Head Coverings in 1 Corinthians 11:3-16

This will be the first of three posts on the chauvinistic passages in the New Testament. Some readers may be surprised to find me agreeing with the fundamentalist interpretations of these passages. That is because for the most part I think moderate evangelicals' ways of rationalizing them away are cop-outs. My position is that we should just admit that the New Testament writers were wrong at these points.

The first passage I'd like to address is 1 Corinthians 11:3-16, which is about head coverings. Paul opens this section by saying that Christ is the head of man and man is the head of woman. Whatever else he may be trying to say here, it is clear that he assumes a hierarchy. "Head" language is used of Christ’s authority over the church and over creation in Ephesians (1:10,22; 4:15; 5:23) and in Colossians (1:18; 2:10; 2:19).

The headship hierarchy is used to talk about honor, and particularly about honor as it relates to the issue of wearing head coverings while praying or prophesying in the public assembly.[1] If a man covers his head during these activities, Paul argues, he dishonors both his literal head and his metaphorical head. By contrast, if a woman prophesies with her head uncovered, she similarly dishonors her head.

Modern scholars' attempts to explain this teaching away as a concession to culture have all failed. If Paul were grudgingly conceding to the norm, there would have been no need for such elaborate argument. There is, in any case, no evidence that Corinthian women wore veils in New Testament times,[2] and while it does seem to have been Roman custom for women to wear something on their head (often just headbands or scarves) in public, Bruce W. Winter has shown that these customs were breaking down in Paul's day.[3] Paul's Greek word katakaluptw, moreover, means "thoroughly covered," and could not refer to a token Roman headband. Jewish culture provides a better parallel; as Joachim Jeremias has explained, a Jewess of Jerusalem who went out "without her face being hidden, committed such an offence against good taste that her husband had the right—and indeed the duty—to put her away from him."[4] It is probable that Paul was attempting to enforce Jewish custom in the Corinthian church, over the objections of the Gentile Christians there.

A better attempt to do away with this teaching, that of Gordon D. Fee and W. Gerald Kendrick, focuses particularly on v. 10 where the NIV reads, "For this reason, and because of the angels, a woman ought to have a sign of authority on her head." The phrase translated "have a sign of authority on" (lit. "have authority over") is found over a hundred times elsewhere in Greek literature, and is always used in an active sense to mean "to have authority over" something. It is always used of authority exercised, never of authority submitted to.[5] The word for authority, exousia, is similar to the one used in the Corinthian slogan Paul quotes elsewhere in the letter: "All things are lawful (exestin) for me" (6:12). And in 8:9 he cautions the Corinthians not to let their freedom (exousia) become a stumbling block. In ch. 9 he uses the word repeatedly to show how Christians should give up their rights for the sake of their brothers and sisters. Since that discussion immediately precedes the present passage, it is reasonable to presume that exousia is the Corinthians' own word. They had written to Paul, apparently arguing that women should have freedom to do as they please with their heads. Kendrick thus concludes that in v. 10, Paul is expressing qualified agreement with the Corinthians. A woman should have freedom of choice about what to do with her own head. Nevertheless, for the reasons offered in this passage, Paul thinks that to responsibly use this freedom is to voluntarily cover one's head.

Kendrick and Fee are probably right that Paul is responding to a Corinthian argument that women should have freedom to do as they please with their heads, but the conclusion that he expresses qualified agreement with them finds no support in the text. The reasons Paul gives in vv. 7-9 in fact directly controvert this conclusion: woman was created for man, and "for this reason" "should have [his] authority over her head."

Probably in v. 10 Paul is not expressing agreement—qualified or otherwise—with the Corinthian slogan. Rather, he is appropriating the slogan and changing its meaning. The Corinthians used the slogan "a woman should have authority over her head" to mean that a woman should have the freedom to do as she wishes with her head. Paul uses it to mean that she should have her head covered. While the Greek phrase "to have authority over" is never used in a passive sense in extant ancient literature, it is certainly capable of passive construal. The Greek phrase functions in much the same way as its English counterpart. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the English phrase "to have authority over" will be used in an active sense. But if the phrase were used in a certain context, it would have to be read passively. The same is true of the Greek sentence construction we find in 1 Cor. 11:10. Paul appropriates the Corinthian slogan and uses it in a passive sense, ironically altering its meaning entirely. The phrase as Paul uses it means that a woman should wear a head covering.

Why is a woman to cover her head? Paul's primary appeal is to the created order. Man was created first, and then woman was created for man. It is a woman’s duty to glorify man by covering her head in the assembly. There are also angels involved somehow. Some commentators have suggested that these may be angels who watch over the created order. These angels would be offended if Christians failed to preserve gender distinctions.

It is not until vv. 11-12 that Paul expresses some qualified agreement with the Corinthians. They apparently argued that since gender distinctions are abolished in Christ's new creation, women have freedom to do as they please. In vv. 11-12 Paul admits that the created order is modified in Christ: neither man nor woman is independent of the other; each comes from the other, and both come from God. This concession, however, is short-lived. In v. 13 Paul launches back into a discussion of propriety, hair, and what seems proper or natural. He puts a stop to any further discussion of the topic in v. 16, where he says, "we have no other practice—nor do the churches of God."

It is possible that Paul felt he could make no concession on this point because the Corinthian rebellion against Christian head coverings was part of a larger rebellion, which Paul intended to shut down entirely. Or it could be that he simply felt more strongly that gender divisions should be maintained and that man is the head of woman than that these distinctions are abolished in Christ. Whatever the reason, modern Christians should feel free to grab hold of the redemptive thread in vv. 11-12 and to pull it until the chauvinism of the rest of the passage is unraveled.

NOTES:

[1] This passage does not, as some claim, say that women should wear head coverings at all time. Only during prayer and prophesying are the women to cover themselves.
[2] W. Gerald Kendrick, "Authority, Women, and Angels: Translating 1 Corinthians 11.10," The Bible Translator 46, no. 3 (1995): 337.
[3] See Bruce W. Winter, Roman Wives, Roman Widows: The Appearance of New Women and the Pauline Communities (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003).
[4] Joachim Jeremias, Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1969), 359-60. It is unlikely that all Jews, particularly those outside Jerusalem, would have been so strict.
[5] Kendrick, "Authority, Women, and Angels: Translating 1 Corinthians 11.10," 338.