Recently I have been thinking more about women and reflecting on the drubbing some of them are giving the Apostle Paul for certain of his supposedly infelicitous comments. One would think the great apostle was a male chauvinist who consigned women to the kitchen when they were not barricaded in the bedroom.
For the moment I mention only First Timothy 2:9–15, which recently erupted in family devotions and then in our neighborhood Bible-study group. The Interpreter’s Bible (Abingdon, 1955) tells us that “few passages in the Bible … have aroused more heated discussion than these verses” (II, 404).
If some feminists see here an opportunity to scorch Paul, they will not lack for ammunition from religious commentators. The Interpreter’s Bible itself suggests “solutions” that bankrupt the evangelical heritage. The Apostle, we learn, is not to be taken literally; his argument is based on cultural conditions (the apostle “fastened divine authority upon particular mores”); Paul presumably clung to objectionable rabbinical interpretation; his reference to Adam and Eve “seems far fetched and unconvincing”; and the supposed anti-feminist passages are in any case not really Pauline in origin.
The expositor finally appeals to “Jesus’ attitude” and “the spirit of Christ” to outweigh the epistle’s teaching. This same device is now widely used to provide leverage on many moral issues. Jesus exalted love, and therefore (for example) divorce is justifiable if marriage turns sour. Indeed, much that the New Testament explicitly condemns is currently approved as expressing “Christian love” or “the spirit of Christ.”
Not that Paul’s precise intention in First Timothy is easy to determine. Even Kittel’s monumental Theological Dictionary of the New Testament helps little with the verb authenteoo, found in the Bible only in 2:12: “I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.” Translations other than the King James render the verb in a noteworthy variety of ways: “have authority,” “put in positions of authority over,” “contradict,” “interrupt,” “dictate to,” “lord over.”
To be sure, Paul does not have in view an end to the Christian woman’s public witness. Women, he emphasizes, are to bear public witness silently by seemly dress and deportment and by good works (2:9 f.; cf. 1 Pet. 3:1–6). And what Paul teaches and approves elsewhere in his other letters should clarify his overall intentions. He commends many women active in church life and work, among them Dorcas, Euodia, Julia, Lydia, Persis, Priscilla, Syntyche, Tryphena, and Tryphosa, and to the Christian hospitality of numbers of women he acknowledges a personal debt (Rom. 16:1–15). In Second Timothy 1:5 he commends Timothy’s mother Eunice and grandmother Lois for transmitting a scriptural heritage to Timothy.
Not only so, but in Galatians 3:29 he affirms that in Christ there is neither “male nor female,” a reminder that Christian realities turn not on gender but on the divine image. Hence his position can hardly be that the male is superior to the female of the species. Not an iota in Paul’s writings suggests any sympathy for the prevalent ancient view that women and slaves are inferior creatures.
What then of the emphasis of First Timothy 2:11–15? Had Paul perhaps changed his mind about women, since he here says that they “should listen and learn quietly and humbly. I never let women teach men or lord it over them. Let them be silent in your church meetings” (Living Bible)? Did he who declared that Christ had done away with the condemning power of the Law (Rom. 10:4) and who waged war on the Judaizers who retained Hebrew rites and practices here unjustifiably bind women converts with rabbinical interpretations of the status of women, when he reminded them that the Law declares that women are not to speak but to be subordinate (1 Cor. 14:34)? Does he return to bondage Christian women who thought they had been freed from pagan inhibitions and Judaistic restrictions and liberated to a new order of life?
It helps little to refer the Pastoral Letters to another author than Paul, since the same teaching appears in First Corinthians 14:34 and 35: “As in all the congregations of the saints, women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the Law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church” (NIV).
What is noteworthy is that the passage in First Corinthians appears in a context in which Paul does not object to women’s freely praying or prophesying; what he criticizes rather are women who do so with shorn hair or uncovered head. Some have suggested that these gatherings were in homes where women took part informally, whereas First Corinthians 14 may have in view an official role in established churches. First Timothy concerns public prayer and worship in a context in which the attitude of some Christians toward the established government was suspect; Paul urges prayer for rulers as well as all men, and urges certain public conduct by women. Could it be that certain women had turned their new-found freedom into a disruptive participation in the larger services? Or is the “spirit” of First Corinthians 11 to be adduced in judgment on the teaching of First Corinthians 14? Is the contemporary movement of women’s ordination therefore to be hailed as a victory for this “spirit” and hence over Paul’s own subsequent hesitancy and supposed inconsistency?
Even so the indicated restrictions about covered head and shorn hair seem strange to us today. Greco-Roman social customs may have been somewhat in view when Paul required women to veil their heads in public worship (1 Cor. 11:5 f.), since only prostitutes were unveiled outside their homes. Social propriety meant that women kept their heads covered in the streets but removed head coverings when entering a home. The early churches met in private homes. In some pagan Greek cults both sexes bared their heads during worship.
But Paul in no way grounds his argument in a protest against established social custom. Rather he appeals for subordination of women in Christian public worship on the basis of a divinely established order, the violation of which he considers reprehensible (cf. Col. 3:18). Indeed, he identifies his teaching on the point in terms of divine commandment incumbent even upon those who may claim private revelation (1 Cor. 14:36, 37). He appeals both to Scripture and to nature (1 Cor. 11:8, 14) as well as to his own authority, and presumes to give a guiding principle of universal and permanent importance
