1 Corinthians 6:18

“Flee fornication! Every sin that a man doeth is without his body; but he that committeth fornication sinneth against his body.” Anselm has well expressed the meaning of the first sentence of the verse: “If we must fight against other sins, we must flee from fornication;” witness Joseph's example.

The asyndeton betrays the apostle's emotion.

Thus far (1 Corinthians 6:13-17) the thought developed by Paul had been that of the dependence arising from impure intercourse: “I shall not make myself the slave of anything” (1 Corinthians 6:12 b). For a man to give to a degraded person a right over him by such a union, is not this to place himself in the most ignoble kind of dependence? From this point Paul passes to the development of the first thought of 1 Corinthians 6:12: “All things are not expedient,” and he shows the injury which the fornicator inflicts on his own body.

He here enunciates a distinction between fornication and other sins, which it is difficult to understand. How are passion, falsehood, intemperance, suicide, sins committed without the body, while fornication is one in the body? Rückert and de Wette acknowledge their inability to find a meaning for this contrast; Calvin and Neander see in it no other idea than that of the greater guiltiness which attaches to the sin of fornication. According to Meyer, Paul means that in other sins some external matter is necessary, while fornication proceeds entirely from within. Hofmann, after criticising those different explanations, gives one which is stranger still, and almost unintelligible: The man who commits any other sin does not keep in his body the matter of his sin (the drunkard, the suicide); while the impure person makes his very body the subject of his sin, and continues in his bodily life identified with the being to which he has given himself.

It seems to me that the contrast stated by Paul is to be explained only from the point of view at which 1 Corinthians 6:13 placed us. The apostle means to speak of the body strictly so called, of the body in the body; he contrasts this living and life-giving organism with the external and purely physical organism. We possess a material body, the matter of which is being perpetually renewed; but under this changing body there exists a permanent type, which constitutes its identity. In chap. 1 Corinthians 15:50, where Paul is teaching the resurrection of the body, he declares that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.” He therefore distinguishes between the organism composed of flesh and blood, which forms the outward wrapping of the man, and the body strictly so called, one with the person which animates this wrapping. It is the same distinction as we have found in 1 Corinthians 6:13-14 of our chapter. Now it is to this inner body that the sin of the fornicator penetrates; it is by and against this inner organism that he sins, while other sins only reach its wrapping, the external body. The εἰς, in so far as it is contrasted with the prep. ἐκτός, outside of, ought to signify in; but it differs nevertheless from the simple ἐν, in, in that it also denotes the injury which the body receives from it; hence the meaning of against which is added to that of in. Thus we understand the οὐ συμφέρει of 1 Corinthians 6:1. Yet bodily injury is not the thing of which Paul is thinking. The sequel shows in what the punishment consists. The body thus profaned had a sublime destiny, and of this it is deprived by the violence done to it.