Those Two Awkward Passages About Women Being Silent

“I don’t want to be Catholic any more … They have all these silly rules about women, and I think it would have been hard for me to become Pope.”

Outnumbered S4 E4, ‘The Parents’ Evening’ (2011)¹

 

Self-explanatory, for once. Thanks to photostock at freedigitalphotos.net.

Believe it or not, the post I’m now sitting down to write is actually the post I originally sat down to write on Tuesday, until I realised that there was another post I really needed to write before I got to this one. I wanted to write about the end of 1 Corinthians 14, but in order to do that I had to write about the beginning of 1 Corinthians 14, and in order to do that I had to write about 1 Corinthians 12, and in order to do that I had to write about Ephesians 4, and, well, you get the picture. I’m kind of just picking up where I left off.

Strive after the higher gifts, Paul exhorts the Corinthians at the beginning of chapter 14. Strive after prophesying, he says in the penultimate verse. Same thing. This whole chapter is enveloped in the context that Paul really, really wants his addressees to be speaking comprehensible gospel truths to one another for the edification of the body. He wants that to be their next obsession after love in terms of how they do church. And in that context, he now gives three scenarios in which it’s more productive to shut up than to speak.²

1) If anyone speaks in a language, (let there be) two at a time or at most three, and each in turn, and let one person interpret. And if there be no interpreter, let him be silent in assembly, and let him speak to himself and to God.

2) And let two or three prophets speak, and let the others make a judgement. And if (something) is revealed to another sitting, let the first be silent. For you can all prophesy one at a time, so that all may learn and all may be encouraged, and the spirits of prophets are subject to prophets – for God is not of disorder but of peace – as in all the assemblies of the saints.

3) Let the women be silent in the assemblies, for it is not permitted for them to speak; but let them be subject, as the law also says. If they wish to learn something, let them ask their own husbands at home, for it is shameful for a woman to speak in assembly.

Three scenarios in which particular people are told to be silent (same Greek word in each case). Now look at those first two scenarios: in neither does the command to be silent in assembly apply to any given individual all the time. Our hypothetical brother with the gift of mysterious languages is perfectly free to speak if there’s an interpreter present. Our hypothetical brother who’s right in the middle of prophesying is perfectly free to continue if no revelation is given to anyone else in the room. And likewise regarding the third scenario, even if one were initially to suppose, by some utterly bizarre logic, that Paul’s repeated exhortations to strive after prophecy applied only to the men of the congregation, that supposition would immediately collapse upon a brief glance at the eleventh chapter of the epistle, where Paul makes the case that women ought to cover their heads while praying or prophesying. I mean, that wouldn’t even be a question if they weren’t supposed to be prophesying at all, now would it? So what we need to work out is what the specific scenario is in which our hypothetical sister should be silent in assembly rather than speak.

Take a look at the given reasoning. Rather than speaking, our hypothetical sister should ‘be subject’. To what or whom is she to be subject? Well, when women as a specific category are asked to be subject to something in scripture, it’s invariably their husbands: check Ephesians 5:22, 24; Colossians 3:18; Titus 2:5; and 1 Peter 3:1, 5. (Worth mentioning at this point is the fact that Greek only uses one word for both ‘woman’ and ‘wife’, and likewise for both ‘man’ and ‘husband’, so do feel free to swap in the one or the other as seems to make most sense.) In all but two of those verses, the adjective ἰδίος (idíos) ‘one’s own’ is used of the husbands,³ which is a really emphatic way of indicating possession: often, you just get a definite article and have to imply the idea of belonging. Women are to submit to their own husbands – so the scenario in which they’re not allowed to speak must be one in which threatens that state of affairs specifically. And what do you know, the women’s ‘own husbands’ show up in the very next sentence. I couldn’t render the Greek word order in a sensible English fashion for my translation above, but it goes at home their own husbands let them ask. The emphasis, then, is first on ‘at home’ and second on ‘their own husbands’; so the idea is, if they want to ask their own husbands something, let them do it at home, not in assembly. Otherwise it would be shameful – i.e., our hypothetical sister would be bringing shame on her husband.

Scoot back to the second scenario for a smidgen more context. We’re talking about a church setup in which, when someone prophesies, the others make a judgement about what he or she has said. So suppose that married couple Bob and Sharon are in the assembly of the saints one day and Bob delivers a prophecy that Sharon reckons is a bit dodge. If Sharon were to take up her issue with what Bob said right then and there in front of everyone, it would be shameful. It’s not appropriate to have a marital tiff in front of the assembly, and as Bob’s wife, Sharon has made a commitment to submit to him, just as he’s made a commitment to love her as Christ loves the Church. So she should be silent in the assembly – but she should definitely ask him about it at home later. Plus, hopefully somebody else present will pick up on the fact that what Bob said was a little suspect, and, lovingly, say so in front of the assembly. It doesn’t shame him if the person who challenges him is some random other sister he’s not married to; she owes him no obligation of submission.

 

Bob and Sharon, maybe. Don’t ask me why I picked those names.

So, with all that in mind, let’s have a crack at understanding that other awkward passage about women in 1 Timothy:

Let a woman learn in quietness, in all subjection. And to teach, I do not permit a woman, and not to usurp authority a man, but to be in quietness.⁴

Remember that we can read ‘woman’ and ‘man’ as ‘wife’ and ‘husband’, and given that we’ve again got women as a specific category being told to be in subjection, that’s deducibly the scenario we’re dealing with here. Also, Paul’s about to make an analogy with Adam and Eve, who are basically the archetypal married couple – as well as the archetypal case of a woman teaching disobedience of God to her husband and him just going along with it. She was deceived; he wasn’t – he knew full well what he was doing – but her let her exercise authority over him anyway, and then blamed her for everything going wrong.

Again, it’s just not consistent with the broader picture given in scripture for Paul to be saying that women must never teach anyone ever: strive after the higher gifts; to each one of us – women included – was given grace; every woman praying or prophesying with uncovered head dishonours (her) head, i.e. women should be praying and prophesying, just not with their heads uncovered. If I might digress a little here, the mandate that we should all be zealous to exercise our higher gifts for the edification of the body is such a strong one that, even before I felt I really understood this chunk of 1 Timothy, I still felt compelled that I had to be teaching. After all, there are lots of little corners of scripture that I don’t feel as if I totally get, and others that I do and am then proved wrong by someone else’s loving correction; a command I see repeated multiple times in no uncertain terms – strive after the higher gifts – surely has to take precedence over a few words that seem at first glance to contradict that command? One has, after all, to do the one thing or the other.

But back to the passage, I think what must be happening is that Paul anticipates that to teach, I do not permit a woman might cause a bit of confusion given that it’s totally legit for women to be prophesying in the general sense (which includes teaching), and so he clarifies, and not to usurp authority over a man, i.e. a husband; in other words, I’d take the and not as explicative rather than additive. The contrast is between being in quietness and subjection, and usurping authority over a husband: the risk, when a woman teaches, is that she’ll step outside the bounds of the submission she owes to her husband. Suppose, again, that Sharon and Bob are hanging out in the assembly of the saints, and a topic comes up that Sharon knows she disagrees with Bob about. Let her learn – hear what others have to say – in quietness and subjection; let her not usurp Bob’s authority over her by deliberately teaching something he disapproves of. Again, it’s not appropriate to have a marital tiff in front of the assembly; they can sort this jazz out at home. Only two or three prophets are going to speak at a time anyway, so it’s no great hardship for Sharon not to be one of them on this occasion – but it’s crucial that she, just like every other saint, exercise her higher gift at some point, or else the body is cheating itself out of precious edification. So suppose the conversation moves on, and the subject at hand is one on which Sharon and Bob have no such disagreement; she can now quite happily teach on it for the edification of the body without usurping his authority.

I hope you can see why I felt why it was necessary to write my previous post before I wrote this one. If you look at these awkward little passages about women detached from the context that we all ought to be falling over ourselves to prophesy for one another’s edification, then it doesn’t seem totally crazy to conclude that women ought to shut up in church altogether. But if you look at them in that context, then such a conclusion strikes me as entirely precluded. In both 1 Corinthians 14 and 1 Timothy 2, the thing that’s potentially threatened by a woman speaking in the assembly is her submission, which can only be to her husband. As long as she avoids dishonouring him or usurping his authority over her, then, she’s free to say whatever she believes will edify her brothers and sisters.

Of course, all of this only applies to a woman who’s married, so my lucky single self doesn’t actually have to worry about any of it. But I think it’s worth working through anyway, if only to be reassured that God does actually think women have a valuable contribution to make to what’s said in the assembly of the saints, and only restricts them from speaking for the sake of preserving the proper Christ-and-the-Church setup of the marriage relationship. I still sometimes get it in my head that what I have to say about God and the gospel is worth less than it would be if I were a man, which is a sad and frustrating thing to get in one’s head when one burns with a compulsion to talk about God and the gospel pretty much whenever one finds oneself in the company of fellow believers. (Seriously, sometimes it feels as if everywhere I go turns into a Bible study: phone catch-ups, late-night conversations with housemates, dinners out, other people’s birthday parties, you name it, I just can’t help myself.) But women are no less included in Paul’s exhortations to strive after the higher gifts than men, and they’re not the only ones called to shut up on occasion in order to maintain good order in the assembly. The crux of the matter is that the wife plays the role of the Church in a marriage, and her husband that of Christ; and as Sharon is to submit herself to Bob’s authority, so we are to submit ourselves to Christ’s authority. And that means obeying the perfect commands he gives us – including the command to strive after the higher gifts, so that his body might be built up into a fuller reflection of his glorious image.

Footnotes

¹ As usual, thanks to Springfield! Springfield! for their goldmine of TV scripts: https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/episode_scripts.php?tv-show=outnumbered-2007.

² Here’s the whole chapter again: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+cor+14&version=ESVUK.

³ If you’re thinking it looks an awful lot like the English word ‘idiot’, there’s a very good reason for that: it was used to describe people who were only interested in their own affairs instead of politics and the public sphere, and the Ancient Greeks took rather a dim view of such people, hence the sense in which the term made its way into English.

⁴ Again, whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+tim+2&version=ESVUK. I’m not really going to deal with the Adam and Eve stuff today; I’d have to start talking about the Septuagint, and this post is long enough already.