12 Therefore, do not let sin exercise dominion in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions.¹³No longer present your members to sin as instruments^* of wickedness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and present your members to God as instruments^* of righteousness.¹⁴For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.

Slaves of Righteousness

15 What then? Should we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means!¹⁶Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness?¹⁷But thanks be to God that you, having once been slaves of sin, have become obedient from the heart to the form of teaching to which you were entrusted,¹⁸and that you, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness.¹⁹I am speaking in human terms because of your natural limitations.^* For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to greater and greater iniquity, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness for sanctification.

20 When you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness.²¹So what advantage did you then get from the things of which you now are ashamed? The end of those things is death.²²But now that you have been freed from sin and enslaved to God, the advantage you get is sanctification. The end is eternal life.²³For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Eve and Adam

When Paul speaks of the “members” of the body, he means all its organs and abilities. In his time a fashionable philosophy denigrated everything material and bodily as unworthy; only the mind/soul/spirit of human beings was worthy and able to survive physical death. Paul on the other hand, specifically honours the body and its capabilities and imagines resurrection as providing a new body. He is clear however the body can be offered either to God or to the power of sin. The body does not direct the person but the person directs the body either to good or to evil. If however people decide to offer their bodies to sin, then bodily passions may become instruments of wickedness, dominating the whole person.

He describes the crucial choice between god and sin, good and evil, in terms of slavery: human beings can choose to serve either god or sin. If they choose the latter they will indeed be slaves, dominated by the demands of the body; whereas if they choose God, they will be treated as free people who will grow in holiness and receive the gift of eternal life.

The human body is seen by Paul as a splendid dimension of human being which can be dedicated to God and goodness, in which case it is an aspect of human freedom; or it can be dedicated to sin and evil, in which case it is an instrument of domination.

Paul’s psychology is not modern, but it’s not daft either. It deals with with the embodied life of human beings in a wise and realistic way. With all our sophistication, modern developed societies may have lost both wisdom and realism about bodily life. I’ve just read a report about pervasive pornography in secondary schools in England and Wales. Children and young people can access pornographic material on smartphones, which makes it almost impossible to control.  A culture is often created in schools and amongst groups of young people in which extreme forms of sexual behaviour are considered normal, reducing boys and girls to studs and slags, and romance to shagging. The habit of “sexting” -texting photographs of oneself or others engaged in sexual activity – has become common, as an instrument of grooming, bullying or even blackmail. 

but teenage behaviour’s always been a problem….

Attempts to regulate the market in pornography are met with howls of rage and accusations of prudishness (clearly it’s better to be dead than to be a prude) and social control (only communists would try to control such a profitable market).

All this is defended in the name of freedom, especially freedom of the body!

Paul would have seen that offering our bodily members to the power of pornography would lead to destructive forms of slavery. He would have known that once the laws of distorted desire are inscribed on the body, they will be very hard to obliterate. His sober wisdom, however, does not recommend social control, as if by religious Law; rather it advocates personal and communal choices that preserve human freedom. Those who offer their bodies to evil become slaves while those who offer them to God are free forever.

Civil law may nevertheless protect vulnerable citizens from the enslaving powers of the free market. I admire the courage of the Icelandic legislature which is considering a complete ban on pornography in print and online, for the protection of children and young people.