Paul on Women in Ministry

The following is the script of part of a lecture on 1 Corinthians which I gave yesterday. Some of the students said it would be helpful to post it here to facilitate discussion on the subject. It's actually an extract from a longer piece, originally published in the Baptist Ministers' Journal.

1 Corinthians 11:2-16
Central to any debate about this passage is the conclusion reached concerning Paul’s use of the word ‘head’ in verse 3. In modern usage, ‘head’ implies a sense of authority, as is seen in the sentence: ‘He was promoted to become the head of the company.’ However, in Paul’s time ‘head’ did not automatically imply a sense of authority. Anatomically, people were not understood as thinking with their heads – rather, conscious and emotive thought were understood to originate in the breast or the stomach. The head was the place through which nourishment entered the body and from which speech flowed, and in this way it was frequently seen as the source or origin of life and relationship. Therefore the head was not seen as directing the body in the way in which we would understand it today, and we need to be careful not to impose our modern perspective upon Paul’s usage.
So, if it is unlikely that Paul was intending his use of ‘head’ to indicate a relationship of authority, what did he mean when he said that, ‘Christ is the head of every man, and the husband is the head of his wife, and God is the head of Christ’? Paul appears to have in mind the understanding of ‘head’ as source and origin, something which becomes clearer in verses 8 and 12 where he speaks twice more of man as the source of woman. Paul is obviously here drawing on the story of creation, where woman originated from man, just as Paul would see the Son originating from the Father, and all creation originating from the Son. Paul is putting forward here, not an argument for authority, but a series of three analogous relationships to try and explain to the Corinthian church that man and woman relate to each other as the head relates to the body, as the Father relates to the Son, and as the Son relates to humanity. His point is that just as humanity found its source in Christ, and Christ found his source in God, so woman finds her source in man, as is evidenced in the order of creation. Paul is not here suggesting an ordering based on dominating authority, with superior and subordinate. Rather, he is likening the relationship of man and woman, with that of Christ and humanity, and of God and Christ. The relationship between the Father and the Son functions, in Paul’s mind, as an image for the way in which Christ and humanity, and man and woman, relate to each other. This relationship is not one of subordination, but is rather a relationship of interdependence and unity.
Some have argued that there is an inherent subordination in the relationship between the Father and the Son, and that this provides a model for a relationship of subordination between man and woman. This is not a new argument, as discussions on the power relationships within the Trinity occupied the minds of many of the early church fathers. The orthodox position was that the Son and the Father are coequal, rather than superior and subordinate. Scriptural backing for this position can be found in a number of key texts, and John Chrysostom (Archbishop of Constantinople AD 398-404) used the word ‘heretic’ to describe those who would seek to understand ‘head’ in terms of authority, preferring instead to see headship as denoting origin and source. If, therefore, it is not appropriate to try and understand the Father-Son relationship in terms of a divinely ordained hierarchy, neither is it appropriate to extrapolate from this to see unequal submission as part of the natural order of male-female relationships.
The broader context of 11:3 is a passage which is primarily concerned with hairstyles and propriety in worship, and an obvious link can be seen between Paul’s discussion of head-coverings and hairstyles, and the relationship of ‘head’-ship that he has proposed between Christ, man, woman, and God. To understand Paul’s logic here, it is necessary to realise that Paul was writing to a specific situation, and was therefore using the arguments which he thought would best convince the intended recipients of his letter. His logic may seem convoluted to the modern reader, because we are reading his words in a context far removed from that of the original recipients. It is important to note that Paul refrains from giving instructions as to how women should dress, and neither does he argue that woman is subordinate to man. Rather, he draws supporting arguments from creation and nature to convince the Corinthian Christians that, for the sake of propriety, certain head-coverings were appropriate in worship and some were not. In Jewish custom, a woman’s head covering was indicative of her commitment to her husband, and in Roman culture, women would cover their heads for worship, whereas Greek women would not. Women’s hairstyles could also make both social and sexual statements, and in the cosmopolitan city of Corinth, where class conflict and sexual politics were rife, it is easy to see why Paul was concerned that this should not become a controversial issue in the church. However, as is clear from verse 16, Paul is not here seeking to make a grand theological point. Rather, he is concerned to avoid controversy and preserve propriety.
Overall, then, 1 Cor 11:2-16 does not lend itself to an understanding of male authority. It recognises that the male-female relationship parallels those between God and Christ, and between Christ and humanity, in terms of interdependence and unity. Paul is using this parallel to make an intensely pastoral point about propriety in public worship, and his intention in writing was not to deal with gender issues, but to provide pastoral instruction in a specific context. Paul’s priorities were love, unity and good witness, and whilst the freedom of Galatians 3:28 may be his ideal, this freedom didn’t mean that the believers were free to throw off all customs to the detriment of the church’s unity and public witness.

1 Corinthians 14:33b-36
This passage is problematic because, at first glance, Paul seems to contradict what he said in 1 Cor 11:4-5. In the earlier passage, Paul clearly expected that women would pray and prophesy in public worship, and his concern was that they should do so with propriety and decorum, whereas a superficial reading of 14:34 appears to say that women should be silent in church. The key to solving this is found in 14:35, where Paul says that if women desire to know anything, they should ask their husbands at home. Paul is actually only restricting women from the shameful public asking of questions.
One of the problems in the early church, and particularly the church in Corinth, was that of order and propriety in worship. In so many ways, the post-Pentecost community of Christian believers had broken down barriers of race, class and gender; but the danger of this freedom was that it ran the risk of breaking down into anarchy, which would seriously hinder the witness of the church. In the Corinthian cultural situation, women would traditionally have received little formal education, and would have been restricted in their access to temple worship. In the new Christian community, they suddenly found themselves, for the first time, being given liberation from these restrictions, and being allowed equal access with men to worship services. The problem seems to have been that they didn’t know how to handle that freedom appropriately.
It was common practise in worship to interrupt the speaker to ask a question of clarification, or to make a relevant point. Which was fine as long as the question was appropriate and useful. The problem was that the granting of equal participation in worship to uneducated women, could so easily have led to them disrupting services by continually asking inappropriate questions. So to avoid this and preserve propriety and order, Paul proposes both short-term and long-term solutions to the problem. The short term solution is that women should keep quiet in worship, and refrain from asking uneducated and disruptive questions. The long term solution is that women should receive education in the form of private tuition from their husbands. These solutions were actually more progressive than restrictive, as Paul is not doubting the abilities of women to learn, and he is opening the door for them to receive an education that would otherwise not be available to them. However, until that long term solution paid dividends, Paul was concerned to preserve dignity and propriety in public worship. This passage is a further example of Paul tempering the freedoms of Galatians 3:28 with a concern for love, unity, and good witness.

Conclusion
Paul says, when answering the question of whether Christians should eat food which has been offered to idols, ‘take care that this liberty of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak.’ Paul also says, when addressing the issue of freedom in Christ, ‘“All things are lawful for me,” but not all things are beneficial.’ It seems that Paul, the idealistic champion of Christian freedom and equality in Galatians 3:28, is also something of a pragmatist. It’s as if he has caught this wonderful grand vision of the way it should be in the new Christian community, and then has to come back down to earth and start to think through the practical implications of the transition from law to grace. Hence Paul welcomes the freedom of women to minister in his churches, except where it is exercised in such a way as to compromise the church’s unity and public witness. Of his own ministry, Paul says, ‘though I am free with respect to all, I have made myself a slave to all, so that I might win more of them… I have become all things to all people, so that I might by all means save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel.’ It seems that he expects no less of those in his congregations.
The passages where Paul asks women to set aside their freedom in Christ for the sake of the unity and witness of the church remain a challenge to the contemporary Christian. In Western culture it is no longer harmful to the proclamation of the gospel for women to minister in church; in fact the converse is probably true. Those who persist in seeking to restrict the ministry of women actually alienate the church from the culture to which it is called to minister, in much the same way as allowing women to minister in Ephesus would have done two thousand years ago.
The challenge from these passages to the contemporary church is this: What freedoms are ours in Christ, which we are being called to set aside for the sake of the gospel? What about our freedom to invest our money wherever we choose, without regard for the ethical practises of our financial institutions? What about our freedom to drive our cars and consume irreplaceable natural resources? What about our freedom to buy our goods at the cheapest price, regardless of the human cost of their production? What about our freedom to remain a predominantly middle-class church? These, and many more, are freedoms with implications for the public witness of the church. In this way, I believe Paul’s approach to Christian freedom is one which can helpfully challenge the contemporary church.
To return to the issue of women in ministry, I would like to close with a quote from Paul Fiddes:
As long as there is no equality of opportunity, social stereotypes will block the path to finding the real distinctiveness between male and female that reflects the distinction in unity within God.
As long as our dominant models of ministry remain informed by predominantly male patterns of pastoral leadership, we will continue to be denied the true richness of ministry that is potentially ours in Christ; even those women who are called to the office of pastoral ministry will face the expectation that they have to become, in some sense, ‘honorary men’ in order to fulfil their calling. If the Christian community could truly grasp Paul’s radical vision for gender equality, women would be called to ministry as women, and free to minister as women. It is tragically true that nearly two thousand years after Paul wrote Galatians 3:28, the Christian church still retains divisions based on race, class and gender. It is equally tragic when the public witness of the church is compromised because the prevailing culture has a clearer grasp on human equality, than does the community of Christ’s people. The time has now come for the church to adopt wholeheartedly what it has always known; that both women and men are called and gifted by God for the task of ministry in the church of Christ.