Chapter 2: Christocentrism --- What Did Jesus Teach and Demonstrate?

Connecting to Chapter 1

Chapter 1’s Scripture analysis established the contours of a genuinely difficult interpretive question. The Greek text of 1 Corinthians 13:8-13 is clear on several things: gifts are partial and temporary; love is permanent; a future “perfect” will supersede the partial; the contrast between “now” (arti) and “then” (tote) frames a present limitation and a future completion. But the text itself does not name what “the perfect” is. That is the open question.

Chapter 1 also surfaced several secondary questions that remain unresolved by grammatical and lexical analysis alone:

• Does “face to face” (prosōpon pros prosōpon, v. 12) describe a literal encounter with Christ himself, or is it a metaphor for a qualitative change in knowledge?
• Does “the perfect” (to teleion) describe a single eschatological event --- the return of Christ --- or a process of ongoing maturation within the present age?
• What is the relationship between gifts and love in Paul’s argument? Are gifts essentially temporary tools, or something more?

The Christocentric lens cannot resolve every one of these questions with finality. What it can do is anchor them in something richer than grammar alone: the actual teaching and priorities of the one whom Paul calls Lord. When we read Paul through Jesus, certain features of the text come into focus with a clarity that lexicons alone cannot supply.

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Jesus as the New Moses: The “Face to Face” Connection

Of all the Christocentric insights this study yields, none is more important or more frequently overlooked than the typological connection between Moses and “face to face” knowledge of God.

The phrase prosōpon pros prosōpon that Paul uses in 1 Corinthians 13:12 is loaded with Old Testament freight. In the Hebrew Scriptures, “face to face” is not a casual metaphor for intimacy. It is the precise description of Moses’s singular, unprecedented access to God --- an access that set him apart from every other prophet in Israel’s history:

“And the LORD spake unto Moses face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend.” --- Exodus 33:11 (KJV)

“And he said, Hear now my words: If there be a prophet among you, I the LORD will make myself known unto him in a vision, and will speak unto him in a dream. My servant Moses is not so, who is faithful in all mine house. With him will I speak mouth to mouth, even apparently, and not in dark speeches; and the similitude of the LORD shall he behold: wherefore then were ye not afraid to speak against my servant Moses?” --- Numbers 12:6-8 (KJV)

“And there arose not a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses, whom the LORD knew face to face.” --- Deuteronomy 34:10 (KJV)

This is the standing of Moses in the Old Testament: alone among the prophets, God spoke to him “face to face,” “mouth to mouth,” “not in dark speeches” --- the exact opposite of the mirror-and-riddle knowledge Paul describes as the present condition of the Corinthian church.

Paul’s language in 1 Corinthians 13:12 deliberately echoes this. “Now we see through a glass, darkly” --- en ainigmati, “in an enigma, in dark speech, in a riddle” --- is the very mode from which Moses was exempt. “Then, face to face” is the mode that was uniquely Moses’s. Paul is not using “face to face” as a vague idiom. He is placing his readers in the lineage of that specific, exalted, Mosaic encounter with God.

And into this typological framework steps Jesus.

Moses himself predicted a successor. In his final sermon, he said:

“The LORD thy God will raise up unto thee a Prophet from the midst of thee, of thy brethren, like unto me; unto him ye shall hearken.” --- Deuteronomy 18:15 (KJV)

This is not a general prediction about the prophetic office. The singular “a Prophet… like unto me” is deliberately framed to echo Moses’s own uniqueness. The apostle Peter, preaching at Solomon’s Portico in the days immediately following Pentecost, explicitly identified Jesus as this prophet:

“For Moses truly said unto the fathers, A prophet shall the Lord your God raise up unto you of your brethren, like unto me; him shall ye hear in all things whatsoever he shall say unto you. And it shall come to pass, that every soul, which will not hear that prophet, shall be destroyed from among the people.” --- Acts 3:22-23 (KJV)

The letter to the Hebrews makes the comparison and its outcome explicit: Moses was faithful; Jesus is greater than Moses, not merely greater as a prophet, but greater in category --- as a Son over the house, not a servant within it:

“Wherefore, holy brethren, partakers of the heavenly calling, consider the Apostle and High Priest of our profession, Christ Jesus; Who was faithful to him that appointed him, as also Moses was faithful in all his house. For this man was counted worthy of more glory than Moses, inasmuch as he who hath builded the house hath more honour than the house. For every house is builded by some man; but he that built all things is God. And Moses verily was faithful in all his house, as a servant, for a testimony of those things which were to be spoken after; But Christ as a son over his own house; whose house are we, if we hold fast the confidence and the rejoicing of the hope firm unto the end.” --- Hebrews 3:1-6 (KJV)

And most directly, John draws the contrast and the fulfillment together in a single stroke:

“For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.” --- John 1:17-18 (KJV)

The logic is striking. Moses had “face to face” knowledge of God --- and yet even Moses could not see God’s face directly (Exodus 33:20-23). Jesus, as the eternal Son “in the bosom of the Father,” is the face of God turned toward humanity. He has “declared” (exēgēsato --- literally “exegeted,” “made known”) the Father in a way no prophet, not even Moses, could.

Now bring all of this to bear on 1 Corinthians 13:12.

When Paul says believers now see “in a mirror, in a riddle” --- Mosaic terms for lesser prophetic access --- but will then see “face to face,” he is pointing to the consummation of what Moses anticipated and Jesus embodies. The “face to face” that awaits believers is not merely a better mode of theological information. It is the vision of Christ himself, who is the face of God.

John makes this explicit:

“Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is.” --- 1 John 3:2 (KJV)

“We shall see him as he is” --- this is the Christocentric definition of “face to face.” Not a canon of completed Scripture, not the maturation of the church’s institutional life, but the appearing of Christ and the transformation his appearing produces. Moses spoke with God face to face, and his face shone so brightly that Israel could not look at him (2 Corinthians 3:7-8). When believers see Christ as he is, they will be like him --- transformed by the encounter. Paul’s mirror-to-face progression leads here.

This does not settle every debate about the gifts. But it establishes something crucial: Paul’s “face to face” has deep Christological roots, and those roots grow in eschatological soil.

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Jesus’s Teaching on the Spirit and “All Truth”

Jesus’s farewell discourse in John 14-16 introduces a tension that runs directly through 1 Corinthians 13, and honest interpretation must sit with it rather than resolve it prematurely.

On the night before his crucifixion, Jesus told his disciples:

“But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.” --- John 14:26 (KJV)

And then, a few moments later:

“I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will shew you things to come. He shall glorify me: for he shall receive of mine, and shall shew it unto you. All things that the Father hath are mine: therefore said I, that he shall take of mine, and shall shew it unto you.” --- John 16:12-15 (KJV)

Three things are worth observing carefully.

First, Jesus explicitly acknowledges a present limitation: “ye cannot bear them now.” The disciples’ capacity for truth is partial --- not because they are faithless, but because they are unprepared. There is more truth than they can currently receive. This is precisely the condition Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 13: knowing “in part,” prophesying “in part.”

Second, the Spirit’s mission is to guide into all truth (pasan tēn alētheian). The Spirit will not leave the church in permanent partial-knowledge. There is a completeness the Spirit intends.

Third, the Spirit’s work glorifies Jesus --- “He shall receive of mine, and shall shew it unto you.” The content the Spirit reveals is Christological at its core. All truth that the Spirit brings points to Christ.

Now the question must be asked honestly: Is the Spirit’s guidance into “all truth” the same as “the perfect” coming in 1 Corinthians 13:10?

Those who argue that “the perfect” refers to the completion of the New Testament canon find a foothold here. Jesus promises the Spirit will guide the apostles into all truth; the apostolic writings are the fruit of that guidance; when that canon was complete, “that which is perfect” arrived in the sense of a completed revelation. The partial prophetic gifts were then superseded by the whole of Scripture.

Those who argue that “the perfect” refers to Christ’s return answer differently: the Spirit’s work of guiding into all truth is an ongoing process throughout the church age, not a completed event in the first century. The Spirit still illumines, still teaches, still draws believers deeper into Christological knowledge. The consummation of the Spirit’s work --- knowing “even as also I am known” --- awaits the return of Christ and the resurrection.

Both readings take John 16 seriously. The text does not adjudicate between them. What it does confirm is that the movement from partial to complete knowledge is a Pneumatological reality --- the Spirit is the agent of the very transition Paul is describing. And the content of that completion is, by Jesus’s own words, relentlessly Christological.

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Jesus’s Teaching on Love as the Supreme Ethic

The Christocentric lens has the most unambiguous thing to say about one element of 1 Corinthians 13: the supremacy of love.

When a lawyer asked Jesus to name the greatest commandment, he replied:

“Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” --- Matthew 22:37-40 (KJV)

On the night of his betrayal, Jesus pressed this further:

“A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.” --- John 13:34-35 (KJV)

And then, in his final discourse before the Passion:

“This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” --- John 15:12-13 (KJV)

Paul’s elevation of love over gifts in 1 Corinthians 13 is not an independent theological innovation. It is a direct application --- one could say an exposition --- of Jesus’s own teaching. When Paul writes that gifts without love profit nothing (v. 3), he is drawing on the logic of Matthew 22 and John 13. Love is not one virtue among others that happens to rank highest. Love is the summary and ground of all the others.

This has a direct bearing on the question of the gifts. The charismatic gifts --- prophecy, tongues, knowledge --- are not the summit of Christian life in Jesus’s teaching. Love is. The gifts are, at best, servants of love. If gifts exist to build up the body (1 Corinthians 14:12), and building up the body is an expression of love, then gifts are instrumental --- they serve love, love does not serve them.

This does not determine when the gifts will cease. But it places them in their proper relation: love is the permanent reality; gifts are the temporary expression. The container changes; what it carries does not.

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Jesus on Maturity: “Be Ye Perfect”

One of the most direct Christological contributions to this study is also one that is easy to overlook, because it comes from the Sermon on the Mount rather than from a passage explicitly about the gifts.

Jesus commanded his disciples:

“Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” --- Matthew 5:48 (KJV)

The Greek reads: Ἔσεσθε οὖν ὑμεῖς τέλειοι ὡς ὁ πατὴρ ὑμῶν ὁ οὐράνιος τέλειός ἐστιν --- esesthe oun humeis teleioi, “ye shall be perfect.” The verb is a future indicative of eimi carrying imperatival force, on the Septuagint’s own pattern for covenant commands (“Ye shall be holy,” ἅγιοι ἔσεσθε, Lev. 19:2 LXX) --- a command wearing the grammar of a promise. The word for “perfect” is teleioi --- the plural adjective form of the same root (teleios) that appears in the neuter singular to teleion of 1 Corinthians 13:10.

This matters because the command is addressed to present-tense Christian living. Jesus is issuing a demand on the Sermon on the Mount community --- the disciples who follow him now, who love their enemies now, who give alms and pray and fast now --- even as the future-indicative form quietly points forward. Teleios in Jesus’s mouth describes something to be pursued, not only awaited.

The context in Matthew 5 is important. Jesus has been teaching the ethic of the kingdom: do not resist evil, love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you. The concluding imperative --- “be perfect as your Father is perfect” --- climaxes this sequence. The “perfection” in view is moral wholeness, the integrity of love that does not distinguish between friends and enemies. The Father causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good alike (v. 45); his love is undifferentiated, complete, without partiality. That wholeness is what Jesus calls teleios.

This usage complicates, but also enriches, the interpretation of 1 Corinthians 13:10. If teleios is the standard Jesus sets for present Christian life in the Sermon on the Mount, then a reading of “the perfect” in 1 Corinthians 13 that is entirely future risks severing Paul’s eschatological horizon from his ethical argument. Paul is not merely predicting an event; he is describing a state --- completeness, maturity, full knowledge --- that has both a present pursuit (be perfect, Matthew 5:48) and a future consummation (face to face, 1 Corinthians 13:12).

The Christocentric lens does not allow “the perfect” to float free of the ongoing call to mature love. Whatever else “the perfect” includes, it includes what Jesus commanded in the Sermon on the Mount.

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Jesus’s Teaching on His Own Return

Whatever weight the maturity-reading of teleios carries, Jesus was equally clear that his own return is a future, definitive, public event that will transform the condition of his people.

In his Upper Room discourse, Jesus made a promise as simple as any in the Gospels:

“And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.” --- John 14:3 (KJV)

After the resurrection, as the disciples watched him ascend, two angels confirmed the manner of his return:

“Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven? this same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven.” --- Acts 1:11 (KJV)

“This same Jesus” --- not a spiritual influence, not a doctrine, not a completed canon, but the person himself, in like manner as he departed. The return is personal and visible.

In the Olivet Discourse, Jesus described the gathering that his return will effect:

“And then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.” --- Matthew 24:30-31 (KJV)

And the book of Revelation --- given in the name of Jesus, delivered to John by his angel --- brings the arc to its conclusion:

“And they shall see his face; and his name shall be in their foreheads.” --- Revelation 22:4 (KJV)

“They shall see his face.” This is the ultimate face-to-face: not a mirror, not a dark speech, not prophetic mediation, but the unobstructed vision of Christ’s face by every believer in the consummated kingdom.

The Christocentric trajectory is clear: from present partial knowledge, through the Spirit’s ongoing work, to the moment when Christ appears and every believer sees him as he is (1 John 3:2). That final “face to face” of Revelation 22:4 is the destination toward which Paul’s “then face to face” in 1 Corinthians 13:12 is pointing --- if the eschatological reading is correct.

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The “Already/Not Yet” in Jesus’s Teaching

Jesus’s teaching on the kingdom of God contains a sustained tension that any reading of “the perfect” must reckon with: the kingdom is both present and future, already here and still coming.

He said:

“The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.” --- Luke 17:20-21 (KJV)

The kingdom is within you --- present, interior, active now.

And yet he taught his disciples to pray:

“Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.” --- Matthew 6:10 (KJV)

The kingdom is coming --- future, not yet fully arrived, still to be consummated.

The parables he told about the kingdom point in both directions simultaneously. The mustard seed and the leaven (Matthew 13:31-33) describe organic growth --- slow, incremental, process-oriented. The kingdom grows from small beginnings to great completion; it does not arrive all at once. But the ten virgins and the thief in the night (Matthew 25:1-13; Matthew 24:43) describe a sudden, unannounced arrival --- an event that catches some prepared and others not. The same kingdom is simultaneously a process and an event.

This Christological tension maps directly onto the debate about 1 Corinthians 13:10. If the kingdom is both growing now (mustard seed) and arriving then (the bridegroom at midnight), then “the perfect” may participate in the same already/not yet structure. There is a present dimension: maturity in love, growth in knowledge, the Spirit’s ongoing teaching. And there is a future dimension: the arrival of Christ himself, the “face to face” that requires his appearing.

It would be a mistake, christologically speaking, to flatten this tension in either direction --- to say “the perfect” is only a present process (as some maturity readings do) or only a future eschatological event (as some cessationist readings do). Jesus did not flatten the tension. He held it, and let the parables do their work in both directions at once.

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Jesus’s Priorities: How We Handle Disagreement

The final Christocentric word on this question is the most practical, and perhaps the most demanding.

On the night before his death, Jesus prayed for those who would believe through the apostolic witness --- which is to say, he prayed for every reader of 1 Corinthians 13 who has ever argued about what “the perfect” means:

“Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word; That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me. And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one: I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one…” --- John 17:20-23 (KJV)

“That they may be made perfect in one.” The word is again teteleiōmenoi (τετελειωμένοι) --- from the same root as teleios, to teleion. Whatever “the perfect” is, Jesus prays that its character will mark his people in their unity.

He also provided a framework for resolving disputes:

“Moreover if thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone: if he shall hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother.” --- Matthew 18:15 (KJV)

The aim of the process is “gained thy brother” --- not “won the argument,” not “established the doctrine,” but preserved the relationship.

The Christocentric test for how we hold any position about “the perfect” is not merely: Is my exegesis correct? It is: Am I holding this position in a way that promotes love and preserves unity? A technically precise cessationist who treats charismatics with contempt has failed the love test. A charismatic who dismisses cessationist concerns as faithlessness has failed the unity test. The exegetical question and the relational question cannot be separated --- not in Jesus’s teaching.

This is not a call to unprincipled tolerance. Paul himself was capable of sharp disagreement. But the manner of holding and debating convictions about gifts must pass through John 17 before it reaches any pulpit or any comment section.

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Summary: What the Christocentric Lens Reveals

The Christocentric examination of 1 Corinthians 13:10 yields the following:

On “face to face”: The phrase carries deep Mosaic typology. Moses had “face to face” knowledge of God uniquely, and Paul’s contrast between present mirror-and-enigma knowledge and future face-to-face knowledge draws on that tradition. Jesus is the new and greater Moses, the one who has fully declared the Father. The ultimate “face to face” is seeing Christ himself, as 1 John 3:2 and Revelation 22:4 both confirm. The Christocentric reading strongly favors a personal, eschatological referent for “face to face.”

On present maturity: Matthew 5:48 establishes that teleios is not only eschatological. Jesus uses the same root to describe what his disciples must pursue now. This provides Christological support for readings of “the perfect” that include present maturity and growth --- though it does not exclude the eschatological dimension.

On the Spirit: John 14:26 and 16:12-15 confirm that the move from partial knowledge to complete truth is Pneumatological. The Spirit is the agent of the transition Paul describes. Whether the Spirit’s work of guiding into “all truth” was completed with the apostolic canon or continues to unfold is a question the Christocentric lens alone cannot resolve.

On love: Jesus’s teaching is unambiguous. Love is supreme. Gifts serve love; love does not serve gifts. Whatever “the perfect” is, it is not a state where love becomes less important. It is the state where love is finally unimpeded.

On the already/not yet: Jesus consistently held together the present and future dimensions of the kingdom. “The perfect” likely participates in this same tension --- a present pursuit and a future arrival.

On disagreement: John 17 and Matthew 18 demand that the manner of holding convictions about gifts be as subject to the love test as any other aspect of Christian life. Exegetical confidence does not exempt anyone from the command to love.

The Christocentric lens does not produce a verdict. It produces a richer question, and a more demanding one: Whatever “the perfect” is, are we pursuing it in a way that looks like the one who promised to come again?

Chapter 3 examines how the earliest Christians --- those within one to two generations of the apostles --- understood 1 Corinthians 13:10 and the question of the gifts.