a. “ ‘Food is for the stomach and the stomach is for food.’ ” Beginning with a general slogan, “all things are permissible to me,” Paul now recites a specific proverbial saying: it pertains to food and the stomach. The composer of this saying, whoever he was, made it vivid by reversing the two nouns in its second half. Therefore, the public readily accepted the motto. But even though Paul acknowledges the truth of this proverb, he adds a comment to the motto in a manner similar to that of the preceding text (see v. 12).
God has created a world that produces a variety of foods to sustain life. If not wasted, food terminates in the stomach of the one who eats. And conversely, a stomach receives food for the benefit of the consumer. This is how God designed his great creation. But God also sets limits. Food products that are subject to perishing, and human life, which is subject to aging, in time pass away. Both food and the stomach are temporal and lack permanence.
b. “But God will destroy both of them.” Here Paul addressed the temporality of food and the stomach. To stress their fleeting nature, he states that God will destroy both. In this context, Paul does not elaborate on either eating foods offered to idols, Christian liberty, or eating and drinking to God’s glory. Elsewhere he addresses those topics (8; 10:23–33).
c. “The body is not for immorality but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body.” The message Paul delivers to the Corinthians is that they should not identify sexual appetite with an appetite for food and drink. J. B. Lightfoot notes that the Corinthians confused the prohibitions of two different categories, “meats and drinks on the one hand, and sins of sensuality on the other.”42 Food and drink should be consumed with moderation and discretion. But consumption as such is not a matter of morality, for anyone with sanctified common sense wishes to be and to remain healthy. Conversely, God’s command to shun fornication and adultery relates to sexual morality.
God created the human body not for sinful pleasure but for his glory. He formed it in his image and after his likeness (Gen. 1:26), not for sexual immorality. The members of the Jerusalem Council knew that the Gentiles considered sexual immorality acceptable. Thus, to the decrees on food the council members added the moral law: “To abstain from things sacrificed to idols, from blood, from strangled animals, and from fornication” (Acts 15:29). Those Corinthians who flaunted their freedom in Christ considered themselves free to indulge in eating and in sexual gratification. But their sexual immorality violated the precepts of the Jerusalem Council and was a transgression of the Decalogue (Exod. 20:14; Deut. 5:18).
God created man’s physical body for service in his creation (Gen. 1:28). He instituted marriage for the propagation of the human race and for the enrichment of the marriage partners. He sees the use of the human body for fornication to be absolutely contrary to this purpose (see 1 Thess. 4:3–5). Hence Paul notes that the body is to serve the Lord and, he adds, the Lord is for the body.
To the slogan of the Corinthians Paul adds his own teaching. He parallels the rhythm and style of their slogan:

    Food for the stomach and the stomach for food.
    The body for the Lord and the Lord for the body.

As food and the stomach are meant for each other so the physical body and the Lord serve each other. Both food and the stomach are of passing significance, but the body and the Lord have lasting significance in relation to the resurrection. The parallelism should not be pressed to its logical conclusion, for that is not Paul’s purpose.43
Our physical body, created by God but stained by sin, will at death descend into the grave. It has been redeemed by Christ and will be raised as his body was raised. The Lord claims this body because it belongs to him (Rom. 14:8).


Kistemaker, S. J., & Hendriksen, W. (1953-2001). Vol. 18: Exposition of the First Epistle to the Corinthians. New Testament Commentary (194–196). Grand Rapids: Baker Book House.

As numerous modern writers agree, including Collins and Murphy-O’Connor, Paul now quotes another Corinthian slogan.198 The purpose of the slogan was to articulate a sense of distance between deeds done in the physical body, especially matters relating to food, sex, or property, and the supposedly “spiritual” level of life, which some would like to think operates on a “higher” plane which can be isolated from the “lower.” This supposed dualism of “levels” is foreign to Pauline thought, but commonplace in those circles influenced by a popular form of quasi-Platonic thought. This becomes even more marked if proto-gnostic influences were also at work. The second slogan, therefore, in effect gives further support to the slogan of the previous verse. To be “above” earthly matters coheres with the claim to be “above” the law as spiritual persons.
If this is a quotation, however, at what point does the quotation end? Surprisingly the NRSV, NIV, and a number of translations place the quotation marks at the end of “food for the stomach, and the stomach for food.” But even given the interpretation of κοιλία as the digestive system, this bare quotation on its own seems banal, unless “and God will do away with one and the other” is explicitly linked to mean: “all this is transitory and without permanent significance for people of the Spirit such as us.” In 1978 I wrote: “We may question whether two of the main English versions, the RSV and the NEB, are correct in closing the quotation marks where they do.… More probably the whole on v. 13a constitutes an eschatologically orientated slogan current at Corinth, and Paul only begins his rejoinder with the words, ‘The body (τὸ σῶμα) is not meant for immorality’, 13b.”199 I then discussed the part parallel of the Christian tradition which finds expression in Mark 7:14–19, and asked what the truncated version of the slogan could amount to on its own. I described as “uninformative” the redundantly repeated tautology. The very same year J. Murphy-O’Connor put forward still stronger arguments to the same effect, and recently Collins has included v. 13a within the Corinthian quotation.200 The general point may be: “libertines had … used the fact that food did not raise a moral issue to support their contention that sexual conduct also had no moral significance. Paul grants that both food and the stomach belong to the transient physical sphere.… But … the body [σῶμα] is not something transient, but will be raised from the dead.”201
The Corinthian libertines were not necessarily what Craig calls “gnostic libertines,” except insofar as their theology reflects the same kind of dualism as later gnostic systems. The particular uses of κοιλία in first-century Greek literature helps us to understand their three-stage logic: (1) κοιλία often means the digestive system rather than a location within the body, i.e., to say “food is for digestion” means that it soon passes through and is disposed of; (2) in this respect it stands as a kind of metonym for all things physical and transient; (3) hence, supposedly, on this line of reasoning, God is concerned only with those aspects of selfhood which will survive disintegration at death, i.e., what pertains to the spirit or to the Spirit.202 Paul interposes a fundamental qualification, however, which interrupts the logic. The σῶμα is not to be equated with the κοιλία, but somatic life is absorbed and transformed in the resurrection of the σῶμα in such a way that continuity as well as change characterizes the relation between the present σῶμα, i.e., present life in its totality, and the resurrection σῶμα, i.e., the transformation of the whole human self as part of the raised corporeity in Christ.203
The logic which Paul uses here will be expounded in detail in 1 Cor 15:12–58, where continuity of identity and transformation of mode of being constitute two principles of the resurrection of the σῶμα (see below, on 15:12–58). Hence the body is οὐ τῇ πορνείᾳ (on this word, see above on 5:1 and 6:9–10, n.), but for the Lord.204 Paul’s theology of the resurrection of the σῶμα also unfolds in three stages of logical steps: (1) God raised the Lord (ἤγειρεν, third singular first aorist indicative active of ἐγείρω). Christ is always the object of God’s act of raising, not its subject (cf. the passive in 1 Cor. 15:14, 20 of Christ, and the active in 15:38 of God);205 (2) Christian believers belong to the single (“one”) Christ-corporeity as his “members” (τὰ μέλη τοῦ Χριστοῦ, 6:15; and ὁ κολλώμενος τῷ κυρίῳ ἕν πνεῦμά ἐστιν, 6:17). (3) God will raise (ἐξεγερεῖ, future, 6:14) us (ἡμᾶς) as the single in-Christ corporeity, for whom “bodily” existence matters.
Paul will argue in the next few verses that being-in-Christ entails a bonding and binding (κολλάω) which is threatened with a wrenching apart if the body (τὸ σῶμα) is “bonded” with that which contradicts the Christ bonding, or pulls in a different direction. Käsemann offers an important comment on this issue of public “world.” He declares, “For Paul it is all important that the Christian life is not limited to interior piety and cultic acts. One of the most remarkable, and at the same time least known sentences of the Apostle runs (1 Cor. 6:13): ‘The body belongs to the Lord, and the Lord to the body.’ … Paul does not mean, as Bultmann would have us believe, man’s relation to himself, but that piece of the world which we ourselves are and for which we bear responsibility because it was the earliest gift of our Creator to us.… It signifies man in his worldliness [worldhood conveys the idea less ambiguously] and therefore in his ability to communicate [i.e., in his relationality].”206 Käsemann concludes: “In the bodily obedience of the Christian … the lordship of Christ finds visible expression, and only when this visible expression takes personal shape in us does the whole thing become credible as Gospel message.”207


Thiselton, A. C. (2000). The First Epistle to the Corinthians: A commentary on the Greek text. New International Greek Testament Commentary (462–464). Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans.