1 Corinthians 5 - Introduction

II. Discipline. Chap. 5.

A large number of commentators think that Paul here passes to the vice of impurity. But it is not till 1 Corinthians 6:12 that he really attacks this vice. As to chap. 5, they confound the occasion with the subject. The occasion is an act of impurity; but the subject treated, and that in consequence of the laxity which the Church had shown in regard to this scandal, is the duty of every living Church to take action against sin when it manifests itself openly within its pale.

It is impossible with the large number of the unconverted who become members of the Church, and with the sin which the converted themselves still bear in them, that evil should not sometimes break out in the Christian community. But the difference which should ever remain between the Church and the world is, that in the former sin should not manifest itself without falling under the stroke of rebuke and judgment. “There is a Holy One in the midst of thee,” said the prophet Hosea to Israel. A Holy One lives also in the Church, and from Him there go forth, in every true Church which has life and not merely the name to live, a protest and reaction against all notorious wickedness. This reaction, the work of the Holy Spirit who proceeds from Christ, is discipline. Where it is weakened, the Church is in the same measure confounded with the world.

The chapter which we proceed to study is the classical passage of the New Testament on the subject; if the apostle has put it here, it is because the subject belongs, on the one side, to the ecclesiastical questions treated in chaps. 1-4, and on the other to the moral questions which will be treated, chaps. 6-10. It is therefore the natural transition between the two domains of ecclesiastical or collective life and the moral life of each member.

In 1 Corinthians 5:1-5, Paul speaks of discipline in special connection with the particular case which obliges him to treat the subject, to pass thereafter to the condition of discipline in general (1 Corinthians 5:6-8); the passage, 1 Corinthians 5:9-13, is an appendix.