NOTES for Co1 13:13

¹³And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.

Faith, hope, love—the traditional triad of the virtues known in the Middle Ages as “theological,” which were believed to be characteristic only of Christians, in contrast to the “pagan” virtues which, according to the same medieval ideas, were common to all people, including virtuous pagans. Paul, it seems, singles out love among the three, without, however, denying that faith and hope are inseparably connected with it.

So what does the apostle mean? One could, of course, explain everything solely in terms of the particular spiritual constitution of the human person. Indeed, both trust and hope are always connected in one way or another with the relationships that bind a person to God and to one’s neighbors. Love, understood as the authors of the biblical books understand the word, is the relationship itself around which everything else is built. All trust is founded precisely on love, and love alone enables one to hope for anything at all, whether it concerns God or another person.

But probably that is not all. All Christian hopes are in one way or another connected with the Kingdom, with the coming day of its full and final triumph, the day of the Last Judgment and the Savior’s return. And every Christian’s faith is likewise connected with the Kingdom and with the One who brought it into the world.

When the day awaited by all Christians—the completion of the present stage in the history of the Kingdom—comes, love will cease to be merely a relationship and will become the spiritual environment in which all its inhabitants will henceforth exist. For in the Kingdom love is the spiritual environment within which all the relationships that form its foundation are built: the relationships of its inhabitants with one another, with God and with Jesus, and Jesus’ relationship with His Heavenly Father. And if faith and hope in their present form still belong partly to the untransformed world, which to some extent determines their form, then the love revealed by the Savior Himself, the love He left to His disciples, already belongs to the Kingdom. Wholly and completely.

Other notes

For Co1 13:8-13

⁸Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.

⁹For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.

¹⁰But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.

¹¹When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

¹²For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

¹³And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.

It is very difficult to speak about such “abstract” concepts, let alone compare them. With a certain degree of... Read more

It is very difficult to speak about such “abstract” concepts, let alone compare them. With a certain degree of approximation, we might put it this way: in ordinary usage, faith and hope describe our relationship to facts. Faith concerns facts that “already are” (I believe that God exists, that He is good, that He created the world, that He ordered the world in such-and-such a way, that He gave His only-begotten Son...), while hope concerns facts that are “still ahead” (I hope for salvation, resurrection from the dead, eternal life...). But sometimes these words are used to express our relationship with another person: faith as trust in God, hope as reliance upon Him. The word “love” belongs to this same series: it speaks of our relationship with someone else. Yet this word truly is “greater” than faith and hope, because love means the fullness of relationship and, of course, includes both trust and hope.

For Co1 13:8-13

⁸Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.

⁹For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.

¹⁰But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.

¹¹When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

¹²For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

¹³And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.

For Paul, love is undoubtedly the foundation of all the relationships that connect... Read more

For Paul, love is undoubtedly the foundation of all the relationships that connect people living in the Kingdom with God and with one another. That is why it remains relevant even when everything else ceases to be so (v. 8). But the apostle is not speaking simply about life in the Kingdom. He clearly has in mind a certain fullness of the Kingdom itself, so to speak, the fullness of fullness. All the spiritual gifts that Paul described so vividly only a short time earlier now disappear, dissolving into love. The apostle gives a completely unambiguous explanation for this: all the gifts we can have today are still far from the fullness of that love with which the Kingdom is permeated, and therefore they are temporary (vv. 9-10). This incompleteness is connected with our own spiritual state: from the point of view of that fullness of life that will become possible in the Kingdom revealed to the end, we are still children, having only the most general ideas about the life of the Kingdom and having taken only our first steps in it (v. 11).

As one can see, for Paul the spiritual path of individual people living in the Kingdom is inseparable from the history of the Kingdom itself. For him the spiritual maturing of Christians is inseparable from the becoming of the Kingdom and its development in our world, which is being transfigured but has not yet been transfigured to the end. The realities of the Kingdom are perceived with difficulty today not only because our eyes have not yet developed enough to see the objects of the spiritual world clearly, but also because these realities themselves have not yet fully taken shape and have not been completely revealed (v. 12). But the full revelation of the Kingdom will happen only at the end of time with the Savior's return. Until then, the love of the Kingdom, which we can experience only in part, is joined with faith that the day will come when it will be revealed to the world in all its fullness, and with hope that we ourselves too will become part of this fullness (v. 13).

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