What does 1 Corinthians 5:13 mean?

1 Corinthians 5:13 comes at the close of a passage in which Paul addresses a serious moral scandal in the Corinthian church—a man was living in an immoral relationship with his father's wife, and rather than being grieved, the congregation was tolerating it, even boasting in their broad-mindedness. In this final verse, Paul draws a sharp line between two spheres of accountability: those "outside" the church, meaning unbelievers in the surrounding culture, and those "inside," meaning members of the Christian community. He states plainly that God himself will judge outsiders—it is not the church's job to police the morality of the non-Christian world. But for those inside the fellowship who claim the name of Christ while persisting in unrepentant sin, the church has a responsibility to act, which is why Paul closes with a command drawn from Deuteronomy: "Put away the wicked man from among yourselves."

The letter was written by the apostle Paul to the church in Corinth, a congregation he had founded, located in a Greek city known for its moral looseness and pagan religious practices. Corinth's culture was steeped in sexual permissiveness, and it seems some of that ethos had crept into the church's thinking, leading them to excuse behavior that even pagans would have found shameful. Paul writes to correct this, urging the church toward the discipline of removing the unrepentant offender from their fellowship, not out of harsh judgmentalism, but for the sake of the man's eventual repentance and the purity of the church as a whole (as seen earlier in the chapter, verse