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The New Testament > 1 Corinthians > Chapter 13

Questions

Verse 8

• Why does Paul say that knowledge shall vanish away? Why is knowledge more fleeting than charity?

Lexical notes

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Exegesis

Verse 7

What does it mean to "believe all things?" Does this suggest that charitable persons should be gullible? Shouldn't the phrase be qualified to say "believe all things that are true?"

Joseph Smith thought so highly of this scripture that he included it in the 13th Article of Faith. On the subject of belief, he once said, "I never hear of a man being damned for believing too much; but they are damned for unbelief." [1] This statement seems to indicate that Joseph Smith thought it best to err on the side of belief. God will not condemn us for believing too much, even if in the end we occasionally believed something untrue. It is better to have a believing heart, than to be filled with skepticism and doubt.

Additionally, the presence of "believe all things" in the Articles of Faith seperates the LDS people from other Christian faiths who limit their spiritual beliefs to things only found in the Bible.

Verse 8

Here Paul takes a detour from his ode to charity, and begins to talk about the limitations of other gifts of the spirit. The scripture, when read in context with verses 9 and 10, suggests that the gifts of the spirit present an incomplete picture of eternal reality. We only "know in part." We only "prophesy in part."

An example of this might be the prophesies of the Old Testament about the coming of the Messiah. These prophesies state that the Messiah will come to deliver His people, which the Jews interpreted as deliverance from the Romans. However, when He finally came, He didn't deliver them from the Romans, but from their sins. The Jews to this day are still waiting for the "real" Messiah. The Jews only understood the prophesy "in part" because the prophesies themselves were not explicitly clear on the matter. In the same way, the many prophesies about the 2nd Coming of Christ are perhaps only "part" of the story of what will eventually happen. When the Millenium finally does come, we may look back on some of our present day interpretations of 2nd Coming prophesy, and laugh at our limited understanding, which comes from only having "part" of the big picture.

Additional commentary on this subject:

Failing prophecies. Paul tells us here that prophecies fail. What does this mean? One way to read this is that some prophecies from God fail. Such an interpretation may at first seem surprising. Certainly though, there are many examples of prophecies failing in the Old Testament. The book of Jonah is an excellent example. The entire book is related to this question of a failing prophecy. Interestingly, it suggest that charity is the cause of the failure of that prophecy (see most explicitly Jonah 4:2). In Jonah, broadly summarizing, the prophet raises a complaint that his prophecy is doomed to failure (that, in fact, this is the reason he flees at the call) because of the love of God for the people of Ninevah. In other words, the infinitude of God's everlasting love marks the finitude of prophecy (finitude/infinitude arise mutually). Prophecy might be understood to be the corruptible body of the incorruptible love of God. All of this might help to understand what Paul is saying here: it is the incorruptible love of God that marks the corruptibility of prophecy. (The consequences of this point for a book like Revelation are vast.)

Since this verse dwells also on the place of tongues and knowledge, these two are apparently also struck with finitude by the infinite love of God. However, these two are questions of further complexity (or perhaps, further simplicity) in light of Paul's continued discussion of tongues (to which knowledge might broadly be compared existentially: both are relations directly with God that apparently ignore other relations) in 1 Cor 14. Whereas prophecy is explicitly a question of one's charity towards others, tongues and knowledge are a question of one's love (charity) for God directly. This complication does not undo the possibility of reading the finitude of knowledge and tongues, but clarifies how it might be read.

Verse 9

In part. Paul's phrasing here suggests that knowledge itself is fragmented (although, see 1 Cor 13:12), as is prophecy. This might be read as carefully tied to the discussion to follow beginning with 1 Cor 14:1.

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