PASSAGE · BSB

1 Corinthians 13

7 positions in the corpus lean on this chapter. Cited verses are marked.

1If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a ringing gong or a clanging cymbal.

2If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have absolute faith so as to move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.

3If I give all I possess to the poor and exult in the surrender of my body, but have not love, I gain nothing.

4Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.

5It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no account of wrongs.

6Love takes no pleasure in evil, but rejoices in the truth.

7It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

8Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be restrained; where there is knowledge, it will be dismissed.

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

10but when the perfect comes, the partial passes away.

11When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I set aside childish ways.

12Now we see but a dim reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

13And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love; but the greatest of these is love.

Who leans on it

Augustine on continuation of spiritual giftsDISPUTED READINGCONTESTED°Earlier work suggests the miraculous gifts belonged to the church's founding era. Later, in the Retractations and City of God 22, he acknowledges miracles occurring in his own time and partly walks the earlier view back.Voddie Baucham on continuation of spiritual giftsSTANDARD ACCOUNTAFFIRMS°Cessationist.Jonathan Edwards on continuation of spiritual giftsPRIMARY SOURCEAFFIRMS°The extraordinary gifts were "given to the church only to support it in its minority, till the church should have a complete standing rule established," and were to cease "as the church advanced to the state of manhood."…M. Heiser on continuation of spiritual giftsPRIMARY SOURCEAFFIRMS°Rejects both labels as unhelpful while landing squarely in the cautious middle — God may do what he wants, the gifts are not withdrawn, and the machinery built around them by charismatic movements is what he objects to. …John MacArthur on continuation of spiritual giftsPRIMARY SOURCEAFFIRMS°Hard cessationism, stated as official church doctrine rather than only argued at book length in Strange Fire (still the fuller popular treatment, but not the primary source used here). Tongues and sign miracles authentic…Justin Peters on continuation of spiritual giftsPRIMARY SOURCEAFFIRMS°Cessationist on the miraculous gifts and only those. He divides the gifts in two: the Apostolic gifts — tongues, interpretation, divine revelation, physical healing — have ceased, while the ministering gifts of prophecy,…R.C. Sproul on continuation of spiritual giftsPRIMARY SOURCEAFFIRMS°Cessationist specifically about revelation-authenticating "sign gifts": in his account, a miracle in the strict sense is an act contrary to nature performable only by an agent of revelation, and those gifts ended with th…