1 Corinthians 6:15–18

1 Corinthians 6:15 — Bodies as Members of Christ Paul opens with his characteristic rhetorical challenge, "Don't you know…?" (Greek: ouk oidate), a phrase he deploys six times in this chapter alone, each time pressing the Corinthians to draw consequences they are failing to live out. The claim is startling in its physicality: Christian bodies are mele Christou — "members of Christ," limbs belonging to His own body. This is not metaphor in a loose sense. Paul's entire pneumatology, rooted in his Damascus Road experience ("Saul, why are you persecuting me?" — Acts 9:4), rests on the conviction that the risen Christ and His Church form one embodied reality. To take these members — consecrated by baptism and the Eucharist — and "make them members of a prostitute" (pornē) is therefore not a private lapse but an act of profound sacrilege. The rhetorical question "May it never be!" (mē genoito) is Paul's strongest expression of horror; he uses it to reject ideas that are not merely wrong but theologically monstrous.

1 Corinthians 6:16 — The One-Flesh Reality Paul grounds the argument in Scripture, quoting Genesis 2:24: "The two will become one flesh." In its original context, this verse describes the marital union instituted by God at creation — the mysterious drawing together of man and woman into a single flesh (basar echad). Paul applies it here with deliberate force: even a liaison with a prostitute, however transactional and devoid of love or commitment, produces a real, bodily henōsis — a union. The word translated "joined" (kollōmenos) carries the sense of being glued or welded together; it is the same verb the Septuagint uses in Genesis 2:24 ("a man shall cleave to his wife"). Paul's logic is devastating: if even illicit union creates a real one-flesh bond, then such a bond — forged with the body of Christ's member — constitutes a radical contradiction at the level of being, not just behavior. This is not prudishness; it is ontology.

1 Corinthians 6:17 — Joined to the Lord, One Spirit The counterpart to verse 16 is breathtaking. Just as bodily union with another creates "one flesh," union with the Lord creates "one spirit" (hen pneuma). The parallelism is intentional and precise. The Christian's union with Christ is not merely juridical (being declared righteous) or merely moral (imitating Christ); it is a real, transformative, spiritual union of the believer's innermost self with the risen Lord through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Patristic commentators, including John Chrysostom, understood this verse as the counterweight that makes Paul's prohibition intelligible: the issue is not that the body is bad, but that it is too precious, too deeply implicated in divine life, to be handed over to immorality.

1 Corinthians 6:18 — Flee, and the Unique Character of Sexual Sin The imperative "Flee!" (pheugete) is urgent and practical. Paul does not say "resist" or "wrestle with" sexual immorality — he says run. This echoes the wisdom of Joseph, who fled Potiphar's wife (Genesis 39:12), the paradigmatic model of chastity under pressure. The subsequent phrase — "every sin a man commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body" — has puzzled commentators. The most persuasive reading, advanced by Thiselton and consistent with Chrysostom, is that Paul is quoting a Corinthian slogan ("every sin is outside the body") and correcting it: sexual sin, uniquely, violates the body itself — the very instrument and temple of the Spirit (v. 19). It disorders the body's deepest capacity for self-gift and communion, which is ordered to both marriage and, ultimately, to union with God.

Typological/Spiritual Senses Typologically, the one-flesh union of Genesis 2:24 is read by the Fathers as a figure of Christ's union with His Church (cf. Ephesians 5:31–32, where Paul himself makes this explicit). The marital imagery runs from Eden through the Song of Songs to the Wedding Supper of the Lamb (Revelation 19:7–9). Paul's use of Genesis 2:24 here thus places sexual immorality within the grandest possible narrative frame: it is a counter-sign to the very mystery that creation and redemption are ordered to reveal.

Catholic tradition brings several distinctive lenses to this passage.

The Body as Sacramental Reality. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§364–365) teaches that the human body shares in the dignity of the imago Dei, and that the unity of soul and body is so profound that the body must be considered a participant in humanity's spiritual dignity. This is not Greek dualism, in which the body is a prison of the soul; it is the Hebraic and Christian conviction that the body itself is the locus of encounter with God. Pope St. John Paul II's Theology of the Body — developed precisely through extended meditation on Genesis 2:24 and 1 Corinthians 6 — deepens this: the body has a "spousal meaning" (oblative meaning), an inherent orientation toward self-gift that sexual immorality directly violates.

Union with Christ and the Eucharist. St. John Chrysostom (Homilies on 1 Corinthians, Hom. 18) draws an explicit connection between verse 15 and the Eucharist: "We are the body of Christ. Let those who are communicants understand what Body it is they receive." The logic holds: those who receive Christ's body in the Eucharist and then engage in sexual immorality create a grotesque eucharistic contradiction. The Council of Trent and the Catechism (§1385) reinforce this, warning that receiving the Eucharist in a state of grave sin is a profanation.

The Virtue of Chastity. The Catechism (§2337–2347) presents chastity not as the mere avoidance of sin but as the successful integration of sexuality within the person, ordered to love. Paul's command to flee reflects what the tradition calls the "negative precept" of chastity, but the positive vision — union with God as one spirit — is its deeper foundation.

Magisterium. Humanae Vitae (§13) and Familiaris Consortio (§32) both draw on the spousal meaning of the body to articulate why sexual union belongs exclusively within the covenant of marriage, a teaching continuously rooted in the very Genesis text Paul here invokes.

Contemporary culture presents sexuality as an essentially private matter, a domain of personal autonomy insulated from religious or moral commentary. Paul's argument cuts directly against this assumption — not by appealing to shame or disgust, but by appealing to dignity. For a Catholic today, these verses invite a concrete examination: Do I treat my body — and the bodies of others — as belonging to Christ? The Eucharist is the practical center of this teaching: every Sunday communion is a renewal of the union described in verse 17. This means that ongoing sexual sin and Eucharistic reception are genuinely incompatible, not as a harsh rule but as a contradiction in terms.

Practically, "flee" means building structures that make temptation harder to encounter: accountability, sobriety about digital media and pornography (a particular contemporary application of porneia), honest confession, and a positive cultivation of the spousal meaning of the body through study of the Theology of the Body. The positive vision — "he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit" — is the goal: a life in which the body is, in John Paul II's phrase, a "theology," a living sign of the love of God.