Dear friends,
Hard passages of the Bible are great passages. The reason that they are hard is because we are not thinking biblically. Wrestling with these hard passages gives us the opportunity to change our thinking in order to be aligned with biblical thinking. 1 Corinthians 6:12-20 is notoriously difficult, and over the next two weeks, Peter and I are going to try to unravel some of its complexities. We start today by looking at the context.
Yours,
Phillip
Phillip Jensen: Today we’re going to be looking at a small passage in the second half of 1 Corinthians 6.
Peter Jensen: 1 Corinthians 6:12–14
“All things are lawful for me,” but not all things are helpful. “All things are lawful for me,” but I will not be dominated by anything. “Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food”—and God will destroy both one and the other. The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. And God raised the Lord and will also raise us up by his power.
Phillip: This passage is only 3 verses, but it is difficult.
Peter: It is. Brian Rosner describes it in his commentary, The First Letter to the Corinthians, as being, “Widely acknowledged to be one of the most difficult passages in Paul’s letters.”1
Phillip: In my view, the hard passages are the important ones. In one sense, there are no hard passages; there are just confused brains. They’re hard for us because we’re not thinking in the way in which the author was thinking, and so we are forced to ask questions about our understanding and assumptions.
What are some of the issues we have with this passage?
Peter: Regarding the beginning of verse 12, who is saying, “All things are lawful to me”? Is it the apostle or is it the reader who says it, and why? Furthermore, what does Paul mean in saying, “Not all things are helpful?” ‘Helpful’ is a rather uncharacteristically weak word. In addition, particularly in the face of such blatant antinomianism (lawlessness), why make such an obvious point about food and the stomach, and then have it turned into threatening words about God destroying both food and stomach? And then there’s this strange skip to sexual immorality. Where did that come from?
Phillip: Context, context, context! We must always look at the context. Yes, these 3 or 4 sentences seem to jump from topic to topic, but the key is to look back at the context. Chapters 5 and 6 have been referring to flagrant acts of sexual immorality of all types. But notice how the chapter ends: by addressing sexually immoral people inside the Corinthian church. It seems that some members of the Corinthian church were doing what the world did and running wildly into sexuality; back in chapter 5, one person was doing something so immoral that even the world wouldn’t have approved of it. They seemed to be justifying their behaviour through an appeal to a twisted version of the gospel about freedom. Their thinking was, “I’m free from the law now, so I can do what I want.”
Peter: On the subject of context, I believe it’s worth observing Paul’s great words just before this passage. As he says in 1 Corinthians 6:11, “And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.”
Phillip: How does this context help you in reading this passage?
Peter: It paves the way for the fundamental theme of what Paul is saying here. He is not a moralist. That is to say, when we’re talking about freedom from the law, he is not saying that people must keep the law of Moses in order to be saved, nor does he merely tell people to stop breaking the law. Rather, he models an approach to living as a Christian. I would say that he appeals to biblical Christology; that is to say, the teaching of the Bible about Christ and about anthropology. Further, he appeals to what the Bible says about these 2 great subjects to expose the weaknesses in the other approach that was being endorsed in Corinth.
Phillip: In the next passage, Paul says, “Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never!” In one sense, he sounds like a moralist for simply forbidding this action, yet he gives a reason for this view. In other words, he doesn’t just chastise people for this error, but he explains why it is wrong.
Peter: Indeed, and just as he told them their lives were utterly changed by the work of Christ and the Holy Spirit, so he applies the gospel to their situation.
Phillip: That then brings us to the aspect of Christology that we’re talking of, being the resurrection of the body in the Lordship of Christ. 1 Corinthians 6:14, “And God raised the Lord and will also raise us up by his power,” deals with, as you would call it, anthropology. It’s got to do with our bodies being raised as Jesus’ body is raised. Inherent in this anthropology is our creation, especially in relationships. We were created in relationships: in relationship to God, and in relationship with each other, male and female. And the great value for us here is that we live in this world, in Sydney, in the same world in which the Corinthians lived in Corinth. That is a world where we’ve been created bodily, in relationship with God, and we are coming to a time of the resurrection when we will be again like the Lord Jesus Christ. But right now, we are living with him as our Lord. Just as the Corinthians were seduced back into sexual immorality, into living in a way inconsistent with their creation and their salvation, so our society is pushing the same sexual immorality. We do need to hear what the Apostle Paul has to say, not just in rules and regulations, but in rationale.
Peter: Yes, and that’s seen right here in the opening. Most translations put the statement, “All things are lawful for me” in inverted commas to denote a quotation from another source. In other words, it’s used by the Corinthians as a slogan, and interestingly, it fits our contemporary world perfectly, as we encourage each other with slogans like, “You do you,” and “Do what pleases you best.” I presume, based on what we read elsewhere in Paul’s writings, that this is a sort of perversion of his preaching of justification by faith. Some Christians, having heard that they are justified by faith alone, now abuse the doctrine as though it is a charter for self-centred lawlessness.
Phillip: Lawlessness is always condemned in the New Testament. It’s one thing to break the law; it’s another thing to place yourself outside the law. The sovereign citizen movement, for instance, places people outside the law, so that it no longer has any application to those within. But justification is not about placing yourself outside the law, nor is it simply about God ignoring the law, forgiving everybody for everything no matter what they do. That kind of forgiveness is not forgiveness, but acceptance, and when you are willing to accept anything anybody does without punishment, that’s just approval of bad behaviour. Instead, God justifies us.
The very word ‘justified’ has a legal overtone. God justifies us by his Son fulfilling the law for us, and paying the penalty for our failure to obey the law. In that way, the law is upheld while genuine forgiveness is secured at the supreme cost of the death of Christ. But I’m surprised at what looks like a very weak response from Paul, in the phrase, “not all things are helpful.” ‘Helpful’ seems like a pretty weak moral term.
Peter: That’s what struck me too. Other translations use the word ‘beneficial’, which is slightly better, but it doesn’t push us much further. But I believe that what the Apostle is appealing to is one of the points made before, namely that our standing with God is relational. That is, true freedom is not simply the abandonment of law and so forth, because the New Testament tells us that law is good. People didn’t understand then what freedom means, nor do they understand it now. The Corinthians, by saying that all things are lawful, have failed to love. When Paul says “It is not helpful,” what he means is that it is not beneficial to the fellowship, to others. Therefore, those who say “All things are lawful for me,” do not keep the heart of the law, which is an obligation that we all have, not in order to be saved, but as people who have been saved and are now living as God wants us to.
So relationships, as you pointed out, are integral to the theology of the passage. And that is where their view of freedom, and our contemporary views of freedom, are exposed as absolutely shallow and indeed inhuman. You see, Paul also says, “I will not be dominated by anything.” Freedom is not the ability to do whatever you want to do, for that simply leads to domination by sin. As Jesus said in John 8:34, “Everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin.” Rather, true freedom is a discovery of who you are meant to be, and the capacity to live according to who you are designed to be.
I always loved the great illustration used by the American poet Robert Frost, who said that, “Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.” That is to say, true freedom—the true capacity to play tennis, in that case—depends upon a limitation to freedom. Who we are, therefore, determines what freedom really is. For us, our true freedom as human beings is found where we were designed to find it: in submission to Christ. Freedom depends on finding the best Lord, and in Christ, you find the Lord who is the greatest of all, and he will set you free.
Phillip: Indeed. The phrase, “All things are lawful for me” is said twice in that verse. The first response to it is “Not all things are helpful”, but the second response ups the ante: “I will not be enslaved by anything.” So while ‘helpful’ may feel like a weak word, ‘enslaved’ feels like a very powerful word. Because while we may think freedom means that we can do what we want, in reality, what we want to do will enslave us, for that is the character of sin itself.
Peter: It is not a true picture of what freedom really is. How does this all fit in with references to the stomach and to food?
Phillip: Context is still key. You see, Paul could be referring to the context of the Corinthian situation, because in chapters 8 and 9, the discussion of legalism and freedom comes up again as to whether people are free to eat food offered to idols, or whether that will bring them into condemnation. Part of the answer to that has to do with your earlier point about relationships. That is, in this situation, the Corinthians had failed to ask, “What is in the best interest of others for my liberty to be exercised in eating food offered to idols?” So Paul in chapter 6 could be laying the foundation for that later discussion, although it’s slightly more likely that he is again quoting the Corinthians. “Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food.” Again, our translation here puts this phrase in quotation marks, meaning it’s likely that the Corinthians are saying it.
In that case, they’re arguing in a way like Aristotle, who saw that the purpose for something gave it its meaning and its morality: the eye is for seeing, the ear is for hearing, and so on. Likewise, the stomach is for eating. And according to the Corinthians, as the stomach is for food and food is for the stomach, both of them are going to be destroyed by God, so it really doesn’t matter what you eat. It’s neither here nor there. From which you can then make the next argument, “The body was meant for sex.” Then it doesn’t matter what you do in that regard either, because as the stomach is going to be destroyed, so will the body be destroyed. So your sexual relations don’t matter any more than what kind of food you eat.
Peter: And they were arguing that this is Christian?
Phillip: They were Christians who were arguing for this behaviour. It takes a time for Christian thinking to change the Christian person. We come as Christians in an Australian culture, and it takes some time for the absolute understanding of the gospel to whittle away the Australian culture that we’ve just taken for granted. The same applies to the Corinthians.
Peter: Referring back to this idea of the body being destroyed and so forth, is Paul’s point that it is the spirit that matters, not the body?
Phillip: No, that’s not right. The Greeks did not like the body; to them, the spirit was everything. The body was seen within certain aspects of Greek philosophy as a prison, as an evil thing in itself. But we are not created as embodied for no purpose and no future. The body is the person and the person has a Lord. We are creatures, created bodily, and we therefore need to look at the purpose of the body. In doing so, we look back to creation, which gives us the biblical attitude of both the matter and the spirit. The purpose of the human body—that is, the purpose of the human person—is to serve Christ. I do not serve him bodiless. My body is me and I am my body. For all things, including your body, soul, and spirit, were made for him.
Peter: And the fate of Christ after death was not merely to live on as a soul or spirit; he was resurrected.
Phillip: Yes, and this idea that we believe in the resurrection of the body is so central to Christianity. Not the reincarnation into a different body, nor just a soul somehow being amalgamated into the spirit world. God raised Jesus from the dead bodily, and he will also raise us up by his same power, bodily. The bodily resurrection of Jesus and of Christian people is one of the fundamental distinctive characteristics of Christianity itself, and of course is very much at the heart of the gospel. The death of the Lord Jesus Christ for our sins, and the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ who is victorious over death, sin and Satan, must never be diminished. The resurrection is important, but it is a bodily resurrection. The tomb is empty, and Jesus’ real body appears. In Luke’s gospel, Jesus eats fish in front of the disciples as a demonstration that his body is a real body. He tells Thomas to reach out and put his fingers in the marks of his hands where he was crucified. Thus, Jesus’ body is a real physical body, the same body resurrected. And as Jesus’ body is resurrected, ours is to be resurrected. So while the stomach will be destroyed, it is to be resurrected into eternity.
Peter: It’s a revolution. By the way, please notice too that Paul digs deeply in this passage into Christology and anthropology—the doctrine of Christ and the doctrine of human beings respectively—to answer their questions and correct their worldly ideas. Of course, you rightly pointed out that context earlier, but we need to summon up our theological context, what the Bible as a whole teaches about these things, in order to see the whole truth emerge from a passage like this.
Phillip: ‘Context’ is a wonderful word, because it refers to the grammar of the sentence, the paragraph, the book in which it is written, the Testament in which it is, and the Bible as a whole. All of that is caught up in the ‘context’ of a passage. So I would say that Paul is laying here some very important foundations for the challenge he’s going to give to the Corinthians in the next few verses about their sexual immorality with prostitution.
Brian S. Rosner and Roy E. Ciampa, “The First Letter to the Corinthians”, 2010 (Eerdmans)
Scripture quotations are from The ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Links & Recommendations
For more on this topic, check out this talk on 1 Corinthians 6 given at St Andrew’s Cathedral on the topic of Sexual Immorality.
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