Resurrection in 1 Cor 6
(avg. read time: 4–8 mins.)
Paul’s exposition on resurrection in 1 Cor 15 is obviously his most extensive teaching on the subject in his letters, and thus it tends to draw the lion’s share of attention in analyses of his theology of resurrection, including in my dissertation. This is completely understandable, but we ought not to overlook his only other teaching on resurrection in the letter, which appears in ch. 6 and is based around the references to resurrection in v. 14. This teaching anticipates ch. 15 in important ways as part of a teaching not only about why what we do in the body matters, but also about why it matters what we do as part of the body of Christ.
In terms of how it prepares for ch. 15, it is one of many parts of the letter that indicates the eschatological frame on which Paul’s whole ethical instruction hangs (1:7–8, 18–19; 2:6–16; 3:12–17; 4:5; 5:5, 13; 6:2–3, 9–11, 14; 7:29–31; 9:25; 10:11–13; 11:26; 13:8–13; 16:22). In the lead-up to the reference to the eschatological resurrection in 6:14, he has referenced the coming “day of the Lord” as an obvious reference to final judgment, for which reason the congregation must act to discipline the man who “has the wife of his father” (5:1), in order that he should be saved on that day (5:5). Acts 24:15 shows that Paul maintained his belief in resurrection for final judgment well after becoming a Christian and writing this letter. That he maintained this belief is further confirmed by Paul’s own writings in the early 1 Thess 1:10 and 5:1–11, as well as the later Rom 2:6–11 and Phil 3:18–21 (cf. also 2 Thess 1:5–10; 2 Tim 4:1). He uses the prospect of judgment as a basis for ethical instruction in Rom 14:10–12 (cf. 2 Cor 5:10). Even before this in 1 Corinthians, he appeals to the final judgment as the coming Day, when people’s works will be revealed and tested with fire (3:10–15; cf. 4:5), but he also warns that those who destroy God’s temple (i.e., God’s people, the body of Christ) will themselves be destroyed on that Day (3:16–17). He also lists people who are characterized by sin who will not inherit the kingdom of God (6:9–10; cf. Gal 5:19–21), which appeals to the final judgment that decides everyone’s ultimate verdict (cf. 5:13; 6:2–3; Phil 3:18–21).1
The list in 6:9–10 serves as an eschatologically oriented warning precisely because of the reference to the kingdom and the future entrance into the same (which happens by resurrection to everlasting life). But Paul’s point in making this warning is to remind the Corinthians (and all other Christians who read this letter, per 1:2) of who they are and thus of how they ought to live. That is, he is building to 6:11. B. J. Oropeza, while commenting on another part of the letter, summarizes the point well: “Corrupt influences may come from the outside, such as from their sexual liaisons (6:9–20), and also from insiders who live immorally but claim to be believers (5:9–11). It behooves congregation members, then, to be alert to bad influences and take the appropriate steps necessary to ensure sufficient fellowship with those who really know God, while at the same time remaining a positive influence to outsiders.”2 This observation reminds us of another way in which this section anticipates ch. 15 in that it contributes to the teaching about the believers’ participatory union with Christ (3:16–17; 5:3–8; 6:9–20; 8:6; 10:16–22; 12). If they are in this union, it follows that they will share in Christ’s resurrection fate. If this is the telos of the Christian life, all else in Paul’s ethical instruction follows, per 15:29–34 and 58.
This is precisely why the statement in 6:11 serves as the hinge between 6:9–10 and the teaching in 6:12–20: “And these things some of you were; but you were washed, you were sanctified, you were declared righteous in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.” Christians are now to be defined by their incorporative, identifying, and participatory union with Christ through the Spirit of God. Thus, they ought to reflect the gospel by which they are defined as a community in Christ, hence Paul’s reference to the key gospel event of resurrection by which Jesus’s Lordship was declared and by which he demonstrated the sanctity of the body, as the body is for the Lord and the Lord is for the body.
To further stress the union implied by the body being for the Lord and the Lord for the body, Paul connects Jesus’s resurrection with our eschatological resurrection by saying that God not only raised (ἐγείρω) the Lord, but that he will also raise us up (ἐξεγερεῖ) by his power (6:14).3 There does not appear to be a significant difference between the terms used for resurrection, as one is simply a compound of the other. But one is written in the aorist tense and has a past reference, while the latter has a future tense. The same God who acted in the one case will act in the other, as it is his power at work. As I have noted on many occasions, one of the foundations of resurrection belief is God’s inexorable, faithful love, which is here expressed by his power to raise the dead, particularly the one who embodies his love. God is the active agent in raising the dead, as in several other statements from Paul (Rom 4:24; 8:11 [2x]; 10:9; 1 Cor 15:15; 2 Cor 1:9; 4:14 [2x]; Gal 1:1; Eph 1:20; Col 2:12; 1 Thess 1:10). Paul refers to God’s power elsewhere as a characteristic of the kingdom/new creation (4:20; 12:10, 28–29; 14:11), but here, as in other texts, he uses it specifically as a reference to God’s resurrecting power (6:14; cf. 2 Cor 13:4; Eph 1:19–20; Phil 3:10). This point once again signifies how resurrection and the new creation are of one piece as they also emerge from the power of the one God.
Of course, what further upholds this connection of Jesus’s resurrection with our resurrection is our incorporative, identifying, and participatory union with Christ, which has its telos in sharing in his resurrection. That is precisely what Paul stresses through his rhetorical question, “Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Should I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? May it never be” (6:15). The body itself can be a symbol for unity, as Paul himself will illustrate in ch. 12, but it is also the means by which humans unite with each other at a most intimate level, hence Paul’s reference to Gen 2:24 in v. 16. In light of the statement that the body is for the Lord and the Lord is for the body, this likewise means that our union with Christ has its end in the signification of that union in our very bodies by our resurrection in his likeness. We are to live in anticipation of the goal of union through resurrection, as those who are already of one Spirit with the Lord by the Holy Spirit (6:17), by acting in sexual holiness and glorifying God with the body (6:20) in the present time, hence Paul’s particular condemnation of sexual immorality as defiling the sanctity of the body (6:18) and the teaching he will supply concerning sexual conduct in ch. 7 (which is also eschatologically driven, as seen in 7:29–31). That is, we are to live consistently with the belief that the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, and it will be made more fittingly so in the eschaton (hence the description of the resurrection body as “a body belonging to the Spirit” or “a Spirit-possessed body” [σῶμα πνευματικόν] in 1 Cor 15:44–45). But that is a subject for another time.
It is noteworthy how multiple texts I have cited in the letter outside of 1 Cor 15 as concerning our union with Christ also feature the Holy Spirit (3:16; 6:19; 12:3–4, 7–9, 11, 13). Indeed, Paul’s argument in 1 Cor 6:12–20 on glorifying God in the body is dependent, inter alia, on the logical link between resurrection (v. 14), union with Christ (v. 15), and the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit (vv. 17, 19). The Spirit also has links to Jesus’s resurrection, the renewed life believers experience now, and the future resurrection in other texts (Rom 1:4; 7:6; 8:9–10, 23; cf. 6:4; 1 Tim 3:16; Titus 3:4–7). Most clearly in Rom 8:11 and 2 Cor 5:1–5, Paul declares that the Spirit is the crucial link between faithful devotion to Jesus and the future resurrection. In short, the Spirit is the guarantor of God’s inexorable, faithful love in the eschatological action of resurrection, even as the Spirit is the one who forges the link of union between Christians and Christ. Thus, as we have seen also with Rom 8 and many other texts outside of Paul, 1 Cor 6 illustrates what I noted in my dissertation of how Christian/Christomorphic resurrection belief has a distinctly Trinitarian shape to it.
For more on judgment in Paul, see L. Joseph Kreitzer, Jesus and God in Paul’s Eschatology, JSNTSup 19 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1987), 93–130.
B. J. Oropeza, 1 Corinthians, NCCS (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2017), 212.
This reference to God raising “us” up is a demonstration that those who insist that Paul not only thought and taught that Jesus could come back in his lifetime but that he would do so have not accurately represented him. This is supposed to be in an earlier letter when Paul was supposedly assured that Christ would return in his lifetime, and yet here he is using the first-person plural in reference to being resurrected, which by the same logic used on texts like 1 Thess 4:15 and 1 Cor 15:52, would mean that he positively expected to be dead before Christ’s return in order that he should be raised. He reiterates the same point in his later letter to the Corinthians, what is supposed to be a “development” of his expectations regarding the Parousia, in saying that the one who raised the Lord Jesus will raise “us” also with Jesus (2 Cor 4:14). Paul thus places “us” on both sides of the living-dead divide.