Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body. (1Corinthians 6:19-20)

Paul is a mystic. Can a mystic be explicit? Doesn't any discussion of the mystical depend significantly on the implicit?

Paul has been trying to explain the relationship of our bodies - our senses, hungers, thirsts, sexuality, and whole physical identity - with the divine.

Here he compares our body to a place of worship. This is an implicit comparison. The comparison is complicated by how we hear and understand the specific words differently than Paul's original audience.

I would translate the first verse as, "Or do you not know that your body is the inner santuary of the Holy Spirit itself whom you have from God himself."

When we hear the word temple, we tend to think of something huge. When the Greeks heard the word naos they would think of the much smaller space at the very heart of their temples which held the divine image.

My body is not the principal architectual feature of a great city. Instead it is the enclosed, shadowy, cool and quiet, holy-of-holies in which dwells the divine.

It also seems to me that the translation of verse 20, "purchased for a price" brings to our reading of Paul a concept of antonement that had not yet been worked out.

The original Greek might be rendered as, "From being about you can determine the value, so praise God with your body." Where the translator has used "bought," the Greek is agorazo or to be in the agora. The agora was the political, economic, and social center of a Greek city. Buying was done there, but so was deciding and socializing and people watching.

What the translator has rendered as "price" is the Greek teemay which is much more the process of valuing that leads to a price than a price itself.

The relationship of our bodies to the divine is difficult to explain. But whatever is done with the language Paul uses, it is clear he is teaching that the body is where we encounter God. The body should not be ignored, misused, or disparaged. Rather it should be honored and given in praise and thanksgiving to the purposes of its creator.