Handed Over to Satan

Here too we know perfectly well what they suspect. They suspect that in the second letter to the Corinthians the apostle Paul granted pardon to the very man guilty of sexual immorality whom in the first he had publicly sentenced to be “handed over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh” — that godless heir to his own father’s marriage. They take it that he then rubbed out his own words by writing: [a]

“But if anyone has wholly saddened, he has not wholly saddened me, but only in part, so as not to weigh you all down. Enough for such a man is this rebuke given him by the many; so that on the contrary you should rather forgive and console him, in case a man like that is swallowed up by too much sadness. For which reason I beg you: confirm your love toward him. This too is why I wrote — to learn by testing you whether you are obedient to me in everything. And if you have forgiven anyone anything, so do I; for I too, if I have forgiven anything, have forgiven it in the person of Christ, so that we may not be outmaneuvered by Satan, since we are not ignorant of the suggestions he throws in.”

What in this points to a man guilty of immorality? What to a man who defiled his father’s bed? What to a Christian who had gone past even the shamelessness of the pagans? A man condemned by a special anger would surely have been released by a special pardon. As it is, he is vaguer in his pity than in his outrage, plainer in his severity than in his mercy — and yet it is anger that is usually left veiled, not indulgence, and grim business that hesitates more readily than glad. Of course the pardon in hand was some moderate one — and now if ever it was a thing to be guessed at, since the greatest pardons are not usually granted without a public announcement, let alone without naming the man.

After all, look at your own practice. When you bring the repentant adulterer into the church to melt the brothers with his pleading, do you not lead him into the middle and throw him down — dressed in sackcloth and ashes, a mixture of disgrace and horror — in front of the widows and the elders, begging everyone for their tears, licking everyone’s footprints, clutching everyone’s knees? And do you, good shepherd, blessed father that you are, not garnish your speech with every enticement of mercy you can manage, to bring the business off? Under the parable of the ewe, do you not go hunting for your goats? And for fear your ewe should bolt out of the flock a second time — as though a thing that was not lawful even once had merely become unlawful in future — do you not fill everyone else with dread at the very moment you are handing out the pardon?

So would the apostle have pardoned so carelessly an outrage of sexual immorality weighed down with incest? Without so much as requiring from the offender that established uniform of repentance, the very thing you ought to have learned from him? With no threat about the past, no warning about what lay ahead? On the contrary, he goes further and begs them to “confirm their love toward him” — as if he were the one making amends to the man, and not the one granting a pardon. And notice what I hear: “love,” not “fellowship.” It is what he writes to the Thessalonians as well: “If anyone does not obey our word given through the letter, mark that man out and do not associate with him, so that he may feel ashamed; and do not treat him as an enemy, but correct him as a brother.” So he could have said that a man guilty of immorality was granted love only, and not fellowship as well — and an incestuous man not even love, since he had ordered him removed from their midst, and much more, of course, from their minds.

“But he was afraid they might be outmaneuvered by Satan and lose the man — the man he had himself thrown out to Satan! Or that the one he had sentenced to destruction of the flesh might be swallowed up by too much mourning.”

At this point they even take “destruction of the flesh” to mean the work of repentance: fasting, filth, every kind of neglect and deliberate ill-usage aimed at wearing the body away, which they suppose makes satisfaction to God. So they argue that the immoral man — the incestuous man, rather — was handed over by the apostle to Satan not to be destroyed but to be put right, on the theory that afterwards, on account of the “destruction” (that is, the general affliction) “of the flesh,” he would obtain pardon; and that he did in fact obtain it. Quite so: this same apostle handed Hymenaeus and Alexander over to Satan “so that they might be trained out of blaspheming,” as he writes to his Timothy.

“And he says of himself as well that a stake was given him, an angel of Satan, to batter him, so that he would not exalt himself.”

If they bring this case in too, to make us understand that the men he handed over to Satan were handed over to be put right and not to be destroyed — what likeness is there between blasphemy and incest on the one side, and on the other a soul with nothing of the kind in it, a soul swollen from no other source than the highest holiness and complete innocence? That was the swelling being kept down in the apostle by “blows” — by an earache or a headache, if you like, as they say. Incest and blasphemy deserved to hand men over whole, to Satan himself, as a possession, and not to one of his angels. And there is a further difference, on which in fact everything turns: those men were handed over by the apostle to Satan, while to the apostle himself an angel of Satan was given. And when Paul asks the Lord to take it away, what does he hear? “Count my grace enough; for strength is brought to its full in weakness.” That is what men handed over to Satan never get to hear.

What is more, if the crime of Hymenaeus and Alexander — blasphemy — cannot be let go in this age or in the age to come, then obviously the apostle would not have gone against the Lord’s settled ruling and handed men who had already sunk out of the faith into blasphemy over to Satan in the hope of pardon. That is also why he pronounced them “shipwrecked as regards the faith,” with no ship left to comfort them, the ship being the church. Pardon is refused to those who have run onto blasphemy after believing; pagans and heretics, on the other hand, come up out of blasphemy every day. But even granting that he did say, “I handed them over to Satan so that they might learn the discipline of not blaspheming,” he said it with everyone else in view: by that handing over — that is, by their being flung outside the church — the rest had to be taught that there must be no blaspheming. In the same way he handed the incestuous man over to Satan as well: not to put him right but to destroy him, handing him to the master he had already gone over to by out-sinning a pagan, so that the others might learn there must be no sexual immorality.

And note that he says “for the destruction of the flesh,” not for its torture. He is condemning the very substance through which the man had fallen out of the faith — a substance that had already perished the moment his baptism was lost — “so that the spirit,” he says, “may be saved in the day of the Lord.” Here is a difficulty: ask whether it is the man’s own spirit that will be saved. In that case a spirit fouled with so great a wickedness is saved, the flesh being destroyed so that the spirit may be kept safe — for punishment. In that case the reading opposed to ours will be admitting a punishment with no flesh in it, if we lose the resurrection of the flesh. So what is left is this: he meant that the spirit which is reckoned to live in the church must be presented “saved” in the day of the Lord — that is, untouched by the infection of impurities — and that this is done by throwing the incestuous man out. That is why he adds: “Do you not know that a little leaven spoils the taste of the whole lump?” And that incestuous immorality was no little leaven, but a large one.

So, with those side issues cleared away, I come back to the second letter to the Corinthians, to prove that this saying of the apostle’s as well — “Enough for such a man is this rebuke given him by the many” — does not fit the immoral man. For if he had sentenced him to be handed over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, then plainly he had condemned him and not rebuked him. So it was someone else for whom he wanted the rebuke to be enough, since what the immoral man had incurred from that sentence was not a rebuke but a condemnation. In fact I put this very question to you to look into: whether in the first letter there were others as well who “wholly saddened” the apostle by “behaving disorderly,” and who “were wholly saddened” by him through incurring his rebuke, in the sense the second letter gives the word — and whether it was one of them who received pardon in that second letter. [j]

Turn your attention to the whole of that first letter, written, if I may put it so, not in ink but in gall: swollen, indignant, scornful, full of threats and of ill will, and shaped charge by charge with particular men in view, the owners of those charges, so to speak. That is what the divisions and rivalries and disputes and presumptions and swaggerings and quarrels called for: to be loaded with reproach, cut short with a curt rebuke, filed down by a lofty tone, frightened off by severity.

And what a sharp reproach a piece of humility can be. “I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, in case anyone should say I had baptized in my own name.” “For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.” And: “I think God has picked us apostles out as the hindmost, like men condemned to fight wild beasts; for we have been made a spectacle to this world, to angels and to men.” And: “We have been made the offscouring of this world, the scrapings of everything.” And: “Am I not free? Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Christ Jesus our Lord?”

And on the other side, what a haughty tone he was forced into: “But it counts for very little with me that I should be examined by you, or by any human court day; for I am not aware of anything against myself.” And: “No one shall empty out my boast.” “Do you not know that we are to judge angels?”

Again, how open the rebuke is when he speaks freely, how plain the edge of the spiritual sword: “You are rich already! You have had your fill already! You are reigning already!” And: “If anyone thinks he knows something, he does not yet know how he ought to know.” Is he not slapping somebody’s face even there, when he says, “For who makes you different? And what do you have that you did not receive? Why do you boast as though you had not received it?” Is he not striking them on the mouth as well, when he says: “But some, in their own conscience, eat it even now as an idol sacrifice; and sinning in that way, by battering the weak consciences of the brothers, they will be sinning against Christ”?

By this point he is naming names: “Or do we not have the right to eat and to drink, and to take women about with us, just as the other apostles do, and the Lord’s brothers, and Cephas?” And: “If others come in for a share of authority over you, should not we all the more?” In the same way he pricks them with a pen that picks out individuals: “So let the man who thinks he is standing watch out that he does not fall.” And: “If anyone means to be quarrelsome — we have no such custom, and neither does the church of the Lord.” And with a closing line like this, capped with a curse — “If anyone does not love the Lord Jesus, let him be anathema maranatha” — he is certainly running some particular man through.

But I would rather take my stand where the apostle is hotter still, where the immoral man himself has upset other people as well. “As though I were not coming to you, some have puffed themselves up. But I will come the sooner, if the Lord permits, and I will find out, not the talk of these puffed-up men, but the power. For the kingdom of God is not in talk but in power. And what do you want? Am I to come to you with a rod, or in a spirit of gentleness?” And what came next? “It is commonly reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and such immorality as there is not even among the nations — that a man should have his own father’s wife. And are you puffed up? Should you not rather have mourned, so that the man who has done such a thing might be taken away from among you?”

Whom were they to mourn for? A dead man, of course. And to whom were they to make that mourning? To the Lord, of course, so that one way or another he might be “taken away from among them” — not merely put outside the church. You do not ask God for a thing that falls within the presiding officer’s own competence. What they were asking was that by death — not just the death everyone dies, but one suited to that particular flesh, which was already a corpse, a tomb leprous with an uncleanness past curing — he might be “taken away” from the church more completely than by simple expulsion. And so, as far as he could be taken away in the meantime, the apostle “judged that such a man be handed over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh.” Flesh that was being cast out to the devil had to be cursed, so that it would be discarded from the sacred pledge of blessing and never come back into the church’s camp.

So here we see the apostle’s severity divided in two, against a man who was puffed up and a man who was incestuous: armed against the one with a rod, against the other with a sentence — a rod he was threatening, a sentence he was carrying out; the one still being brandished, the other already in flight; the one to rebuke with, the other to condemn with. And certainly, straight afterwards, the rebuked man trembled under the threat of the raised rod, while the condemned man perished as the penalty fell on him at once. The one backed off in fear of the blow, the other in paying it.

When a letter from this same apostle goes to the Corinthians a second time, a pardon is plainly granted — but it is uncertain to whom, since neither the person nor the offense is named. Let me set the two men side by side with the sense of the words. If the incestuous man is put before us, the puffed-up man will be standing on the same platform. Surely the parallel holds well enough when the puffed-up man is rebuked and the incestuous man condemned. To the puffed-up man pardon is granted, but after a rebuke; to the incestuous man no pardon appears to have been granted, since he lies under condemnation. If the pardon was granted to the man they feared might be “swallowed up by mourning,” it was the rebuked man who was still in danger of being swallowed up — losing heart at the threat, and mourning over the rebuke. The condemned man was reckoned as swallowed up already and for good, by his crime and by his sentence alike: a man whose business was not to mourn, but to suffer the thing he might have mourned before he suffered it.

If the reason the pardon was granted was “so that we may not be defrauded by Satan,” then the loss being guarded against had to do with something that had not yet perished. You take no precautions over a thing already finished off, only over a thing still safe. But the condemned man — condemned into Satan’s possession, at that — had already been lost to the church the moment he did such a thing, to say nothing of the moment the church itself disowned him. How was she to fear being cheated of a man she had already lost when he was snatched away, and whom after his condemnation she could not have kept? And finally, which is it fitting for a judge to pardon: what he has settled once for all by a formal sentence, or what he has left hanging by an interim ruling? And I mean, of course, the kind of judge who does not make a practice of “rebuilding what he has torn down, in case he be found a transgressor.”

Come now: suppose he had not “wholly saddened” so many people in the first letter; suppose he had rebuked nobody and terrified nobody; suppose he had struck the incestuous man alone; suppose that for his sake he had sent no one into a panic and left no puffed-up man appalled. Even then, would it not be better for you to suspect, and more faithful of you to argue, that somebody quite different had been in the same position among the Corinthians at that time — a man who, rebuked and terrified and already wounded with mourning, then received pardon because the moderate size of his fault allowed it — than to read that pardon as granted to an incestuous man?

This much you were bound to read, if not in a letter, then stamped on the apostle’s own character, written more plainly by his modesty than by any pen: that you must not steep Paul — the “apostle of Christ,” the “teacher of the nations in faith and truth,” the “chosen vessel,” the founder of churches, the censor of discipline — in shallowness so great that he either condemned rashly a man he was about to acquit, or acquitted rashly a man he had not condemned rashly. And this over a sexual immorality that is a matter of plain indecency — let alone over an incestuous marriage, a godless indulgence, a lust that murders a father: a lust he refused even to compare with the nations’, for fear it should be put down to custom; a lust he would sit in judgment on though absent, for fear the guilty man should “gain the time”; a lust he condemned only after calling in “the power of the Lord,” so that the sentence should not look like a human one. So he has made fools of his own spirit, and of the angel of the church, and of the power of the Lord, if he cancelled what he had formally pronounced with their advice.