“At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16: 11)
The Basket Case Chronicles #47
“I wrote unto you in an epistle not to company with fornicators: yet not altogether with the fornicators of this world, or with the covetous, or extortioners, or with idolaters; for then must ye needs go out of the world” (1 Cor. 5:9-10).
Paul had written an epistle to the Corinthians previously (which means that 1 Corinthians is actually 2 Corinthians), and in this letter he had told them that they were not to hang out with fornicators. But this can be misunderstood, and Paul writes here to head off such a misunderstanding. He did not mean to prohibit Christian from associating with fornicators—the intention was to keep Christians from associating with fornicators who called themselves Christians (as we will see in the next verse). The same thing applies to covetous people, and swindlers, and idolaters. It is fine to have lunch with such people. To avoid that kind of contact you would have to leave the planet, which Paul is not asking for.
It is more than a little interesting that when the church refuses to practice church discipline, this Pauline assumption gets inverted. Paul says that we can hang out with non-Christians who live like this, but not with professing Christians who do. But when the church doesn’t discipline, Christians hang out with professing Christians who are immoral and dishonest (sitting across from them at the potluck), and they do not spend any time with worldly people who live that way openly. They don’t do the latter because of what it would do to their “testimony,” and all while the whole church conspires to wreck their collective testimony by means of culpable silence.