In the Greco-Roman world, extramarital sex, indeed a wide variety of forms of nonmarital sex that Jews and Christians would find aberrant, including various forms of incest, was not considered shameful. Jews and Christians were in a notable minority in their attitudes about fornication, prostitution, adultery, incest, and the like. But what Paul faces here, a man having incestuous relations with his father’s wife, was considered inappropriate by most pagans in the Greco-Roman world. As MacDonald points out, it is not in this case the impurity of the outside world that is in danger of polluting the community but the immorality that has been allowed to penetrate the sacred community itself.

God’s control of things is not contrary to the responsibility of man. It is the very foundation of it. If God were not in control He could not hold man responsible. Man is accountable to God because God is sovereign; he should obey God because God is in control of things. Moreover, man has significance because God has sovereignly ordained significance for man. Whatever responsibility we have is founded on God’s sovereignty, not in spite of it. Without God’s sovereignty man would have no responsibility.

Paul wants the Corinthian Christians to be involved in the internal judicial process, but not to take their disputes to outside courts, which is precisely the opposite of what is happening. This reveals Paul’s view of Christian community. He sees the Christian community as having reasonably well-defined boundaries and thus as a subculture that even has its own judicial procedures. This is how Paul wants the community to be, not how it was actually functioning.

The sexual problems discussed in chs. 5 and 6 were created by the male members of the community. There was in Greco-Roman society a very clear double standard with a shame code in regard to the behavior of married women. 6:12ff. is not, any more than 5:1–5, about the behavior or arguments of Christian women trying to justify their behavior.

In regard to Paul’s vision of community, he is trying to establish a high group consciousness with what I would call a mid-grid in terms of both stratification of roles and individuation. Paul believes that human identity must be established by the right dialectic between the one and the many, between identity as an individual and identity as a group member. He knows that “in order for the group to work or have substance there must be a collection of individuals who give over some of their identity and independence explicitly and/or implicitly to the group.”

Paul knows that he is dealing with a voluntaristic community, much like a guild or club in Roman society. In accord with this similarity, he wishes to affirm some asymmetrical roles, such as his own and that of his coworkers toward the Corinthian ekklēsia and some roles at the purely local level as well, as seen in 16:15f., though Stephanas may be an example of achieved status. Paul’s own status as Christ’s agent is in his view not an acheived status but a designated status verified through Paul’s actual work.

In Paul’s thought there is a dialectic between factors that lead to ordering in the community and factors that tend, conversely, toward leveling in the community. One might expect that possession by all of the Holy Spirit and of the Spirit’s gifts would be a totally leveling factor. Paul makes it clear, however, that there is a ranking of roles—listed in chs. 12 and 14—based on what is most beneficial to the group as a whole. Paradoxically, Paul’s view of leadership as obligatory service to the group prevents a more stratified approach to leadership.

For Paul the Christian society stands over against nature because nature and human nature are fallen. Therefore, clear boundaries must be established between what may seem natural and what is appropriate behavior. “A concern for purity is not a concern for a hierarchy among the participants, but a concern about the boundaries of the group. Purity and the perception of danger in taboos are markers for group separation from the rest of the world, which is perceived as impure.”