This post is part of my yearlong Bible series; please click here for details on the project.
I grew up in a Southern Baptist church. And, honestly, I have a lot of good things to say about it. The people in that church were generous and kind, and they took their commitment to God seriously. In a world where wishy-washy hypocritical Christians make the faith look bad, these Christians were not like that. They weren’t perfect, but they were absolutely dedicated to living out what they believed.
But as we saw with the Pharisees, dedication is only part of the equation. You can be so dedicated that you miss the forest for the trees. You get fixated on the letter of the law and completely miss the spirit of the law.
Southern Baptists had already famously done this once in the past; they were, sadly, on the wrong side of the slavery debate in the 1800s. There were cultural forces at play there, but also, some Southern Baptists had been unable to get past the fact that there’s slavery in the Bible—which they took as confirmation that it was allowed by God—and had entirely missed the context that the Bible repeatedly pushed for greater freedom and equality in a culture where slavery was already deeply ingrained. So when other Christians (including other Baptists) were pushing to abolish slavery, Southern Baptists split off and continued to support slavery.
They were wrong. But they’d convinced themselves that they were right, in part because of a couple of Scripture passages that they’d misinterpreted.
Well, there’s another issue where I believe they did the same thing—and no, I’m not talking about homosexuality.
In this chapter, Paul says that women must “be silent in the churches.” So because of this passage and another one in 1 Timothy, Southern Baptist churches like mine taught that women were not allowed to be pastors or teach men, because they had to be in submission.
Growing up, I was taught that this was just the way God wanted things, because the Bible said so. It always seemed unfair to me, but who was I to contradict God?
And yet, I saw the bad fruit of this interpretation in my own church.
Our church was large enough to be considered a megachurch, and it offered a variety of Sunday school classes for adults on different topics. One of the most popular recurring classes was one on “Christian parenting,” offering a combination of biblical and practical guidance for parents.
That class was taught by my mom—a Duke grad who had studied child psychology, spent many years as an educator, and raised four well-adjusted, well-mannered kids. She knew what she was talking about, she was beloved in the church, and she had a wonderful teaching style. Her class was very popular.
But because she was a woman, she wasn’t allowed to teach on her own. She was only allowed to teach the class if she had a male co-teacher who could officially be “in charge.” My dad didn’t particularly enjoy teaching, so he would just attend the class while the church paired Mom up with a series of male co-teachers, all of whom I’m sure were wonderful people, but none of whom were the reason people attended the class. My mom was the draw. The male co-teachers, despite being “in charge,” were the window dressing.
This always struck me as stupid. If God didn’t want women to teach men, Mom shouldn’t have been allowed to teach at all, with or without a man standing beside her. The fact that she was allowed to teach—despite the church’s official stance on women teaching in church—proved that church leaders saw her gifts and recognized that she was bringing something important as a teacher. But if that was true, then why did it matter whether a man was standing beside her? It felt like the kind of silly things the Pharisees would have come up with to technically avoid breaking a rule.
Of course, most Christian denominations do allow women to teach in church. Women can be pastors even in many very conservative denominations—Catholics and Southern Baptists being two notable exceptions.
Even in my Southern Baptist church, there was no rule against women talking, despite the wording of this passage. Women often spoke in various contexts in our church—even from the pulpit, as long as they weren’t “teaching men.”
And many scholars have argued that Paul couldn’t have meant in this passage that women had to be silent, anyway; elsewhere, he talks about women praying and prophesying. Nor could he have meant that women were barred from leadership, because he writes about female church leaders.
What Paul was addressing here, many scholars believe, was a cultural issue: Women at the time were less educated and had a cultural expectation to submit to their husbands and care for their kids. In a traditional religious assembly of the day, with women separated from men as per Jewish custom, there may have been problems with uneducated women, distracted by their kids, yelling across the room to ask their husbands to clarify things they missed, interrupting other speakers in the process.
Certainly, the scene Paul describes in 1 Corinthians is one of chaos, with people talking over each other in languages no one else understands, and in this letter, he seems to be giving them some simple, common-sense guidelines to maintain order in the assembly for the good of all: Take turns. Let others speak. Not too many people at once. Don’t speak another language (even a heavenly one) unless there’s an interpreter. If someone else is speaking, be quiet and listen.
It’s strange to think that these things had to be spelled out—especially given that much of this wouldn’t apply to the way we do church today—but early Christian meetings seem to have been much more of a free-for-all, more like a modern Friends (Quaker) meeting, where there’s no pastor in charge of a sermon and instead, anyone can stand up with a revelation or idea to share at any time.
There’s a lot of debate, too, about what Paul meant when he said that “the law” (v. 34) required women to be silent. Normally, when Paul says “the law,” he’s talking about God’s Law in what we today would call the Old Testament. But there’s no Old Testament law requiring women to be silent or barring them from teaching!
Some speculate that Paul actually was referring to the secular law—which, yes, was the same Greek word, and which did require women to submit to men. If true, this could be another case of Paul saying: Obey the local laws and customs, even though you’re freed from the rules and regulations of God’s Law. Let’s be known as good citizens, not as agents of chaos.
There are other interpretations and other debates about this passage, too, that I don’t have time to get into. And again, I think it’s possible for sincere, thoughtful Christians to disagree with one another.
But I always come back to this: In the end, we have to be willing to step back and see the big picture. Are our interpretations bearing good fruit? Are we seeing the evidence of love and grace in our actions? Are we living by the Spirit or by the letter of the law?
Up close, we can argue and argue about what this passage was supposed to mean, and because so much of the cultural context is lost to us, we may never know for sure. But when I ask those big-picture questions of the way my mom was treated at our church growing up, I know that can’t have been right.
The Bible tells us that men and women are both created in the image of God. It repeatedly affirms the leadership, importance, and spiritual gifts of women. And if that was true even in a culture that severely undervalued women and gave them very few opportunities to shine, how much more should we recognize and celebrate women’s gifts today—including those who are gifted with teaching and leadership?
I may not know every answer to every biblical question, but I know the difference between legalism and following the Spirit. And I am committed to follow the Spirit every time.
