Dear friends,
When Paul wrote to the Corinthians, he had to deal with many issues, some of which were raised by the Corinthians themselves. Several of the issues related to the subject of sexual morality. Chapters 5 and 6 of 1 Corinthians conclude with the importance of serving God with our bodies, and chapter 7 opens with the issue of how to serve God with your body in the face of sexual immoralities. The answer is not in celibacy, but a right understanding of sex in marriage. Peter and I are going to take several weeks to discuss the many issues raised in 1 Corinthians 7. This week, it’s sex in marriage, verses 1-6.
Yours,
Phillip
Phillip Jensen: So far, we have been working through 1 Corinthians, and we are now up to chapter 7.
Peter Jensen: The last 2 chapters have largely been about sexual morality, with good reason: the Corinthian world and the Roman world in general was, in many ways, quite permissive in sexual matters. Men virtually could do as they pleased, and they were fairly loose when it came to things like marriage, the only requirement for it being that you had to be married to one woman, and she had to do certain things. Basically, marriage was not seen as a stoppage to people carrying on as they pleased.
It’s not unlike our own world. We have this extraordinary prevalence of de-facto marriages, same-sex marriages (if that’s indeed what they should be called), child-free marriages, open marriages, and we have virtually free divorce. Someone once said, “It’s easier to free yourself from a partner than it is to leave a company.” So our world may not be exactly the same, but it is very much like the Corinthian and Roman world. That creates very practical difficulties for the younger generation, particularly those who want to get married, where real estate prices make it very difficult to get married, and those who do marry do so later because they must first establish their careers.
Phillip: The Corinthian situation was in some ways more explicitly sexual than ours, in that the great temple in Corinth is said to have had up to 1000 prostitutes. But prostitution has been legalised and promoted within our society. You mentioned real estate being a factor in declining rates of marriage, which is an interesting issue. In Australia, we’re now building 2-bedroom home units with no intention for housing families. Families are not where the money is; the money is to be found in two bedrooms. In this way, we’re making it harder for people to get married. But while marriage is under attack from all sides around us, there’s been something of a reversion lately amongst certain elites who are commentating on this issue. One of them is, of course, Louise Perry who wrote her book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution.1 The last chapter in this book is on marriage, and her advice for young women is “Marry a dad, not a cad” and “Listen to your mother.”2 But at the heart of the Christian view of marriage, something which was culturally accepted up until the 1960s, are the principles set out in 1 Corinthians 7.
Peter: In 1 Corinthians 7, Paul is setting out the principles for marriage quite directly, and he is addressing the attack on the Christian view in those days, helping us to see how corrupt the contemporary view of sexual relations is. By ‘corrupt’ I mean that it’s against God’s word, and it’s unethical, but also that it goes against our humanity. It does not lead to joy, to happiness or to living well; it’s dangerous to the wellbeing of people, for it’s not how God has designed us. In fact, 1 Corinthians 6 ends with these great words, “For you were bought with a price.” He’s talking of the cross, of course; consequently, you are to “glorify God in your body.” We are not to give up the body, nor turn against it, but to glorify God in our body. One explicit example of how we glorify God in our body is to avoid connecting with prostitutes. So “Glorify God in your body,” is how we move into chapter 7.
Phillip: 1 Corinthians 7:1–6
Now concerning the matters about which you wrote: “It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.” But because of the temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Do not deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement for a limited time, that you may devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control. Now as a concession, not a command, I say this.
Why would Paul start this discussion on marriage in terms of not having any sexual relations with your wife? That just seems to defeat the very purpose of marriage.
Peter: That line is a quotation from the Corinthians. Essentially, after embracing the gospel, they drew from it the implication that sexual relations are forbidden, even between husband and wife. They heard Paul’s summons to abstain from sexual immorality, and they read it as a summons not to have sex at all. It may be an expression of another idea prevalent in the ancient world: that is, the expression of asceticism.
Phillip: What does that word ‘asceticism’ mean?
Peter: It’s a spiritual and religious idea that you must revolt against the body in favour of the spirit. In practice, you may fast constantly, or you may go out into the wilderness and not have very much at all in order to be in communion with God. One such aspect of asceticism is total celibacy, as though the body can be brought under control by being starved of food and sex. In some cases, it involves things like flagellation, beating yourself or being beaten by others. This is not unknown today, where people are beaten in order to give up sins of various types. That’s asceticism.
Phillip: Does this idea lie behind monasteries, nunneries, and the like?
Peter: Somewhat, but not entirely. But the Corinthians may have thought that this kind of asceticism is what is meant by the commandment to glorify God in your body.
Phillip: It’s almost like a ‘super-spirituality’ in that regard. But Paul’s answer here is quite clear. It’s not to abandon sex altogether. Rather, Paul is putting sex into the right context—that of husband and wife. He also speaks on the right way to conduct the marriage. It’s one thing to limit sex to marriage, but then how do we enjoy sexual relationships within the marriage? Paul speaks about that too, for in marriage, the husband and wife have each other and act out their mutuality. It’s an extraordinary passage in terms of this mutuality, because those who have attacked Christian marriage have for a long time spoken as if marriage was as the pagans would have it: that is, the husband owning the wife. But this passage speaks of the wife owning the husband as much as the husband owning the wife. Throughout this passage, what is said to and of the husband is equally said to and of the wife. That is, we don’t have to wait till the 21st century to discover that women have sexual needs and pleasures. It’s here in the 1st century, written by Paul, whom the world wants to tell us was a woman-hater.
It’s also in the Book of Common Prayer that the reasons for marriage are, firstly, to have children; secondly, because of our temptations to sin; thirdly, our companionship. It’s very interesting to see how modern prayer books still speak in terms of having children, (although that’s muted somewhat), and they certainly in terms of companionship, but they often completely omit what Paul is concerned about here when he talks about sinfulness. In fact, in the original Greek, it doesn’t say “temptation to sin”; it says “temptation to immorality”. So the Corinthians’ suggestion is that “It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.” But sexual immorality is occurring, and so the solution is to have sex within the context of marriage. Our view of marriage now has been so overwhelmed by romanticism that it omits some of the fundamental factors of what marriage is about, in terms of having children and in terms of our sexual needs. But this mutuality is exactly what feminists would say that Paul is against.
Peter: Yes, you mentioned the description of Paul as the “woman-hater”. In Ephesians 5, Paul calls upon the wife to submit to her husband or to obey him. This has been taken to mean that the Bible regards women as inferior to men, and gives men a green light to become nasty or even abusive. But in this reading of it, the context of Ephesians 5 is disregarded, as Paul in the very same passage summons the husband to love his wife even to the point of giving his life for her. So yes, there is an authority vested in the husband, but it’s an authority as is usual with authority: it is in the interests of the other person, or the other persons when the marriage is blessed with children. So this passage gives us a recognition of the different roles of husband and wife within marriage, which is based, among other things, on the differences in physical strength. Therefore, the calling of the husband is not to boss the wife around, but to defend and provide for the wife and the family. And here in this passage, to the astonishment of those who criticise Paul, he speaks of each equally owning the body of the other. What do you make of this?
Phillip: It’s not just Paul who acknowledges those kinds of differences; Peter says much the same thing in 1 Peter 3. And while we may not actually be sure of Paul’s marital status—whether he’s a widow or whether he never married—we know that Peter married because he had a mother-in-law. But this passage is a great illustration of Paul’s view of mutuality. The ESV translates it as “conjugal rights”, but I think the NIV’s translation as “marital duty” is better; or the Holman Bible, which speaks of responsibility. That is because what we’re dealing with here is a command. It’s not a piece of counselling advice, but something that is owed, because sex is integral to the very act of marriage itself. I’ve met people who have tried to have sexless marriage, which defies the very point of marriage.
So verse 4 doesn’t start with the word ‘for’, despite the translations that try to put it that way. We don’t have something that is causal here, but rather an explanation. In our translation, it says, “For the wife doesn’t have authority,” but the original text just tells us, “The wife doesn’t have authority.” He’s not giving a cause for verse 3; he just gives the explanation of what marriage is about. Thus, what he’s saying is that this mutuality is exclusive. Our bodies belong to each other, to our husband or to our wife, and not to some other person. The very character of this relationship is that we have our body for our spouse and no other. Furthermore, authority is not by conquest, but freely given, in the consensual marriage of two persons, a man and a woman. Yet this mutuality is not egalitarian in the context of Paul and of Peter; it’s complementarian. The husband and the wife are not the same. One is a man, the other is a woman. They have different sexual drives and sexual needs, but each is provided for the other, and each is to provide only for the other.
Peter: Indeed, and verse 5 offers another explanatory statement about what he’s been saying. 1 Corinthians 7:5
Do not deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement for a limited time, that you may devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.
This is an explanatory statement of what you’ve been saying: don’t deprive each other of the sexual relations agreed upon when you entered into marriage, except by agreement between the two of you. Paul does not say that it’s just the husband who is the boss, for the decision is to be made by agreement between the husband and wife. Furthermore, it is to be for a limited time, so that people are not moving into asceticism. Prayer is mentioned here as a reason to abstain, but there are other possible reasons: it could be illness, for example. There are also times when sexual relations in marriage are simply not possible, and it is important to know that it’s not the norm, but it is necessary. In these moments, self-control needs to be exhibited here. But then, Paul tells husbands and wives to come together again once they can, in order to avoid Satan’s temptation to indulgence and lack of self-control.
Phillip: The marriage bed is not to be a place of warfare, but a place of mutual agreement and of consent. One is not to withhold for the sake of winning an argument or anything like that. Sex is a part of married life and our provision is for each other. This passage is a description of mutuality in decision, the importance of not sinning, an indication of the reason for marriage—not only to have children—and the reality of sexual motivation. These are all caught up in these wonderful few verses. But notice verse 6, where Paul describes this as “a concession, not a command.” You don’t have to deprive one another for a season if you don’t want to. It’s not as though when you pray, you mustn’t have sex with each other. It’s a concession he’s making. If you choose to do this, provided you’re choosing it together and for a season, it’s a choice that is available to you, which is right and proper.
Peter: Yes, so let’s go back to the beginning. How do you best glorify God in your body? It’s not to stop having sex.
Phillip: No, it’s certainly not. It’s in finding God’s way to have sex. It’s a funny way to put it, but not if you believe in the Creator who’s created our bodies, and that sex is part of our creation. In this case, within marriage, God’s way to have sex is in the right place, at the right time, in the right way, with the right person. The commandment is not simply to get married. It’s to get married in order to live as married people do under God, rather than as the pagans who abuse the relationship.
Louise Perry, The Case Against The Sexual Revolution, 2022 (Polity)
Ibid.
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 given at St Andrews Cathedral called Sexual Morality.
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