1 Corinthians 6:19-20

“Or know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit which is in you, and which ye have of God? And ye are not your own; 20. for ye are bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body.”

The ἤ, or, signifies, “Or if you deny the fatal violence done to your body by fornication, you are ignorant of the holy dignity to which it is destined, and of which it is deprived by this sin. The fornicator sins and robs his body of the honour of being the temple of God.”

According to Romans 8:11, the presence of the Holy Spirit in the believer is the pledge of a glorious resurrection for his body. To renounce this dignity of being a temple and organ of the Holy Spirit by the fact of fornication, is therefore to expose himself to lose this resurrection.

The phrase, which ye have, or, which ye hold from God, is intended to emphasize strongly the superhuman origin of that Spirit whom the believer receives, and the dignity of the body in which this Divine Guest comes to dwell. We must not translate: which ye have by God, as if ὑπό were used; ἀπό denotes the origin and essence.

It would not be unnatural to make the last proposition, And ye are not your own, also dependent on the interrogative verb, Know ye not that...? But Hofmann rightly objects that the ὅτι would require to be repeated. It must therefore be regarded as a forcible affirmation: “And (because of the communication of the Spirit) ye do not any more belong to yourselves, and have consequently no longer right to dispose of your body at will.” And this taking possession of the believer by the Holy Spirit is not only an act of power on God's part, it is founded on right. This is what is explained by the first proposition of the following verse.

Vv. 20. The taking possession is legitimate; for there was the payment of a purchase price. We must not therefore translate: “bought at a great price.” The greatness of the price does not matter here. It is the fact of payment only which Paul would emphasize.

The particle δή is untranslateable; it implies the perfect evidence, and consequently urgency, of the fulfilment of the duty mentioned.

The phrase glorify God does not signify merely: not to dishonour Him; it means to display positively in the use of our body the glory and especially the holiness of the heavenly Master who has taken possession of our person. Man has lost, in whole or part, since his fall, the feeling which was so to speak the guardian of his body, that of natural modesty. Faith restores to it a more elevated guardian: self-respect as being bought by Christ the organ of the Spirit and temple of God. This is modesty raised henceforth to the height of holiness. The words which follow in the T. R., and in your spirit..., are an interpolation added with a liturgical and hortatory aim.

The three essential ideas of the passage are therefore:

1. That the use of Christian liberty as respects the body is naturally restricted by the danger of using that liberty so as to alienate it and destroy ourselves.

2. That fornication involves the Christian in a degrading physical solidarity, incompatible with the believer's spiritual solidarity with Christ.

3. That it renders the body unfit for its Christian dignity as a temple of God, and so for its glorious destination.

It appears from this entire development that contempt of the body goes side by side with abuse of the body, while respect for the body will always be the best means of ruling it. And so the whole of Scripture, from the first page of Genesis to the last of Revelation, pays homage to the dignity of the human body.