The Childhood Argument¶

The text. "When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways." (1 Corinthians 13:11, ESV)

The setting¶

Verse 11 is one sentence in a paragraph about knowledge. Verse 9: "we know in part and we prophesy in part." Verse 10: "when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away." Verse 12: "now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face." The child and the man are there to explain the sentence before them.

The cessationist reading¶

The popular reading takes the sentence as a timeline. The child is the church in her infancy, when she needed tongues and prophecy as a child needs a nurse; the man is the church with a completed Bible, who has put away the toys. Verse 11 then supplies what verses 8-10 leave implicit: the "perfect" is the canon, and the childhood ended when it arrived.

Two honest notes. The reading is more common in sermons and study Bibles than in technical commentaries; the strongest cessationist exegetes reach their conclusion another way, and Richard Gaffin takes "the perfect" to be eschatological. And the reading has real pastoral force: it explains why gifts might suit a young church and be unnecessary for a mature one. It is not foolish. It does not survive its paragraph.

The problems¶

1. The "I" is Paul¶

"I spoke... I thought... I gave up." The first person is not decorative. Paul is the child and Paul is the man. If this is a map of church history, then Paul is the church, and the church became a man when Paul did. When did Paul grow up — at Damascus, in Arabia, when he wrote Romans? The text gives no date because it is not giving dates.

2. The analogy measures proportion, not time¶

Childhood is to adulthood as the partial is to the perfect. That is a ratio, not a calendar. Paul uses the same figure for a present, individual condition in this very letter: "But I, brothers, could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ" (1 Corinthians 3:1); "Brothers, do not be children in your thinking. Be infants in evil, but in your thinking be mature" (14:20). In 14:20 the readers can still be children, in the letter where manhood supposedly arrived. An era cannot be a present possibility.

3. The verse is bracketed by knowledge and sight¶

Verses 9 and 12 both speak of knowing: in part now, fully then; a mirror now, a face then. Verse 11 is enclosed by them and explains verse 10. The partial passes away the way childish things pass away when a man takes up a man's work. A different subject — a book, a canon, a date — would not illustrate the sentence; it would interrupt it.

4. The church has not grown up¶

"Until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ" (Ephesians 4:13). The word is teleios, the adjective behind to teleion in 13:10. Paul says the whole church is still on the way, and that the gifts are the means by which it comes (4:11-12), not the toys of an earlier stage. If manhood came with the canon, the church now has the unity of the faith and the stature of Christ. It does not.

5. If childhood ended with the canon, the church lives by sight¶

On the canon reading, the "then" of verse 12 has already arrived: the church sees face to face. But the paragraph ends, "So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three" (13:13), and faith and hope belong to the interval — "we walk by faith, not by sight" (2 Corinthians 5:7); "now hope that is seen is not hope" (Romans 8:24). If the canon ended the childhood, the church has lived by sight for nineteen centuries, and the New Testament's account of the Christian life is false.

The continuationist reading¶

The partial is to the perfect as childhood is to adulthood: a statement about mode, not date. Childhood is not a disease. A child's words are real words and a child's knowledge is real knowledge, incomplete but not false. So the gifts are real knowledge of God and real speech from God, given to a church that does not yet see. They will be outgrown when she sees the face she has been talking about. Until then she is to be mature in love (14:20) while knowing in part (13:9) — which is how an adult uses a gift: for others, in order, in love.

What this does and does not prove¶

It proves: that verse 11 is an analogy of proportion, not a chronology; that its "I" is Paul; that the church has not attained the maturity of Ephesians 4:13; and that the canon reading would leave the church living by sight.

It does not prove: that the gifts continue, or that every exercise of them is mature. The verse gives no date. It measures the distance between the partial and the perfect, and that distance is not yet closed. What the whole chapter does with it is set out in the flagship page.