Have Mercy on Yourself in Christ: The Body is Meant for the Lord and Not as a Tool for Pleasure
a study on 1 Corinthians 6 based on a lecture by Chris Green
I’ve signed up for the Open Table Conference on Corinthians I and II, which runs from September to April. Last week I wrote an essay reflection on the lecture given by Kenneth Tanner because the topic resonated strongly for me, in my experience with the church. Today, feeling bummed out by so much terrible news that I’ve covered here lately, I decided to write a reflection on this week’s lecture by Chris Green.
These OTC lectures change the way I engage the biblical texts, and they change the lens through which I view G-d and a faith life lived in Him. Wednesday’s lecture on 1 Corinthians 6 shattered my brain, blew me completely away—a wonderful and amazing discussion of the body and of sexuality in the context of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians deserved further reflection and consideration. It warranted an essay on my part.
Readers might have guessed that writing serves as a kind of spiritual formation for me, it’s a devotion to G-d when I write about theology, biblical study, lectures or homilies or sermons. If you like these essays on theology and biblical study, please consider a paid subscription. Failing that, you can make a one time donation.
1 Corinthians: 6
Lawsuits among Believers
6 When any of you has a grievance against another, do you dare to take it to court before the unrighteous, instead of taking it before the saints? 2 Do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if the world is to be judged by you, are you incompetent to try trivial cases? 3 Do you not know that we are to judge angels—to say nothing of ordinary matters? 4 If you have ordinary cases, then, do you appoint as judges those who have no standing in the church? 5 I say this to your shame. Can it be that there is no one among you wise enough to decide between one believer and another, 6 but a believer goes to court against a believer—and before unbelievers at that?
7 In fact, to have lawsuits at all with one another is already a defeat for you. Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be defrauded? 8 But you yourselves wrong and defraud—and believers at that.
9 Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived! Fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes, sodomites, 10 thieves, the greedy, drunkards, revilers, robbers—none of these will inherit the kingdom of God. 11 And this is what some of you used to be. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.
Glorify God in Body and Spirit
12 “All things are lawful for me,” but not all things are beneficial. “All things are lawful for me,” but I will not be dominated by anything. 13 “Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food,” and God will destroy both one and the other. The body is meant not for fornication but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. 14 And God raised the Lord and will also raise us by his power. 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! 16 Do you not know that whoever is united to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For it is said, “The two shall be one flesh.” 17 But anyone united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. 18 Shun fornication! Every sin that a person commits is outside the body; but the fornicator sins against the body itself. 19 Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? 20 For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body.
image: 1817 Fresco from Zograf monastery in Mount Athos, Greece
Thesis of this epistle — The body is meant not for fornication but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. And God raised the Lord and will also raise us by his power.
Paul calls the Corinthians to glorify G-d in their bodies. Chris Green mentions the Richard Horsley commentary on Corinthians, first regarding chapter 5 (which the OTC Panel covered last week), it’s mainly about community and discipline, and the community and the discipline may have existed mainly in the mind of Paul. When we read this text, we see it from Paul’s POV. So, Horsley means to ask, did the Corinthians see themselves as belonging to a larger community of the church?
Regarding chapter 6, Horsley points out the awkward Greek phrasing of the thesis verse, the body is meant not for fornication but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body, does this have theological significance? Paul, a human, lives removed from the Corinthians, and perhaps these ideas live more in Paul (as rhetorical projection?) than in the Corinthians themselves. Did the Corinthians agree with Paul’s assessment? However, we don’t read it that way, we read it as scripture, and as such the text bears infinite meaning. Our reading of the text, therefore, becomes a kind of spiritual formation. In this way, we become a living doxology, a people whose lives together serve as a witness to G-d, glorify G-d in your body.
How do we hear this text, though? Most of us have heard it from a lectionary, read alongside other texts, in a liturgical schedule. So the texts tune each other, and that influences our understanding and interpretation of the text.
For example, the RCL places 1 Corinthians 6:12-20 on the second Sunday after epiphany, alongside the 1 Samuel 3 (the call of Samuel, where Eli teaches him to say speak Lord your servant is listening), John 1:43-51 (where Jesus says to His disciples follow me), and Psalm 139 (in which the psalmist says you have searched me and known me, you knit me together in my mother’s womb). Hearing 1 Samuel 3 and John 1:43-51 alongside 1 Corinthians 6 frames Paul’s ethics as a response to the call of the Lord, a call to do the work of G-d in the world. Psalm 139 connects Paul’s theology of the body to the Lord, as the embodied One who makes the body, knits it together. Point being — we are intricately made by a G-d who Himself “was intricately made”, ie woven together in the womb of Mary. On that second Sunday of epiphany, we have a theme of manifestation. Therefore as we read Paul’s words glorify G-d in your body, alongside these other texts on that Sunday, we hear a call to be the light of the world. So, our handling disputes, of food, of sex—all these relate to manifesting G-d’s light in the world, both in what we do and don’t do.
The Byzantine lectionary positions that same passage from 1 Corinthians 6 on the Sunday before lent, the Sunday of the prodigal son. We read Paul’s words alongside the prodigal, we hear the prodigal say give me my share, and we see an example of Paul’s warnings regarding those who think they belong to themselves. We are not our own, though. We don’t just get to take and use as we like because we belong to G-d, as a member of the body.
image: the seven deadly sins via Simply Catholic
Doesn’t this point to the way our fear of death reduces the self to acts of self preservation or self glorification? Has Paul put his finger on the heart of human experience? Out of our fear of death, we end up abusing food and sex — what we take into our body, and what we give out of our body. We distract ourselves with pleasure, we use pleasure to numb ourselves, to escape pain that could help us grow spiritually, and to draw closer to G-d. We could safely say all problems that break out in community have a connection to sex and food. Pride in my heirs, in my ancestors, matters of bloodline and inheritance, the land and it’s resources and its borders — all these go to the crux of food and sex, the table and the bed. These issues also sit at the heart of what fractures communities. They sit at the heart of what sets communities against one another, when strife and violence play out. The fear of death drives these behavioural phenomenon in our communities. Christ came to free us from that horror and suffering.
How does this text relate to the prodigal? Perhaps Paul saw our honouring the body as a kind of homecoming, or a renewal, a kind of gathering around the Lord’s table. When we consider Paul’s text in conjunction with these other texts, his ethic seems less severe — it becomes an urging to coming home to the Lord’s table. So, the way we read scripture has to do with how we hear it, how we understand it. When we hear various passages alongside one another, together they fine tune our understanding of each separate text.
What about the going to court thing? How does this tie in? Chris Green suggests that, when the Corinthians go to court, they publicly air those things happening at the Lord’s table, or what’s not happening at the table or at the bed, (ie vis a vis food and sex), or what they’re doing to make what happens at the table and in the bed matter. It goes beyond individual indulgence in food, gluttony, lust. We exist and stay alive because of food and sex, they lie at the heart of the human condition and the human experience. Sex and food have the capacity to take us out of ourselves with ecstasy. They also have the capacity to enslave us, make us beholden to them.
How do food and sex enslave us? Think of the recovery community. They’re organised around what’s entering the body or what the body enters. Disordered passions drive addiction, compulsion, obsession. We abuse good gifts of pleasure which G-d gave us, and we become enslaved by our twisted passions.
Who exerts controls, who maintains the rules — that’s where principalities and powers work in human society. So, Paul seems to have a sense that, when communities have become fractured, when they war against each other or within themselves, it goes back to what is or isn’t happening at the table and in the bed. Minority communities need internal mechanisms for conflict resolution. Meaning we need to deal with our own sh1t in our own communities. It’s connected to honour-shame dynamics and how to balance that. Paul wonders about the Corinthians going to the unrighteous to settle disputes, and the ways this violates the integrity and spirit of the community. Ultimately this leads to violating Christ. Paul doesn’t admonish the Corinthians except to tell them this isn’t who you are, you’re meant to judge angels.
What’s meant by judging angels? It refers to the notion that we judge our teachers by how we live. The way a community lives provides a testament to how their teachers taught them. So, perhaps Paul might feel as though the Corinthians have shamed him, because he taught and teaches them? The way we live our lives provides the judgement referred to in this passage. Repeat, we exert a kind of judgement through our life choices and the way we navigate daily existence with ourselves and others around us and with creation in general. So, it’s not as though we will adjudicate cases, it’s that our life embodies and serves as the testament to the faithfulness of G-d and our unfaithfulness to Him.
What’s the takeaway from this discourse about judgement? It’s that Paul sees the church as an icon of G-d’s justice.
In the book Origin of 1 Corinthians by John Hurd, Hurd notes that Paul asks the Corinthians ten different times, do you not know, and this grounds Paul’s rebuke in his catechesis. I’ve taught you this .. you should know this. Paul means the church of Corinth to serve as an icon of judgement, as a sign of the Kingdom of G-d. The judgement of G-d takes place, it begins in the church. Church community should serve as a witness of the judgement of G-d (serving as a light to the world). Therefore when the Corinthian Church members turns to pagan courts to resolve their conflict, they distort their witness of the judgement of G-d.
What does Paul mean by line 7? Thistleton suggests a slightly refine translation, why not let yourselves be wronged? Chris Green calls this middle voice, not active and not passive, middle.1 Why not allow this thing to happen to you? Thistleton calls this a permissive reflective middle voice. It suggests our position as members of the body of Christ, we have freedom, however we don’t have autonomy from G-d, we must yield to His law. Obedience to G-d frees us. Self control, an important fruit of the spirit, provides us with freedom. The Sprit provides us with most freedom. The victory of the martyr provides the greatest victory. Martyrs judge the world.
If you endure the injustice, you are victorious; you are deprived of money but not of the victory won by a disciplined life. Your opponent cannot compel you to do what you do not wish to do. Here is the proof: tell me, who was victorious, the envious one or the one on the dunghill? ... Whose victory do we admire, that of the devil who afflicted Job, or that of Job who was afflicted? Clearly Job, even though he could not hold onto his perishable wealth or save his children. And why do I speak of wealth and children? Job could not even protect his own body. But nonetheless Job, who lost all his possessions, is the victorious one. — Crysostom’s Homily (17) on 1 Corinthians 6.
Job loses everything and yet, he loses nothing. He remains faithful to G-d, and he gains his freedom in that way, he achieves victory. In verse 5 Paul mentions shame, meaning to say to the Corinthians that we can act in ways that betray our own worth. When we choose a path of self destruction, we betray ourselves, we violate our own dignity. Shame happens when we act in ways that betray our own worth and dignity. It happens when we debase and deface ourselves through our actions. When we have lesssened our own worth through our behaviour, we have shamed ourselves. When I act in a way that’s false to my dignity, I have done violence to myself, I’ve disfigured my glory (in G-d). Could this serve as a call back into dignity and worth?
In verses 9 to 11, Paul calls the Corinthians back to who they are — invoking the middle voice when he speaks of baptism. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God. Paul tells the, their actions distort the witness of the community, they disfigure the glory the community, collectively and individually, should bear. The self talk of the community has become an anathema to the teachings of Paul. Three distortions of the Corinthian self talk — all things are lawful, sin is outside the body, food and body are insignificant. In his letter, Paul mentions these things in order to correct them, and bring Corinthians back to G-dcentric values.
What distorted messages do we hear within our church community? All things work together for the good. You do you, and I’ll do me. How can we say I’ll do me and follow Jesus, who teaches that we do Him, we serve others through emulating Him? We talk about G-d using us, in a utilitarian sense that denigrates us, makes us things. Reader, think about other catch phrases we hear in the church, think about the ways that a lot of Christian teaching in community involves knowing these catch phrases and countering them with more Spiritually sound messages. Teaching then becomes healing and sanctifying. Paul sees how the church has become factionalized, he seeks to get to the underlying driving forces. Sex and food and the ways we abuse them cause us to create our own catchphrases to justify our undignified behavior. We must come to know in the community of Christ that we cannot just do anything we feel like anytime we feel like it. In this text, Paul holds the mirror up to the Corinthians.
14 Remind them of this, and warn them before God that they are to avoid wrangling over words, which does no good but only ruins those who are listening. 15 Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved by him, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly explaining the word of truth. 16 Avoid profane chatter, for it will lead people into more and more impiety, 17 and their talk will spread like gangrene. (2 Timothy2:14-15).
How do we fight over words, and how does that embody death? What if spiritual warfare very much involves the ways we speak, the way we use words to communicate to others? Can we recognise the patterns in our phrasing that violate our values and ethics? Our speech provides the most profound vehicle for the spiritual warfare we face in daily life. We can liken ourselves to Jacob, whose hip fell out of joint after wrestling with G-d and ever after he walked with a limp. Jesus died and then rose from the dead— our speech will be awkward. When we say things with catchphrase ease, it means we haven’t lived these things fully enough.
What does Paul mean in verse 9, do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? A fundamentalist interpretation will take that as meaning not getting into heaven after death. Chris Green suggests that it refers to the kingdom of G-d entering us, as opposed to simply us entering the kingdom of G-d. When we engage each other in undignified and hostile ways, the kingdom of G-d doesn’t appear in the world. For the simple reason that, that we cease to manifest the light of the gospel, we block and disfigure the glory of G-d, we manifest brokenness, death, the fear of death. It’s not a moralistic finger wagging, it’s an admonishment they when we mistreat each other as member of the body of Christ, we lie about G-d to the world. Think beatitude language. Think salt and light. Also, John Behr notes that Paul used the word, inherit, not enter. We bring the way of the Lord through our treatment of one another as members of the church.
Let’s jump ahead to the spirit and the body. The body is meant not for fornication but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body … But anyone united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. Why does Paul shift from talking about one flesh to one spirit? The body has a teleology, it has a purpose—not fornication, but for the Lord. The body serves manifestation and epiphany. Paul means our body, and he means the church, because that’s the body of Christ. In verse 9 Paul gives a list, male prostitute refers to a passive, sodomite2 refers to a dominant. Think middle voice.
Sexuality can refer to doing violence to others, using your body to dominate another, to crush their spirit. G-d didn’t create the body to serve as a weapon, He didn’t create the body to serve as a vehicle of violence against others. When Paul speaks of the body, he means the human body and he means the body of Christ, the Christian community. When we use our body to dominate and crush another, we disfigure G-d, we engage in a false testament to G-d. Painful self indulgence puts our body at war with our spirit.
To be one with Christ means to be bound with Him—the ultimate freedom. We do not have a master-slave relationship with G-d. We have a body-spirit relationship with Him. When Paul speaks of sinning against the body, he means the body of Christ, which already includes the body of the sinner, and the body of the sinned against. Submitting passively to the will of G-d denotes another form of domination. Glorify G-d in your body means make choices to live in ways attuned to the Spirit that embodies you. In his sermon on 1 Corinthians 6, Augustine tells us to have mercy on Christ in ourselves. For Augustine, everything depends on recognizing Christ in one another:
So if anyone, from a desire to commit fornication, had little value in his own eyes and was despising himself, let him not despise Christ in himself. Let him not say, I will do it, l am of no account, for all flesh is grass (Isa. 40:6). Your body is a member of Christ. Where were you headed? Come back! From what precipice were you eager to hurl yourself? Have mercy on Christ in yourself, recognize Christ in yourself! Shall I therefore take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? The prostitute is the one who agrees to commit adultery with you. Perhaps she is a Christian and takes the members of Christ and makes them members of an adulterer. You are despising Christ in each other, failing to recognize your Lord or to consider the price with which you were bought (1 Cor. 6:20). What sort of Lord is one who makes his slaves into his brothers? Yet “brothers” was too little for him—he made us into his members. Is being so highly valued of so little account? It was conferred on us so graciously: shall it not be treated respectfully? If this gift were not given to us, we would wish it given; shall we, because it is given, treat it with contempt? —(Augustine, Sermon 161:1-4).
Our flesh is not grass. Christ lives in each of us. When we engage in adulterous behaviour, we despise Christ in ourselves and each other. When we regard ourselves as slaves of the Lord, we debase and abuse the body of Christ. Remember that, in ancient times, the body of a slave meant nothing. Violence and indignity characterise the master-slave relationship. Consent, free will, and co-suffering love characterise the relationship between Christ the Lord and humans. What a slave master does with the body of a slave doesn’t count, the slave body has become an object, not worthy of dignity, and therefore it carries no moral significance. G-d doesn’t have slaves, in fact in Exodus 21:16 G-d tells Moshe that anyone who steals a human to sell into slavery should receive the death penalty. G-d doesn’t master the church, he serves it in the way of co-suffering love. In fundamentalism G-d erases humanity completely, there’s one actor — that’s a distortion of G-d, it disfigures His glory.
So, what’s Augustine saying with respect to sexuality, then? He says that fornication and sexual dysfunction/immorality arise from self hate. He equates sexual distortion with self deprecation. He also says that G-d doesn’t regard us as slaves, and not even as brothers, He sees us as Himself—that’s what members in His body means, that’s what oneness in Christ means.
In The Body’s Grace, Rowan Williams alludes to this same sentiment that Augustine expresses. G-d loves us as G-d loves G-d. “Solitary sexual activity operates at the level of release of tension and localised pleasure,” it has little relational value—means little in the way of perception beyond oneself, and so carries little value in any discussion of sexuality, as a process or relationship. Solitary sexual activity can therefore tell us little about grace.
“For my body to be the cause of joy, the end of homecoming, for me, it must be there for someone else, be perceived, accepted, nurtured; and that means being given over to the creation of joy in that other, because only as directed to the enjoyment, the happiness, of the other does it become unreservedly lovable. To desire my joy is to desire the joy of the one I desire: my search for enjoyment through the bodily presence of another is a longing to be enjoyed in my body. As Blake put it, sexual partners “admire” in each other “the lineaments of gratified desire”. We are pleased because we are pleasing.” — Rowan Williams, The Body’s Grace
Williams writes about asymmetrical sexual practises, practises which permit only limited awareness of the embodiment of the other, practises in which one agent dominates, and doesn’t have wait upon the desire of the other. What do we want to convey to others with and through our sexuality? Do we want to convey our body’s capacity for healing and enlargement of life of others? What does our sexual activity embody? Corruption? Immaturity? Does it matter what we do with or say about our body? Do we fixate on maximising pleasure and minimising damage? What about learning grace, what about learning humanity in and with one another?
Writes Williams, “I can only fully discover the body’s grace in taking time, the time needed for a mutual recognition that my partner and I are not simply passive instruments to each other. Such things are learned in the fabric of a whole relation of converse and cooperation …” G-d is not unequally yoked in His marriage to us. When we understand that, we can fully grasp what’s meant by marriage to Christ as being in His body. We do not have an imbalanced relationship to G-d. He draws us up into the fullness of His life, however He doesn’t approach us from a superior position. So, in this context, Chris Green points out that error of conceiving of G-d as a really powerful being who gives some of His power to us — this denotes an asymmetrical relationship and that’s not the connection G-d has with us. Grace brings us into fullness, identity, equality.
Let us reverently pay homage to:God, Transcendent Person,Supreme FatherThe Messiah, Manifest Person,Son of the Most HighThe Holy Spirit, Testifying Person,These three persons consist of one substance.—from The Luminous Way to the East, a text from the Tang period of China, first contact with Syriac Christians.
G-d, Aluohe, Chinese transcription of Alaha. Transcendent person, Miaoshen, Miao means mystery and shen means body — mysterious body.
Manifest person, Yingshen, response body, transformative body.
Testifying person, Zhenshen, means testifying body. Sanshen, three body, language used to describe the Trinity, reflects the the tripartation of Buddha’s body.
Regarding the body, as Paul conceives of it, what does “body” mean or to what does it refer?
“Body” does not have as stable a meaning as we suppose.
Paul rejects the claim that sin is “outside the body.” Sexual sin is uniquely against the body, against the self as body, and against the ecclesiastic body.
“Outside” refers to not related to carnal desire/pleasure; sexual sin most directly touches the body’s teleology.
Internet archive link to The Bodies of G-d in Ancient Israel by Benjamin Sommer.
When we read Pauline scripture, we think we know it already. We lack humility, and as such, we can’t fully glean the wisdom in the words of the text. What if we could put aside the moralistic lens, and lean into the deeper nuanced truth embedded in the language Paul uses here? Paul didn’t write morality codes! He wrote about living well in our embodied lives, in the body of Christ that’s consistent and aligned to who He is and who we are. If He’s raised from the dead, we can’t say it, be it, do it like that! We don’t know what we’re talking about a lot of the time. Cherith Nordling suggests that we have a radical body dysmorphia in the body of Christ, and that trickles down to young people and their embodied lives now. Few straight lines exist that link what we think we believe and what we believe. Robert Jensen, in Systematic Theology, wrote about sexuality in a naturalistic manner, as opposed to a sacramental and apocalyptic one, yet he wrote about Christology being asymmetrical. Christology being asymmetrical and sexuality being not asymmetrical don’t match, and reminds us we don’t know it all, in fact we know very little.
Note: *This essay is based on Chris Green’s lecture on 1 Corinthians 6 in the Open Table Conference, as well as commentary from Cherith Nordling, John Behr, and Brad Jersak, members of the OTC panel.
English has no equivalent to Middle Voice, which refers to the subject being the cause and the focus, agent and experiential object, of the verbal action. A choice to experience something passively.