Scripture Daily

Context No. 230 of 4322 · 1 Corinthians

Context · Reflection

1 Corinthians 11:11-16: in context

11Nevertheless, neither is the woman independent of the man, nor the man independent of the woman, in the Lord. 12For as woman came from man, so a man also comes through a woman; but all things are from God. 13Judge for yourselves. Is it appropriate that a woman pray to God unveiled? 14Doesn’t even nature itself teach you that if a man has long hair, it is a dishonor to him? 15But if a woman has long hair, it is a glory to her, for her hair is given to her for a covering. 16But if any man seems to be contentious, we have no such custom, neither do God’s assemblies.

Paul is finishing a difficult passage about how men and women should cover their heads when they pray and prophesy in the Corinthian assembly. It is one of the most argued-over sections in all his letters, tangled up with the customs of Roman Corinth, where hair and veils carried signals about status and respectability that are hard to recover now. This is the end of the argument, and two things in it are worth slowing down for.

The first is verse eleven, where Paul plants something that cuts against a simple ranking of one sex over the other. In the Lord, he says, the woman is not independent of the man, nor the man of the woman, for as woman came from man, so man now comes through woman, and all of it comes from God. Whatever else he is arguing, he stops to insist the two need each other and both come from the same source. The second is how he closes. After appealing to custom and to what he calls nature, about long hair and short, he says that if anyone wants to be argumentative about it, we have no such custom, and neither do the churches of God.

That last line is telling. Paul has laid out his reasons, some of them plainly shaped by his own time and place, and then he refuses to let the matter become a fight. He would rather the community not split over the covering than win the point. Which of my strong opinions about how worship should look would I actually let go of, before I would let it divide the people around me?

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