Sermons and articles 2: Alistair Begg's Sermons on the Headcovering, Part 3

Now, the major point is clear, namely, that women are to adorn themselves in a certain way.... He wants to make sure that women are adorning themselves in a way that a man is not adorning himself. That is clear.

But it's really not clear. We've now gone from the very specific head covering, for which he gave some good solid evidence, to this very vague statement that actually obscures the main point.

As to the precise nature of what the covering is, we've got to be honest enough to say that is not equally clear.

Once you've changed the very precise "covering versus uncovering the head" into the very imprecise "adorning or not adorning themselves" it is less clear that placing a piece of cloth on the head of enough length to hang down a ways would meet Paul's requirement. His own examples make it clear enough what would suffice for covering the head: Haman's pulling his garment over his head, the covering of the face and body by the wings of the Cherubim, Philo's kerchief, Plutarch's part of the toga. Anything in other words that does the actual work of covering will do, including his own suggestion of a shawl. A dish towel would do. So would a hood or some kinds of hats. There is really no lack of clarity of any importance.

So here we are at one of our fundamental principles of hermeneutics, which is what? "The main things are the plain things and the plain things are the main things." Now what is plain is that he wants women to be distinguishable from men and it's got something to do with what they put on their heads. So we know that.

Unfortunately what's being called plain here really isn't the plain thing but obscures the plainness already established.

And we can debate all night whether it's a shawl or whether it's their hair or whatever else it is.

But his own argument has already quite effectively shown it is not hair, and there's also no need to debate whether it's a shawl because a shawl would clearly fit the requirement well enough as would many other cloth items.

But it doesn't affect the main issue.

But what he's calling the main issue now is not at all the main issue. He's reduced the specific requirement that the head be covered to the vague idea of an adornment that distinguishes the feminine from the masculine. The main issue has in fact been lost completely by now.

Far more important is the question to which we now come.

Which of course further removes us from the real issue of the head covering.

Why does Paul want women to adorn themselves in a certain way? Why is he so concerned about this covering?

This has in fact already been answered in the discussion about Verse 3 earlier, but now he's going on with the vague idea of feminine "adornment" and has left the head covering behind.

And, anticipating our next question, is there really any use spending time thinking about it when it is so far away from Cleveland and so long ago in history. Well, I think you'll agree before we conclude, the answer is yes.

There was no need to raise this question at all. Scripture is ALL very old and far away from us and we know it's always worth our time because it's God's word.

Now, the key to answering the question as to why he's so concerned about the covering is found in Verse 3.

Which was already clear from the earlier part of the talk but now he goes on to elaborate it and reiterate that women should not see it as their worth being diminished by the headship hierarchy. He also emphatically states that the issue was very important to Paul so we need to take it seriously and it's good to get that said.

Now, so strongly does Paul feel about this it's not some average issue for him ...

It's important to say this although he gives a different reason for it than I would, in emphasizing that cutting off the hair is disgraceful for women. He also repeats the false information that shaving the head is the sign of a prostitute, "or extreme feminism" he says, which is probably a projection from our own culture.

Actually, the fact that Paul wrote fifteen verses including at least three arguments in favor of the head covering should be enough to demonstrate how seriously he takes it.

Then he discusses who is being dishonored, the self or the head over oneself, and then what Paul meant about women praying and prophesying.

...So let's understand why the head covering business is so crucial. The man does honor to his head, by declaring his independence under Christ, and the woman does honor by showing that she's under subjection. That's why the issue is important. It's not so much what goes on her head as what's going on inside her head. It's not so much the physical dimension of it as it is expressive of a whole response to a God-ordained pattern of authority.

Really there is nothing in the passage to support this conclusion. Paul is taking pains about the objective particulars involving external coverings over the head. He hasn't once used the word "submission" or any similar word for an attitude or an inner state in this context. The honor and dishonor in this context are ALL about whether one covers or does not cover the head. It's an external thing, a public thing, not an inner thing. If a man should blunder into the service with a hat on he would be told to remove it. The mere fact of having it on is what is dishonoring to Christ. What he has in his head is not the point. If ever there was a writing of Paul's that DOESN'T speak to the inner man -- or woman in this case -- this is it. ALL his references are EXTERNAL: the hierarchy of headship as established at creation, to cover or not to cover, praying and prophesying in a public context of some sort, having one's hair long or short or shaved off, the offense to watching angels and so on and so forth.

We don't even really know how many were refusing to cover their heads or why. All that is speculative. It could be fundamentally as simple as that some did cover their heads because it was their custom to do so while others didn't see why they had to learn an alien custom.

It hits at the very root of what a woman is and what a man has been programmed to be. And when a woman reacts unfavorably as they were doing in Corinth to the responsibilities expressed in her dayof making it clear before the church and before the watching world that she understood God's pattern -- God is over Christ, Christ is over man, and man is over woman, and whether she wore something on her head or not was expressive of whether she believed that and was prepared to live it out. THAT's why it's so important, and that's why he drives it home.

Again I have to point out that there was not one uniform culture in the Corinthian church with a uniform custom about covering the head, so it ISN'T about "the responsibilities expressed in her day" at all. God's pattern was not exemplified in any one culture; Paul had to teach it to them. It was something that had to be learned, not something from their own upbringing they had suddenly decided to throw aside.

Also, I really don't think this is particularly about the WOMAN's understanding God's pattern necessarily. Paul seems to be teaching the whole church and making it the church's responsibility far more than any individual's responsibility. Does he think that a man's being UNcovered ought to reflect such a serious inner sense of his responsibilities if he thinks that's what it's about for a woman? (It also needs to be pointed out somewhere, and Pastor Begg does note this at the very beginning of his sermons, that covering the woman's head is a UNIVERSAL requirement for the human race, established at Creation, not something peculiar to the church. In fact across the world and down the ages you see it still practiced among various peoples who still retain that sense of the Creator's requirement although with many distorted understandings of it.)

It's really quite astonishing how someone will make this point so strongly about how important it was to Paul and yet turn around and pull the rug right out from under what Paul wants us to do.

Then he goes on to emphasize how some have misused verses 3 to 10 to justify male domination and how that is to be avoided, and how it should also be avoided to misuse verses 11 and 12 to set aside the previous verses.

How then does this apply to our situation today?

I think what he's referring to here is what he refers to in the opening chapter of Romans in verse 26. Because of this God gave them over to shameful lusts and even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. The very nature of humanity says that it is unnatural by God's created order for women to be involved as husband and wife within a same-sex relationship.

Somehow the verses about the hair mean to him the whole passage is about masculinity and femininity. He's using all the same concepts that are in Schreiner and in MacArthur.

Now he says that thinking it's about an actual head covering is ridiculous because think of the tribes in Africa where they wear hardly anything. Well, does that situation stay the same when the gospel is taken to such people? I don't think so. As a people begins to absorb the gospel and the biblical requirements, they also start to wear more clothes, and then it is not so absurd to add a head covering to the clothing. The same kind of situation would be met among the American Indians too, where the men wear their hair very long. Again, you don't start with that sort of thing, but there's no reason not to expect that over time it would become part of the life in Christ. It's only "ridiculous" if you are thinking of laying it on them before they've even learned the gospel.

So he continues the theme, which is not at all derivable from this passage that I can see, that a woman is charged with all the responsibility for behaving in a way that demonstrates her acceptance of her feminine role.

So the principle is timeless and the instinctive element within us is timeless and the cultural accretion or application will vary.

And he goes on to elaborate his idea that it's all about "upholding distinctive elements of the difference between masculinity and femininity."

Now the reason that Paul was concerned about all of this, and the reason we should be concerned tonight, is because head coverings or the absence of head coverings sent a message.

Well, there it is again, that "message," that "signal" that was supposedly "sent" in Paul's day, that John MacArthur also treats as factual, and so did Thomas Schreiner. Funny that Pastor Begg himself noted that Jewish men covered their heads, a fact all by itself that would garble any signal that would identify men as properly and by custom supposed to uncover their heads. In some Messianic congregations today the leaders still cover their heads with a prayer shawl and the men wear yarmulkes. Perhaps he didn't get far enough to note that Roman men also at least sometimes covered their heads in worship of their gods, and he already claimed that Jewish women didn't cover or "veil" their heads in that time though in fact they did, so that they were recognizable by that practice, while Greek and Roman women were not so consistent about it and it apparently didn't have any particular meaning to them as it did in the Jewish community. There is not a lot of conclusive evidence about any of this to be found in a perusal of the internet but the fact that there was no consistent pattern IS factual, so that this idea that there was some clearcut message sent by wearing or not wearing a headcovering in Paul's day is easily disproved by a few pictures you can find on the web.

But this false idea persists and is stated over and over with a tone of authority as if it were established fact.

Who originated this false idea? Was it Thomas Schreiner in that book put out by the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood? Since John Piper and Wayne Grudem were the editors of that book presumably they share this notion as well. Both Alistair Begg and John MacArthur probably picked up this false idea from that book, or they all picked it up from some previous so-far-unidentified source?

So you come to the congregation and here's Fred and he's got a shawl on his head. You'd say to yourself, What in the world happened to him? ...

This whole point of view is often marked by such "humorous" absurdities, which merely serve to ridicule and trivialize the idea of a head covering and obscure the fact that the argument itself is simply wrong. Actually, come to think of it, it COULD be used to demonstrate that it's wrong, because you simply are not going to find Fred with a shawl on his head. There really is NOT a problem of confusion of the sexes in churches, even now in our unisex age, and even less so in Paul's. If someone from the androgynous culture gets saved you will find that person gradually drifting into a more sex-appropriate style over time. The culture is getting more askew, yes, but I haven't seen it in the churches so much.

But what would really make the RIGHT point is thinking about how you'd react if Fred were wearing a baseball cap on his head. THAT would lead you in the right direction.

Or you come into the context and here's a lady with her hair swingin' in the breeze instead of up in the bun. Or, it's shorn to the Sinead O Connor style and she's got nothing over her head. ...

You see, the head coverings SAID something in that culture.

I wish he wouldn't mix the hair up with the head covering now but just to respond to the hair comments, they were NOT going to find a bald woman in a congregation in those days and most likely not a woman with long loose hair either. What WAS true of that culture was that women wore their hair very long and dressed up on the head in some way, sometimes with elaborate braids with jewels woven into them (which prompted that other scripture message about not overdoing the adornments).

There is no reason to think that Paul was implying that women were cutting off their hair or letting it hang loose, none whatever. His whole point about the hair was that it demonstrated a NATURAL condition that he expected them to recognize, not defy. It's because it was so consistent that he could appeal to them to recognize that it would be a disgrace to have it otherwise.

Today, what you've got on your head says precious little of anything. I mean, we wouldn't be able to deduce anything, I don't think tonight, out of what's on your head or not.

NOR COULD THE CORINTHIANS. IF I COULD KILL JUST ONE FALSE IDEA THAT HAS DUG ITSELF IN ON THIS SUBJECT IT WOULD BE THIS NOTION THAT THERE WAS A UNIFORM PRACTICE IN CORINTH THAT "SENT A MESSAGE."

Corinth was a cosmopolitan city, a crossroads of many cultures, and the Corinthian church was made up of all those cultures, and NONE of them had the same exact practices Paul was advocating. Paul is NOT advocating any merely cultural practice at all; he is teaching a brand-new practice and going to great lengths to explain it with a number of arguments because it was NOT something familiar to ANY of them. ALL his arguments are from God's creation or God-given Nature, not ONE from any human culture. If there's one thing that ought to be recognized as out of character for Paul or the word of God in general it's any idea that we can look to fallen human culture for our standards for just about anything. For anything you find in culture that mercifully preserves the image of God and His law, you can find something else that reflects merely the defiance and disorder of the Fall.

Since this whole false idea that Paul was only concerned about the sexes preserving their distinctiveness in dress and behavior is based on the false idea that Paul is advocating a merely cultural standard in the head covering, surely that can be dropped now so that some OTHER meaning to the head covering can be sought.

Such as that Paul wanted women to COVER THEIR HEADS -- to reflect, not femininity as such, but God's ordained order of headship. And that not in some isolated pocket of time frozen back in the first century but in ALL TIMES.

It's all about the HEAD, all of it. It's not about anything else. The HEAD is the natural symbol or seat of personal authority, and covering it up is the natural symbol for subordination to another's authority. THIS is in fact the "timeless" principle in the passage, not the broad distinction between masculine and faminine preferred by Schreiner, Begg and MacArthur. The meaning of the head as Paul was at pains to get it across doesn't change with cultural fads, though the style of how you cover it may change.

...So for me to say to you is you go out and buy a bunch of shawls and pull them over your head -- what in the world would be the point of that?

Obedience perhaps? Of course "a bunch of shawls" is just a way of ridiculing and trivializing the whole idea. It's true that what sort of head covering would do the job in our time and place does need discussion, but for starters a modest cloth hat that covers the head and hair should do fine and not look outrageously out of place either. A scarf should also do fine. We don't have to get into shawls. They'd do the job too of course and maybe they would become popular, who knows.

It would miss the point that the principle is timeless, the instinctive psychological element is timeless of masculinity and femininity...

Since he keeps repeating this notion of the timeless principle I've got to say again it's the meaning of the head that's actually timeless in that passage, and there's really nothing necessarily culture-bound about putting something on or over the head. It depends on how it's done. People still wear head coverings in our day, hats and scarves and hoods and so on. Covering the head is as "timeless" as the principle of dressing in a feminine or masculine way.

Let me say this in conclusion. I believe this is remarkably appropriate for our generation. First of all in relation to the whole question of role relationships between men and women. Let the whole culture say what it likes, this is what God says. ... dress children to uphold distinction link between feminininty and submission of women Masculine women do not submit readily to men.

This may be true (but I'm sure we've all known some iron-willed very feminine women), but "masculinity" in a woman is a personality trait bred in the relationships with the parents and it isn't going to matter how you dress her, that isn't going to keep any masculine characteristics from developing if the psychological conditions are there for that to happen.

Feminine men rarely if ever express adequate headship over women.

Well, we're all fallen when we come to Christ, and have to learn many things.

But all this is only his pursuit of his completely wrong understanding of what Paul is getting at in this passage, however useful his exhortations about male and female roles vis a vis the culture may be apart from that.

The women in Corinth who prophesied without coverings...

...were probably Greek or Roman. Er, no?

...were sending a signal and they knew it. "We no longer submit to male authority." That's what they were saying and that's why it was so important.

The issue was not what was on their head.

Oh yes it was.

The issue was what they were saying by leaving it off their head.

OK, I'll repeat that there would have been many women in that church who did not come from a culture that normally wore a head covering. I would doubt that any of the Jewish women in the congregation left theirs off, as it would have been too much of an ingrained habit for them to abandon it, and they would have had family at home who would not approve.

That would not have been the case with the Greek and Roman women, however. If by leaving it off they were sending a signal of defiance to authority it would only have been because Paul had already taught them they must cover their heads. Either the teaching didn't make a lot of sense to them or they thought it was "Jewish" or they believed it conflicted with the spirit of Christ, but the point is that they didn't have a custom of their own of covering the head that would make leaving it off mean something otherwise. It MIGHT have meant "we will not submit to men," maybe because they misunderstood the idea of equality in Christ, but it might simply have meant we won't submit to a teaching that doesn't make sense to us. But we do know that by Tertullian's time some hundred-plus years later the Corinthian church was a model of good practice concerning the head coverings according to him, so they did learn from Paul's concerted effort to make it clear in 1 Cor 11 why it was necessary. Their supposed rebellion did give way, so it wasn't terribly deep.

And so we speak to a culture today where the advance of women to unbiblical positions of leadership and the absence of men from true leadership simply paves the way to chaos. I don't think it's any accident that Paul addresses the issues of feminine adornment and submission to male leadership in the same passage.

So he's continuing about the sex role confusion in our culture these days, making some good points of course but all in the service of this wrong view of what Paul is asking -- which is not "feminine adornment."

The principle is timeless, the natural instinct is timeless and the cultural expression is variable.

Therefore what should we do? We should seek to insure that in our homes and in our offices and in our church the principle that is taught from all of creation should be affirmed for the glory of God, for the glory of man and for the glory of woman. There can be no glory attached to any part of that trinity except by ruthless careful obedience to the principles of this book.

This just stuns me. He's given very good proof that a literal head covering is what Paul is calling for, he's affirmed the importance of Paul's concern and the source of it all in God and not in culture, and yet at the end it all goes down the drain as the head covering itself is denied in favor of the multitudinous ways the differences between the sexes may be expressed.

This is so sad. He ends with a prayer for obedience to the word of God, for separation from the culture, and the hope that the church may yet affect the culture toward God's standards.

But oh dear, what we really are to obey has in fact been completely overturned in this talk rather than affirmed. He's piously affirming the problem itself instead of the solution, carefully avoiding the head covering itself which the passage so clearly points to, as even he says it does.

I have no doubt that the giving up of the head covering in the churches, starting over a century ago and reaching its culmination in the 60s, is one of the reasons for the church's lack of power to affect this world exactly as he is praying we might be able to do.

What is the source of the adamant hardness of this prejudice against the simple meaning of this text, that women should cover their heads? What leads these otherwise fine men of God to embrace phony "facts" and spurious reasoning in the service of avoiding the clear solid teaching of Paul in favor of a nebulous behavioral standard? There is definitely such a prejudice against the very idea of covering the head even while he affirms this is what Paul is advocating and even as he affirms and exhorts us to all the virtues of which it was meant to be the symbol, now as well as then. The prejudice is so adamant and taken for granted it isn't even considered for a moment. Why is that? What set the minds of these leaders so against this simple concept that was accepted for nearly two millennia after Paul's exhortation up until very recently?

Rejection of the head covering has been a terrible and effective snare to the church.