Paul, Women, and Wives

Marriage and Women's Ministry in the Letters of Paul

Keener, Craig S.

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 1992
• ISBN:
  9781441237156
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Paul's letters stand at the center of the dispute over women, the church, and the home, with each side championing passages from the Apostle. Now, in a challenging new attempt to wrestle with these thorny texts, Craig Keener delves as deeply into the world of Paul and the apostles as anyone thus far. Acknowledging that we must take the biblical text seriously, and recognizing that Paul's letters arose in a specific time and place for a specific purpose, Keener mines the historical, lexical, cultural, and exegetical details behind Paul's words about women in the home and ministry to give us one of the most insightful expositions of the key Pauline passages in years.

PART 1

THE ROLES OF WOMEN IN THE CHURCH

The first part of this book examines those passages in Paul that have been advanced to support women’s subordination in the church. The second part addresses the main passage used to argue for women’s subordination in the home.

The first passage we will examine is 1 Corinthians 11:1–16. This passage allows women to minister in the congregation, but calls them to cover their heads lest they detract from God’s glory by distracting men from the worship of God. Paul covers all his bases by marshalling several arguments that will appeal to various groups of readers; one of his arguments for women covering their heads is based on the creation order. The cultural issue addressed in this passage is probably that women of higher wealth and status were decking themselves out and distracting men by their artificial beauty. Paul sides with the lower-status, more conservative elements in the congregation for the sake of propriety and church unity.

The second passage we will examine is 1 Corinthians 14:34–35. This passage could be read as enjoining absolute silence on all women in all churches, but this interpretation would contradict the context and the earlier passage in 1 Corinthians 11, where women are praying and prophesying. More likely, this second passage addresses women who are asking misguided questions during the teaching period of the church service, thereby slowing everyone down, and Paul’s admonition refers only to this situation. The cultural situation is the inferior training of women, which Paul seeks to correct by urging husbands to take a more active interest in their wives’ spiritual and intellectual maturation.

The third passage we will examine is 1 Timothy 2:8–15. This is the only passage in the entire Bible explicitly forbidding or limiting women’s teaching role. This passage is therefore problematic, since Paul elsewhere commends fellow ministers who were women. Again, the cultural situation is in view; women were in general less trained than men, and Paul does not want people susceptible to false teaching to be in leadership positions when heresy is so rampant in the church. But here again he proposes a long-range solution for the Christian women in that congregation: they should be educated as the men had been.

He bases his argument against allowing these particular women to teach first of all on the creation order, the same basis for the requirement that women in Corinth wear head coverings. The second basis for his argument is the parallel between the deceivable women of Timothy’s congregation and deceivable Eve, similar to his earlier parallel between the deceivable Corinthian Christians of both genders and Eve. But, as in 1 Corinthians 11, he ends up qualifying his argument so that no one takes him too far; Eve’s curse is removed for those who persevere in Christ.

There is in the entirety of the New Testament no evidence for the subordination of women that is practiced in many of our churches today, and certainly not sufficient evidence for men to rule out the validity of women’s calls to minister the word of God. When men claim that God has called them, we do not question their call if their lives and ministry bear witness to that claim; when women claim that God has called them, we ought to evaluate their calls on the same terms. If we judge other people’s calls on the basis of a narrow and ill-considered interpretation of several texts, ignoring the clear examples of other texts, we may succeed only in silencing some of God’s servants needed for our generation. And if we do that, we invite God to pass judgment on our own call as interpreters of God’s word.

1

Head Coverings in 1 Corinthians 11:1–16

One passage generally acknowledged to address a specific cultural situation is 1 Corinthians 11:2–16. Paul presents four basic arguments for why married women should wear head coverings in church worship services: the order of the home, the order of creation, the order of nature itself, and church custom. Although many churches would use arguments like these to demand the subordination of women in all cultures, very few accept Paul’s arguments here as valid for covering women’s heads in all cultures. “Men preaching and teaching is something for all cultures,” they say, “whereas women wearing head coverings was only an issue back then.”

This seems to me a curious form of reasoning, however: the same argument Paul uses in one passage for forbidding women to teach he uses in another passage to argue that married women (i.e., nearly all adult women in his day) must cover their heads in church. In the one passage, Paul does not want the women of a certain congregation to teach; in the other passage, he wants the women of a certain congregation to cover their heads. We take the argument as transculturally applicable in one case, but not so in the other. This seems very strange indeed.

Someone who advocates women’s subordination may object that Paul would understand that styles of apparel are different in our day than they were in his, so that a modern woman could attend church without a hat, and a man might even venture to wear one. But to this we would reply that Paul would understand that styles of ministry, the educational level of women, and the moral and social significance of women teaching is different from what it was in Paul’s day, and that he would therefore approve of women teaching in church.

In this chapter I will address only 1 Corinthians 11, examining the nature of head coverings and each of Paul’s arguments for why the Corinthian women ought to wear them. Because some of Paul’s arguments in this passage are difficult for modern readers to follow, the discussion will necessarily be involved at times. But the basic points of his argument are not difficult to grasp.

INTERPRETATIONS OF 1 CORINTHIANS 11:2–16

The following survey of views is not exhaustive, but it is representative of the different sorts of positions that other writers have taken concerning this passage.[1]

Some deal with this troublesome passage by excising it entirely, claiming that a later writer inserted it into Paul’s letter.[2] In one major academic journal, a scholar argued that this passage was an interpolation (an insertion);[3] another scholar responded, “No, it’s not”;[4] and still another scholar responded, “Oh yes, it is.”[5] Those who feel that the passage is an insertion argue that it is not consistent with the way Paul thinks elsewhere, a thesis that is more than a little questionable. But even if the text stood in tension with what Paul writes elsewhere, we must remember that it was not uncommon for ancient writers to write things that sometimes stood in tension with each other; modern writers do the same thing, especially when they address different issues.[6] And the textual basis for removing this passage is impossibly weak.[7]

Other scholars accept the passage as authentic but ask whether its instruction is specific to that culture or universal in its import. At least one scholar does suggest that Christian women should still cover their heads in church today,[8] and I admire his consistency on the matter, even though I disagree with him. Less consistent, though surely more popular, is the view that a head covering was simply the ancient cultural manifestation of a wife’s subjection to her husband; the head coverings are no longer necessary, but the subjection is.[9] My objection to this approach is: how do we know that the subjection was not also cultural?

Those who view Paul as reflecting the standards of his culture vary in the extent to which they accept his teaching here as valid for all cultures. Ramsay suggests that Paul was merely a child of his age on the matter of head coverings, but that his eternally valid view is presented in Galatians 3:28, “in Christ there is . . . neither male nor female.”[10] Perhaps more sympathetic to the Paul of 1 Corinthians 11 is the related view of Morna Hooker:

Because it seemed to Paul (conditioned as he was by his Jewish upbringing) that the only way of avoiding scandal in the particular social conditions of first-century Corinth was for women to wear something on their heads in public, women continued to be expected to wear hats in church for almost 1900 years thereafter. Could there have been a greater distortion of the spirit of Paul, who insisted that religion was not a matter of law, than to turn him into a great lawgiver?[11]

One increasingly common view is that Paul is refuting a Corinthian view that women in the congregation should cover their heads, and is arguing that the women should resist this requirement.[12] But this view strains our sense that Paul could write clearly; although Paul sometimes cites Corinthian views before qualifying and correcting them, the whole tenor of this passage is that he does indeed want the Corinthian women to cover their heads.

A related and more likely position is that while Paul acknowledges these women’s authority over their own heads (11:10), he calls on them to submit to the head coverings so as not to cause offense.[13] This position has in its favor the entire preceding context of surrendering one’s own “rights” (the same term Paul uses in 11:10 for “authority”) to avoid causing others to lose faith in Christ.[14] Since 1 Corinthians 8 and 10 address various issues raised by the practice of food offered to idols, with Paul using himself as an example of sacrificing one’s own rights in chapter 9, this makes the most sense of the passage in the context. In the rest of the chapter Paul returns to a discussion of eating, although there he states his case far more forcefully than he does regarding head coverings, because the next issue is less morally ambiguous (contrast 11:2, 17).[15]

What then do we make of Paul’s arguments in 11:2–16? I will argue later in this chapter that Paul’s arguments here (as often elsewhere) are meant to persuade his readers in terms of the logic of their own culture. Paul was a masterful missionary, and he was skilled enough in debate to understand the Corinthians’ own views, and to probe the Corinthians for consistency until he could persuade them to change their positions. This does not mean that his logic is the same sort of logic a Christian philosopher would use today. Had any one of his arguments here been an absolute, unambiguous, universal proof, Paul could have settled for one argument instead of four.[16] As Gordon Fee notes, Paul here appeals to “shame, propriety, and custom” rather than to outright declarations or commands; this is a cultural issue, not a “life-and-death matter” like the abuse of the Lord’s Supper.[17]

WOMEN’S HEAD COVERINGS IN ANTIQUITY

When we speak of head coverings, we are normally speaking of a shawl that covered a woman’s hair instead of a face-veil. Although some of our evidence, especially from the eastern Mediterranean, may suggest the use of face-veils such as now are in vogue in traditional Middle Eastern societies, most of our evidence points to a covering that concealed only the hair from view.[18] Since veils were one kind of head covering, we subsume evidence for them under our discussion below on head coverings in general.

Some scholars have argued that neither a veil nor a shawl was in view in this passage, but rather hair put up high on one’s head instead of being let down. For example, James Hurley suggests that the accepted custom of wearing one’s hair up in church was being violated by controversial women who were letting their hair down.[19] He cites 1 Timothy 2:9 (which addresses wealthier women who are showing off their faddish hairstyles in church) to show that women in Pauline congregations did not wear veils.[20] But we might cite the same passage to show why Paul wanted them to cover their heads—to avoid showing off their fashionable hairstyles in church! Hurley’s position is problematic, as Fee points out; if an “uncovered” head simply means “having her hair down,” how is “the man’s not covering his head in v. 7 . . . the opposite of this?”[21] It is thus clear that head coverings, not merely long hair, are in view.

In this first section of our discussion of the custom of head coverings in antiquity, we start with the possibly related question of the seclusion of women in some aspects of Greek culture.

Seclusion of Women in Classical Antiquity

The practice of women covering their heads in public may be related to the old Greek tradition that restricted women in many ways to the domestic sphere.[22] In theory, at least,[23] women in fourth century BCE Athens could not go to the market and were not to be seen by men who were not their relatives.[24] The orators especially attest the separation of male and female spheres of life in classical Athens,[25] and “one speaker in court seeks to impress the jury with the respectability of his family by saying that his sister and nieces are ‘so well brought up that they are embarrassed in the presence even of a man who is a member of the family.’ ”[26] Under classical Athenian law, a wife who needlessly entered the public sphere placed her honor as a faithful wife in grave danger.[27]

This ideal seems to have continued to some degree in conservative parts of the Greek-speaking Mediterranean world, through the period directly before the spread of Christianity. Thus marriage contracts from first or second century BCE Egypt ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part 1: The Roles of Women in the Church
• Part 2: Women’s Roles in the Family
• Appendix A: Women’s Ministry Elsewhere in Paul
• Appendix B: Mysteries, Music, Women, and Wine—Ephesians 5:18-21 and the Threat of Subversive Religions
• Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Index of Ancient Sources
• Notes
• Back Cover