Catholic Commentary
Clarifying the Boundaries of Church Discipline
9I wrote to you in my letter to have no company with sexual sinners;10yet not at all meaning with the sexual sinners of this world, or with the covetous and extortionists, or with idolaters, for then you would have to leave the world.11But as it is, I wrote to you not to associate with anyone who is called a brother who is a sexual sinner, or covetous, or an idolater, or a slanderer, or a drunkard, or an extortionist. Don’t even eat with such a person.12For what do I have to do with also judging those who are outside? Don’t you judge those who are within?13But those who are outside, God judges. “Put away the wicked man from among yourselves.”
1 Corinthians 5:9–13 addresses church discipline and corrects the Corinthians' misunderstanding of Paul's earlier instruction against associating with sexually immoral people. Paul clarifies that he meant believers should not associate with unrepentant members within the church community, not avoid all immoral people in the surrounding pagan world, which would be impractical; instead, the church bears responsibility to exercise internal discipline and exclude persistent sinners from fellowship.
The Church disciplines her own members while remaining engaged in a sinful world—and refusing to do either is a failure of love, not an expression of it.
Commentary
1 Corinthians 5:9 — The Prior Letter and the Misreading Paul refers to a now-lost earlier letter to the Corinthians (sometimes called "the previous letter"), in which he had instructed them to avoid association with "sexual sinners" (Greek: pornoi). The Corinthians had apparently misread this as a blanket call to separate from all immoral people in their surrounding society. Paul's correction here is pastoral and precise: he never intended such an impractical, world-denying reading.
1 Corinthians 5:10 — The World Cannot Be Fled Paul is emphatically realistic about the Christian's place in the world. To avoid all the sexually immoral, the greedy (pleonektai), the swindlers (harpages), and idolaters would require a wholesale exit from Greco-Roman society — a practical impossibility. The catalogue of vices here is deliberately broad: these are the ambient moral conditions of the pagan world. Paul is not naive about this. His theology is incarnational, not sectarian; Christians must live in the world (cf. John 17:15), even as they are not of it. This verse implicitly forbids a puritanical isolationism that would make Christian witness impossible.
1 Corinthians 5:11 — The Sharper, Inward Command Here Paul restates his actual command with precision. The operative phrase is "anyone who is called a brother" (adelphos onomazomenos) — that is, one who bears the name of Christian through baptism. The list of sins is expanded from verse 10 to now include the slanderer (loidoros) and the drunkard (methusos), a significant addition. Within the covenant community, these behaviors are not ambient social facts to be tolerated but scandal — a stumbling block to the body's holiness. The instruction "do not even eat with such a person" is pointed: shared meals in the ancient Mediterranean world were primary expressions of fellowship and endorsement. To eat with someone was to honor them. In the specifically Christian context, the shared table could also evoke the Eucharist, making the prohibition all the more serious: persistent, unrepentant sinners within the community are to be excluded from the fellowship of the table, precisely to preserve its meaning and summon the sinner to repentance.
1 Corinthians 5:12 — The Distinction of Jurisdictions Paul draws a crisp theological line: the Church has no mandate to judge those outside (exō) her communion. This is not moral relativism — Paul is not saying the conduct of non-Christians is inconsequential — but a recognition that the Church's disciplinary authority is covenantal and internal. The rhetorical question "Do you not judge those who are within?" implies that the Corinthians already possess the competence and the obligation to exercise internal discipline. Their failure to act against the incestuous man (cf. 1 Cor 5:1–8) was not humility; it was abdication.
1 Corinthians 5:13 — The Quotation from Deuteronomy Paul closes with a formula drawn from the Deuteronomic legal codes (Dt 17:7; 19:19; 21:21; 22:21; 24:7), each of which concludes community discipline proceedings with "so you shall purge the evil from your midst." This typological invocation is theologically loaded: Paul reads the Church through the lens of the holy assembly (qahal) of Israel. Just as Israel was commanded to preserve the ritual and moral integrity of the covenant community by removing the persistently wicked, so the new covenant assembly — the ekklesia — carries the same obligation. The quotation is not a call to harshness but to covenantal seriousness: the holiness of the Body of Christ is at stake.
Typological and Spiritual Senses At the allegorical level, the "leaven" imagery from the preceding verses (5:6–8) continues here: allowing unrepentant, self-identified Christians to remain in good standing corrupts the whole batch. The Church as the unleavened bread of the new Passover must be kept pure. At the anagogical level, this discipline is oriented toward eschatological accountability — the judgment of those inside is ultimately a mercy, aimed at saving them "on the day of the Lord" (5:5).
Catholic Commentary
Catholic tradition illuminates several dimensions of this passage that other readings risk flattening.
On Church Discipline and the Power of the Keys: The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that Christ entrusted to the Church the authority to bind and loose (CCC §§553, 1444), and that this authority is exercised, among other ways, through the canonical discipline of excommunication. Paul's instruction here is a foundational New Testament warrant for that tradition. The Church does not exercise this authority arbitrarily but in service of the sinner's conversion and the community's holiness. St. Augustine, commenting on this passage (Epistola 250), underscores that fraternal correction — up to and including exclusion from the Eucharistic table — is an act of caritas, not cruelty.
On the Distinction Between the Church and the World: Vatican II's Gaudium et Spes (§43) echoes the logic of verse 10: Christians are not to flee the world but to transform it from within. Paul's realism here anticipates the Church's long-developed theology of engagement. The Church does not demand that the world be the Church before she will enter it.
On the Catalogue of Vices: St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 43) treats scandal — the spiritual harm caused by bad example within the community — as a grave sin precisely because it damages the common good of the Church. Paul's list in verse 11 targets exactly the behaviors most destructive of communal witness and charity.
On Eucharistic Integrity: The instruction not to "eat with" such a person has been consistently read by patristic and medieval commentators (Chrysostom, Homilies on 1 Corinthians, Homily 15; Theodoret of Cyrrhus) as encompassing exclusion from the Eucharist. The Catholic discipline of withholding Communion from those in manifest grave sin (CIC §915) is grounded precisely in this logic: the Eucharistic table is the summit of ecclesial communion, and sharing it with the unrepentant contradicts its meaning.
For Today
For contemporary Catholics, this passage cuts against two opposite errors that are both alive in parish life today.
The first error is a false mercy that refuses all fraternal correction out of misplaced tolerance — the assumption that any challenge to a fellow Catholic's behavior is "judgmental." Paul dismantles this: refusing to judge those within the Church is not humility, it is abdication of charity. The second error is a puritanical separatism that refuses engagement with non-Christians or lapsed Catholics, treating every sinner outside the Church as untouchable. Paul dismantles this too: Christians must remain present and engaged in a sinful world.
The practical application is demanding: Catholics are called to both courageous internal accountability and generous external engagement — not one at the expense of the other. Concretely, this means being willing to have the difficult conversation with a friend or family member who publicly identifies as Catholic while living in manifest contradiction to that identity, while simultaneously remaining in warm, evangelizing relationship with non-Christian friends and neighbors. It also means taking seriously what it means to approach the Eucharistic table in a state of full communion with the Church.
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