Verse explainer
Paul isn't calling anyone immature — he's saying our best knowledge now is childhood compared to what awaits, and love is what carries us across.
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
BSBWhen I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I set aside childish ways.
The plain meaning
This verse sits inside Paul's argument that love outlasts every spiritual gift. In vv. 9-10 he has just said 'we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away.' Verse 11 is his illustration: the gap between a child's speech and an adult's is real, but it's nothing compared to the gap between our present partial knowledge and the full knowing that is coming. The 'putting away' is not a put-down — it is natural, even joyful, growth. Jamieson, Fausset, and Brown note that Paul maps the three childish verbs onto the gifts: 'spake' to tongues, 'understood' to prophecy, 'thought/reasoned' to knowledge. All three are real and valuable now, but all three are the lisping first words of something far larger. The controlling point of the chapter is that love alone does not get 'put away' — it is the adult form, the permanent thing, not one of the passing partial gifts.
The common misreading
What the commentators say
Clarke draws the analogy out fully: our present spiritual state, however advanced, stands to the coming state of full blessedness as infant babbling stands to adult speech and reasoning. The child has real understanding, but it is narrow, instinct-like, and without experience. The adult has not destroyed childhood — he has fulfilled it. Clarke's point is that the verse is about proportion, not contempt.
JFB observe that Paul's three verbs are carefully chosen to mirror the three gifts under discussion: speaking (tongues), understanding or having the sentiments of (prophecy), and reasoning or judging (knowledge). Each gift is real but partial — a child's-eye view of reality. When the perfect state arrives, these partial instruments are not so much condemned as outgrown, in the same way a man's maturity does not condemn his childhood but completes it.
Gill, commenting on the surrounding verses, stresses that the contrast is between seeing 'through a glass darkly' now and face-to-face then. The child/adult image reinforces that gap: present knowledge, even apostolic knowledge, is partial and imperfect compared to the beatific knowledge awaiting believers. For Gill this humbles every claim to spiritual completeness in the present life.
The word behind it
'I have done away with' or 'I have rendered inoperative.' From katargeō — to bring something to nothing, to abolish, to set aside as no longer operative. The perfect tense conveys a completed action with ongoing effect: the man has permanently set aside childhood's mode. Crucially, Paul uses this same verb in v. 10 for the partial gifts being 'done away' when the perfect comes — making verse 11 a direct lived analogy for that theological claim.
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