C. Fornication (6:12–20)
C. Fornication (6:12–20)
Paul has spoken of a specific case of incest (ch. 5). Now he deals with the general principle governing sexual practices. First he shows that what the Christian does with the body is determined by what God has done for him (12–14). Then he goes on to apply this to the specific evil of sexual sin (15–20).
12. Everything is permissible for me occurs twice here and twice more in 10:23. It looks like a catch-phrase the Corinthians used to justify their conduct, possibly one they had derived from Paul’s teaching when he was among them. He would perhaps have said something like this by way of an assertion of Christian freedom over against Jewish legalism and the like. Other religions laid down rules that must be kept if people were to be saved (food laws were especially common). To abstain from specified forbidden things was a necessary part of attaining salvation. Not so Christianity. The believer will avoid evil things, but this is not a path of merit, earning salvation. Salvation is all of grace. It depends on what God has done in Christ. The believer is not hedged around with a multitude of restrictions. All things are lawful. But this liberty must be lived out in the spirit of Augustine’s maxim, ‘Love, and do what you will.’ If we love, in the sense in which the New Testament understands love, we need no other guide. The Corinthians, however, were taking Christian liberty to mean, not an unbounded opportunity to show the scope of love, but an incredible means of gratifying their own desires.
Paul agrees with the statement of Christian freedom, but he immediately goes on to an important qualification: not everything is beneficial. Some things are not expressly forbidden, but their results are such as to rule them out for the believer. There is a second reason for caution, I will not be mastered by anything. There is a play on words which Edwards (following Chrysostom) renders, ‘All things are in my power, but I shall not be overpowered by anything.’ There is some emphasis on ‘not I’. Paul would not allow himself to be brought under the control of anyone or anything. How could he when he was ‘the slave of Christ’ (7:22; Rom. 1:1, etc.)? There is an ever-present danger that we bring ourselves into bondage to the very things we do by way of asserting our Christian freedom.
13. ‘Food for the stomach and the stomach for food’ looks like another expression used by the Corinthians. Eating is a natural activity, and they apparently held that one bodily function is much like another. Fornication is as natural as eating. Paul rejects this with decision. The belly and food are transient (‘God has no permanent plans for the stomach!’, Wilson); in due course God will do away with both (for destroy see note on ‘nullify’ in 1:28). But the body is not destined to be destroyed. It is to be transformed and glorified (15:44, 51; cf. Matt. 22:30; Phil. 3:21). There is no such connection between the body and sensual lusts as between the stomach and food. God did not design the body for sexual immorality as he did the stomach for food. Rather the connection is between the body and the Lord. Most agree that whereas sarx, ‘flesh’, expressed for Paul thoughts like those of man in his weakness, his sin and his fallen estate, sōma, ‘body’, is rather the whole personality, man as a person meant for God. ‘While sarx stands for man, in the solidarity of creation, in his distance from God, sōma stands for man, in the solidarity of creation, as made for God’ (J. A. T. Robinson, The Body [SCM Press, 1952], p. 31). The body cannot be dismissed as unimportant; the body is for the Lord. It is the instrument wherein we serve God. It is the means whereby we glorify God. The Lord for the body shows that just as food is necessary if the stomach is to function, so is the Lord necessary if the body is to function. It is only as God enables us that we can live the kind of life for which we were meant.
14. The resurrection dominated early Christian thinking, as we see from the early chapters of Acts, and, indeed, from the whole New Testament. That the Father raised the Son from the dead, and did not simply cause his soul to persist through bodily dissolution, shows something of the dignity of the body. Bodily life enshrines permanent values. The resurrection forbids us to take the body lightly. Here, as usually in the New Testament, the resurrection is attributed to the action of the Father (though occasionally we read of Jesus rising). Closely connected is the future resurrection of believers, a subject Paul will deal with at greater length in ch. 15. Here it is enough for him to draw attention to the fact of the resurrection as showing the importance of the body. If it is to be raised it must not be put into the category of things that will be destroyed. That this is due to the divine initiative is stressed in the reference to his power. There is an exact correspondence. Food is for the stomach and the stomach for food, and the end of both is destruction. The body is for the Lord and the Lord for the body, and resurrection is the destiny of both. In passing we notice that Paul classes himself with the dead at the parousia (as in 2 Cor. 4:14); he can also put himself among the living (1 Thess. 4:15). It is precarious to draw inferences from such statements about whether he thought he would live until the parousia or not.
15. For the fourth time in this chapter Paul appeals to what his readers know with Do you not know …? Members (melē) is the ordinary word for parts of the body (cf. Rom. 6:13, 19). That believers are the body of Christ is more fully developed elsewhere (12:12ff.; Eph. 5:23ff.). The point here is that believers are united to Christ in the closest fashion; they are ‘in Christ’; they are members of his body. It is this that makes sexual vice so abhorrent. The word rendered take (airō) means ‘take away’; the horrible thing about this sin is that the members of Christ are taken away from their proper use (the service of Christ) and made ‘members (melē again) of a prostitute’. The sinner is, of course, not ‘a member’ of a prostitute in the same sense as he is ‘a member’ of Christ. But the use of the same word both times brings out something of the intimacy and incongruity of the union with the prostitute. There is a horrible profanation of that which should be used only for Christ. This would be even more so if the Corinthian prostitute was connected with the temple, for then the act would form a link with the deity. Paul recoils from it with an emphatic Never! This renders mē genoito, ‘may it not be’. All but one of the New Testament occurrences of this expression are in the Pauline writings, though this is the only example in this epistle. It is a strong repudiation of the suggestion that has been made. Paul will have nothing to do with it. ‘Perish the thought!’
16. Yet again Paul appeals to what his readers know. The view he is expounding of the nature of the sexual act is no private opinion, but one known and accepted by the Corinthians, and one found in Scripture (Gen. 2:24). D. S. Bailey says that Paul’s application of this passage ‘displays a psychological insight into human sexuality which is altogether exceptional by first-century standards’ and he goes on to speak of the act as ‘an unique mode of self-disclosure and self-commitment’ (cited by Bruce). The Corinthians had not thought through the implications of their sexual laxity. Anyone who unites with a prostitute by that act becomes one with her. ‘Casual sex’ is anything but casual. It is an act of sacrilege. Temples like our bodies are not meant for profanations like this.
17. As in v. 16, Paul uses the strong verb kollaō (unites), a word used of close bonds of various kinds. In the literal sense it means ‘to glue’; it comes to have metaphorical meanings, but clearly it points to a very close tie, indeed. In v. 16 Paul uses it of the physical bond with the harlot. Those who share the sexual act become ‘one body’. Now he uses the same verb for the spiritual tie that links the believer to the Lord. Those joined by the spiritual tie become ‘one spirit’. Believers are one with their Lord. They have ‘the mind of Christ’ (2:16). They react the way the Lord would react.
18. Flee fornication, says Paul. The present imperative indicates the habitual action, ‘Make it your habit to flee’. It cannot be satisfactorily dealt with by any less drastic measures. The believer must not temporize with it, but flee the very thought. Paul goes on to suggest that this sin strikes at the very roots of our being. He does not say that it is the most serious of all sins, but that its relation to the body is unique. Other sins may have effects on the body, but this sin, and this sin only, means that a man takes that body that is ‘a member of Christ’ and puts it into a union which ‘blasts his own body’ (Way). Other sins against the body, e.g. drunkenness or gluttony, involve the use of that which comes from outside the body. The sexual appetite arises from within. They serve other purposes, e.g. conviviality. This has no purpose other than the gratification of the lusts. They are sinful in the excess. This is sinful in itself. And fornication involves a man in what Godet calls ‘a degrading physical solidarity, incompatible with the believer’s spiritual solidarity with Christ’. The sexual sinner sins against his own body. Moule suggests that All sins (other is an insertion of NIV) a man commits are outside his body is the slogan of some of the Corinthians, meaning ‘physical lust cannot touch the secure “personality” of the initiated’. To this Paul retorts: ‘on the contrary: anyone who commits fornication is committing an offence against his very “personality” ’ (IBNTG, pp. 196f.). J. Murphy-O’Connor rejects the idea that ‘body’ can mean ‘personality’ and holds that the Corinthians were saying that ‘the body has nothing to do with sin … sin takes place on an entirely different level of one’s being’ (CBQ, 40, 1977, p. 393). Whichever way we take it, Paul’s rejoinder is that the body is sacred. And the resurrection shows that it has permanent values.
19. For the sixth time in this chapter Paul drives home his appeal to what the Corinthians know so well with his argumentative question, Do you not know …? Earlier he had referred to the church as a whole as God’s temple (3:16), but here body is singular, so that each believer is a temple in which God dwells. The word is naos, which means the sacred shrine, the sanctuary, the place where deity dwells, not hieron, which includes the entire precincts. This gives a dignity to the whole of life, such as nothing else could do. Wherever we go we are the bearers of the Holy Ghost, the temples in which God is pleased to dwell. This rules out all such conduct as is not appropriate to the temple of God. Its application to fornication is obvious, but the principle is of far wider application. Nothing that would be amiss in God’s temple is seemly in the child of God.
This verse sheds light on the way Paul regarded the Spirit. The temple is the place where God dwells; that is its distinguishing characteristic. Now the One who dwells in this temple is the Holy Spirit, who is thus seen to be divine. This comes out also in the expression, whom you have received from God. The Spirit within man is the gift of God, not the result of some man-induced experience. And because the temple is God’s and because the believer is that temple it follows that the believer is God’s.
20. The reason is you were bought at a price (Goodspeed, ‘you have been bought and paid for’). There is possibly an antithesis to the price paid to a prostitute (Ruef thinks that this ‘is not a very delicate way of putting it, but the Corinthians were probably not very delicate people’). The verb is in the aorist tense, which points to a single decisive action in time past. Paul mentions neither the occasion nor the price, but there is no need. Clearly he is referring to Calvary, where Christ gave his life to purchase sinners. The imagery is that of redemption, perhaps what scholars call ‘sacral manumission’. By this process a slave would save the price of his freedom, pay it into the temple treasury of a god, and then be purchased by the deity. Technically he was the slave of the god, but as far as men were concerned he was free. Deissmann says that the words used here are ‘the very formula of the records’ (LAE, p. 324). Of course Paul is not saying that Christ’s redemption corresponded exactly to sacral manumission; it is the terminology, not the precise process that is significant. And the price paid for sinners was no pious fiction, but the very real price of the death of the Saviour. The result is to bring us into a sphere where we are free (cf. ‘Everything is permissible for me’, v. 12). But we are God’s slaves. He has bought us to be his own. We belong to him. Héring comments on this appeal to act in accordance with the truth that the body is God’s temple: ‘we are probably witnessing here the first attempt in the history of moral thought to refute libertinism in some other way than by the arguments of an ascetic, legalistic or utilitarian type’. We should miss neither the originality nor the force of Paul’s argument.
The obligation now rests on us to honour God (cf. Rom. 12:1). This is the positive where ‘flee fornication’ is the negative. The prime motive in the service of the Christian is not the aim of accomplishing purposes attractive to him personally, but the glory of God. Therefore translates dē, a shortened form of ēdē, ‘already’. It is sometimes added to an imperative to give it a note of greater urgency. ‘Do it so speedily that it is already done!’ The use of the aorist rather than the present imperative agrees with this. There is an urgency about it. Let there be no delay.