1 Corinthians 6:15

“Know ye not that your bodies are the members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ, and make them the members of an harlot? Let it not be so!”

Paul had just said that the body is not for fornication, but for the Lord. In the first proposition of this verse he justifies the for the Lord, to deduce from it as a conclusion in the second the not for fornication. Baur and Scherer see here a petitio principii, inasmuch as the term harlot already implies the guiltiness of fornication, which is precisely the point to be proved. But the apostle is not treating the question from the standpoint of rational morality; he starts from Christian premises: Know ye not...? Now the relation between Christ and the believer, implied in faith, gives him logically the right to reason as he does.

As the Church in its totality is the body of Christ, that is to say, the organism which He animates with His Spirit, and by which He carries out His wishes on the earth, so every Christian is a member of this body, and consequently an organ of Christ Himself. By means of the Spirit of Christ which dwells in his spirit, and by means of his spirit which directs his soul and thereby his body, this body becomes as it were the body of Christ, the executor of His thought; hence the practical conclusion: This organ of Christ must not be taken from Him to be given to a harlot. Therein is a double crime: on the one hand, a revolt, an odious abduction (ἄρας); on the other, an act of ignoble self-debasement and the acceptance of a shameful dependence. And hence the apostle's cry of indignation: Let it not be so!

Ποιήσω, perhaps the deliberative subjunctive aorist: “Shall I choose to make...?” or simply the future indicative: “Shall I make?” The second meaning is better: one does not deliberate in regard to such an act. But do not the expressions, “members of Christ” and “members of an harlot,” contain something of exaggeration? This is what the light - minded Corinthians might ask, and it is to this objection that 1 Corinthians 6:16-17 give answer.