1 Corinthians 5 sees Paul confront the church at Corinth for a kind of sexual immorality he says not even the surrounding pagans of the day tolerated: a man having sex with his father's wife. Sexual immorality is not whatever someone's personal feelings or cultural zeitgeist approves of. The specific type of incest in question is a man having sex with his father's wife (Leviticus 18:6, 8, 20:11), which could be distinct from the independently sinful act of a man having sex with his mother (18:7; or by extension, a woman having sex with her father) because having multiple spouses is not condemned (Exodus 21:10-11, Leviticus 18:18, Deuteronomy 21:15-17, and so on). It is not the case that all sexual expression outside of marriage or sexual expression within marriage that is directed towards the thought of other people is sinful (Deuteronomy 4:2, 12:32). When Paul speaks of sexual immorality here, he only means what the Torah directly or by logical extension condemns. Nonetheless, Paul culminates the chapter of 1 Corinthians by saying to not even eat with such a person as the incestuous man and to expel all like him from the church.
God did not command such things as never eating with sinners in the Torah, so this, like anything else that neither is prescribed by Yahweh in Mosaic Law or elsewhere or that follows logically from what is prescribed, is a permissible option in some situations although it might to some come across in isolation like a universal command. Tolerance is not righteous, and it cannot possibly be even if Christianity is false and some other moral system is true [1], and Paul is certainly emphasizing the error of thinking that one can trivialize the sins of other people, and particularly people who claim to be an ideological brother or sister. To clarify, he is not violating Mosaic Law by proposing an excommunication of sorts here instead of execution. The very sin he is highlighting is one only specified in the Torah, and he does not push back against God's demand to kill such a person as the man who has his father's wife (Leviticus 20:11).
Any person is indeed free to show mercy as long as it is not on the basis of fallacious assumptions that mercy is required or owed to anyone, though the default is to impose justice at the expense of all conscience or social objections; people are obligated to follow God's justice and justice alone (Deuteronomy 16:20), purging evil from among them (Deuteronomy 24:7, which Paul paraphrases in 1 Corinthians 5:13) and showing no pity (Deuteronomy 17:7, 12, 25:11-12), with no special respect given to the rich or poor (Exodus 23:3, 6, Leviticus 19:15), the native-born and the foreigner (Exodus 23:9, Leviticus 19:33-34, 24:22, and many more), or men and women (Exodus 21:17, 26-27, 28-32, and many more). Paul does not object to any of this, and indeed, he would have been in violation of the Law to have the offender killed apart from two or three witnesses (Deuteronomy 17:6, 19:15) or by someone other than judges/an assembly serving Yahweh (Deuteronomy 17:6-11, 25:1), for he was not a judge. Thus, aside from all of the other related non sequiturs and reasons why nothing about 1 Corinthians 5 contradicts strict theonomy, Paul is not acting contrary to Mosaic Law in demanding expulsion rather than execution in this particular case.
Now, is what Paul calls for here contrary not to the Law, but to the actions of Jesus, who nonetheless fully endorsed Yahweh's Torah laws (Matthew 5:17-19, 15:1-20, 18:15-16, and so on)? After all, Christ eats with sinners and is condemned by the Pharisees for it (Matthew 9:10-13, Luke 5:27-32). The distinction is that Jesus eats with people who are in need of a spiritual physician, as he puts it in these passages; he says it is the sick and not the healthy who need a doctor. The sinners he dines with are people newly devoted to true righteousness or who are not pretending to be genuine and/or thorough followers of Yahweh. The Pharisees who object to him are those who are in reality not abiding by Mosaic Law as it is (Matthew 23:1-3, Mark 7:1-13). By contrast with Jesus, Paul addresses the severity of overlooking a brother's or sister's sins, or those of a supposed brother or sister, and insists on not even eating with such people, instead saying that the unrepentantly immoral (sexually or otherwise) man or woman be expelled from the church (1 Corinthians 5:11-13). He actually distinguishes between those allegiant to God (or allegedly so) and those who are not, pointing out that to truly avoid all the wicked, one could not inhabit this world at all (1 Corinthians 5:9-10).
Yes, even the morally "sick" within the church need a physician, but the context of Christ's meals with wayward or recently repentant people is not the same as that which Paul is speaking of. The apostle states elsewhere (Ephesians 5), in full accordance with the logically necessary ramifications of how if something is good or evil, actual toleration of the latter is itself evil, that we are not to be partners with those who are not only unrepentantly sexually immoral, but also greedy or in any way impure--an even broader direct scope of sins than those mentioned in 1 Corinthians 5. Something which follows from the ideas put forth in both chapters, though, is that spouses, and not just pastors, would be included among those who are not to be partners with unrepentant sinners or not even eat with them if they claim to be in allegiance to God and all that this entails.
It could not be the case that this is true of everything except being marriage partners with such persons, a potentially even more intimate relationship. Without the word being used or the specific context of marriage being brought up, Paul addresses how there is basis for divorce over sins other than sexual immorality. Like Exodus 21:10-11, 21:26-27, Deuteronomy 21:10-14, and 24:1-4 from Mosaic Law in all of their ramifications, Paul's stance ultimately requires that divorce is permissible for any sin whatsoever. If this is what is allowed or situationally necessary in marriages, which could not in context possibly be exempt from what Paul speaks of, then of course relationships between non-spouses in the church, in business, and so forth would be permitted to be broken and even tossed aside in certain cases for any unrepentant sin, especially of grievous kinds! Sin is not to be tolerated one way or another.
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