your body is not the temple/don't worry about God's will for your life

I have long reminded folks who have heard that their individual body is the  temple of the Holy Spirit (therefore, don't smoke,  have sex outside of marriage, commit suicide etc) that  1 Corinthians 3 actually says 

¹⁶ Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in your midst?¹⁷ If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy that person; for God’s temple is sacred, and you together are that temple.  NIV

Here , the body of Christ as a corporate entity is the temple.  It doesn't say that we (or our bodies) are individual temples (templettes, lol).  "You yourselves" (ustedes) together as one are the  corporate one body/temple.  (See A Crash of Rhinos...a Committee of Buzzards).

Then I admit and that later in the same letter (ch 6), Paul  suggests that your (individual) human body i a  (not "the") temple:

¹⁹ Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; ²⁰ you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body.

So:
Chapter 3: Together, corporately, we are the temple .
Chapter 6: Individually, a person's body is a temple.

But Shane Hipps presents even this second passage as all about the corporate interpretation, as is the first:

Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body.1 Corinthians 6:19-20
For my entire Christian life, I had understood this passage as a call to personal purity ad individual morality. I was taught that if I was ever tempted to drink, get a tattoo, or smoke, this verse could serve as a cocked and ready defense. While I am grateful it warded off certain temptations, Paul is not talking about individual purity. He is talking about the church. 

Every time Paul says ‘you’ in this passage it is plural, yet every time he says ‘body’ it is singular. He is speaking to a corporate group about their shared body - the church. The churchi s the temple of the Holy Spirit, not me personally. Paul is emphasizing that the Spirit dwells in the corporate body. Our individual purity still matters, and the Bible still teaches that the Spirit dwells in us personally, but this passage is actually concerned with the church community as a whole.[Paul assumes that our faith journey is bound up and rooted in a larger community of people who serve together, not individually, as God’s medium. This means the church does not exist only for us, we exist for it - each an essential part in the incarnated body of Jesus in the world]

The true significance of this is well understood by a former seminary professor of mine.  A Christian friend of his  who was not a churchgoer approached him because this friend was struggling with a particular passage in Paul's epistles.  This friend was intent on figuring out exactly what Paul was saying and what it meant for my life.  After he laid out his dilemma, my professor responded by saying, "Don't worry about it."  "What do you mean?" his friend replied.  My professor explained, "You don't have to worry about it.  It's not written to you; it was written for the church, and you're not part of a church, so you don't have to worry about it."  His friend was a bit startled.  My professor told me this man and his family joined a church soon after that conversation.

Whatever you think of my professor's tactics, the point he made is an important one.  We need to read Scripture through a lens that is not just personal but also corporate.  Instead of asking, "What does this passage say to me?"  we might ask "What does this passage call our community to become?"  When we begin to see the images in Scripture as corporate rather than individual, we can develop a more complete understanding of the true essence of the church and gain clarity on God's chosen medium.-Shane Hipps, The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture: How Media Shapes Faith, the Gospel, and Church  pp. 96-97.  Read it in context here. Note: this book was reworked as  Flickering Pixels: How Technology Shapes Your Faith.
There the bracketed section above appears, and a different story is told  at the end. Read that here."    176-177.

And note this:

In checking this Scripture on Bible Gateway, I see that the ch 6 passage in the 1984 version of the NIV (which Hipps used) reads:

Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; ²⁰ you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body.

But the 2011 version reads:

Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; ²⁰ you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.

Compare the two in helpful parallel chart here. 

Hmm, translators.  What's up with this backsliding?   Hipps is correct that "you" is singular and "body" is plural.  It actually looks like they may have been following the interim translation, the banned TNIV.  In Shane Hipps' language, this is Windows, not Mac ecclesiology ( "Hidden Power," p 1`46ff. "The 'Mac' approach to church rethinks its theological operating system, 'PC' approach attempts to add to its theology methods that appear innovative perpetuating consumerism," as Kurt Willems helpfully summarizes) .  May be time for a translation temple tantrum.

SBL Greek New Testament includes a footnote:

¹⁹ ἢ οὐκ οἴδατε ὅτι τὸ σῶμα ὑμῶν ναὸς τοῦ ἐν ὑμῖν ἁγίου πνεύματός ἐστιν, οὗ ἔχετε ἀπὸ θεοῦ; καὶ οὐκ ἐστὲ ἑαυτῶν, ²⁰ ἠγοράσθητε γὰρ τιμῆς· δοξάσατε δὴ τὸν θεὸν ἐν τῷ σώματι ^[a]ὑμῶν.Footnotes:

1. ΠΡΟΣ ΚΟΡΙΝΘΙΟΥΣ Α΄ 6:20 ὑμῶνWH Treg NIV ] + καὶ ἐν τῷ πνεύματι ὑμῶν ἅτινά ἐστιν τοῦ θεοῦ RP  LINK

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