FAITH. HOPE. LOVE. For centuries of church history, these have been known as the “theological virtues.” Traditionally, they’ve been held together with the four “cardinal” virtues: first, prudence or wisdom; second, justice or fairness; third, fortitude or courage; and finally, temperance or self-control. The moral life is thought to hinge on these latter four virtues — the word “cardinal” comes from the Latin word for “hinge” — and their role in moral philosophy can be traced all the way back to Plato and Aristotle.

But in Christian thought, the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and love are given by God. As we’ve seen, Paul mentions them together at the end of First Corinthians 13:

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. (1 Cor 13:13, NIV)

Throughout the letters of Paul, we can see places where he mentions one of the three in the context of at least one of the other two. The love chapter isn’t the only place where Paul puts the three together. In First Thessalonians, for example, he writes this:

But since we belong to the day, let us be sober, putting on faith and love as a breastplate, and the hope of salvation as a helmet. (1 Thess 5:8)

He says this in the context of answering what seems to be a question from the Thessalonians about when Jesus would return. Paul, of course, doesn’t have a date and time they can put in an appointment book. Rather, he says, they should expect that “the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night” (1 Thess 5:2) — but they don’t need to worry, for they are children of the light and not of the darkness, of the day and not the night (vs. 5). They should therefore live in a way that looks ahead toward the return of Jesus and the day of salvation, while protected in the present by the armor of faith, hope, and love.

Passages like these help us understand the nature of biblical faith and hope. We sometimes use the word “faith” as a noun, referring to “the faith” as a religious tradition or set of beliefs. That’s fine as far as it goes. But we mustn’t forget that at root, faith is an orientation toward God: we believe in God and trust what he says.

On the basis of such faith, then, we also have hope; we specifically trust in the future God has promised. Biblical hope isn’t mere wishful thinking, as in my wife and I “hoping” for good weather on our upcoming vacation. Rather, hope means the faithful expectancy that God will do what he says, and as a virtue, it means to live every day in light of that expectation. In a specifically New Testament hope, we look confidently toward the day that Jesus will return. In that day, our salvation will be complete, and we will live eternally with God in resurrection bodies.

Such are the virtues of faith and hope. But what makes love the greatest of the three?

BY THE TIME they reach the end of the love chapter, no one reading or listening to Paul’s letter should be surprised that he holds up love as the supreme virtue. After all, he’s already contrasted faith and love near the beginning of the chapter: “if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing” (vs. 2). In context, Paul is probably describing faith in this way because that’s how the Corinthians think about spiritual gifts: they’re to be desired for their wow factor. Hey, everybody, look at me. I can move mountains. Top that!

But even if their faith were uncontaminated by selfish motives, love would still be greater than faith and hope because love is eternal and the other two are not. That’s the whole gist of the latter part of chapter. We might think here of what the author of the book of Hebrews says about faith and hope:

Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. (Heb 11:1)

What happens, though, when we finally have what we hope for, what we’ve trusted God for? What happens when we can finally see what before we could only imagine? As Paul says elsewhere, “Who hopes for what they already have?” (Rom 8:24). When God’s promise has been fulfilled, we will no longer need faith and hope the way we did before.

But love? As the apostle John teaches:

Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. (1 John 4:7-8)

We are commanded to love, because love has its origin in the very nature of God. It wouldn’t make sense for John to say, “God is faith” or “God is hope.” Only love. And God’s love, John insists, has been demonstrated by the sacrificial death of his Son (1 John 4:9-10). We are therefore to embody that love in relationship to one another; this is what makes the character of God visible (vss. 11-12).

AS WE’VE SEEN, Paul transitions out of describing what love doesn’t do and back to what love does by saying that love “does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth” (1 Cor 13:6). He follows that statement with a rapid-fire addition of four more verbs applied to love:

It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. (1 Cor 13:7)

We’ll explore the first and last verbs in the list next time. For now, consider the middle two. Love, Paul says, “always trusts” and “always hopes.” Does that sound familiar? The word translated here as “trusts” is the verb form of the noun Paul uses at the end of the chapter to name the virtue of “faith.” Paul is saying that love always has faith, that love always hopes.

“Always,” that is, for now, for there will come a day in which love no longer needs faith and hope because God’s purposes for this broken world will at last be complete.

But until that day, as we’ll see next, love must persevere in faith and hope.