Probably the most influential interpretation, held by some well-known evangelical Bible teachers, is that the head covering was merely the cultural expression in Paul’s day of the principle of headship, sometimes reduced to the principle of femininity, the idea here being that the culturally appropriate expression of femininity also expresses submissiveness to male headship. This principle of headship or femininity or submissiveness is understood as the foundational universal principle that concerned Paul, while the head covering was merely the cultural expression of that principle in his time. Paul is then requiring that women signal their acknowledgement of male headship and submission to it, or simply their femininity as clearly distinguished from masculinity, by whatever their own culture recognizes as an expression of the principle.
This interpretation of the culturally defined status of the headcovering is held by the following Bible expositors:
1.The Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood offer their answer to questions they’ve received about their position on the head covering, which pretty much speaks for the position of all who hold this point of view:
The key question here is whether Paul is saying that creation dictates a2. John MacArthur’s similar perspective is presented in a transcript. Scroll down to “So let me give you a little cultural thing…”
head covering or that creation dictates that we use culturally appropriate expressions of masculinity and femininity, which just happened to be a head covering for women in that setting. We think the latter is the case. The key verses are: "Judge for yourselves: Is it proper for a woman to pray to God with her head uncovered? Does not nature itself teach you that if a man has long hair, it is a disgrace to him, but that if a woman has long hair, it is her glory? For long hair is given to her as a covering" (1 Corinthians 11:13-15).
So what Paul is saying is this, now listen carefully. Look at your society and mark out the symbols. What are the symbols of femininity in our society? What are the symbols of masculinity? And identify with those. If they don’t violate Scripture, if they don’t violate God’s design for morality, then adhere to those symbols because that says something to your society. Listen, even this society today still knows when a woman looks like a woman.3. Alistair Begg discussed it in a two-part series within a larger series on First Corinthians, available from his ministry for $2.00 as an MP3 download and possibly in other forms. You have to go to MP3 Downloads, and then page 17 of the MP3 alphabetical list for “Man and Woman in Biblical Perspective:” He spells out his own interpretation for our day toward the end of the Second Part.
Do not the things that God has marked into men and women from the very order of creation… teach you the very necessity of distinguishing between the sexes?4. Thomas Schreiner also takes the position that culturally appropriate expressions of femininity meet Paul’s requirement, in his chapter on the headcovering in Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, edited by John Piper and Wayne Grudem. The whole book is online at the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood website, linked above: Scroll down to Chapter 5.
Doesn’t it teach you that in light of that, we must be very very careful about embracing anything that would obscure the distinctions that God has intended in the very nature of his created order?
5. Chuck Smith, Ray Stedman, David Guzik and Jon Courson all have taught that the universal principle is submission to male headship (Stedman says the headship of husband over wife, the rest say men in leadership over women as well as husbands over wives) and that different cultures have different customs that express this. Their audio sermons on this passage can be found at Blue Letter Bible in the Commentaries section for 1 Corinthians 11. [note: The BLB site has changed quite a bit since I wrote this so I may have to come back and change this some time].
Some answers to the cultural interpretation:
The conclusion that it is a cultural matter rests largely on Paul’s appeal to the Corinthians in verse 13 to judge for themselves what is seemly, based on what he calls the natural difference in hair length between the sexes. If only because it’s not obvious in our own culture, some find it hard to think of such a difference in hair length as being based on nature, let alone make the connection between hair length and the head covering Paul is apparently expecting us to make, but in addition to that, the fact that Paul appeals to their judgment at all clinches the idea that it must be a matter of custom he has in mind.
1. The headcovering was not a universal custom in Corinth.
This conclusion is usually backed up by statements about the Greek cultural practices of Paul’s day which were supposedly what Paul wanted them to adhere to, but these statements turn out to have no basis in reality. The usual idea seems to be that since Corinth was a Greek city, therefore it would have been Greek culture that established the customs, but Corinth was a big cosmopolitan city, under Roman rule at the time, and the church would have included people of many cultures, Jews and Greeks and Romans and even possibly Germans, who did not all have the same customs of dress. To complicate the problem further, some have referred to the cultural situation in Corinth as “eastern” and confused what sound like Arab practices such as face veiling with the Greek and Roman. Proponents of the cultural explanation don’t offer evidence for their claims about the cultural practices of the time, and unfortunately, some commentators seem to have picked up some false ideas about the cultural situation in Corinth and passed them on without checking on their validity.
The pattern of reasoning goes like this:
“I don’t see many women with headcoverings in this congregation. That’s because headcoverings don’t have the meaning to us they had to the Corinthians. To theA first answer to this is to consider that if respectability in Corinthian society required a headcovering, it is hard to imagine that any Christian woman would have abandoned the practice or that Paul would be having to teach them its importance. It’s fair to infer from the fact that Paul is writing on the subject at all that at least some women in the congregation were not covering their heads, whether because they belonged to a culture that didn’t require headcoverings or because they misunderstood the equality of the sexes in Christ as many suggest, but there’s no reason to think all the women in the church were not covering their heads. There is also no reason to think that any of them understood the reasons for the covering that Paul gives, or that the headcovering “signaled” any such thing as these expositors suggest, even the Jewish women who did come from a cultural background that required them to cover their heads. If you ask an orthodox Jew the reason orthodox women cover their heads in public now, the answer won’t have anything to do with the creation order or headship, or femininity as such; to them it’s all about sexual modesty, and the same is true for Muslims. What Paul was teaching was a new and specifically Christian ordinance.
Corinthians the headcovering was an essential badge of honor for the respectable woman. It signaled that she was submissive to the headship of her husband.”
The description goes on:
“Corinth was known for the temple priestesses of Aphrodite who were alsoIt is then assumed that some women in the church were rebelling against the head covering, although from this description of the cultural situation it is very hard to imagine any Christian woman being ignorant of or willing to take the risk of being mistaken for a priestess of Aphrodite. However tempting her sense of newfound freedom in Christ might have been to shed her subjection to men, she’d be subjecting herself to far worse indignities if she did that. Of course if you suppose that the women were removing their customary head coverings only in the Christian worship, then their public life would not be a problem, but does it make sense to think that they would do something their culture defined as so disreputable only when they came together in the presence of God? Far more likely they were rebelling against the church’s own teaching to cover the head, not the culture’s, either because it made no sense to them from their own cultural backgrounds, or seemed to contradict their new understanding of freedom in Christ (maybe they thought of it as a form of Jewish legalism?), and this is why Paul is having to explain it in such detail in this passage and finally simply invokes apostolic authority against any further dispute.
prostitutes, and they were distinguished from respectable women by going without a head covering” (Jon Courson says they shaved their heads; Zodhiates inserts a variation of this explanation into his definition of the word katakalupto in his
Word Study Dictionary: “It must be remembered in this connection that women of loose morals, especially the prostitute priestesses of the temple of Aphrodite at Corinth, kept their hair very short in order to be distinguished for what they were”).
In any case, this picture of the cultural situation in Corinth is apparently a fiction; there is simply no evidence to back it up. I have read and listened very carefully through sermons by a number of expositors for any of them to give evidence for their teaching on Corinthian culture, and have come across none. There is only the assertion of the supposed cultural environment as if it were fact with nothing offered to support it.
Careful researchers have concluded that as far as Greek culture went, it appears that, far from its being a clearcut cultural signal, sometimes women wore headcoverings and sometimes they didn’t, and the same for Greek men. Also, there is no evidence that prostitutes dressed in any distinctive way, and it’s highly unlikely that they shaved their heads. Pictures I found of the hetairae, the Greek higher class prostitutes, show them with long hair arranged in various ways, often with a headband holding it in place at the back of the head. There are also illustrations of Greek women with that hair arrangement who aren’t identified as prostitutes, however, although possibly they might have been, or another possibility is that they were respectable women who weren’t covered because they were at home. There is simply no evidence one way or another. One famous prostitute is said to have been the model for Praxiteles’ sculpture of the Aphrodite of Cnidus, which shows her with long hair pinned up in back. The idea that the priestess-prostitutes of Aphrodite shaved their heads is clearly false; whether they went without headcoverings any more than respectable women did is impossible to determine. In fact Jewish women were said to stand out in that time because of their head coverings which suggests it was not a particular practice among the Greeks. And long hair on women appears to have been universal across the cultures, which is what takes it out of the category of a cultural expression and makes it a matter of nature, as Paul argues.
Here is some information on the various cultures that does not support the statements made by advocates of the cultural interpretation:
1) The following is probably the best, most thorough, most scholarly, discussion of the information available on the internet on the ancient customs, on the website of Michael Marlowe who calls himself The Bible Researcher.
2) Tertullian, in “On the Veiling of Virgins,” where he discusses whether Paul requires a headcovering for unmarried as well as married women, points out that the very Corinthian church to which Paul wrote his exhortation did, in Tertullian’s day some 150 or so years later, require the covering of the heads of the unmarried women, implying that the married women were of course also covered, which shows that this is what they understood to be Paul’s message. (See the last sentence of Chapter 8). It appears from his discussion that there wasn’t any clearcut custom of headcoverings in any of the cultures, and that when the churches attempted to follow Paul they came up with a variety of solutions that Tertullian discusses and criticizes. All of them, however, involved some sort of cloth covering, and none took it to mean hair or any other symbol.
2. There are no cultural equivalents to the head covering.
Those who hold this view recognize that Paul is concerned with a universal principle and not with mere custom, and that it was a headcovering, probably a shawl, that he required, but they believe that the headcovering is just one of many ways the principle can be honored, that there are different customs that signal this universal principle in different cultures. Unfortunately, no clear examples of such alternative customs are offered by these expositors. It is merely stated as a general principle that whatever in your culture signals recognition of male headship or female submissiveness or femininity as such is what Paul requires, but what precisely would function as such a signal is not specified. This leaves us pretty much without a standard at all, and probably explains the prevailing anarchy in the churches with respect to this question. The reason such a signal is not specified is no doubt simply that there is really nothing in any culture that is equivalent to the head covering as the symbol Paul would have us exhibit, whether the principle is thought of as male headship or female submissiveness or femininity itself.
1) The problem with the principle of headship in the abstract is that in our culture we have no more of a feeling for this principle than we do for the headcovering, so there simply isn’t any particular form of dress that would signal it in our context. In other cultures as well, it’s not clear what customs can be said to signify male headship specifically, at least not according to a Biblical perspective. Perhaps the custom one sees in some cultures of the woman and children trailing after the husband while walking down the street would be an indicator of male headship, but from a Christian perspective is that really an expression of the creation ordinance of male headship, or is it an expression of the distortion brought about by the Fall, in the form of male dominance and oppression of women? Does the woman’s practice of trailing behind express her willing submissiveness or is it just a cultural habit that is imposed on her? Likewise, under Islam, is the total covering-up of women an expression of loving male headship or of the curse of male oppression brought about by the Fall? In other words, there doesn’t seem to be a clear indicator in any given culture that expresses the principle of headship as Paul teaches it in this passage. The exponents of this position assume there must be such indicators, but in fact such an indicator doesn’t really exist, and without a clear indicator we can’t know whether we are obeying God as required in this passage or not.
2) A problem with taking femininity as the universal principle is that feminine apparel is too broad a category to replace the specificity of the headcovering. Thomas Schreiner concludes his chapter on the headcovering with the statement that women should pray and prophesy in the congregation “with hearts that are submissive to male leadership, and they should dress so that they retain their femininity.” No one can doubt that these virtues are required of us but they simply aren’t what Paul is talking about in this passage, and again, no one who holds this view has specified just what the particular indicator of femininity in our culture – or any culture -- might be. John MacArthur insists that
“[t]here are symbols in our society for femininity. And you know as well as I do that you can look at a woman who obviously has adapted the symbols of femininity and looks like a woman, and you can look at another woman who looks like she is rebelling against everything that womanhood absolutely means. Can’t you tell that difference? Of course you can because even our society has symbols. Every society does.”But it is quite striking that for all his insistence he makes no effort to suggest a single one, nor does any other proponent of this view. The headcovering on the other hand is awfully specific.
There just don’t seem to be any such indicators that could meet the standard of specificity of Paul’s exhortation to cover the head, or tell us whether someone has a submissive heart or is dressing appropriately. This has to be because the concept of femininity is really much too vague to stand in for the very specific head covering, and it has many fallen forms of expression as well. In western cultures fashions are constantly shifting, and in recent times have very drastically changed. Already by early in the 20th century you could no longer count on the time-honored floor-length skirt as a definition of feminine dress, and only a few decades later you couldn’t count on a skirt at all as a feminine sign; you couldn’t even point to long hair any more, since women started cutting their hair short for the very first time in history as a form of feminine fashion. Makeup also became available to all and has now become a regular part of feminine presentation, but would we dare identify “the painted face” as the symbol of femininity that could stand in for the biblical headcovering? And in the next decade or so, who knows what new culturally acceptable expressions of femininity may become standard? Belly button rings? In other words, in our own culture isn’t femininity often flirting with mere sluttishness by any reasonable Christian standard? I’m sure it seems obvious we just wouldn’t go there, but the point is that femininity in our culture often tends in this direction and we haven’t been given a standard for sifting the acceptable from the unacceptable in any of these discussions. MacArthur is careful to add the caveat that of course the feminine symbol he advises we take as our own must meet Christian moral requirements, but this just throws it all back on the individual woman, and underscores the problem with looking to culture for a Christian symbol at all. There just isn’t a cultural standard of femininity that we can point to as fulfilling the requirement of 1 Corinthians 11, despite the assurances of these expositors that there must be.
Also, It seems hardly likely that the women in the Corinthian congregation did not appear feminine enough without the headcovering. For one thing we can be sure that women wore their hair long simply because Paul expects them to recognize it as natural to women. Like women everywhere, women in Paul’s day would have been more inclined to elaborate on their femininity than to suppress it, and unfortunately, being fallen, would often do this in the direction of immodesty and ostentation if social sanctions did not restrain them -- witness our own society, or witness Hollywood. The elaborately adorned hair styles of Paul’s day must be described as very feminine for instance, but they can approach the ostentation that Paul elsewhere criticizes.
Women want to look attractive and what is more feminine than that? But femininity in the fallen world is all about self display and self adornment, although up to a point Christian women aren’t called to suppress this inclination. Nevertheless, that point may be reached sooner than we normally assume, as Paul does seem to be calling for the subduing of much of outward feminine expression, the very opposite of what is proposed by the cultural interpretation under discussion. The kind of femininity Paul approves is the inner kind, submissiveness and modesty and all the Christian adornments of the inner life which come from practicing the graces of Christ. It’s hard to see how any particular prescribed outward symbol could express this, and Paul isn’t proposing the symbol for that purpose anyway. Scripture passages on feminine modesty (1 Timothy 2:9, 1 Peter 3:3-4) counsel restraint, and emphasis on the inward graces, and otherwise do not define femininity by outward forms.
It’s the burden of the expositors to define it for us, who tell us there are ways the culture signals femininity that equals the meaning of the headcovering. Of course Paul couldn’t possibly be asking us to follow the fashions of the world, which in our day have to be described as falling far short of the standards of modesty of even the old pagan cultures, let alone the Christian cultures of the intervening centuries, but there doesn’t seem to be any other guideline given us by the expositors who hold the cultural view. It is even emphasized by some that we are to be “sensitive” to the culture around us in its indicators of respectful dress, as if Christians were somehow less attuned to respectful dress than the culture is, when really, aren’t we the ones with the knowledge of God’s standards, and shouldn’t we then be setting the standards ourselves?
It may also be worth noting at this point that churches that endorse this interpretation don’t in fact enforce any particular standard of presentation that would be symbolic of female subordination to male headship. They may have an all-male eldership, they may teach on the wife’s submission to the husband in marriage, they may exhort the women to general modesty in dress, but when it comes to this passage on the headcovering they have no standard at all. Even in churches where the leaders endorse long hair as the requisite covering they don’t necessarily enforce it. In other congregations, some women may have long hair who believe that is what Paul was calling for, but otherwise the subject is treated as if Paul really did say at the end of his careful exhortation that it makes no difference at all what you do, and the result is that Paul is disobeyed in the churches and God’s order dishonored.
3) The concept of female submissiveness is another problem in the cultural interpretive scheme. This reduces Paul’s very specific outward symbol of the headcovering to behavior and inner disposition. Thomas Schreiner, for instance, concludes that although “[l]ack of head coverings sends no message at all in our culture,” nevertheless “that does not mean that this text does not apply to our culture. The principle still stands that women should pray and prophesy in a manner that makes it clear that they submit to male leadership. Clearly the attitude and the demeanor with which a woman prays and prophesies will be one indication of whether she is humble and submissive. The principle enunciated here should be applied in a variety of ways given the diversity of the human situation.”
The problem here is that Paul’s very specific symbol of headship is being reduced to unspecifiable inner states and standards of behavior, but Paul has said nothing in this passage that justifies this equation. He teaches the virtue of submissiveness elsewhere, but here he is teaching the headcovering as purely an outward symbol of the creation order and the hierarchy of authority it established. Since he has nowhere mentioned a submissive demeanor or attitude in this context, it shouldn’t be read into what he has written – not because he doesn’t require that of women of course, but simply because it is not what he is addressing here, and we lose what he means to teach us in this specific context when we reduce it to these other considerations.
4) Paul’s arguments are so explicitly about the head, and headship, and covering the head, that to suggest cultural equivalents that don’t have anything to do with the physical head misses the whole point. It is the physical head that symbolizes authority or headship, and covering it symbolizes the subordination of one’s own authority or headship to another, to a woman’s husband if married, to appropriate male leadership if not, and at least in the abstract to the principle itself of God’s order of authority as Paul is laying it out. Nothing else comes close to conveying this. Hair can’t symbolize this because it is the woman’s glory, and reflects the glory of her husband (or of Adam) rather than of God. If in our culture we are unable to read the meaning of the head covering, that is merely to say that we are to learn its meaning from Paul. There is no reason to think it sent any clearer message to the Corinthians anyway, since Paul is at pains to explain it to them.
3. The teaching on the head covering is specifically Christian, a completely new custom. Paul is teaching something that is apparently new to most of the Corinthians, as it is to us in our day. Far from assuming that the Corinthians understand God’s order of headship and the other reasons for the headcovering, he begins his exhortation in verse 3 by telling them that he “would have them know” these things. The wearing of a covering on the head is an act of obedience to the apostolic teachings; it is a symbol the angels can read and that God can read, of the conformity, not just of individual women, but of the whole church, to God’s governmental order. This is the case whether the church fully understands the symbol or not, and whether individual women understand it or not.
What is to be symbolized is not femininity, and not the subjective state of the woman, but the objective state defined by God of female subordination to the male in His governmental hierarchy. The angels looking on – some of whom cover themselves in the presence of God -- aren’t reading the hearts of the women, but simply taking note of whether or not the church body as a whole practices this recognition of God’s order.
4. Paul refers to culture merely as an argument for the universal principle.
Finally, the idea that Paul is concerned with culture as such at all is the main problem with this interpretive framework. As I note above, what has prompted this line of thinking is that Paul himself does appeal to the judgment of the congregation, both regarding the propriety of a man’s praying covered and a woman’s praying uncovered, and the modes of hair length and style, and this can suggest at first encounter that he wants these things to be defined and enforced by the standard of local customs as recognized by the people.
Although this may seem to put the question on the footing of cultural norms, this is really a misreading, because the rest of the passage doesn’t justify such a reading of Paul’s aims. He himself treats the argument as based on universals despite his reference to customs. He argues specifically from God’s created order, and from nature, and from apostolic authority, and NOT from ephemeral customs except as they reflect the natural or God-given order.
How are we to resolve this apparent discrepancy? Jim Elliott gave a very helpful explanation in his Journals (p. 267 of the paperback edited by Elisabeth Elliott), where he suggests that if Paul were addressing New Guineans (this was in 1953), who wouldn’t share the cultural expectations of the Corinthians about hair length, he would no doubt not appeal to their judgment, but simply teach the principles of hair lengths and head coverings to them. The problem then is our own misunderstanding of Paul in taking culture or custom as the standard, whereas to Paul custom is only useful where it demonstrates the universality of God’s order. Culture may endorse almost anything, may in some respects reflect God’s order or may completely rebel against it, so that it makes a completely untrustworthy standard. Longer hair may or may not distinguish women from men in a particular culture, even if it does across most cultures. Covering the head is a custom in some cultures and not in others. Instead of looking to culture for our standards, this state of affairs should be understood to show that some customs are in tune with God’s order and some are not, and where they are not they express the spiritually dulled or rebellious fallen nature of humanity. This variability of custom then underscores Paul’s real concern, which is not custom but God’s order: if custom supports God’s order, well and good, he will use that as part of his argument; if it doesn’t he wouldn’t mention it.
(Elliott, by the way, believes that in a culture that does not regard short hair on a woman as a disgrace, short hair would be the equivalent of the head covering in demonstrating the principle of overheadship. I believe that in this case he has himself fallen into the error of taking culture as Paul’s standard. Paul was saying that if a woman will not wear a covering then she might as well have no covering at all, including the natural covering of her own hair, but go ahead and expose her head fully, because her head is really as exposed in either case, the one state of uncovering being just as bare as the other in the context of the hierarchy of headship, and since he is having to explain this to them it is clearly not something they would recognize on their own but something he wants them to learn.)
We do recognize, if we stop to think about it, that Paul’s appeal to the congregation’s judgment was rhetorical, meaning he fully expected agreement with his own judgment, so that if we read the appeal as directed to us, as of course we must, we feel the expectation that we are to assent to his judgment along with the Corinthians, despite the fact that we are not likely these days to have an intuitive or culture-based reference point of our own for agreeing with him (just as the New Guineans wouldn’t). This of course sets up a cognitive dissonance in us, which is what has led to the misunderstanding in the first place that Paul has any interest in enforcing cultural norms. When we recognize that nothing in what he has actually said supports such a reading, nor is there anything in Paul’s writings anywhere else in scripture that supports it, we are at first in a quandary how to understand his argument from customs that we know from history and personal experience are not universal. This is where Jim Elliott’s observation is very helpful, that Paul only appeals to custom where it supports the universal principle, that his appeal is not to culture as such, but to the universal standard it happens to uphold in this instance. Again, Paul is only concerned with God’s order, and with custom only insofar as it supports God’s order. The standard is then something that we should learn from him about God’s government if our culture does not happen to reflect it.
From all these considerations, it seems clear that symbols of femininity and masculinity as such are simply not what concern Paul in this passage, not feminine dress, not a submissive demeanor, not long hair. What concerns Paul is that headship be externally symbolized in the only way it can be, by displaying the glory of Christ in the man, and covering the glory of man in the woman. His concern is God’s government, God’s hierarchy of order, it is the display of Christ’s glory in worship, and this requires the specific covering of the literal female head whose merely human glory is not to be on display. This is what Paul wants to see practiced in the churches, and again, in contrast with the current most popular readings of the passage, this is a call to suppress some natural modes of feminine expression, such as the display of beautiful long hair or elaborately arranged hair. Culture is simply not a reliable source of godly standards, so Paul cannot have meant to direct us to culture at all for examples of the practices he wants to establish in the church. Paul was exhorting us to a NEW standard, a specifically Christian standard.
TO BE CONTINUED.
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