1 Corinthians 5 documents a public and serious issue of sin within the local church. The essential details of the passage are not difficult or tricky to discern. Essentially, serious, gospel-denying sin is being tolerated, the church are called to exercise discipline and remove this person from their number. They are to treat him as an unbeliever so he might see the need to repent and for the good of the wider church within which the sin will spread if it is not addressed. By and large, pretty uncomplicated stuff.
There is, however, one potentially tricky detail in the passage. Not so much what it is saying specifically (though it needs a bit of thinking about) but more the implications, particularly as certain relationships are concerned. The specific portion I am talking about is this:
[9] I wrote to you in a letter not to associate with sexually immoral people. [10] I did not mean the immoral people of this world or the greedy and swindlers or idolaters; otherwise you would have to leave the world. [11] But actually, I wrote you not to associate with anyone who claims to be a brother or sister and is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or verbally abusive, a drunkard or a swindler. Do not even eat with such a person.
What are we to make of this?
The simple part is the correction Paul is making. Paul is not prohibiting dealing with people in the world who live (entirely understandably) as though they are in the world because they are in the world and belong to it. Rather, he is saying that those who profess to be believers in Christ, and yet deny him through ongoing unrepentant sin, are the people to be avoided.
The marginally tricky question is what Paul means when he says ‘do not even eat with such a person’. It helps to know that eating with people in the ancient world – particularly going to their houses to do so – indicated association and welcome. When Jesus went to the homes of tax collectors and ate with prostitutes, though he wasn’t affirming their sin in doing so, he was very much implying genuine welcome for such people should they repent. This was what so shocked the Pharisees, who had deemed them to be in such sin as to be beyond the redeeming love of God. Jesus expressed in word and deed it simply was not so.
It is less overtly the case today, certainly in modern Western British culture, that eating with someone necessarily implies welcome and acceptance in the same way. Certainly, Paul’s admonition here applies directly if our eating with a professing believer in unrepentant sin would imply genuine welcome and give the impression – both to them and to the watching world – that we (and, more importantly, Jesus) are unconcerned by this serious matter of sin. However, the presence of food at the same time as speaking to a person is not generally understood to convey such things necessarily. The principle here is not giving any impression that we approve of the sin or that there has been no change in our relationship when there is evidently an elephant that must be acknowledged.
The question of non-association is not straightforward. What does this mean in practice? Paul says it means not eating together. That seems to be predicated on the ancient practice of eating together implying welcome and some degree of affrmation. The question is, what is the modern equivalent of genuine non-association? The issue gets thornier still. What does non-association look like when the miscreant in question is a close relation? How do you meaningfully disassociate from a grandparent, parent or child whilst, at the same time, fulfiling one’s other clear and biblical obligations to them? After all, to not eat with a child/parent would fall foul of Paul’s insistence elsewhere that to not care for one’s family makes a person worse than an unbeliever and is, in itself, to effectively deny the faith.
Given biblical teaching elsewhere, one line must clearly be that this is not a call to shun people. Not only is there Paul’s other instructions to care for family, it follows that to aim to bring a person to repentance warrants actually speaking with them about the sin in question. If we are going to do that, it involves meeting with them on some level and still having some sort of ongoing contact. On these grounds, whatever else non-association means, it almost certainly doesn’t mean either shunning nor failing to fulfil other biblical obligations towards our family.
At the same time, ‘not to associate’ must mean something in practice. What it cannot mean is just carry on as before. It cannot mean continue meeting up as friends and treat the person in exactly the same way as you treated them before. There must necessarily be some change in the relationship.
The difficulty – and the Bible doesn’t directly resolve it for us – is there is a quite a gap between those two poles. On the one hand, don’t shun people or fail to fulfil particularly familial obligations. On the other, the relationship is necessarily different and warrants some level of separation and disassociation. Where do the lines fall?
Inevitably, these things will play out differently within different relationships. Certainly, the removal of somebody from membership involves a degree of separation. With a non-relative, this will also make it difficult for the relationship to continue on precisely the same grounds and terms as before.
To some degree, the same is likely to be true with a relative who professes faith but with whom we have to be clear they are not functioning or living as believers. Whilst not inevitable, it is usually the case that the simple acknowledgement of these things brings with it its own form of psychological separation. Relationships are inevitably impacted. Oftentimes, the mere mention of the brute reality – we do not recognise you as a believer – leads to a degree of separation and change in the relationship merely by the acknowledgement of the elephant in the room.
I don’t think these questions are easy. I don’t think the Bible gives us clear and direct answers in how to address them in the various relationships where they may occur. To some degree, we are left to use our own wisdom to figure out what this looks like within the few parameters we are given. Namely, we aren’t to shun or fail to fulfil our obligations, we are to name sin for what it is and we are to acknowledge a degree of disassociation and separation in some form. Quite what that looks like across cultures, in different relationships and contexts is left for us to largely work out for ourselves. At least, within the church community together.