Women and Church Leadership

Transcription

1 Women and Church Leadership ML508 LESSON 8 of 13 Dr. Alice Matthews Academic Dean- Christian University GlobalNet Introduction Words are important, but it is at least as important to know how those words are used today, and for our purposes, how they were used 2,000 years ago. One Greek word at the center of much of the discussion around women and church leadership is the word kephale (pronounce that keh-fa-lay), translated head. Because of its importance to the subject of this course, we will use this lecture-segment to look at its use in Paul s letters, particularly in 1 Corinthians 11:2-16. In this passage, the apostle is talking about men and women leading in public worship, so we need to examine what that word, kephale, means in any discussion of gender and public worship. Pause this lecture segment and open your online Blog/Journal. Now in Biblos.com or your own collection of Bible translations, read 1 Corinthians 11:2-16 in three different translations. Then in your Blog/Journal begin listing issues in this passage. What are the questions it might raise for you? There are many here and this is one of the most complex discussions we must deal with in this course. Jot down anything here that is unclear or you think needs further unpacking. The first thing we discover in this passage is that Paul uses the word head (kephale) in both a literal and a metaphorical sense. He talks about our physical head, the topmost part of our physical body, and he also uses the word as a metaphor for other things. (A metaphor applies a word to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable; one thing becomes a symbol of something else, usually something abstract.) While we are clear about head in reference to the topmost part of our bodies, we may be less clear about the word when it is applied to something more abstract. And to complicate things further, while the metaphorical use of a word may mean one thing to us today, it may have meant something entirely different in biblical 1 of 12

2 times. Because this word is prominent in Paul s letters, and especially in his statements about public worship, we need to look at it carefully. In 1986 at the same annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society at which Dr. Liefeld read his paper on the nature of ministry, Dr. Wayne Grudem read a paper titled Does Kephale ( Head ) Mean Source or Authority over in Greek Literature? A Survey of 2,336 Examples. He later expanded the paper to include responses to later publications by egalitarians. You can access this expanded version of his work as Appendix A in Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (pp ). We will look at the results of his survey later in this lecture. From the title of his paper, you can see the basic issue: Does this Greek word mean source (as in the head of the spring or the head of the river ) or authority over (as in he is the head of the business )? Paul uses the word solely as a metaphor in 1 Corinthians 11:3, then as both a literal object (the topmost part of the human body) and as a metaphor in verses 4, 5, and 7, and as only a literal part of the body in verses 10 and 13. We have seen, especially in Romans 16, that as Paul moved across the Roman Empire, starting new churches, women as well as men were co-workers. But Paul faced some serious problems in some of those churches. Two in particular are important for this segment of our study the churches in Corinth and in Ephesus. Corinth straddles the narrow isthmus separating southern Greece from the north. It was commercially important, but it was called the least Greek of all Greek cities. Dominating the city from the Acrocorinthus was the temple dedicated to the cult of Aphrodite, the goddess of love. More than 1,000 temple prostitutes served in this temple and plied their trade in the city streets below. Corinth was noted for its debauchery. Here in Corinth, Paul met Prisca (Priscilla) and Aquila who had recently moved to Corinth from Rome. Tentmakers by trade like Paul, they worked closely with him during the 18 months he stayed in Corinth to start a church there. At a later time, Paul settled down in Ephesus, again with Priscilla and Aquila who agreed to go with him from Corinth to Ephesus to begin another church. For three years they worked together in evangelism, discipleship, 2 of 12

3 and tentmaking. Ephesus was called the light of Asia and was the capitol of the provincial seat of the Roman imperial proconsul in a land we now know as Turkey. Ephesus was a busy seaport city at the mouth of the river Caystros, the western terminal of an important trade route from the Euphrates River. This city was key to evangelizing the entire region. The principle glory of Ephesus was the Temple of Artemis (Diana), one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. This enormous structure of marble, ivory, cypress, and cedar took 220 years to build, and the temple brought great prosperity to the city. Paul had problems with both of these churches in Corinth and Ephesus. While at Ephesus, he sent Titus back to Corinth to check on things. The news was bad. With the temple of Aphrodite overshadowing the city, immorality was not merely a vice; it was a cult. It was hard for Corinthian converts to break from their past. We need this background as we read the two letters to the church at Corinth as well as the two letters to Timothy whom Paul later sent back to Ephesus to clean up that mess. I. Kephale in 1 Corinthians 11:3 Now that you ve read this passage in three different translations, we want to begin with verse 3. It s likely that the translations you read all had some essential agreement on the English text, making this verse look like a slam-dunk argument for gender hierarchy in the church: the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ is God. Yet there are some questions that must be answered before we can make that assumption. The first question is this: What was the first-century understanding of the Greek word kephale, translated head? In the last two decades evangelicals have spilled a huge amount of ink debating this question. I ve already mentioned Grudem s 1985 paper, Does Kephale Mean Source or Authority over in Greek Literature? A Survey of 2,336 Examples. In the appendix A expansion of the paper in Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, Grudem argues that the context of the word kephale in the 12 New Testament passages in which it is used indicates that the meaning authority over should 3 of 12

4 be the undisputed way to translate kephale (p. 427). But other biblical scholars have challenged this. Gordon Fee called Grudem s work misleading both in its presentation and conclusions: The number 2,336 in the title is especially [misleading] since only a small percentage of these [examples] are metaphorical, and these are the only ones that count. Furthermore, Grudem s conclusion that 49 of these mean authority over is especially misleading for several reasons: (1) these 49 include 12 New Testament examples which the author prejudges exegetically to mean authority over when these are the very passages in question, (2) of the remaining 37, 18 are from Greek translations of the Old Testament which for reasons outlined below are the exceptions that prove the rule that this is not an ordinary meaning for this Greek word, (3) for most of the remaining 19 there is serious exegetical question as to whether the authors intended a metaphorical sense of authority over and (4) since he used Philo in his calculations, he seems quite mistaken, in light of the passages from Philo cited in c45, to conclude that no instances were discovered in which kephale had the meaning source, origin. What Grudem has demonstrated is that the metaphorical usage of leader can be found (it is not at all clear that it ever means authority over ), but he is quite wrong to assert that the idea of source or origin is not to be found. In one part of Grudem s appendix, he responds to a very long article by Dr. Richard Cervin in which Cervin argued that kephale never meant authority over in the first century but began to have that sense at the end of the second century. Cervin also argued that in the first century there are very few examples of kephale being used as source and his conclusion is that the word means preeminent. Other Greek scholars argue that kephale does mean source in the first century, not authority over. Fee asserts that the metaphorical use of kephale to mean chief or person of highest rank is rare in Greek literature. He cites S. Bedele, The Meaning of kephale in the Pauline Epistles, JTS 5 (1954), who wrote, In normal Greek usage, classical or contemporary, kephale does not signify head in the sense of ruler, or chieftain, of a community. If kephale had this sense in the writings of St. Paul (it certainly has it nowhere else in the New Testament), we must suppose it to have been acquired as the result of LXX usage of the word to translate [the Hebrew] ro s (p. 211). 4 of 12

5 Fee states that Paul s understanding of the metaphor and almost certainly the only one that Corinthians would have grasped is head as source, especially the source of life, corroborated by 1 Corinthians 11:8-9, the only place where one of these three relationships is picked up further in Paul s argument. Thus Paul s concern is not hierarchical (who has authority over whom) but relational (the unique relationships that are predicated on one s being the source of the other s existence). We might sigh at so much wrangling over the word kephale and ask, what difference does all of this back-and-forth argument make in how we read 1 Corinthians 11:3? Does the translation of kephale as source even make sense? We get some help with this when we look at the arrangement of the three pairs in this verse: the head of every man is Christ, the head of the woman is man, the head of Christ is God. Look carefully at the argument Paul builds in this text. What is the order of the three pairs? Arguments are usually built in some kind of ascending or descending order. Blog: Read the verse, substituting authority over in place of head. If authority over is the issue, what do you see here? Now read these three pairs substituting source in the place of head. If the first-century idea of kephale is source, then how can you make sense of this verse? Note any differences that strike you. The Liddell and Scott Greek-English Lexicon and Kittel s Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (in 10 volumes) both state that kephale in both secular and religious Greek usage contemporary to Paul had the meaning of source, origin, sustainer, not ruler. The use of authority began much later under the pressure of Latin usage, seen in the writing of some post-apostolic church fathers. James Hurley (Man and Woman in Biblical Perspective) agreed that head could mean source, stating on page 166 that Adam is the source of Eve in that she was physically taken from him, and Adam did come into existence through the creative work of Christ. In this sense, Christ is the source. But Hurley did not take the third step, that God is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ (2 Corinthians 1:3), that Christ is the Son of the Most High (Luke 1:32), or as the Father has life in Himself, so He has granted the Son to have life in Himself (John 5:26), or 5 of 12

6 that God sent forth His Son, born of a woman (Galatians 4:4). God was the author of the incarnation, the source of Christ s earthly being, no less than Christ was the source of man and man of the woman. We read in Colossians 1:15-16, He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him. Yet at this point Dr. Hurley reflected, writing on page 167, The best conclusion seems to be that in 1 Corinthians 11:3 Paul was teaching that a hierarchy of headship authority exists and that it is ordered: God, Christ as second Adam, man, woman. Yet making head mean authority over raises several problems: The first and perhaps the biggest one lies in the relationship of God and Christ in the Trinity. They are both persons within one being in the Trinity, and nowhere in Scripture is there a reference to any kind of chain of command in the Trinity. There is a revival today of the subordinationist theory of the Trinity, which was propounded in the fourth century and then rejected as heresy. We must be very careful about resurrecting this notion. -- When Christ is said to act in obedience, He fulfills His self-assumed destiny as the suffering servant. He did not learn obedience because He was a son but in spite of the fact that He was a son (Hebrews 5:8-9 uses although). His obedience didn t come from the fact of being God s Son, but from being perfected in fulfilling His mission: He accomplished His task by being obedient to it. -- The apostle John affirms unequivocally the lordship and divinity of Christ: the eternal Logos is God (John 1:1) who has come from God and will return to God (John 13:3; 16:28), and was in the Father and the Father was in Him (John 10:38; 14:10); the two are one (John 5:18; 10:30); Christ is Lord (John 13:13) and God (John 20:28). -- At the same time, in His earthly ministry, Jesus took upon Himself to act as servant, to do nothing on His own authority but to speak as the Father had taught Him (John 8:28), so that the world might know that He loved the Father (John 14:31). During His humiliation, Christ acknowledged the Father as greater than Himself (John 14:28), but this temporary voluntary subordination still 6 of 12

7 bore marks of the coequal reciprocity in the Godhead: the Father had belonged to the Son (John 16:15) because the Father had given all things into His hands (John 3:35; 13:3), even all judgment had been given by the Father to the Son so that all should honor the Son even as they honored the Father (John 5:22-23). Thus the Father would glorify the Son as the Son glorified the Father (John 17:1). -- In The Four Loves, C. S. Lewis describes this relationship of mutuality between the Father and Son in these words: The Father gives all he is and has to the Son. The Son gives himself back to the Father, and thus gives the world (in himself) back to the Father too. A second (lesser) problem in making head mean authority over lies in the doctrine of the Lordship of Jesus Christ. In what sense can Christ have authority over a man and not over a woman at the same time? His lordship extends over both. Christ is never presented as lord over males to the exclusion of females. -- In the 1960s-70s Bill Gothard (at his Basic Youth Conflicts conventions) used 1 Corinthians 11:3 to teach a chain of command in marriage. According to his interpretation, a wife does not answer directly to God for her actions. She is accountable to her husband, not directly to God, and he is accountable to God for her as well as for himself. The husband becomes the intermediary between her and God. Nothing in Scripture teaches that. To interpret kephale as ruler or authority-over would change its meaning entirely, resulting in a chain of command of subordination moving from the top of a hierarchy of power to the bottom: God is Christ s ruler, Christ is man s ruler, and man is woman s ruler. But that s not the order in which Paul (under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit) arranged the three pairs in this case. Paul s order of the three pairs shows that he is not building a chain of command. It s unlikely he would have jumbled the sequence in a matter involving God, Christ, and humanity when he kept his hierarchy straight dealing with spiritual gifts in 1 Corinthians 12:28. Rather than hierarchical, the arrangement is chronological: Christ as the source of man (Genesis 2:2), man as the source of woman (Genesis 2:22), 7 of 12

8 God as the source of the Incarnate Christ (Matthew 1:20-23). II. Kephale in 1 Corinthians 11:4-6 These verses point to the fact that women were praying and prophesying in public worship of some sort. If, however, this is forbidden to women (as we ve noted in 1 Timothy 2:12 and 1 Corinthians 14:34-35), how is this praying and prophesying to be explained? Some say this was not in public meetings. (See 1 Corinthians 14:4 in which the one who prophesies edifies the church.) Others hold that women were praying and prophesying, but only in congregations of women. Nothing in the text implies this and the context of the chapter is the church. Some argue that prophesying was not authoritative preaching, but teaching was. Note in 1 Corinthians 12:28 that Paul lists first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, after that miracles, then gifts of healings, helps, administrations, varieties of tongues. Whether this list should be understood as chronological (the order in which workers are needed to plant and grow a church) or as the order of importance, prophets precede teachers in the list. The apostle Paul uses kephale both metaphorically and physically in this passage. It s a play on words back and forth. In the passage, verses 4-5 have to do, not with authority structures, but with decorum in public worship or worship protocol. Both men and women pray and prophesy in public worship, but a man doing so with his head covered dishonors his head, and a woman doing so with an uncovered head dishonors her head. What is this about? Commentators are not agreed on many details in these verses: Is the covering long hair or a shawl or scarf (or even a prayer shawl)? The word veil is never mentioned in the text and not enough is known about first-century customs to know if this means hair or a shawl. Payne makes a strong argument for it being wild hair in contrast to hair neatly bound up as seen in many ancient Greek portraits. Whatever is in question, the point is this: If Christ is the man s head (metaphorical), then his head (physical) cannot be covered in worship. 8 of 12

9 If man is woman s head (metaphorical), then her head (physical) must be covered in worship. Man s head (physical) represents the image and glory of God (1 Corinthians 11:7). He cannot cover Christ (his metaphorical head) in God s presence. The woman s physical head emblemizes man as a reminder of her derivation from him. Thus she reflects the glory of man (verse 7) and man s glory must be covered in God s presence. The point of the passage is not gender roles but worship protocol. The issue isn t about relationships between men and women, but between all believers and God. Gordon Fee suggests that the problem came from some women praying and prophesying without the customary head covering or hairstyle possibly because they were pneumatikos, spiritual in a way that disregarded distinctions between men and women. As part of their new spirituality, they disregarded some very customary distinctions between the sexes that would otherwise have been thought of as disgraceful. III. Kephale in 1 Corinthians 11:7-9 Paul at no point in these verses speaks of authority. His concern is with the woman being the man s glory, the one without whom he is incomplete (1 Corinthians 11:7-9). To blur that relationship brings shame on her head. But what do these verses mean? Fee suggests the following: the existence of the one brings honor and praise to the other: By creating man in His own image, God set His own glory in man. So man exists to God s praise and honor and is to live in relationship to God so as to be His glory. Woman is related to man as his glory, a relationship now jeopardized by her present actions. Paul does not deny that she too was created in God s image and is also God s glory. In Genesis 2, man by himself was incomplete, and when he sees the woman, he glories in her, bursting into song (Genesis 2:23). She came from man and was created for him to complete him. IV. Kephale in 1 Corinthians 11:8-12 Paul makes two important theological points in this section of 1 Corinthians 11. In verses 8-9 and 11-12, he argues for the interdependency of men and women, and in verse 10 for a 9 of 12

10 woman s own authority. We will look at verse 10 first, then at its context about interdependency. It is in verse 10 that the apostle Paul speaks of authority. Pause the lecture long enough to re-read 1 Corinthians 11:8-12 taking special note of verse 10. Make notes about any questions which this verses raises in your mind as you ponder it. This text has defied scholars over the centuries. It literally reads, Therefore the woman ought to have authority on the head because of the angels. This text is the only mention of authority in the passage and it is the woman s own authority, not the authority of someone else over her. Perhaps the single best article on this verse is M.D. Hooker s Authority on Her Head. [provide download here] Here is a synopsis of Dr. Hooker s argument: In Jewish worship the man played the active role in worship, but now woman, in contrast to Jewish custom, takes part in prayer and prophecy in public worship. The only reason she can do this is that a new power has been given to her. In Jewish thought, though Adam and Eve were both given dominion and authority over creation (Genesis 1:27), Jewish exegesis did not give it to Eve. Yet women now also speak to God in prayer and declare His Word in prophecy. To do this, women need authority and power from God. The head covering, symbolizing the effacement of man s glory in the presence of God, also serves as the sign of exousia (power) given to women. With the glory of man now hidden, women too can reflect the glory of God. Far from being a symbol of her subjection to man, her head covering is what Paul calls it: authority. In prayer and prophecy, she, like the man, is under the authority of God. The differences in creation remain and are reflected in differences of dress, in the relationship to God in worship. But in Christ there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:28). Payne notes that many Bible versions and interpretations mistranslate exousian echein in 1 Cor 11:10, which means to control or to exercise authority (as it does in Rev 11:6; 14:18; 20:6) as though it meant sign or symbol of [man s] authority (e.g., ESV, NEB, NIV, NRSV), veil (e.g., RSV), covering, subjection, or submission. There is no lexical support, nor apparently any instance elsewhere, where authority means any of these things.... All 103 occurrences of exousia ( authority ) in the NT refer to authority held in someone s own hand, whether 10 of 12

11 inherent, assigned or achieved. Likewise all nine references to exousia in 1 Corinthians mean to have power of one s own [p. 182]. The woman s exousia is an active power she is to exercise. While because of the angels in verse 10 is not central to the argument Paul makes about our interdependency, many commentators choose to ignore this causal clause. Yet for hundreds of years people have wondered about the Watcher myth of sexually-aroused angels in verse 10. But if angels are without sex, how are they tempted? Others posit that angels guard the divine order, and if a woman doesn t show her subordination to a man, they are offended. But the angels aren t cosmic policemen. The context of 1 Corinthians 11 is church worship, and Paul picks up here on an idea that appears elsewhere in his letters. In 1 Timothy 5:21, we read, I charge you, in the sight of God and Christ Jesus and the elect angels who observe the church. The seven letters in Revelation 2 and 3 are addressed the the angels of the seven churches, implying their presence in the churches. God s angels are present in worship, and women in verse 10 are reminded that they are seen by the angels as they pray and prophesy. So hide the glory of man in worship! It is interesting that a number of Bible translations ignore the word order in verse 11, reversing it from neither is woman separate from man to read neither is man independent of woman. This assumes that the authority in verse 10 is the man s authority over the woman rather than her own authority. Payne notes, These translations go beyond eisegesis, reading into the text something that is not there. They actually change the text itself by altering the sequence and logic of Paul s argument. The basic teaching of this passage is the interdependence of men and women: all things originate from God (1 Corinthians 11:12). Whatever implications were drawn in the past from a male/female sequence in creation, such implications are now obsolete in Christ. Man and woman are interdependent because of their reciprocal origination. But both must ascribe primacy and rulership to God who alone is the originator of all things. Conclusion The discussion of kephale in this lecture-segment has been limited to the use of the word in public worship, as found in 1 11 of 12

12 Corinthians 11:2-12. We know that Paul used the word in other contexts, but because this is a course on women and church leadership, we can t digress and explore kephale in the context of marriage (Ephesians 5:21-31). We must be clear about what we can and cannot say about kephale, head. And we must also avoid our 21st-century propensity to import our current word usage into the biblical understanding of key words. An example of that is the creation of the word headship as a biblical term, when in fact no such word appears anywhere in the Bible. Christ-Centered Learning Anytime, Anywhere 12 of 12