In I Corinthians 6:12-20, Paul will sum up his argument concerning sex to this point and provide a transition to the next two chapters. We may not talk about it in polite company, but sex is on our minds and in front of our eyes every day. Safer sex. Sex and the City. Sex Addicts Anonymous. Sex offenders. Sex Education. Sex Therapy. Sex on the Internet. Clearly, people have a passion for the subject. Today, sex is at the heart of our entertainment and advertisement industries. It is used to sell everything from breakfast cereal to school backpacks, and sexually provocative images, artists and clothing are marketed to children as young as age 6. Even little kids now receive literally thousands of messages a year about sex ... on television, in magazines, on billboards, in pop music. Unfortunately, for advertisers, new research shows that when a television or print ad uses sex to promote its product, people remember the sex, but forget the product! If sex has become our ultimate concern - one that completely permeates our entertainment, advertising, health and fashion industries - then it has become, in a sense, our god.
Paul has a concern for a specific type of sexual relationship. However, he will direct us to several solid ethical principles that have broad application. He first addresses a phrase used by some in the community to justify behavior with which Paul does not agree. In fact, Paul may have said this phrase while among them, discovering now that they are misusing what he said. Yet, even in dealing with the difficult moral issues involved in this context, Paul goes back to the freedom of Christians.[1] 12 “All things are lawful for me,” say his potential opponents, but not all things are beneficial, or for the common good. Here is one ethical principle. As we appreciate our freedom in Christ, we still have a moral obligation to consider the common good. “All things are lawful for me,” but I will not allow anything to dominate me. Here is a second ethical principle. While proclaiming our freedom, Paul points out how easily appetites and their immediate gratification enslave some people. He notes that those who consider "all things lawful" may soon find themselves dominated by the pursuit of pleasure. 13 “Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food,” his potential opponents say, and yet God will destroy both one and the other. The stomach and food go together. Yet, God is the agent of final judgment. Paul counters that just because one can do something does not mean that one ought to do it. Such a slogan became the basis for some believers to argue that frequenting prostitutes was simply a way for them to meet physical needs in a way that did not affect the soul. Pointing to his principle regarding the body, Paul reminds his readers that the body is meant not for fornication (pornea refers to the practice of prostitution, although in Jewish and Christian circles it could refer to any sexual activity by persons not married, which seems implied in Matthew 19:9, quoting from Deuteronomy 24:1-4. The closes Hebrew equivalent is “zonah,” which has the wider connotation of unfaithfulness). If the body is not for pornea, then, sharing a third ethical principle, the intent is that the body is for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. God intends us to use our bodies in ways that please the Lord, not in the random and potentially damaging ways represented by the term "fornication." He bases the importance of the body on the resurrection of Jesus. 14 And God raised the Lord and will also raise us by his power. Therefore, God naturally has expectations for how we use our earthly bodies while in this life. He now uses the body as a metaphor in order to get across his point regarding sexual behavior. This fourth ethical principle relates specifically to the Christian community. In our consideration of what we ought to do and to avoid, we need to consider its relation to the fellowship we have in the body of Christ. Thus, he asks, 15 Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Should I therefore take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never! To participate in prostitution and other sexual violations, then, involves Christ in those actions because we now constitute Christ's own body. The point appears to be that some in Corinth wanted to regard physical sex relations as something morally neutral and sexual intercourse with prostitutes as something quite simple, on part with the satisfaction of other physical needs.[2] Paul is referring to the impossibility in the sexual sphere of the Christian, one spirit with the Lord, is joined in body with a harlot, and therefore at root frivolously, unfaithfully, and in sheer lust.[3] 16 Do you not know that whoever unites oneself to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For, bringing us to a fifth ethical principle that narrowly relates to our sexual encounters, we find it said in Genesis 2:24 and Mark 10:8 that “The two shall be one flesh.” Sexuality, states Paul, should be seen as what God intended in the forming of man and woman. Food is important and we can meet that desire in many ways. However, sex is different in that we can meet sexual desire in one way. We are not to treat it casually. “We come to love not by finding the perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.”[4] Those who engage in sex become part of one another - physically part of one another's bodies, but also part of one another's families. In Hebrew, the phrase has the double meaning of physical union and the union between family groups. Thus, the one with whom you engage in sexual activity should become by rights a member of your family with all the attendant rights to shelter, support and protection that family relationships imply. To have casual sex, and no doubt, to produce casual children, is a great social injustice. It denies the women affected, and the children of these women, to a legal place within society. This is an offense against human society. It is an offense against the community. It offends both the heavenly Christ, as a spiritual being thus linked to corporeal irresponsibility, and the earthly body of Christ, namely the community, whose standard of love does not allow for disposable relationships between its members. Paul does not regard the sexual sphere as unclean, of course. Rather, Christians will enter into sexual relationships with a concern for the whole being of the other, symbolized in the image of the two becoming one flesh.[5] 17 But anyone united to the Lord becomes one spirit with the Lord. Theologically, this statement seems to make a distinction between the exalted Lord and the Spirit, ruling out full identity.[6] The power of the Spirit incorporates Christians into the body of Christ.[7] 18 Shun fornication! Every sin that a person commits is outside the body; but the fornicator sins against the body itself. In Hebrew anthropology, the spirit and the body are one entity. Paul drives home his point by offering a sixth ethical principle. 19 Alternatively, do you not know that as a member of the Christian community, your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you? This statement theologically implies the deity of the Spirit.[8] Paul is also offering an important word for our time. As with many of these principles, they have application beyond the sexual encounter. We have freedom in the Christian life, yet, that freedom places upon us the responsibility of considering a variety of factors that should affect our sense of what we owe to each other. The rationale here is that since the body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, what we do with our bodies is important to God. Just as the Spirit of God, while no one can confine to any one earthly place, took up residence in the temple in Jerusalem, so God's image, and Christ's Holy Spirit, reside within each human body. Just because the human soul will one day leave its earthly body does not make the "temple" that once contained it any less holy. Further, stating a seventh ethical principle, we need to remember that we have our bodies from God, and that we are not our own? 20 For we were bought with a price. Believers live with the wonder and amazement of enjoying a relationship with God through the price of the death of the Son. The one who gave his life for them is also the one to whom they owe their lives. Paul may mean God has ransomed them from a higher slavery by the price paid by the death of Christ. I prefer to think that he meant that God has bought them by the death of Christ into a new love relationship with God, with the death of Christ being the great example of that love. Therefore, we are to glorify God in the body. God has effected a change in ownership of the body. In the brief time we have on this earth, we are to bring glory or honor to God. This suggests that we are to make the human venture a success. We need to be part of making the real world a better place. Abuse or misuse of the body will mean I am less able to fulfill my calling in life. Any immorality on my part hurts me, those who love me, and those whom my life touches. God has paid s great price to make this unity between God and humanity a real one. Therefore, one should take this unity seriously and use one's body only to glorify God. Collectively, the Christian community is the body of Christ, the physical presence of the risen Christ in the world. This limits individual freedom. They are not free to do as they please because of their relationship to Christ and one another.
To focus on the sexual encounter, Paul warns against the kind of sexual intercourse in which man and woman turn to each other merely for the satisfaction of sexual needs. The principle is that the Lord intends a union of two persons into “one flesh.” The Christian couple as “one flesh” corresponds with the fact that they are one spirit with the Lord. Belonging to a partner in marriage needs to correspond to the fact that both belong to Christ. They would contradict this if either of them belonged to a prostitute. The reason is that Christ is the faithfulness of God in person, whereas the prostitute personifies human unfaithfulness. Sexual intercourse with a prostitute can only be a sorry distortion of the completion between man and woman. Such intercourse does not complete the divine plan for human fellowship. It cannot complete self-satisfaction. It betrays such fellowship. Individuals do not seek the other in the totality of his or her personality. They seek only the sexual being as an occasion for self-satisfaction. One treats the other as an It. The other treats you as an It. Neither seeks true connection. They merely answer to the legitimate sexual impulse or desire they have.[9]
If sexual satisfaction becomes our primary concern, then we have made it a god that rules the consideration of what we do with our lives. However, what intrigues me is the insight Paul has into ethical behavior. He is not laying down a law. Yet, those who do not approach legalistically still have to consider how they use their freedom. None of the principles is an absolute. Rather, they are insights that ought to guide us in our discernment of what we ought to do, how we ought to live, and what we owe each other. The overarching theological principle is that the Father raised Jesus from the dead through the power of the Spirit. Paul is extracting from this act of the Father the importance of what we do in the body. Given the resurrection of the body and the hoped for resurrection of the dead, we know the body is important to God. Thus, we need to consider prayerfully how a specific action contributes to the benefit of the community or how it might lead to our enslavement to immediate gratification. We are to offer our bodily activities in ways that bring pleasure to the Lord. We need to remember that our bodies are part of another body, the Body of Christ, a community that is the physical presence of the risen Lord in this world. As each part of our bodies affect and influence the other part, so what we do affects those with who we are in fellowship. In particular, we need to remember that thoughts and actions relate to the friendship we have with Christ. Specifically related to sexual encounters, we are to remember what God intended in creation, in which man and woman become one flesh, a view Jesus endorses in Mark 10:8. If more men and women honored this principle, many of the problems related to Hollywood and politics would not have happened. The point here is that sex is different from other desires. For most people, sexual desire is so strong that it can rule. Of course, other legitimate desires can gain a sinful place in our lives, but sexuality is something that touches almost everyone. Freud, for all his faults, rightly raised the pervasive nature of sexual nature to our consciousness. To broaden the discussion beyond sexual encounters again, as we consider how we ought to live, we need to remember that as free as we are, our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who lives within us. In another moment of amazement and wonder for the believer, the Spirit as the third “person” of “mode of being” of the Trinity lives within us. Therefore, it matters to God how we care for the temple in which the Spirit dwells. We could apply this principle to many areas of our personal and corporate behavior. Finally, we need to consider the death of Christ on the cross, part of the point of which was to deliver us from the forces that enslave us and bring us freedom. If we pause here for a moment, amazement and wonder is the proper response to the story that anyone would die for us so that we could be free and enjoy life with God here and forever. In this case, the “story” involves the Son of the Father. Those being the case how ought we to live. What do we owe to each other? From the perspective of the believer, our lives are an offering to God. Our lives ought to bring glory and honor to God. When it comes to ethics, we might consider other matters. However, I find these insights from Paul offering much upon which we might want to ponder. Prayerfully, humbly, I conclude, let it be so, Lord Jesus, in my life and in the lives of anyone who might read this.
[1] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 3, 68.
[2] Barth, Church Dogmatics III.4 [54.1] 135.
[3] Barth, Church Dogmatics III.4 [54.1] 145.
[4] --Sam Keen, To Love and Be Loved (Bantam, 1999).
[5] Barth, Church Dogmatics III.4 [54.1] 135.
[6] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, Volume 1, 269.
[7] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 2, 451.
[8] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 1, 303.
[9] Barth, Church Dogmatics III.2 [45.3] 305-8.
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