Is there a patristic precedent for understanding "foreknew" as "foreloved"?
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Origen (d. 254) appears to be the earliest church father to explicitly understand foreknowledge in this way. In his Commentary on Romans, VII.8, he connects the language of Genesis 4:1 ("Adam knew Eve") with the concept of God's foreknowledge, and writes with respect to Romans 8:29 ("those whom he foreknew he also predestined"):
In the present passage as well the Apostle had set down this word "knowing" in accordance with the custom of Holy Scripture. His aim is to show that those who are foreknown by God are those upon whom God had placed his own love and affection because he knew what sort of persons they were.
The last phrase makes it clear that Origen did not understand predestination the same way that the Reformers did. But nonetheless, to him, the foreknowledge of God implied love for the predestined:
He is said to have known his own [2 Timothy 2:19], that is, he held them in love and united them with himself. It is in this way, then, that "those whom God foreknew, these he also predestined, and those whom he predestined, these he also called, and those whom he called these he also justified."
Augustine's formulation of predestination is often seen to be closer to that of the Reformers, and his discussion on John 17 seems to reflect this. Unlike Origen, he doesn't limit forelove to being merely a result of God's foreknowledge:
[I]n the Son the Father loves us, because in Him He has chosen us before the foundation of the world.
He continues:
The love, therefore, wherewith God loves, is incomprehensible and immutable. For it was not from the time that we were reconciled unto Him by the blood of His Son that He began to love us; but He did so before the foundation of the world, that we also might be His sons along with His Only-begotten, before as yet we had any existence of our own. (Tractate 110.6)
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