The argument that requiring women to cover our heads is legalism

Heard from someone who argued at great length in an email that the idea of a head covering is "legalistic." He quoted numerous Bible verses all demonstrating Paul's arguments against the Law, works righteousness and so on, without ONCE quoting the passage itself that is ABOUT the head covering.

Once you recognize that Paul is indeed recommending that women cover their heads and that men should not, because his arguments are universal and not tied to custom, then calling the argument legalistic is to call Paul legalistic. The very apostle known for his teaching against legalism.

The blindness to this one little bit of scripture is sometimes breathtaking. Its being so misunderstood, misread, and in fact aggressively misread, has just got to be evidence that it is FAR more important than the vast majority are willing to allow. Sure looks to me like the devil is working overtime to obscure it -- to minimize and trivialize it for starters, then to confuse the meanings of every verse in it, and to summon all those verses about legalism against it.

A report on a sad encounter with the popular views on the head covering

Just a brief report that may lead to more posts on this blog after such a long time, but I'm not sure it will.

Recently had an *experience* on a Christian forum where the head covering had been the subject of many threads and I joined in on the latest one. The dominant viewpoint was definitely against the interpretation of a cloth covering but it's hard to say beyond that what the dominant positive interpretation was -- I suppose hair as the covering.

The main thing about those discussions is that very few who were against a cloth covering referred to scripture at all. Many seemed to content themselves with psychoanalyzing those of us who did defend the cloth covering, as if our views were not based on the scripture but on our own subjectivity, saying it's just hard to break a traditional mindset and so on. Well, that hardly applies to me since I came to this subject without any tradition whatsoever. I knew individuals who had all the various interpretations, including a few who wear hats because of tradition, but I had no tradition of my own about it. And I certainly had no DESIRE to cover my head, quite the opposite.

The main theme was of course that the idea of having to cover the head is legalistic. Of course we're Pharisees to have this view. One woman went so far as to attribute it to Satan. Someone also claimed that the Holy Spirit showed him it's hair, and some argued that anyone who thought differently wasn't hearing from the Spirit. Much conjecture off the top of the head, much accusation. Chaos and confusion and the kind of "arguments" that are unanswerable for all the wrong reasons.

When I asked one participant why he kept ignoring my argument that it couldn't be hair because women throughout history always wore their hair long and Paul wouldn't have needed to exhort them to that, his answer was that I was simply wrong because Paul SAID the covering was hair. Another didn't have any problem saying that all Christians in all history could be wrong. And so on and so forth.

Well, I've tried to answer such objections on this blog already. Very little new was said, it was a pretty rancorous discussion despite attempts to keep affirming mutual love of the brethren.

Now another thread is underway on pretty much the same subject but I have no interest in joining it after my other experience. A couple who argued along with me on the first thread have left the forum as well. The usual is happening on the new thread too. The head covering is dismissed as legalistic, the actual scripture isn't addressed, in fact nobody there is arguing for a cloth covering now, what would be the point? Same here. I keep checking in but have no desire to argue when nobody will address the points of the argument anyway.

Pretty discouraging.