1 Corinthians 7:14

obviates the objection which the Christian wife or husband (for the order, see note on 10 f.) might feel to continued union with an unbeliever (cf. Paul's own warning in 2 Corinthians 6:14 ff.): “Will not the saint,” some one asks, “be defiled, and the ‘limbs of Christ' (1 Corinthians 6:15) be desecrated by intercourse with a heathen?” To such a protest ἡγίασται γὰρ κ. τ. λ. replies: “For the husband that is an unbeliever, has been sanctified in his wife,” and vice versâ. ἡγίασται … ὁ ἄπιστος is a paradox: it does not affirm a conversion in the unbeliever remaining such whether incipient or prospective (D. W [1045], and some others) the pf. tense signifies a relationship established for the non-Christian in the past, sc. at the conversion of the believing spouse; but man and wife are part of each other, in such a sense (cf. 1 Corinthians 6:16 f., by contrast) that the sanctification of the one includes the other so far as their wedlock is concerned. The married believer in offering her- (or him-) self to God could not but present husband (or wife) in the same act “sanctified in the wife, brother,” respectively and treats him (or her) henceforth as sacred. “Whatever the husband may be in himself, in the wife's thought and feeling he is a holy object.… Similarly the Christian's friends, abilities, wealth, time, are, or should be, holy” (Bt [1046]). Marriage with an unbeliever after conversion is barred in 2 Corinthians 6:14.

[1045]. W. De Wette's Handbuch z. N. T.

[1046] J. A. Beet's St. Paul's Epp. to the Corinthians (1882).

The (relative) sanctity of the unconverted spouse is made more evident by the analogous case of children : “Else one must suppose that your children are unclean; but as it is, they are holy!” P. appeals to the instinct of the religious parent; the Christian father or mother cannot look on children, given by God through marriage, as things unclean. Offspring are holy as bound up with the holy parent; and this principle of family solidarity holds good of the conjugal tie no less than of the filial derived therefrom. See the full discussion of this text in Ed [1047]; it has played no small part in Christian jurisprudence, and in the doctrine of Infant Baptism; it “enunciates the principle which leads to Infant Baptism, viz. that the child of Christian parents shall be treated as a Christian” (Lt [1048]). On ἐπεὶ ἄρα, alioqui certe, si res se aliter haberet, see 1 Corinthians 5:10 and parls.; νῦν δὲ, as in 1 Corinthians 5:11, is both temporal and logical (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:20; Romans 6:22).

[1047] T. C. Edwards' Commentary on the First Ep. to the Corinthians. 2

[1048] J. B. Lightfoot's (posthumous) Notes on Epp. of St. Paul (1895).