1 Corinthians 6:12-20

3. Prostitution in the church 6:12-20

The apostle proceeded to point out the sanctity of the believer’s body as the temple of the Holy Spirit. He wanted to help his readers realize the seriousness of the sins that marked them to some extent as a church.

"The Greeks always looked down on the body. There was a proverbial saying, ’The body is a tomb.’ Epictetus said, ’I am a poor soul shackled to a corpse.’" [Note: Barclay, The Letters . . ., p. 62.]

"The question is: If there are no restrictions in food, one appetite of the body, why must there be in sexual things, another physical desire?" [Note: Johnson, p. 1238.]

"Apparently some men within the Christian community are going to prostitutes and are arguing for the right to do so. Being people of the Spirit, they imply, has moved them to a higher plane, the realm of the spirit, where they are unaffected by behavior that has merely to do with the body. So Paul proceeds from the affirmation of 1 Corinthians 6:11 to an attack on this theological justification.

"As before, the gospel itself is at stake, not simply the resolution of an ethical question. The Corinthian pneumatics’ understanding of spirituality has allowed them both a false view of freedom (’everything is permissible’) and of the body (’God will destroy it’), from which basis they have argued that going to prostitutes is permissible because the body doesn’t matter." [Note: Fee, The First . . ., pp. 250-51.]

This is one of the more important passages in the New Testament on the human body.