1 Corinthians 5:1

My Notes

What Does 1 Corinthians 5:1 Mean?

1 Corinthians 5:1 addresses a scandal so extreme that Paul frames it with a comparison designed to shock: even the pagans wouldn't do this. "It is reported commonly that there is fornication among you" — holōs akouetai en humin porneia. The word holōs means actually, in fact, indeed — as if Paul can barely believe what he's heard. Porneia — sexual immorality in the broadest sense. And it's not hidden. It's reported — akouetai, heard, publicly known.

"And such fornication as is not so much as named among the Gentiles" — kai toiautē porneia hētis oude en tois ethnesin. The comparison is the knife: even the Gentiles — the pagans, the people without the law, the nations whose sexual ethics were notoriously lax by Jewish standards — don't practice this. The church has out-sinned the world. The people called to holiness have surpassed the people with no holiness standard.

"That one should have his father's wife" — hōste gunaika tina tou patros echein. A man in the Corinthian church was in a sexual relationship with his father's wife (likely his stepmother). The Torah explicitly prohibited this (Leviticus 18:8, Deuteronomy 22:30). Roman law prohibited it. Even the relatively permissive sexual culture of Corinth didn't normalize it. And the church — far from addressing it — was apparently proud (v. 2: "ye are puffed up").

Paul's outrage isn't just that the sin occurred. It's that the community tolerated it — and that their tolerance was worse than pagan standards. The church that should have been salt and light had become darker than the darkness it was supposed to illuminate.

Reflection Questions

• 1.Where might your community be tolerating something that even outsiders would recognize as wrong?
• 2.How do you distinguish between genuine grace and the kind of tolerance Paul condemns here?
• 3.What does the Corinthians being 'puffed up' about their tolerance reveal about false conceptions of spiritual maturity?
• 4.When the church's moral standard drops below the world's, what's been lost — and how is it recovered?

Devotional

Even the pagans wouldn't do this. And the church is proud of tolerating it.

Paul's opening to the discipline chapter is a double indictment: the sin itself, and the community's response to the sin. A man is sleeping with his father's wife. That's bad enough — prohibited by every moral code available to the Corinthians, from Torah to Roman law to basic human decency. But the church's response is what horrifies Paul more: they're puffed up about it. Not grieving. Not confronting. Inflated — possibly congratulating themselves on their tolerance, their open-mindedness, their unwillingness to judge.

The comparison with the Gentiles is devastating. The very people the Corinthians would have considered morally inferior — the pagans, the people without God's law — wouldn't tolerate what the Corinthian church was celebrating. The community called to be holier than the world had become less moral than the world. The standard they were supposed to raise, they had lowered below the floor.

There's a version of grace that becomes an excuse for everything — a theological framework so committed to non-judgment that it can't name evil when it's sitting in the front row. Paul demolishes it here. Grace doesn't mean tolerance of what even pagans recognize as wrong. Love doesn't mean watching someone destroy themselves and calling it freedom. The church that can't discipline is a church that's lost its distinctiveness — and Paul says a church that out-sins the world has nothing left to offer the world.

Where has your community confused tolerance with grace? Where has the refusal to confront become its own form of complicity?

Commentary

Trusted original commentary from respected historical Bible scholars and theologians.

Cross References

Related passages throughout Scripture