’s fulfillment in history—the divine event crashing onto the streets of

Montgomery.”108 This construal of the moral space of the universe as ultimately
“on the side of justice” because of the “great epic” of the cross that “split his-
tory into A.D. and B.C.” empowered the nonviolent resister to “suffer and not
retaliate.”109
Moreover, both the theology of enemy love and the pragmatic tactics of
nonviolent resistance were often framed as acts of imitation, as “[following] in
the footsteps of Jesus.”110 When movement leaders called for Montgomery bus
boycotters to walk to the courthouse and then to Dexter Avenue Baptist church
for the Pilgrim-Prayer-Day, they were “inspired by the actions of Jesus, who
carried the cross to his crucifixion.”111 For these leaders, as for John, such imita-
tion depended on and was itself an act of moral formation, part of the process
of becoming militants of reconciling love. Imitation was thus one way to pursue
transformation, and the civil rights movement’s leaders knew that such trans-
formation is central to social change.112 As James Lawson, whom King called
the “leading theorist and strategist of nonviolence in the world,”113 argued as
recently as 2019, the task of overcoming “racism, sexism, militarism, and plan-
tation capitalism” begins with ridding these vices from our own hearts.114
In his final public speech, Dr. King challenged his audience to embrace “a
kind of dangerous unselfishness” modeled on Jesus’s Good Samaritan story. To
live such unselfishness, King argued, required his audience to stop asking what
would happen to them if they stood with the sanitation workers in their strike,
and start asking “If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will hap-
pen to them?” King knew this practical summons could cost him his life, and
he was murdered the very next day. But in the final lines of his final public
speech, he declared: “I’m not worried about anything; I’m not fearing any man.

108. Charles Marsh, “The Civil Rights Movement as Theological Drama—Interpretation and
Application,” Modern Theology 18 (2002): 234.
109. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Non-Aggression Procedures to Interracial Harmony” (ad-
dress delivered at the American Baptist Assembly and American Home Mission Agencies
Conference, 1956). Available at https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/
non-aggression-procedures-interracial-harmony-address-delivered-american.
110. James M. Lawson, Jr., Nonviolence and Social Movements: The Teachings of Rev. James M.
Lawson Jr. (Los Angeles: UCLA Press, 2016), 37.
111. As well as by Gandhi and his famous march across India. Lawson, Nonviolence and Social
Movements, 44.
112. Lawson, Nonviolence and Social Movements, 55.
113. Lawson, Nonviolence and Social Movements, 6.
114. James M. Lawson, Jr. (speech given at Clayborn Temple, 5 April 2019). Intriguingly, how-
ever, Lawson’s own training for nonviolent action apparently rejected the sort of self-protec-
tion reflected in the image I explored in my introduction. See Lawson, Nonviolence and Social
­Movements, 22.

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 100 JOURNAL O F THEOLO G IC AL IN T E RPRE TAT ION

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”115 Standing within a
world transformed by the death and resurrection of Jesus, empowered by God
to imitate Jesus in his self-giving love in anticipation of God’s final victory, and
practically discipled and formed in the black church, King gave testimony to
the power of militant reconciling love. If theological ethics today desires to bear
witness to such love, and if the argument I have made is at all compelling, then
the ethics of 1 John may yet continue to guide disciples seeking to become mil-
itants of such love.

Michael J. Rhodes is a Lecturer in Old Testament at Carey Baptist College, Auck-

land, New Zealand, and an ordained minister of the Presbyterian Church (EPC). Prior
to ­joining the staff at Carey, he spent ten years engaged in Christian community de-
velopment projects in Memphis. He is the author of the popular-level book Practicing
the King's Economy and holds a PhD from Trinity College Bristol/the University of
­Aberdeen. His dissertation is entitled “Formative Feasting: Practices and Economic
Ethics in ­Deuteronomy’s Tithe Meal and the Corinthian Lord’s Supper.”

115. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Mountain Top Address” (1968). Available at https://kingin-
stitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/ive-been-mountaintop-address-delivered-bishop
-charles-mason-temple.

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