Please explain how the teaching of Paul in the eleventh chapter of First Corinthians in regard to woman's praying or prophesying "with her head uncovered" applies to us today. Is there any special teaching in the denomination on this point of a woman's covering her head while in church or in prayer?
In this letter to the Corinthians, Paul is endeavoring to establish order in worship where there evidently has been disorder. Some of the members of the Corinthian church had a distorted view of the meaning of Christian liberty. There had been confusion in divine service. Some of the women had taken advantage of their new freedom to defy the conventions of that day by coming boldly into public meetings without the customary veil or head covering of that time.
Paul was not one to encourage people to break the customs which were not contrary to Christian duty. Anything that would tend to break down a sense of decorum was to be condemned. The customs of those times did not permit a woman properly to appear in public without a veil and headdress, lest she be identified with the many disorderly women that walked abroad without such headdress in the pagan city of Corinth. To go forth in this manner gave way for one to he looked upon as a lewd woman.
The Bible commentator Lange says : "The unveiling of the head was an abuse originating in female vanity under the pretext of Christian freedom, and of equality with man; and it was so much more disturbing to devotion as it was contrary to custom to see women unveiled out of the house." Paul was encouraging the Christian women of Corinth to observe the proprieties, and not be overzealous in trying to break down the customs of the day. We must distinguish between fashion and propriety. Fashion may often outrage propriety, which is an established code of manners making for order and decency.
While Paul is referring here to a local situation, he does establish a principle for all time. There are certain acts that are becoming and natural to man and to woman. In arguing his point he says, "Does not even nature itself teach you?" Though man and woman are spiritually equal, yet their natural spheres of action are different. Nature has made that clear. A mannish woman or a womanish man is not according to nature. It is the very nature of man to be forward and aggressive, as it is the nature of woman to be modest and unassuming.
Anything that would force either sex out of its proper sphere is condemned by nature itself. One's own inner sense of propriety suggests that. So any "obtrusive boldness" and "flaunting immodesty" in public, and more particularly in the house of God, on the part of women, is neither according to worldly propriety nor Christian ethics. Both man and woman play an equally important part in the life of the world and the church, with women often and properly occupying a position that a man may have occupied, but not in the same manner.
As to the wearing of a headdress to worship in the house of God, the proper conventions indicate that this is entirely suitable for women today. But the custom of the day does not demand as it did in the days of Paul, that a woman go forth with covered head in order to identify herself as a proper member of society. If a woman for any reason or other should feel it necessary to appear in church without a headdress, this is not to be condemned, as there is no indication of irreverence or boldness in such an act. I know of no denominational teaching in regard to women's appearing in church without such headdress.
Frederick Lee.
[Associate Editor, Review and Herald.]
