Paul's Teaching About Women in 1 Corinthians Chapters 11 and 14
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Paul’s Teaching about Women in 1 Corinthians Chapters 11 and 14 David Gooding A Myrtlefield House Article www.myrtlefieldhouse.com David Gooding has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Copyright © The Myrtlefield Trust, 2019 All rights reserved. Permission is granted to reproduce this document in its entirety, or in unaltered excerpts, for personal and church use only as long as you do not charge a fee. You must not reproduce it on any Internet site. Permission must be obtained if you wish to reproduce it in any other context, translate it, or publish it in any format. This text originally appeared in The Word, 1994. Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. May not copy or download more than 500 consecutive verses of the ESV Bible or more than one half of any book of the ESV Bible. Quotations marked KJV are from The Authorized (King James) Version. Rights in the Authorized Version in the United Kingdom are vested in the Crown. Reproduced by permission of the Crown’s patentee, Cambridge University Press. Other quotations are Dr Gooding’s own translations or paraphrases. The Myrtlefield Trust PO Box 2216 Belfast, N Ireland BT1 9YR w: www.myrtlefieldhouse.com e: [email protected] Myrtlefield catalogue no: bib.art.007/bh Paul’s Teaching about Women in 1 Corinthians Chapters 11 and 14 QUESTION: How do you relate and reconcile Paul’s teaching on women in 1 Corinthians chapters 11 and 14? He appears to allow women to pray and prophesy in chapter 11, but in chapter 14 they must say nothing: ‘keep silent’ (v. 34). What would a godly woman nowadays be doing when she is prophesying? Can you give a description and some examples? Can you give details about both chapters 11 and 14 regarding the flow of the argument and the words used, especially in chapter 14. (We already have Symbols of Headship and Glory, based on chapter 11.) DWG: The matter of Scripture versus tradition or fashion is important here, i.e. the cultural question. The two passages that are most frequently discussed in the context of whether women should be allowed to take part audibly in the meetings of the church are 1 Corinthians 11:2–16 and 1 Corinthians 14:33–35. It seems clear enough to me from the first of these passages, and from Acts 21:9, that in New Testament times Christian women did both pray and prophesy. The point at issue nowadays is where did they do this praying and prophesying, and in particular did they do it publicly in the church, or elsewhere? Disagreement over the matter may arise among Christians who are sincerely anxious to do the will of God. If 1 Corinthians 11:2–16 stood by itself, one would get the impression that Paul is here giving directions on how women should pray and prophesy in the church; whereas in 1 Corinthians 14:33–35 Paul forbids women to speak in the church. And while one can pray in the church without speaking audibly, one certainly cannot prophesy in the church without speaking audibly. At first sight, therefore, these two passages seem to conflict, and Christians divide in their reaction to this apparent conflict. Some take chapter 11 as the controlling passage, and maintain that chapter 14 must be interpreted so that it does not contradict chapter 11. Even if they do not understand chapter 14 completely, they argue that we should not allow these obscurities to remove the freedom which 1 Corinthians 11 seems to give to women to speak audibly in the church. Others take the opposite view. They hold that 1 Corinthians 14 is absolutely clear, and must therefore be allowed to control the interpretation of chapter 11. Chapter 14 says that women are not allowed to speak in the church. Therefore, their praying and prophesying mentioned in chapter 11 must have been done, not in the church, but elsewhere. I suppose that dear and godly Christians will be arguing about this until the Lord himself comes. Certainly one cannot settle the question by counting the number of expositors and commentators ranged on each side of the question. One must decide the matter in one’s own heart before the Lord. But also one must presumably submit to the rule of the elders in each church. Here, the question of the autonomy of each church seems to me to be very important. If each church is really autonomous, then the elders of each church have not only the right, Paul’s Teaching about Women in 1 Corinthians Chapters 11 and 14 P a g e | 4 but the duty, to decide disputed matters before God, and to guide the church in the way which they feel is right, without interference from outside by other churches. That said, my own feeling is that the two passages in Corinthians do not contradict each other. If, by way of putting things into their historical context, we think of ancient Israel for a moment, their women prayed and some of them also prophesied. How marvellous and effective Hannah’s prayer was, for instance. However, in New Testament times they would not have done either, at least audibly; neither in the formal services of the temple nor in the formal services of the synagogue. A famous example in the New Testament is Anna the prophetess (Luke 2:36-38). She did not prophesy in the course of the temple services nor in the course of the synagogue services. On the other hand, she did prophesy in the presence of men. On the one famous occasion that we know of, Joseph and Simeon were present, and doubtless there may well have been men among those to whom she spoke, who were ‘looking for the redemption of Jerusalem.’ But the situation in which she exercised her ministry was an informal one in the temple courts when there were no formal services going on in the temple. At such times the temple courts would be frequented by various individuals and groups of people, each doing their own thing, whether praying or offering a sacrifice, or celebrating a Bar Mitzvah, or what have you. In such informal situations, Anna would have prophesied, as led by the Lord, to both men and women. How many of Elijah, Elisha, Isaiah and Jeremiah’s prophecies were delivered in the course of the formal services in the temple or synagogue? I imagine then that the early Christians followed the Jewish custom. In the church, women were not expected to speak: 1 Corinthians 14:35 says so explicitly. Therefore, they did not pray and prophesy audibly in the church. But what they were not expected to do in the formal meetings of the church, they were expected and encouraged to do elsewhere. I know that there are other explanations of the apparent contradiction between chapters 11 and 14. In my youth, attempts were made to resolve the difficulty by saying that in 1 Corinthians 14:35, the word ‘speak’ means ‘chatter’. The idea was that the women in the early churches were much given to chattering. That view has now become old fashioned and has faded away. Very rightly so, for, without intending to, it offered a gratuitous but very serious insult to Christian women. When I was last in a service in a Jewish synagogue, I had to sit among the men. I do not know what the women did; but I can tell you that the whole way through the service the Jewish men kept up a constant babble of conversation about everything under the sun. Why should it be thought that it was only the Christian women that were given to chattering during the meetings of the church, and not the Christian men? Nowadays a more modern explanation is put forward. People say that 1 Corinthians 14:35 should be interpreted in the light of verses 29–33, and that ‘speak’ in verse 35 means ‘speak’ in the sense of questioning the prophets, as verse 29 encourages the other prophets to do. In other words, what verse 35 is forbidding women to do is not praying and prophesying, but publicly questioning the men prophets. And it is suggested that the reason for this prohibition is that, if women were allowed publicly to question the prophets, they might, under the guise of questioning, attempt to teach the church, correct the doctrines of the prophets, and substitute their own. Paul’s Teaching about Women in 1 Corinthians Chapters 11 and 14 P a g e | 5 But it is not clear to me that verses 34–36 are carrying on the topic dealt with in verses 29– 33. It seems to me that at verse 34 Paul turns to dealing with a different matter; and, secondly, the reason why Paul says that women should not ask questions in the church is not that they might be tempted to usurp authority over the men prophets and teach the church publicly— if he did mean that, he would have said that—the reason he gives why they should not even ask questions in the church is, ‘for it is shameful for a woman to speak in the church.’ Since Paul could have put it otherwise, if he had chosen to, I take it that when he says ‘speak’, he means ‘speak’.