“The call into fellowship with Christ (1 Cor. 1:9) is also a call into the fellowship of his Spirit-baptized body (12:13). The bodies of believers are, individually, temples of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 6:19; cf. 1 Thess. 4:6, 8), while the church itself, as a whole, is God’s temple (1 Cor. 3:16-17). Further, that is so in the context of the entire creation ‘anxiously longing’ for the future (open) ‘revelation of the sons of God,’ when it will be ‘set free from the bondage of corruption’ (Rom. 8:19, 21). To polarize personal and corporate, or personal and cosmic, concerns in matters of the gospel is simply foreign to Paul.” (Richard B. Gaffin, By Faith Not by Sight, p. 48).
(for this evening’s 101 Bible Study in Astoria)