The Greatest of These

BibleGateway

Contents:

  • The Greatest of These
  • 1 Corinthians 13:13
  • Greatest Of These
  • Previous Volumes
  • Tables of Contents from our recent issues

    • It is one thing to describe the changes that have gone on within a given system of presuppositions; it is quite another thing to contemplate the possibility that these presuppositions will themselves be questioned and discarded as no longer fit to account for reality as man experiences it.

    • Hillsong United.
    • 365 More Short-short Stories.
    • And the Greatest of These Is Hope.
    • ;

    The historian of Christian doctrine suffers from a special embarrassment; for the body of Christian belief and doctrine, whose changes in the church's past he seeks to analyze and record, is the very system of presuppositions that is now regarded as obsolete and superseded in its effort to describe the ways of God with his creation.

    If the task is to look "toward the year ," what right does a historian of doctrine or any other Christian theologian have to speak? That challenge has been addressed to Christian theology with mounting stridency since the seventeenth century, when the new man of the Enlightenment first became aware of his powers and began to question the need for grace to supplement nature or for revelation to supply what human reason could not discover for itself.

    The Greatest of These

    Confident of the powers of reason to draw the plans for "the heavenly city of the eighteenth-century philosophers" and of the capacity of the human spirit to build that city, rationalists such as Thomas Jefferson and Edward Gibbon found the supernatural content of the Christian faith increasingly irrelevant to their conception of the future and to their hope for achieving it. During most of the period that has styled itself "modern," the Christian message has been attacked as excessively gloomy and pessimistic, with all its talk about sin, hell, and the wrath of God.

    Nothing seemed to make less sense than the apocalyptic language of the Old and New Testaments, for the future was shiny enough by itself, without having to be illumined by the brightness of the great day of the Lord. That mood has been fundamentally transposed during the first two thirds of the twentieth century. Now the Christian message is being attacked as excessively optimistic and comforting, with all its talk about grace, heaven, and the life everlasting. It is not the Christian message that has changed; it is the temper of the times.

    Grace and the forgiveness of sins used to seem unnecessary; not they seem impossible, and the Gospel is too good to be true.

    Thus the apocalyptic language of the Bible has begun to make a grim kind of sense—not as the harbinger of hope, which it was for earlier Christian believers, but as the voice of doom. The reverse Utopias of Huxley and Orwell bespeak a loss of appetite for the future, a failure of the capacity to hope, a paralysis of expectation. The paralyzing apocalypticism of our time has elevated to a dominant position some of the very accents in Christian thought that seemed permanently obsolete at the turn of the century, even as it has turned away both from the Christian expectation of the life of the age to come and from its secular counterpart, the doctrine of progress.

    1 Corinthians 13:13

    The secular doctrine of progress may be seen as the attempt to affirm the Christian hope of the future without the Christian faith in the past. It saw the processes of history as self-redeeming and as moving inevitably toward the achievement of their inherent goal, but it did not believe that the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ were necessary either for the achievement or even for the discovery of that goal. As it was with the goal of history, so it was with the destiny of the individual.

    His hope for a future life beyond the grave was not contingent on the cross of Christ and the empty tomb, but was the natural possession of his immortal soul. Thus, in Lessing's famous formula, "contingent truths of history can never become proofs for necessary truths of reason. Destiny was independent of history. At most, the biblical story of the covenant of God with Israel and with the church could be seen as a helpful preparation for an age of spiritual maturity, in which man could himself become, in Emerson's phrase, "a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost," who did not need historical revelation, and a bearer of his own fulfillment, who did not need historical redemption.

    The sacraments of the church were, at best, symbols among other symbols of the way things are, rather than channels through which the grace won in the death and resurrection of Christ is communicated. All of this makes for a radiant hope and a serene expectation of the life to come—or, at least, it does for a while. But the Christian hope of the future is tied inseparably to the Christian faith in the past.

    The Christian declaration, "And I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the age to come," appears as the end and the climax of a creed whose central content is the eternal being of the Blessed and Undivided Trinity and the historical incarnation of Jesus Christ. As in Bach's Mass in B-Minor the words, "Ex expecto resurrectionem mortuorum," repeat the majestic leitmotiv of the earlier, "Et resurrexit"'; so in Christian confession the faith in the heavenly origin of Christ is the ground for hope in the heavenly destiny of man, and the historical death and resurrection of our Lord enable the believer to pass through his death to resurrection.

    Greatest Of These

    The sign of this connection in the New Testament is the second advent of Christ, which stands in continuity with his first advent and yet differs from it as glory does from lowliness. Baptism is a baptism "into his death" Rom. From these affirmations it seems to follow that, in the Christian sense of the words, one cannot keep the hope without the history, and that the road to a future with God lies through a past with Jesus Christ.

    And as this axiom applies to the ultimate hope of life beyond the grave, so it applies also to the lesser hopes and proximate goals toward which the human spirit looks.

    For the Christian and the church, the way also to these proximate goals this side of the great hope leads "through Christ our Lord," as the collects say. These lesser hopes are what a collect calls "those good things which we are not worthy to ask, but through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ," who gives us the right to pray and the grounds to hope.

    I have written unto you, young men, because ye are strong, and the word of God abideth in you, and ye have overcome the wicked one….

    Previous Volumes

    Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth…. New International Version And now these three remain: But the greatest of these is love. New Living Translation Three things will last forever--faith, hope, and love--and the greatest of these is love. English Standard Version So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

    Berean Study Bible And now these three remain: Berean Literal Bible But now these three things abide: New American Standard Bible But now faith, hope, love, abide these three; but the greatest of these is love. King James Bible And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity. Christian Standard Bible Now these three remain: Contemporary English Version For now there are faith, hope, and love. But of these three, the greatest is love.

    Greatest Of These Lyric Video -- Hillsong UNITED

    Good News Translation Meanwhile these three remain: But the greatest of these is love. All rights reserved worldwide. You'll get this book and many others when you join Bible Gateway Plus. Starting your free trial of Bible Gateway Plus is easy.

    Tables of Contents from our recent issues

    New International Version And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. New Living Translation Three things will last. And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

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