I can think of no other religion that states that truth or life or the way is a person. Usually they are philosophies expounded by a person. Again, this text doesn't say that God is loving, that love is one of God's qualities. It goes further than that, insisting that God is love itself, and that love is God himself. The text denies the status of love as an abstract concept, with facets explainable by various Greek words that capture its nuances.
Love is a Person.
Essentially, this approach denies the separation of knowledge and relationship. In God's system, we only truly know when we are in relationship with him. By his definition, knowing a body of doctrine without a relationship with the God of the doctrine is in fact ignorance. For many years our modernist, scientific culture led us to believe that we could study things objectively, and that we could only truly understand things from the outside. This was reflected in religion by the development of systematic theology and a tendency to emphasize knowledge at the expense of treating each other with grace and understanding.