Your Body is NOT Yours-1 Cor 6:12-20

𝑫𝒐 𝒘𝒆 𝒎𝒐𝒅𝒆𝒓𝒏𝒔 𝒕𝒓𝒖𝒍𝒚 𝒃𝒆𝒍𝒊𝒆𝒗𝒆 𝒕𝒉𝒂𝒕 OUR BODIES DO NOT BELONG TO US 𝒕𝒐 𝒅𝒐 𝒘𝒊𝒕𝒉 𝒊𝒕 𝒂𝒔 𝒘𝒆 𝒑𝒍𝒆𝒂𝒔𝒆?

“I‘m free to do anything” is the Corinthian Christian’s favorite slogan, for their idea of “wisdom” greatly emphasizes personal freedom. So, giving up their personal rights was unimaginable. Paul finds this very troubling. In 6:12-20, he attacks the roots of their community-destroying insistence upon autonomy. Paul here adopts the diatribe style–he constructs an imaginary dialogue between him and them.

“Freedom“ in Christ? Paul quotes their saying [“I am free to do anything”] here and in the idol-meat controversy (1 Cor:10:23)—and qualifies it. Their Stoic-Cynic thinking is that the enlightened wise one [sophoi] is free to do anything he/she chooses. The idea is that the sophos is a “king” to whom all things belong (1 Cor 3:21–23; 4:8). Such philosophical ideals created a slogan/watchword expressing their radical understanding of freedom in Christ.

Their idea of “freedom” may have come from Paul himself (1 Cor 9:1, 19). The “wise” Corinthians might suppose that Paul would agree with their slogan. Was he not the great apostle of freedom from the rules of the Jewish Law? He preached God’s unconditional grace, did he not? In light of this theological understanding, surely all the old scruples and prohibitions must fall away. The wise and enlightened person knows, like Paul, that “nothing is unclean in itself” (Rom 14:14). Therefore, they reasoned, we are free to do whatever we want with a clear conscience.The incestuous man (5:1–13) is an extreme instance of such thinking, but Paul’s forceful argument (6:12–20) suggests that he’s heard of them going to prostitutes and contending that it was harmless. In ancient Corinth, prostitution was not only legal; it was widely accepted. “The sexual latitude allowed to men by Greek public opinion was virtually unrestricted. Sexual relations of males with both boys and harlots were generally tolerated” (Talbert). Thus, men who frequented prostitutes were not asserting some unheard-of new freedom; they were merely insisting on their right to continue participating in a pleasurable activity that was entirely normal within their own culture.”God will destroy the physical body, so it’s OK to sleep around.” To counter this attitude, Paul opens the argument by quoting 3 Corinthian slogans, each followed by his own counter slogan in rebuttal (6:12–14). There’s some guesswork in reconstructing this dialogue, for the Greek manuscripts do not use quotation marks. The translator must decide where Paul is quoting a slogan and where he is offering his own rejoinder. Many translations take “and God will destroy both one and the other” as Paul’s own words. But it’s theirs, not Paul, who contend that God will destroy the merely physical elements of the self. The idea that the physical body is unimportant is precisely the point that Paul is trying to refute.The body is created by God as a good part of creation [Here and 1 Cor 15], and God will redeem the body through resurrection. Their sophoi, seeing the body as transient and trivial, conclude that it makes no difference what we do with our bodies. If we are hungry, we should eat; if we desire sex, we should seek it. None of this makes any difference, because it concerns only external physical matters, which are of no lasting significance. Paul gives 3 responses to their slogans.

1. 1st rejoinder to the slogan “I am free to do anything,” Paul cleverly rebuts the sophoi by using another philosophical term: not all things are beneficial (sympherei). Even apart from any specifically Christian reasons, their extreme position is simply bad philosophy: the wise person will not act in self-indulgent ways but will seek to act in accordance with an enlightened understanding of what is good. In Paul’s other uses of the verb sympherein (1 Cor 10:23; 12:7), he clearly talks about what is beneficial for the community, not just the individual. Here (1 Cor 6:12), it’s heard in individualistic terms: “‘I am free to do anything,’ you say. Yes, but not everything is for my good” (NEB).
2. Paul restates their slogan and offers a 2nd rejoinder: “I will not be dominated by anything.” This too is a Stoic argument: the wise person will not surrender control to anything or anyone. Those seeking freedom through promiscuous sex will end up as a slave to passion. The verb translated “dominated” here is the same one that appears in 1 Cor 7:4, where husband and wife are said to “have authority” over one another’s bodies. Paul suggests subtly that the “wise” Corinthians who go to prostitutes are surrendering control of themselves to prostitutes. This response is an ironic put-down of the pretentious claims of the sophoi.
3. Paul’s most emphatic rebuttal is for the slogan “food for the stomach.” They use this argument about food analogically to justify their sexual freedom. That is why Paul’s response ignores the issue of food (he’ll treat later) and targets their fornication. No longer using philosophical categories, he appeals to the language of Christian confession. The body belongs to the Lord Jesus, and God confirms his concern for the body by raising the Lord Jesus. This act of power declares God’s ultimate promise to raise us also (Rom 8:11; 1 Corinthians 15). The body is not simply a husk to be cast off in the next life; the gospel of Jesus Christ proclaims that we are to be redeemed body, soul, and spirit (1 Thess 5:23–24; Rom 8:23). Salvation can never be understood as escape from the physical world or as the flight of the soul to heaven. Rather, the resurrection of the body is an integral element of the Christian story. Those who live within that story, then, should understand that what we do with our bodies in the present is a matter of urgent concern and utmost importance.

Our bodies belong to the Lord Jesus. After emphatically asserting that God’s raising of Jesus validates our physical body,  Paul explores the implications of “the body is for the Lord” (1 Cor 6:15–17). Those in Christ are united with him in a relationship of intimate union [“one spirit with him” (1 Cor 6:17)] that is analogous to—but even deeper than—sexual union. [Paul describes union with Christ in 1 Cor 6:17 with the same verb that he had used in 1 Cor 6:16 to describe union with a prostitute.] This means that our physical bodies no longer belong to us, but to Christ, in a manner analogous to the belonging of the bodies of husband and wife to one another (1 Cor 7:4; 2 Cor 11:2; Eph 5:22–33). Having sex with a prostitute is therefore not only committing an act of infidelity to Christ but also taking something that belongs to Christ (his own body) and linking it to the sphere of the unholy. Contemplating this blasphemous prospect, Paul asks rhetorically, “Should I therefore take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute?” (No one can ever accuse Paul of being a timid theological thinker; this is a bold metaphor carried through forcefully to its conclusion.) His response is an emphatic, “Never!” The whole argument presupposes that sex cannot be understood merely as a momentary act that satisfies a transient natural urge. Instead, it creates a mysterious but real and enduring union between man and woman. In support of this claim, Paul cites Gen 2:24: “The two shall be one flesh.” The union of a member of the church with a prostitute is disastrous for the Christian community precisely because it creates a real bonding with her; therefore it creates an unholy bond between the Lord’s members and the sinful world. The result is both defilement and confusion.Paul concludes with an emphatic imperative: “Flee fornication!” (1 Cor 6:18a) There’s a possible echo here of Joseph’s fleeing from Potiphar’s wife (Gen 39:12), which became proverbial in Jewish tradition for resistance to the lure of sexual immorality. Paul urges them in the strongest possible terms to cease the practice of patronizing prostitutes.A new subsection begins (6:18b), but it’s difficult to know what to make of the first sentence in this unit: “Every sin that a person commits is outside the body.” 2 possible ways to interpret this puzzling remark.

1. Take it as the first half of a comparison that asserts fornication to be worse than all other sins, or at least more body-related as adopted by the NIV: “All other sins a man commits are outside his body, but he who sins sexually sins against his own body.” The word “other” is not in the Greek; this interpretation assumes that Paul has expressed himself imprecisely.
2. Take this sentence as one more of their slogans in the imagined diatribal dialogue: Paul: Flee fornication! Corinthians [objecting]: [But why?] Every sin a person commits is outside the body. Paul: But the fornicator sins against his own body. According to this reading, their slogan means, “The body has nothing to do with sin.” This fits well indeed into the context, where the Corinthian sophoi are arguing that bodily actions are of no significance. All things considered, this interpretation is to be preferred, even though there’s no clear syntactical indication in the text of a quotation.

Either way, Paul’s own position is clear: The fornicator not only defiles the church by linking Christ with a prostitute (6:15–17) but also sins against his own body (1 Cor 6:18). His action damages not only the community but also himself. Such damage is tragic, for the individual body of the Christian is “a temple of the Holy Spirit within you,” a place where God’s Spirit resides (v. 19; cf. Rom. 8:11). Elsewhere, as we have seen, Paul uses the “temple” image for the church as a corporate whole (1 Cor. 3:16–17; cf. 2 Cor. 6:16; Eph. 2:19–22). Here he dramatically transfers this metaphor to the individual. Just as the church should be kept holy through the exercise of community discipline, so the individual body should be kept as a disciplined holy vessel, fit for the indwelling Spirit. Paul takes some pains, however, to emphasize that the Spirit is a gift (“which you have from God”). Once again here Paul’s moral exhortation moves from indicative to imperative. He does not say, “Keep your body holy so that God might give you the Spirit.” Rather, he says, in effect, “Because the Holy Spirit already dwells in you, you should keep your body from fornication.” Anyone preaching on this text should take care to respect this line of logic.Our bodies are not our own property which we may use according to our own autonomous designs. “Do you not know… that you are not your own?” (1 Cor 6:19). Rather, we’ve been placed under the ownership of the Lord. By his death, Jesus has paid the terrible price to ransom us from bondage to the powers of sin and death; consequently, we now belong to him and not to ourselves, for “you were bought with a price” (1 Cor 6:20a). The metaphor is of the purchase of slaves by a new master. Rom 6:18–“you, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness.” A similar idea in a different context–“[W]hoever was free when called is a slave of Christ. You were bought with a price” (1 Cor 7:22b-23a). We belong to God and not to ourselves (Rom 14:7–9) is the key idea of Paul’s affirmation. From this fundamental theological truth follows the closing exhortation: “Therefore glorify God in your body” (1 Cor 6:20b). Paul’s climactic argument against fornication with prostitutes is that our bodies–which belong to God–should be used in ways that bring glory to God, not disrepute. It is by no means a question of individual freedom, as their slogan asserts. The gap between their sophoi and Paul is measured precisely by the distance between 6:12 and 6:20. They say “I am free to do anything”; Paul says “Glorify God in your body.” Their argument focuses on the rights and freedoms of the individual; Paul’s focuses on the devotion and service owed to God.

Paul doesn’t call the church to expel the men visiting prostitutes. Instead, he provides an alternative theological vision and calls them to cease this behavior. Paul doesn’t treat fornication as merely private morality. It damages the community as a whole, and it can be corrected only if their sophoi come to understand their bodies as “members of Christ.” “The body of Christ” is a major Pauline image for the church (10:16–17; 12:12–31). Paul doesn’t yet develop the ecclesial implications of the “body” metaphor in 1 Cor 6:15–17, but he provides the necessary groundwork. The implication in 6:12–20 is that those who claim the freedom to do anything must stop acting as free agents and submit their moral discernment to Paul’s apostolic teaching and to the discernment and discipline of the community as a whole. If the argument of 5:1–6:11 summons the whole church to take responsibility for moral discipline in the community, the conclusion of the argument in 6:12–20 is the necessary complement: it summons individuals to the moral humility of recognizing themselves to be subject to the lordship of Christ. Then, they’ll be forced to abandon their provocative pose of moral autonomy and to return into the discipline and nurture of the community. What are the ethical issues that confront us today? As in ancient Corinth, so in the church today, people declare, “I am free to do anything.” Paul vigorously rebuts them. In 6:12–20 Paul weaves 3 different arguments against those who justify going to prostitutes: 1] resurrection of the body (6:13–14), 2] the body as a temple for the presence of the Holy Spirit (6:18–19), and 3] the Lord’s rightful ownership of the body (6:15–17, 20). The shifts from one argument to the other are abrupt and potentially confusing, but the 3 lines of thought are complementary. Few Christians today would defend prostitution. Nonetheless, Paul’s 3 lines of theological argument address us just as urgently as they did the Corinthians.

1. The resurrection of the body often gets lost in the popular piety of the church. We recite the Apostles’ Creed: “I believe in the resurrection of the body.” But many Christians imagine their future hope in disembodied terms. Singing beloved gospel hymns like “I’ll Fly Away,” they expect their “souls” to “go to heaven” when they die. It hardly ever occurs to anyone that this is a major modification—indeed, a betrayal—of the NT’s eschatological hope for God’s redemption of the creation and of our bodies (1 Cor 15). The resurrection of the body is a crucial underpinning of Christian moral teaching. God joins the spiritual and the physical, and they CANNOT be seperated. “God raised the Lord and will also raise us by his power.” So we CANNOT act as though our actions in the body are of no moral significance. The resurrection reconfirms the Creator’s love for the creation. Therefore, the body matters. To misuse the body is to hold the creator in contempt.
3. Christians today are probably less inclined than were Paul’s Greek converts to slip into forms of dualism that denigrate the physical body. (If anything, we may be subject to the opposite error of idolizing the body and supposing that only the present physical world matters.) Nonetheless, we may need to remind ourselves that our bodily actions stand under the eschatological judgment of God. We should therefore use our bodies in ways that point towards the wholeness for which we hope in the resurrection. Learn to think of our bodies as bodies with a future. Then we might be more careful about what we do with them now. This has important implications not only for sexual morality but also for other issues such as health care and ecological responsibility.
4. The body as temple. In a culture without temples, no holy place is reverenced as the single dwelling place of God. So it’s hard to recover the power of this metaphor. Sex education in the church might begin by seeking to cultivate a deep awareness of the indwelling presence of God. An authentic reverence for the reality of the Holy Spirit’s presence in our bodies might facilitate the recovery of the Bible’s powerful categories of holiness and purity as meaningful norms for our sexual practices. Could such teaching in the church help to overcome the growing cultural tendency to accept premarital and extramarital sexual relations as normal and inevitable? Whether or not such teaching proves effective is in one sense not our business. Our task is to bear witness to the truth we are given and leave the results to the working of God’s Spirit. The destructive forces arrayed against such teaching are no greater than those with which Paul had to contend with.
5. The body is the Lord’s. This argument most directly challenges us today. If we confess that we’re not our own, that we’re bought with a price, all talk of sexual autonomy is nonsense. We’re not free to do anything we like, to invent our own standards, to behave as moral “free agents.” But we’re bound to a relationship of obedient faithfulness to Christ.
7. Paul’s argument against extramarital sex (6:12–20) never mentions infidelity to a spouse. Perhaps the fornicators were not married. But a likelier explanation is that sexual promiscuity is not primarily an offense against any human relationship but, most fundamentally, as a sin against God. The union with a prostitute violates the believer’s prior bond with Christ.
8. In Western culture today most discourse about issues of sexual and reproductive ethics is dominated by post-Enlightenment categories that sound eerily like a reprise of the Corinthian slogans: “rights,” “freedom of choice,” “self-determination,” “autonomy.” Even within the church, such language is rarely questioned by any of the factions into which our churches are divided. For eg., the discussion of abortion becomes polarized into a debate over “the right to choose” vs. “the right to life.” We should stop shouting such slogans and listen to Paul. Do you not know that you are not your own? For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body. This may not affect the world, but it might change the church. We must reframe the questions in ways more faithfully responsive to Paul’s vision for the community. Learn how to talk about sexual issues—and other moral matters—as people who belong to the Lord, people whose moral decisions are shaped not by personal preference or expediency but by the desire to glorify God in our bodies (1 Cor 6:20).

With his appeal to them to glorify God in their bodies, Paul concludes his call for community discipline (5:1–6:20). The first 6 chapters builds a theological foundation for the pastoral task that follows: Paul now addresses questions that they have asked in a letter to him.

Reference:

1. Richard B. Hays. First Corinthians. Interpretation. A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching. 1997.
2. Gordon D. Fee. First Corinthians. The New International Commentary on the NT. 1987.
3. Richard B. Hays. The Moral Vision of the N.T. A Contemporary Introduction to N.T. Ethics. 1996.

Sermon Divisions:

1. 7/12/20: Always Thank God (1:1-9) [1 Cor 1:4].  Cosmic Epic Calling [1 Cor 1:2].
2. 7/19/20: The Devil Divides, God Unites (1:10-17) [1 Cor 1:10]. All Agree. No Divisions. Perfect Unity.
3. 7/26/20: The Cross—God‘s Way—is Dumb (1:18-25) [1 Cor 1:18]. The Cross Stumbles. The Cross is like a Cop Out. Foolish Cross.
4. 8/2/20: What You Were, Who Christ Is (1:26-31) [1 Cor 1:26, 30]. The Necessity of Lack. No Boasting  [1 Cor 1:31].
5. 8/9/20: Nothing but Jesus (2:1-5) [1 Cor 2:2].
6. 8/16/20: Wise vs. Stupid (2:6-16) [1 Cor 2:6]. True Wisdom is Only for the Mature. The Mind of Christ [1 Cor 2:16].
7. 8/23/20: You‘re NOT Spiritual (3:1-4) [1 Cor 3:1].  Spiritual, Yet Not Spiritual.
8. 8/30/20: Merely Servants (3:5-9) [1 Cor 3:5]. Field Laborers.
9. 9/6/20: Build with Care or Be Destroyed (3:10-15, 16-17) [1 Cor 3:10-11]. God’s Temple.
10. 9/13/20: Deceived by Wisdom (3:18-23). All Belongs to Christ and God. Wisdom doesn’t boast.
11. 9/20/20: When You Are Judged (4:1-5) [1 Cor 4:4]. Go Ahead…Judge Me!  Judged Only by God; Accountable Only to God.  Judging Others Blinds You.
12. 9/27/20: When You Are Scum (4:6-13) [1 Cor 4:13]. Become Scum. Puffed up Corinthians and Suffering Apostle amid Others’ Boasting.
13. 10/4/20: Imitate Me (4:14-21) [1 Cor 4:19]. Fatherly Admonition. Final Warning to Boasters. Fatherly Admonition to Paul’s Corinthian Children.
14. 10/11/20: Expel the Wicked Man (5:1-13) [1 Cor 5:13]. Drive out the wicked person from among you.
15. 10/18/20: You were Cleansed in the Name (6:1-11) [1 Cor 6:11]. You will Judge the World [1 Cor 6:2]. I Say this to shame you [1 Cor 6:5]. Legal Disputes Should Be Handled within the Community.
16. 10/25/20: Your Body is NOT Yours but Christ’s (6:12-20) [1 Cor 6:19]. Your Body is a Part of Christ’s Body. Glorify God with your Body [1 Cor 6:20].
17. 11/1/20; 11/8/20; 11/15/20: Women, Wives, WL Wise Men.

“Glorify God in Your Body” (6:12-20) Your Body is for God (1 Cor 6:13) Your Body is a Part of Christ’s Body (1 Cor 6:15). Your Body is not yours but Christ’s (1 Cor 6:19)

The Corinthians idea about freedom

• What does their slogan about having “the right to do anything” show about what they think freedom in Christ is (1 Cor 6:12)?  How might their wrong idea of freedom have come from Paul himself (1 Cor 9:1, 19)?
• What does their slogan about “food, stomach and God destroying both” show about their “wisdom” regarding their physical body (1 Cor 6:13a)? How does this slogan justify sexual immorality with prostitutes (1 Cor 6:13b, 16)? How is this tough when our hormones are raging?

Paul’s correction of their unbiblical view of freedom

• How does Paul qualify and rebut their slogans in 3 ways (1 Cor 6:12-13)? Just how deceptive is the “wisdom” of the world (Eph 2:2)? What does Paul mean by “the body is for the Lord” (1 Cor 6:13b, 19)?