6. What was 1 Corinthians 11 really about?

Thus far:

1. The Memory Verse Approach
2. Adventures in Interpretation
3. Adventures in Jewelry
4. Beginnings of Context
5. Adventures in Hair, Part I

4. So what was 1 Corinthians 11 really about? 

We know that the central problem of the Corinthian church was disunity (1:10). They were divided into various factions. Some of the original believers there might be called the "Paul" group because they were loyal to him and his authority. But there were apparently others who used Apollos as an excuse to disregard Paul's instructions. Apollos had come to disciple the community after Paul and no doubt took slightly different approaches to various issues -- just like your pastors vary a little from one to the next.

Here are some of the lines of disunity at Corinth. Some wealthy individuals apparently got drunk at the Lord's Supper while others went hungry. Some were taking others to court. Some may have wanted to use Jesus as an excuse to divorce. Tongues speakers perhaps thought they were spiritually superior to others who didn't speak in tongues. Some had no problem eating at pagan temples while others found this practice highly problematic. 

Welcome to the church at Corinth!

1 Corinthians 11 arguably has to do with disorderly worship at Corinth, a theme Paul will explore in more detail in chapters 12-14. In chapter 14, Paul sets down rules for the exercise of spiritual gifts. One prophecy at a time. One speaking in tongues at a time but only if there is an interpreter. No more than two or three in a gathering.

5. The situation in chapter 11 relates to the social awkwardness of men and women in close quarters -- especially with wives praying and prophesying in the worship. Remember that they gathered in house churches. We can imagine that this was a sexually tense situation, with men and women together in unusual proximity.

Paul's goal in 1 Corinthians 11, I would argue, is not only to reduce disorder but to reduce the sexual tension by making sure everything is "in its place." Because the dynamics have everything to do with the cultural situation, the specifics don't translate directly to today. What translates to today are 1) removing barriers to worship, including the full participation of women in worship and 2) not creating an environment conducive to adultery.

How does he do this? By making sure that the wives in the assembly wear their hair veils. This would likely have been odd to do in a home -- especially for the matron of the house. But the hair veil served as a kind of wedding ring indicating that a woman was "taken." Additionally, it was an instrument of modesty. 

We've already mentioned that different cultures have different thresholds for sexual attraction. Dresses in the 1800s went nearly to the ground. If a woman in a dress going to the knees had walked around Victorian England, she would have raised lots of eyebrows by showing some leg.

Women's hair was apparently quite enticing in certain Jewish circles of the first century. In the Jewish novel, Joseph and Asenath (dating to the first or second century AD), the widow Asenath begins to wear a hair veil when she remarries Joseph. The veil thus indicated that a woman was married.

In the worship at Corinth, the covering put the situation into order. Now, when a wife prayed or prophesied in worship, her hair veil made her modest in the face of the other husbands in the congregation (not to mention God and the angels, who were putatively male -- you don't want angels lusting after you like they did in the days of Noah). "Keep your eyes to yourself," it said. "I'm married."

The hair veil thus gave authority to the wife to pray and prophesy in the presence of other men and the angels. As a quick sidenote, you'll notice that I am speaking extensively about wives rather than women in general. Unmarried women did not wear the hair veil. The word for women in these passages (including 1 Timothy 2) arguably should be translated wives because women were not normally conceptualized as free agents in the culture like they are today. Most of the women in the congregation would have been "women-as-wived."

6. Let's skim the passage with this background in view. First, Paul assumes that Christ is the head of the man and the man is the head of the woman (11:3). He is affirming the cultural pattern of his day to establish order in worship.

There is some debate over whether "head" (kephale) means authority or source in the New Testament, including here. I am sympathetic to the source argument, and it has some evidence in 11:8 and Ephesians 4:15-16. This idea of the husband as the nourisher and origin of the wife thus has some textual basis.

However, the likelihood that this headship imagery has some background in Aristotle pushes me in the other direction. In Aristotle's Politics 1254b10-20, he sets down a structure for the home VERY reminiscent of Colossians 3:18-4:1 and Ephesians 5:21-6:9. There is thus nothing distinctively Christian about the household structure here. It is exactly what everyone thought. It is only when Paul moves in the direction of the value of the wife, slave, and child that he is being distinctively Christian.

(I might add that in Plato's Republic, the head symbolizes the rulers of society, so we can't argue that the notion of the head as authority was not present in the background.)

So the household structure in this passage is just as cultural as the wearing of hair veils. I sense that many egalitarians -- who have not lived as I have under the implementation of the teaching on hair length -- have a subconscious impulse to try to make as much in this passage directly applicable to today as possible. So while the hair length and covering can be assigned to the cultural domain, there is a hesitancy to recognize that the headship language is cultural as well.

Yet, as I have indicated, this structure comes from Aristotle and Hellenistic culture. You won't find it articulated in the Old Testament. More importantly, it pulls against the spiritual equality that is a fundamental implication of the Day of Pentecost (Acts 2:17; Gal. 3:28).

Paul is trying to hold both things in tension in 1 Corinthians 11. Women can clearly pray and prophesy in worship -- that's what's driving the instructions in 1 Corinthians 11. Yet this radically new situation of the Spirit is creating some cultural complications too. So Paul reaffirms those cultural patterns so that the Spirit can continue to flow through the wives of the assembly.

7. So a man should not have his head covered (11:4). It needs to be uncovered to reflect Christ. The expression "having against head" hints at what they would have known without having to be told. We are talking about veiling in this passage. Not a face veil as in Muslim culture, but a hair veil like we used to wear during Christmas plays with a towel covering our hair.

In 11:6, Paul pulls out the big guns. If the wife is not going to cover, it's like her shaving her head like disgraced women sometimes are. The audience gasps. No, not that! OK. So put a veil on it.

Our puzzling verse, 11:10 now becomes clear. She is not only engaging the husbands around her when she prays and prophesies. She is engaging the spiritual realm of God and angels too, who are putatively male (for some strange and uncomfortable reading, see Dale Martin's The Corinthian Body). The hair veil "authorizes" her spiritual activity in the presence of all these "males." Its purpose is to enable her to fully participate in the ministry of the church. 

8. I end where this chapter started. By the time I was a boy, most Wesleyans were not too concerned about men and women's hair anymore. In the sixties, some Wesleyan young men had the Beatles cut. And women were at least cutting their hair to shoulder length. Our tradition never wore prayer bonnets like the Quakers and others.

Nevertheless, in my corner of the Wesleyan world, some of these verses in 1 Corinthians 11 were like memory verses. "If a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her" (11:15). "If a woman be not covered, let her also be shorn" (11:6). "Doth not even nature itself teach you, that, if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him" (11:14).

Most Christians at the time basically ignored verses like these. They "deselected" them in their paradigms without much thought. But as someone with a hyperactive conscience, I needed a basis not to see them as binding on men and women today. The basis was the discovery of context. "Doing what they did isn't doing what they did if it doesn't accomplish the same purpose."

A bun doesn't have any meaning today. A hair veil not only has no meaning today -- it would actually be somewhat offputting. Far from saying, "Everything is in order here," it would create unnecessary distance with those we want to lead to Christ. Ironically, a wedding ring performs much of the same function as the hair veil today.

Context is everything. That was a lesson I was only beginning to learn in my late college/early seminary years.

1.3 Meaning is Always Local

Last weekend I started a weekend series in which I am trying to capture somewhat of my journey with Scripture.  Last Sunday's post ended with me in college trying to decide whether the historical context of Scripture really made any difference for me today.  Would God have allowed the text to have teachings or instructions that were not "timeless."
________
... Let me illustrate with an issue where 1 Corinthians comes into conflict with current Christian practice: head coverings for women.  I grew up around people who took this letter's teaching on women's hair to apply directly to women today. "For this cause ought the woman to have power on her head," says the King James Version (KJV) of 1 Corinthians 11:10.  11:15 then goes on to say, "if a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her: for her hair is given her for a covering."

Now the experts don't actually agree on what Paul is exactly talking about here.  Is it simply talking about long hair on a woman or a special braid?  Or is he talking about a veil to cover the hair, my personal favorite?  I grew up hearing that the passage was about women having long hair and men having short hair, and the custom in my circles was for women to heap their hair up on their head in a bun, a "Wesleyan wad," as it were, to have "power" on their heads.

So the question presented itself.  Is there something about Paul's instructions to the Corinthians here that applied to the Corinthians but would not apply to twentieth century (at that time) North America?  Why would God allow something in the timeless answer book that only applied to back then and not to today as well?

I can shed a lot more clarity to this question now than I certainly could then.  My starting point is again to recognize that at the very least, 1 Corinthians 11 meant something to the Corinthians.  After all, that's who Paul says he is writing in 1 Corinthians 1:1.  He does not say, "and to all you women who will be reading this letter in two thousand years, you need to cover your hair too."

Sure, there are instances where you might argue that a passage in Scripture wasn't aimed at its original audience but was a prophecy only to be understood in the distant future.  I'm sure I'll come back to that later.  Suffice it to say, there is much less of this sort of prophecy in Scripture than you might think and the first order of business is always to see if a text made sense at the time it was written in the categories of its own day.

But the books of the Bible overwhelmingly say they were written to people who have been dead for a very long time.  That is the place to begin to understand the first meaning of the books of the Bible. Any other approach opens up the door to a "semantic free-for-all," meaning that these texts can come to mean almost anything. While in the end I think some of this looseness is perfectly appropriate, we need to be clear that it is not the first, original, historical meaning of the Bible. The first meaning of a biblical text is what it actually meant in its original context, not what it means to us today.

Let me also say that the response, "Ah, but what did it mean to God," is a bit of a cop-out.  After all, if you're talking about a meaning the text did not originally have, who are you to think you know what was really going on in God's mind at the time.  There are some good come backs to this question, such as "Well, the New Testament tells me with regard to the Old Testament" and "God clarified what he was up to later on in the church through his Spirit." Those are of course faith responses that may very well be correct.

In fact, I believe answers like those are necessary from a Christian perspective. But it does not change the original meaning, which is what these texts meant in the light of what words meant at the time these books were written or reached their "final forms." The first meaning of a biblical text is what it actually meant when it was first written.

So the first meaning, the default meaning of 1 Corinthians is what the words of 1 Corinthians meant when Paul wrote them to Corinth in the early 50s. I understand so much more about this sort of thing now than I did in college. This is not just the stuff of a dictionary.  The meaning of words is a matter of how they are used in relation to a place and time, a culture and a social setting.

Meaning is always local, in the first instance, and universal meaning is simply instances where all the local meanings are the same everywhere.  This is an incredibly important insight and fundamental to the meaning of anything, anywhere.  The meaning of something is the function of something in a specific context, and universal meaning relates to instances where the function of something is the same no matter where you go.

As one of my seminary professors used to put it, "Context is everything."  Common meaning builds up from particulars.  It does not play out down from some imagined, vastly oversimplified universals we project onto God's mind--as if he thought in such pre-school categories. To hear so many people talk about the universals in God's mind, he is less than a kindergarten student in the sophistication of his thought.

So to understand 1 Corinthians in its first meaning, we must know what hair meant in ancient Corinth, in its socio-cultural matrix.  The question of what hair means to God is an interesting one but one that must be put on hold if we want to understand 1 Corinthians.  Maybe the meaning will be the same for us, but it is beyond question that hair did mean something to the Corinthians and they would have read 1 Corinthians in that light. To understand 1 Corinthians I must first know how their categories might differ from mine.  Otherwise, simply by doing what they did I may actually be doing something quite different in terms of its meaning.

Obviously I did not have this depth of insight at the time and I will simply leave the question of historical meaning here for now.  I'm sure I will have opportunity as I continue, to return to the fundamental historical insight over and over again.  I would sum it with the following, seemingly incontrovertible logic:

1. The biblical texts were, in the first instance, written to multiple ancient audiences who understood those texts in terms of what words and actions meant at that time.

2. The meaning of words and actions for them is often different from the meaning of words and actions to me.

3. Therefore, the original meaning of the words of Scripture are more indirectly applicable to us today than directly applicable.

2nd Lecture: Finishing 1 Corinthians 11

There were three more segments on 1 Corinthians 11 at the beginning of the second lecture. Here are the links to them.

Part 6: From the second lecture, but this gives my sense of what husband headship has to do with women in ministry--my answer is nothing. Paul does not connect the two issues.

Part 7: Some background literature (Joseph and Aseneth) to 1 Corinthians 11

Part 8: This second part of the second lecture gives my final sense of 1 Corinthians 11, the bottom line on its meaning.

Women in Ministry Lecture 1 (1 Corinthians 11)

Below is the first Spring 2009 lecture I gave at Indiana Wesleyan University on women in ministry on 1 Corinthians 11.

Part 1: Galatians 3:28 as possible Christian tradition

Part 2: patriarchal cultures (including the biblical ones) had space for exceptional women leaders

Part 3: We don't know all the circumstances behind Paul's comments on women.

Part 4: Nothing uniquely Christian in the Bible about male headship in the ancient world.

Part 5: What's up with the head covering thing?

Part 6: From the second lecture, but this gives my sense of what husband headship has to do with women in ministry--my answer is nothing. Paul does not connect the two issues.

Part 7: Some background literature (Joseph and Aseneth) to 1 Corinthians 11

Part 8: This second part of the second lecture gives my final sense of 1 Corinthians 11, the bottom line on its meaning.