Verse explainer

What does 1 Corinthians 13:13 really mean?

Paul doesn't rank love above faith and hope because the other two disappear — he ranks it highest because love alone reaches both God and neighbor, and never has an end.

KJV

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

BSB

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

The plain meaning

Paul has spent the whole chapter cataloguing what love does and doesn't do (vv. 4–7) and then arguing that gifts like prophecy, tongues, and knowledge are provisional — they serve for now and will be superseded (vv. 8–10). Against that backdrop, he names the three things that do abide: faith, hope, and love. These are not themselves gifts in the spectacular sense; they are the permanent architecture of the Christian life. Faith reaches toward God; hope looks forward to what God has promised; love moves outward to God and to the people around you. Paul's point in calling love "the greatest" is not that faith and hope are worthless or merely temporary. It is that love is the only one of the three that is, in its very nature, directed at others — it is the one that the law is said to fulfill (Romans 13:10). It also underlies and activates both faith and hope: a faith without love, Paul has already argued in v. 2, profits nothing at all.

The common misreading

"The greatest of these is love" means faith doesn't really matter — love is all you need. This reading lifts the final clause out of a chapter and a letter where Paul is fiercely insistent that faith is not optional. Just two verses earlier (v. 2) he writes that a person could have faith to move mountains and if they have no love, they are nothing — but notice: that argument only works if faith is taken seriously, not dismissed. And in verse 13 Paul explicitly says all three abide: faith, hope, and love together. He is ranking them, not eliminating two of them. Love is 'the greatest' for specific reasons: it fulfills the law (Romans 13:10), it is the one virtue directed wholly outward toward others, and it is the one that, as Adam Clarke observed, makes us most resemble God himself. That is a claim about love's pre-eminence, not about faith's irrelevance. Elsewhere Paul calls faith the means by which righteousness is received and the foundation on which the entire Christian life is built. The verse is a summit statement about love's dignity — not a demolition of everything that came before it.

What the commentators say

Adam Clarkeearly 19th c. · PD

Clarke argues that love is greatest because it alone is properly the image of God in the soul — "God is love" — whereas faith and hope concern primarily ourselves. Faith receives from God, hope anticipates future good, but love alone makes us resemble God and qualifies us for eternal union with him. He also presses an unusual point: faith and hope do not simply end at death but continue in the eternal state, where the infinite perfections of God will always exceed what any creature has yet apprehended — so even in heaven, love remains the crown of the three.

Jamieson, Fausset & Brown19th c. · PD

JFB notes that love is connected especially with the Holy Spirit as the bond of union between believers, while faith is directed toward God and hope is on behalf of ourselves. They acknowledge that in one sense faith and hope are superseded — faith by sight, hope by fruition — but in another sense all three abide permanently now that the extraordinary gifts have ceased, since these three are necessary and sufficient for salvation in every age. Love is greatest partly because it presupposes faith and gives it the works without which faith is dead.

The word behind it

ἀγάπη agapē

The Greek word translated 'charity' in KJV and 'love' in BSB. Not the affection between friends (philia) or romantic love (erōs), but a deliberate, self-giving orientation toward the good of another. Paul's choice of agapē throughout the chapter is pointed: it is the love that can be commanded, that acts regardless of feeling, and that — uniquely among the three permanent virtues — is directed outward to both God and neighbor. This is why it crowns the list.

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