This is part of a Bible study I’m leading on 1 Corinthians.
Introduction
Chapters 5 and 6 are quite challenging. In chapter 1 through the middle of chapter 4, Paul stressed how the “foolishness” of the cross overturns human claims to wisdom and emphasized that within the church we are all “rich” and “kings” without any need to judge each other. But at the end of chapter 4, Paul begins to turn to the problems in the church at Corinth, and in Chapters 5 and 6, he both passes judgment on the cause of those problems and instructs the Corinthians to exercise their own judgment. How can we understand this dramatic shift?
We could say Paul is just inconsistent, and maybe that’s correct, but Paul also obviously is smart enough to see such inconsistency. It’s helpful here to remember that 1 Corinthians is only one piece of correspondence between Paul and the church at Corinth. We’re glimpsing part of a broader dialogue about power, influence, and corruption in the church body. At the end of chapter 4, Paul noted that “some” of the Corinthians had “become arrogant.” (4:18.) In Chapters 5 and 6, he addresses the problems caused by those “arrogant” people.
There are three large problems related to these “arrogant” people: (1) a man is sexually involved with his “father’s wife” (given the phrasing, probably not the man’s biological mother)(5:1); (2) Litigation in the Roman courts between members of the congregation (6:1); and (3) Members of the congregation were using prostitutes (6:15).
All of these problems seem to have related to an attitude or spiritual teaching among some of the Corinthian church members: “All things are lawful for me.” (6:12.) And in connection with that attitude, these seem to have been open and notorious activities, not just secret vices. The people involved in these activities were gravely wounding and dividing the church, asserting what they thought were absolute privileges against other members of the body, destroying the basis for peace.
Chapter 5: The Ecclesial Center
In Chapter 5 Paul addresses the first big problem in the Corinthian church, the man sleeping with his father’s wife. Notice that this is not merely a case of Jewish / Christian moralism: Paul says even the pagans would be scandalized by this kind of conduct. (5:2.) Paul’s judgment is harsh: “When you are assembled . . . you are to hand this man over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord.” (5:5, NRSV)
“Flesh” (Greek sarx) in Paul’s letters is a term for that which is bound to the powers of the world, which Paul often contrasts with “spirit” (Greek pneuma), a term for the power of the Kingdom of God. The NRSV correctly translates “the flesh,” but it assumes “his spirit” when the article “the” (to) rather than the personal pronoun “his” (autos) is used. This is not necessarily an invalid grammatical assumption, but it can mask that Paul’s concern is not about retribution against this one man but rather is about preserving the ekklesia, the church, against the “powers” of the world.
We don’t know what may have been involved in the community “handing over” the man to “Satan.” “Hand over” (Greek paradidómi) can include delivering someone to military or judicial custody (see Matt. 10:17), betrayal (as in the betrayal of Jesus, see Matt. 10:4), and handing over goods in trust (Matt. 25:20). We might imagine some kind of rite of excommunication in which the man is put out of the assembly, but we don’t know for sure.
If the idea of formally putting someone out of the assembly isn’t difficult enough to our modern ears, the reference to “Satan” is even more shocking. In the Hebrew Scriptures, “the satan” seems to be an angelic being in God’s heavenly court whom God employs to accuse or test people (see, e.g., Job 1). In some of the Second Temple apocryphal literature, a motif develops of heavenly beings or angels who are in rebellion against God, drawn in large part from the strange mention of the nephilim in Genesis 6. Among the characters in the Second Temple literature there’s even a good archangel named “Metatron,” which to our ears sounds like something from a Transformers movie.
Remember that Paul is swimming in this Second Temple Jewish stream, in a Roman culture alive with gods and demons. That is not our culture in the modern global North. It is, though, very much part of many cultures today in the global South. Perhaps our “flat” modern worldview, so tied to our concepts of “natural laws” and physical causes, is missing something here. Perhaps we can imagine that “natural” and “supernatural” causes need not exclude each other, but might represent different facets or lenses through which we understand the phenomena we encounter.
What about the seemingly harsh instruction to exclude someone from the assembly? The fact is that any community requires boundaries. As we are working through this part of the text, we see in our nation right now the protests over the death of George Floyd. I’m sure we all agree that police officers should not use excessive force and should not target black men. I’m sure we also agree that everyone has a right to peaceful protest but not to loot and riot. Abusive police officers must be removed from the force, police officers who commit violent crimes must be prosecuted, and racism must have no home among law enforcers. Looters and rioters must be stopped and people who incite violence must be removed from the streets. Without some boundaries, we can’t have a community committed to the values we hold dear.
This is also true in the community of the church. We are more likely today to think of boundaries for behavior during public worship rather than for what we consider private conduct. Imagine, for example, a person who stood up in the sanctuary and shouted obscenities whenever one of the Pastors began to speak (or in our present circumstance, someone who flooded the Zoom chat with pornographic pictures). We would probably agree that such a person should be kept out of the public worship gathering.
It seems strange to us, though, that Paul would exclude a person for private sexual conduct, even for something as flagrant as sleeping with one’s stepmother. Yet even here, we can consider a contemporary parallel. All the Pastors and Elders in our church recently completed a “Safe Church” training regarding sexual abuse. Sadly, we know that churches are prime ground for child sexual abuse, and that Priests, Pastors, and other leaders often are the abusers. Again, I’m sure all of us would agree that a church leader who is sexually abusing children must be removed from the church and reported to authorities.
In the context at Corinth, Paul connects the problem to arrogance and employs a familiar metaphor: that of microscopic yeast leavening a loaf of dough. (5:6-8.) We all know from experience how quickly a bad attitude can spread through a community. Note how Paul connects this metaphor to Christ, and to the Lord’s supper. The “paschal lamb” is the pascha, the Greek word for the Jewish Passover and by extension for the lamb sacrificed at Passover. Paul wants to celebrate the “feast,” the Lord’s supper, “not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.” (5:8.) Later in the letter (Chapter 11), Paul will mention specific problems with the Corinthians’ celebration of the Lord’s Supper: “When you come together, it is not really to eat the Lord’s supper. For when the time comes to eat, each of you goes ahead with your own supper, and one goes hungry and another becomes drunk.” (11:20-21.)
Note also Paul’s instruction about the list of bad people at the end of chapter 5 — those who are sexually immoral, greedy, idolaters, revilers, drunkards or robbers: “do note even eat with such a one.” (5:11.) Assemblies of the early churches were small, often met in homes, and the Lord’s Supper was part of a communal meal. A person around the table behaving in such ways could exert significant influence over the fragile community. The communal meal was to be a time of unity and fellowship, not of sexual license, drunkenness, or nasty arguments (“revilers” is loidoros, someone who is abusive, insulting, denigrating of others’ reputations).
Perhaps it was even at these gatherings that the man boasted — maybe loudly and drunkenly, from one faction’s table — about sleeping with his father’s wife. Imagine that Paul received a report like this: “Every time we meet for the Lord’s supper, Antipas and his friends sit at their own table. They get to drinking, telling racy jokes, singing drinking songs, and inevitably Antipas begins loudly boasting about how he’s sleeping with his father’s hot trophy wife behind his father’s back. We’ve asked him to stop but he just laughs at us and says ‘Well, I’m not perfect, just forgiven.’” That’s a fictional reconstruction, of course, but maybe not too far from what was happening.
What can a text like this mean for a local church or denominational body today? Is “church discipline” a set of rigid rules through which people are shunned or excommunicated? Is it a kind of judicial process, with a body of canon law that determines appropriate penalties? Should we follow Paul’s instructions here, or Jesus’ example of eating with “sinners?” Should we refuse to worship with anyone who is greedy, who idolizes their work, or who says nasty things on social media? We might find no one left in the sanctuary if that were the case. Our primary take-away from this section of 1 Corinthians, perhaps, should be that the community will always need to discern ways to protect its integrity. We will learn elsewhere in 1 Corinthians about doing so in love and with respect for legitimate differences in belief and conduct.
Another important qualifier in this section is Paul’s comment about judging “outsiders” versus those on the “inside.” Paul says the members of the church are not to withdraw from the world or judge the world. (5:10, 14.) These matters of judgment are for the internal health of the church community.
What about Paul’s statement in chapter 4 that we should not pronounce judgment on others within the church (4:1-5)? Again, this could just reflect confusion or inconsistency in Paul’s thought, but it seems unlikely someone as skilled as Paul would make such an obvious mistake in the span of a few paragraphs. In chapter 4, Paul focuses on the final judgment of whether or not someone’s work has built up the church. In chapter 5, Paul focuses on questions of discipline related to specific kinds of conduct. There seem to be two different levels of “judgment” at work here: a final, broad evaluation of work using different ideas or methods that is within the general scope of the community’s purpose; and an immediate, discrete response to a clear, specific threat to the community. The first kind of judgment Paul says we should leave to God. The second kind of judgment Paul says we must employ when necessary to protect the community’s health.
Some Discussion Questions on Chapter 5
- How would you understand the “natural” and the “supernatural?” How can we modern people in a scientific age relate to the “supernatural” worldview of a text like 1 Corinthians? Are there things about this we can learn from cultures in today’s Global South?
- What do you think about the comment above that “any community requires boundaries?” Are the concepts of “welcome” and “boundaries” mutually exclusive?
- Do you have a concept of church discipline? If so, how do you think it should function?
Chapter 6: Boundaries, Lawsuits, Cosmic Judgment, and Sex
In chapter 6, Paul introduces a third kind of judgment, that of the secular law courts. Paul’s consternation that members of the church at Corinth are taking their disputes to the secular law courts connects with his discussion of “insider vs. outsider” judgment in Chapter 5. The church community should manage its own affairs, according to its own values and standards. One mark of maturity within a church community, Paul says, is the ability to resolve disputes internally, without airing those disputes before the world, even if one of the parties does not recover all of the money that might be available in the secular courts. (6:1-8.)
This section presents its own challenges in our context. The clerical sexual abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church were abetted by a culture of silence, in which offenders were lightly disciplined internally and governmental authorities were not involved. We are beginning to learn that this kind of problem extended to other church polities as well. Sadly, it is not only a Catholic problem.
If we use this text to justify a church polity’s institutional abuses, obviously, we miss the point. The kinds of lawsuits in the church at Corinth seemed to a claim of financial fraud, and the plaintiff in the case also appears to have been engaged in his or her own fraud (6:7-8.). If you’ve ever been involved in a lawsuit among the owners of a small, family-owned business, you might have a feel for what this kind of dispute is like. That kind of case, among the families in a close-knit church community, is something the community should find a way to mediate before it hits the courts and the newspapers. (Even here, we will find it difficult to draw lines. What about a diamond-studded televangelist who defrauds his followers out of their life savings based on false claims that the money is going to mission work, and who refuses all efforts at mediation?)
Paul also introduces a fourth kind of judgment in Chapter 6, often overlooked in discussions about whether or when Christians should judge each other: an eschatological judgment, but not the kind we might expect. Paul says “the saints” will judge the world (cosmon) and angels. (6:2-3.) Remember that in chapter 4, Paul told the Corinthians they owned “all things,” including the present and the future, and that they were already “kings.” (1 Cor. 3:21-22, 4:8.) And remember that many of the people in the Corinthian congregation were not from the higher classes of society. Paul again dramatically turns the social order on its head, not only the Greco-Roman social order, but also the Jewish expectation of warrior king Messiah in the line of David. This group of common people is so important that the fate of the cosmos and of the angels is held in its hands.
In verses 9-11 Paul recites a list of types of people who will not “inherit the kingdom of God.” These “vice lists” are common in Paul’s letters, as are “virtue lists,” and such lists also were a feature of Greco-Roman Stoic moral literature. Paul says that some of the Corinthian church members used to be people on the vice list, but that they have been “washed,” “sanctified,” and “justified” “in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.” (6:11).
These terms in verse 11 are theologically rich. The use of the word “washed” in conjunction with the phrase “in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God” suggests a baptismal connection, particularly in light of Paul’s discussion of baptism in Chapter 1. “Sanctified,” as we said in our discussion of Chapter 1 (see 1:2), derives from the word hagios, meaning “holy.” “Justified,” as we saw in our discussion of Chapter 4 (4:4), derives from the word dikaioo, which entails righteousness and justice.
Paul tells the Corinthians they have been washed, sanctified, and justified in the midst of his harsh criticism of their conduct. This suggests that there is an already / not yet quality to these terms. By virtue of their baptism and because of the Spirit of God, the Corinthians are already washed, sanctified, and justified, even though their conduct, at present, is not living up to those terms.
There are major, intractable debates among the different Christian denominations, and even within the different denominations, about the precise nature of baptism, sanctification, and justification. With our focus on this particular text in 1 Corinthians, however, we can at least say this: our baptism is a defining event; the “name” of Jesus Christ is a defining name for us; the event and the name are not static or mechanical but are connected to the Spirit of God; and the result is that we actually become clean, holy, and righteous/just, even as we remain in a struggle with sin.
A few aspects of this vice list deserve some special comment. The NRSV translates one of the words “fornicators” and two other words “male prostitutes” and “sodomites.” Some translations have rendered the last two words “homosexuals” or “men who have sex with men.” These are among the “clobber texts” in our current culture wars within the churches about homosexuality.
The word translated “fornicators” is pornoi, which you will recognize is the source of our word pornography. Pornos in the New Testament is a generic term for sexual immorality. Of course, the Jewish culture that gave birth to the New Testament considered any sexual relations outside of marriage immoral. The word translated “male prostitutes” in the NRSV is malakoi, which was a term used for effeminate men. In its broader cultural usage, it does not really refer to male prostitutes or to any specific sexual conduct. The word translated “sodomites” in the NRSV is arsenokoitai, a word that Paul seems to have invented. We can’t be sure exactly what Paul meant by arsenokoitai, although there is a plausible argument that it refers to elements of the Greek translation of a text in the Old Testament about men lying with men. Although it is mentioned only briefly in the Old Testament, ancient Jewish teaching forbade same-sex conduct.
The traditional view is that Paul likewise condemns all same-sex conduct, at least between men, as a permanent moral norm. This is consistent with some even more difficult sayings of Paul about same-sex conduct in Romans chapter 1. But it’s also true that there was no category of stable, inherent “homosexual” identity in the ancient world, nor was there any social structure for same-sex marriages. The same-sex conduct with which Paul would have been most familiar would have involved prostitution and/or abusive relationships between men and boys — often boys who were slaves or under the man’s tutelage. This has led some scholars and church leaders to conclude, given our contemporary understanding of sexual identity, that a Christian sexual ethic can incorporate same-sex marriages. In North America and Europe, this issue currently is dividing many of the churches. (For one good discussion of the hermeneutical question as a matter of corporate discernment, see Oliver O’Donovan, Church in Crisis: The Gay Controversy and the Anglican Communion (Eugene: Cascade Books 2008)).
We might also ask some broader questions about Christian sexual ethics. We think of marriage ideally as a union between two adults who have fallen in love and who both freely and equally enter into the union. In the ancient Roman world, things were more complicated. There were different marriage and divorce rules and norms practiced by the Roman elite and common people. Marriage among elites often involved property, political status, and family alliances rather than romantic love. Among the elites, celibacy was discouraged and sometimes penalized because marriage was considered a duty to the state (marriage produced children, who were new subjects of the state, and increased taxes). Roman women enjoyed a relatively greater degree of freedom than in other parts of the ancient world, but they were still considered subordinate to men. A Roman married man could indulge in informal polygamy with slaves and prostitutes without adverse legal or social consequences. In the Jewish subculture during Roman times, people likewise married young (usually between puberty and the age of 20) and with help from community match-making.
Even though Paul does not completely reject the Roman-Jewish view of marriage, he does say a number of counter-cultural things about the marriage relationship in 1 Corinthians, particularly in Chapter 7, where he advocates celibacy. In Chapter 11, Paul reiterates traditional Jewish and Roman views about the priority of the man / husband, but there and in other letters he also emphasizes the man’s dependence on the woman. This emphasis also may have been somewhat counter-cultural, or at least drew out themes from Jewish and Roman sources concerning the mutual interdependence of the man and woman / husband and wife that were often ignored in practice.
Perhaps the over-arching point we can take from this vice list is that in matters of sexuality no less than in matters of honesty and commerce, there are forms of behavior that foster the kind of community God desires and forms of behavior that destroy such community. To “inherit the kingdom of God,” now and in the eschatological future, is to be part of God’s peaceable community. It’s not a list of arbitrary rules that we must keep on pain of exclusion, but the relationships truly matter, and sex is a foundational element of deep human relationships.
Paul makes this connection clear at the end of Chapter 6 in his discussion of members of the Corinthian community who were consorting with prostitutes. The “body” metaphor for the church is important to Paul and he will come back to it later in the letter (Chapter 12). If we are united to God by his spirit, we in our bodies are the temple of God (6:17-20). Paul has already employed the “temple” metaphor in Chapter 3, in connection with the community as a whole (3:16-17). The individual body, the individual temple, is interwoven with the corporate body, the corporate temple, the church. This kind of personal sexual sin, then, hurts not only the individual involved, but the corporate body.
Some feminist commentators have observed that Paul pays no attention to the plight of the prostitute — a good point. In the ancient world, like today, women who worked as prostitutes usually had little choice, because they were enslaved or impoverished. We can also suggest that using prostitutes is a moral problem because it so often involves a terrible power dynamic, in which a man exploits a woman. Of course, as in the ancient world, today there are male prostitutes as well as female, and, as in the ancient world, today some people choose to engage in sex work without physical or economic coercion. The broader issue of prostitution / sex work is more complicated than a single moralistic statement can capture.
Nevertheless, with whatever careful qualifications we might make about our cultural differences from Paul’s context, a Christian sexual ethic will emphasize the proper place of sex within marriage. This is not because we’re prudes but because we value the unique commitment of marriage and the gift of sexuality that seals this commitment. When we abuse the gift of our sexuality we move ourselves and our community away from the kingdom of God.
Some Discussion Questions on Chapter 6
- When, if ever, do you think it is appropriate for Christians to bring other Christians before the secular law courts? Have you ever thought of the secular law courts, and the temporal law, as a locus of “power” that can conflict with the kingdom of God?
- How do you understand your baptism? How do you think Paul’s concepts of “washed,” “sanctified,” and “justified” relate to each other?
- What do you think is the significance of Paul’s eschatological comment that we (the church) will judge the cosmos and judge angels?
- How can we express, and live, a Christian sexual ethic in our culture?
I sometimes suggest that the Reformed tradition is like a Weeble. Do you remember those toys? “Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down!” These were egg-shaped toys with a heavily weighted bottom. You could press the toys in any direction and they could lean out, but then return to center. I think of the church’s creeds and confessions as the weighted bottom of my theoretical questioning: they provide a center of gravity that enables me to lean out into the hard questions. Granted, our churches often are not comfortable with fostering an ethos of curiosity and questioning, even though God is not at all frightened by such things. Again, I think it’s important for Christian scholars to model what faithful questioning looks like.