The Apostle’s Battle Line

Hammer out the rest of that letter, then, to bring out what the apostle meant, and you will find that the rest of it does not square with wiping out an act of incest either — unless we are willing to have the apostle blush at how badly his later words fit. For what sort of theory is this? The moment after making a free gift of restoration to the church’s peace to a man guilty of incest and sexual immorality, he goes straight on piling up appeals: turn away from filth, cut off the blemishes, do what is holy — as if he had decided nothing to the contrary a moment before. [a]

Set the two things side by side and see. Is it in character for a man who has just released from sentence someone plainly convicted not merely of disgrace but of crime, to say, “And so, since we have this ministry, in keeping with the mercy shown us, we do not lose heart; we have renounced the hidden things of disgrace”? Is it in character, again, for a man who lists his own labors — hardships and pressures, fasts and sleepless nights — and names chastity among them, to excuse an immodesty everybody can see? Is it in character, once more, for a man to take back into fellowship any reprobate whatever, when he is the one who writes: “For what partnership is there between righteousness and iniquity? What fellowship between light and darkness? What harmony between Christ and Belial? What share has a believer with an unbeliever? What agreement between the temple of God and idols?”

Will he not have to hear this said back to him, over and over: “And how do you separate things that you yourself joined earlier in this same letter, when you restored the incestuous man? By putting him back into one body with the church, you have made righteousness share with iniquity, darkness have fellowship with light, Belial sound in harmony with Christ, and the believer hold the holy things in common with the unbeliever. And let the idols look to themselves: the very man who ruined the temple of God is turned into a temple of God. For here too you say, ‘You are a temple of the living God. For he says: I will live in them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. So come out from among them, be separate, and do not touch what is unclean.’ You spin out this thread of argument as well, apostle — at the very moment when you are holding out your own hand to so huge a whirlpool of filth. In fact you add more still: ‘Since we have this promise, dear friends, let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of flesh and spirit, bringing chastity to completion in the fear of God.’”

Tell me: is this a man who had just been calling some notorious offender back into the church? Or did he write it precisely so that he should not look, to people like you today, as though he had? These words of his are bound to work both ways — as a standing bar against the earlier part of the letter and as a ruling given in advance over what comes after. For when he says, toward the end of the letter, “I am afraid that when I come God may humble me, and that I may have to mourn many of those who sinned before and have not repented of the impurity they committed, the sexual immorality, the vileness,” he certainly did not lay down that they were to be taken back if they had entered on repentance, these people he expected to find in the church. He laid down that they were to be mourned, and beyond any question thrown out, so that they would forfeit repentance.

And besides, it makes no sense that the man who had just insisted that light has no fellowship with darkness, nor righteousness with iniquity, should be hinting here at something on the subject of fellowship. No — anyone who takes some part of him in a sense that runs against the man’s own nature and purpose, against the standard and the rule of his teaching, simply does not know the apostle. That is what they do who suppose that a teacher of holiness in every form, holy by his own example too, a man who curses and cleanses away every kind of filth and who never once contradicts himself on the point, restored a man guilty of incest to the church’s peace sooner than some milder offender.

So we have to keep holding the apostle himself up in front of them; and I mean to show that he is the same man in Second Corinthians that I know him to be in all his letters. He is the one who, back in the first letter, was the very first to consecrate the temple of God: “Do you not know that you are God’s temple, and that the Lord lives in you?” And to hallow that temple and keep it clean, he is the one who laid down the rule for its wardens: “If anyone ruins God’s temple, God will ruin him; for God’s temple is holy, and that is what you are.” Now then — who in the world has ever put back together a man whom God has ruined, that is, handed over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh? Especially when Paul added, for that very reason, “Let nobody deceive himself” — meaning, let nobody imagine that a man God has ruined can be made whole again. [k]

It is the same when, among all the other crimes — ahead of all of them, in fact — he states that “adulterers, and the sexually immoral, and men who let themselves be used as women, and men who go to bed with males, will not reach the kingdom of God,” and prefaces it with “Do not be deceived” — that is, if you think they will reach it. And people who have the kingdom taken away from them are certainly not allowed the life that is lived in the kingdom either. Then he adds, “And such you were; but you were washed, but you were made holy, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.” In the same measure that he marks such sins paid off when they come before baptism, he rules them unforgivable after it — since it is a fact that nobody is allowed to be washed a second time.

In what follows, too, recognize Paul standing like an immovable column of discipline and its rules. “Food for the stomach and the stomach for food, and God will do away with both the one and the other; but the body is not for sexual immorality but for God” — for “Let us make man,” God said, “after our image and likeness,” and “God made man; after the image and likeness of God he made him.” “And the Lord for the body”: yes, because “the Word became flesh.” “And God both raised the Lord and will raise us up by his own power” — on account, that is, of our body’s union with him. And so: “Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ?” — because Christ too is God’s temple: “Pull down this temple, and in three days I will raise it up again.” “Shall I take away the members of Christ and make them the members of a prostitute? Do you not know that whoever is glued to a prostitute becomes one body with her — for the two, it says, shall become one flesh — while whoever is glued to the Lord is one spirit? Run from sexual immorality.”

If it can be called back by a pardon, in what sense am I to run from it — so as to turn adulterer all over again? I shall gain nothing by running: I shall be “one body” with whatever I am glued to by sharing in it. “Every sin a person commits is outside the body; but whoever is sexually immoral sins against his own body.” And in case you should run to that sentence for a license to be immoral, on the ground that the thing you sin against is your own and not the Lord’s, he takes you away from yourself and awards you to Christ, as he had arranged already: “And you are not your own.” He sets against it at once, “for you were bought at a price” — the Lord’s blood, that is — “so glorify and exalt the Lord in your body.” Ask yourself whether the man who gives that order is likely to have pardoned someone who disgraced the Lord and threw him out of the government of his own body — and did it by incest.

If you want to drink in the whole knowledge of the apostle, and to see with what an axe of censorship he lops and uproots and clears away every forest of lusts, for fear of letting anything gather strength and sprout again, then look at him wanting souls to fast even from nature’s own lawful fruit — the apple, I mean, of marriage. “Now about what you wrote: it is good for a man not to touch a woman; but because of sexual immorality, let each man have his own wife, and let husband render the wife her due, and wife the husband.” Who can fail to see that he loosened the bond of that “good” against his own will, and did it to head off sexual immorality? But if he has granted, or does grant, indulgence to sexual immorality, then of course he has wrecked the point of his own remedy — and he will have to put the brake straight back on the marriages he allowed in place of self-control, once the immorality those marriages were permitted to prevent has stopped being anything to fear. For an immorality that has indulgence granted it will not be feared.

And yet he states that he granted the use of marriage “by way of indulgence, not of command,” since he “wishes” everyone were on a level with himself. But when lawful things are granted only by way of indulgence, who is to hope for unlawful ones? “To the unmarried and the widows,” he says as well, “it is good to hold out” as he does; “but if they are too weak, let them marry, because it is better to marry than to burn.” Burn with which fires, please — the fires of craving, or the fires of punishment? Well — if sexual immorality is pardonable, it will not be a thing anyone burns with craving for. And it is more like an apostle to be taking thought for the fires of punishment. So if it is punishment that burns, it follows that sexual immorality, with punishment waiting for it, is not pardonable. Meanwhile, while he is forbidding divorce, he uses the Lord’s ruling against adultery as the tool for providing something in place of divorce — either holding out unmarried, or else a reconciliation and peace — since “anyone who dismisses his wife for any cause except adultery makes her commit adultery, and the man who marries a woman dismissed by her husband commits adultery.” What powerful remedies the Holy Spirit supplies, to keep anyone from committing a second time what he does not want pardoned a second time!

And in every case he says it is best for a man to stay as he is. “Are you bound to a wife? Do not look to be loosed” — so as to give adultery no opening. “Are you loosed from a wife? Do not look for a wife” — so as to keep the chance for yourself. “But even so, if you do marry a wife you have not sinned, and if a virgin marries she has not sinned; such people, though, will have pressure in the flesh.” Even there he is granting a permission by way of “sparing them.” On the other hand he lays it down that “the time has been wound up,” so that even “those who have wives should be as though they had none.” “For the shape of this world is passing away” — a world that no longer needs the command, “Grow and multiply.” And so he wants us to live “without anxiety,” because “the unmarried care about the Lord, how they may please God, while the married think about the world, how they may please their spouse.” And so he declares that the man who “keeps his virgin” does “better” than the man who “gives her in marriage.” And so, carefully, he judges her the happier who, after losing her husband once she had come to the faith, lovingly takes up the opportunity of widowhood. And so he commends all these counsels of self-control as God’s own: “I think,” he says, “that I too have the Spirit of God.”

Who is this most audacious defender of yours, who stands up for immodesty in every form — plainly a “most faithful” advocate for adulterers, for the sexually immoral, for the incestuous, in whose honor he has taken up this case against the Holy Spirit and reads out false evidence from the Spirit’s own apostle? Paul granted no such indulgence: Paul, who tries to strike “the necessity of the flesh” out even of the respectable excuses for marrying. He does grant an “indulgence,” I allow it — not to adulteries, but to marriages. He does “spare,” I allow it — marriages, not whoring. He takes care not to pardon even nature, for fear of flattering guilt. He is at pains to put restraints on the union that inherits a blessing, for fear the union that inherits a curse should be excused. This one thing was left him: to strain the dregs out of the flesh, since its stains he cannot wash out. But this is the standard trick of twisted and ignorant heretics — and by now of the Soulish generally: to arm themselves with the handy support of one ambiguous passage against the whole drilled battle line of statements in the document.

Call me out, then, to face the apostle’s battle line. Look at his letters: every one of them stands guard for modesty, for chastity, for holiness; every one of them aims its missiles at the interests of luxury, of lewdness, of lust. What, in short, does he write to the Thessalonians? “Our appeal did not come out of seduction, or out of impurity.” And: “This is the will of God, your holiness — that you keep away from sexual immorality; that each of you know how to possess his own vessel in holiness and honor, not in the passion of craving, like the nations that do not know God.” What do the Galatians read? “The works of the flesh are obvious.” And what are they? Among the first he has set “sexual immorality, impurity, lewdness” — “and I tell you beforehand, as I have told you before, that people who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.” [ac]

And the Romans — what lesson is pressed on them harder than this, that after coming to believe there must be no deserting the Lord? “What shall we say, then? Do we go on in sin, so that grace may overflow? Never. We who died to sin — how shall we still live in it? Or do you not know that we who were baptized in Christ were baptized into his death? We were buried with him, then, through the baptism into the death, so that as Christ rose again from the dead, we too may walk in newness of life. For if we have been buried together in the likeness of his death, we shall be in the likeness of his resurrection too — knowing this, that our old man was crucified together with him. And if we died with Christ, we believe that we shall live with him too, knowing that Christ, once raised from the dead, dies no more, and death no longer has mastery over him. For in that he died, he died to sin once for all; but in that he lives, he lives to God. So count yourselves dead indeed to sin, but living to God through Christ Jesus.”

So, Christ having died once for all, nobody who has died after Christ can live to sin again — least of all to a sin as gross as this. Otherwise, if sexual immorality and adultery can possibly be readmitted, Christ will be able to die a second time as well. And the apostle presses hard when he forbids “sin to reign in our mortal body” — he knew that body’s “weakness of the flesh.” “For as you handed your members over as slaves to impurity and iniquity, so now hand them over as slaves to righteousness, for holiness.” And even if he has said that “no good lives in his flesh,” he means it according to “the law of the letter,” which is where he was; but according to “the law of the Spirit,” to which he attaches us, he frees us from the “weakness of the flesh.” “For the law of the Spirit of life,” he says, “has set you free from the law of sin and of death.”

And though he may look as if he is arguing partly from the Jewish side, it is at us that he directs the rules of discipline whole and entire — at us, for whose sake, as we labored under the law, “God sent his own Son through flesh, in the likeness of sinful flesh, and because of sin condemned sin in the flesh, so that the righteousness of the law,” he says, “might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to flesh but according to the Spirit. For those who walk according to flesh have their minds on the things of the flesh, and those who walk according to the Spirit on the things of the Spirit.” He has said, besides, that “the mind of the flesh” is “death,” and that it is therefore “hostility,” and hostility toward God; and that “those who are in the flesh” — in the mind of the flesh, that is — “cannot please God”; and, “If you live according to flesh,” he says, “you will die.” And what are we to understand by “the mind of the flesh” and “the life of the flesh,” except whatever “it is shameful even to say”? The flesh’s other works an apostle would have named outright.

In the same way, writing to the Ephesians, he calls up what they had done in the past in order to warn them about the future: “Among whom we too lived our lives, doing the cravings and pleasures of the flesh.” And in the end he brands those who had renounced themselves — Christians, that is — for having “given themselves up to the practice of every kind of impurity”: “But you,” he says, “did not learn Christ that way.” And again he says this: “Let the man who used to steal steal no more.” On the same pattern: let the man who used to commit adultery commit adultery no more, and the man who used to be sexually immoral be immoral no more. He would have added these too, if he had been in the habit of extending pardon to such people, or wanted it extended at all — he who will not have anyone defiled even by a word: “Let no foul speech come out of your mouth.”

Again: “But sexual immorality and every impurity — let it not even be named among you, as fits holy people” — so far is it from being excused — “knowing this, that nobody who is sexually immoral or impure has God’s kingdom. Let nobody seduce you with empty words; it is on this account that the anger of God comes upon the sons of unbelief.” And who “seduces with empty words” if not the man who announces in a public speech that adultery can be forgiven? He does not see that its very foundations have been dug out by the apostle, who puts restraints on drunkenness and revelry, here as elsewhere: “And do not get drunk on wine, in which there is debauchery.” To the Colossians, too, he shows which “members” they are to “put to death” on the earth: “sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil craving” — and “foul talk.”

Give way by now, then, and surrender the one passage you cling to before statements as many and as weighty as these. The few are thrown into the shade by the many, the doubtful by the certain, the obscure by the plain. And even if the apostle really had pardoned that Corinthian his sexual immorality, it would be one more case of his going against his own practice, once, to meet the need of the moment. He circumcised Timothy, and only Timothy — and yet he did away with circumcision.