It’s common to hear Christians speak of their bodies as temples of the Holy Spirit. The implication is that we should treat our physical bodies with appropriate reverence. The lead text for this is 1 Corinthians 6:19, where Paul asks, “Do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own?” Seems pretty clear.
The trouble is that the Bible consistently speaks of one temple for the one God. So if each Christian’s individual body were a temple in and of itself, then that would mean God has millions of isolated temples all over the world. There is a bit of a theological problem with this.
A handful of commentators and biblical theologians, however, have contended that in 1 Corinthians 6:19 Paul is talking about the body of Christ—the church—as the temple of the Holy Spirit. If so, that would change the meaning and application of 1 Corinthians 6:19 quite dramatically.
We would like to propose four lines of argument that support such a corporate reading of 1 Corinthians 6:19 and then offer a church-centered application.[1]
The first argument is grammatical. Paul’s uses of “you” in 1 Corinthians 6:19 are all plural
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