Chapter 11: Cultural Head-Coverings

Kimberly: Can I change the subject here? At Grace Evangelical, we don’t think that women teaching from the pulpit is biblical. It ‘s a policy that we all feel very comfortable with. But when Ryan and I were going to Azusa Pacific, one of our more ‘liberal’ professors was a woman who was quite out-spoken about the need for the church to embrace equal participation of women in ministry. It seems like you are pretty ‘liberal’ too. What are your thoughts?
AT: Well, I certainly wouldn’t call myself ‘liberal,’ but we can talk about that later.
RW: Yeah, Kimmy, he’s ‘postmodern,’ not ‘liberal.’
AT: These ‘labels’ can be a bit confusing…more on this later. The question about gender really needs to start with the question of ministry that we talked about earlier. I think we are asking the wrong question when we focus on whether or not women should be senior pastors or bishops or priests or get to have a speaking or teaching role in the community. These roles have been overvalued and hero-worshipped since, it seems, the 3rd generation of Christian faith. It wasn’t originally like this. So should women have equal participation in ministry? By all means! Everyone has an equally vital role in ministry, none being more important than any others.
RW: Yeah, but what about Paul’s admonitions in the Pastorals and I Corinthians 14 about women remaining silent in the church?
AT: These passages, I believe, have been traditionally used, since the second century, for power agendas by men who are in charge and women, with their own agendas, who feel quite content letting the man be in charge. In addition, notions of self-evident and inerrant Bible reading strategies have made the issue a non-negotiable in many Christian communities. However, the same Paul who wrote in I Corinthians 11:3-16 about men and women each having time to prophecy in the community could not have possibly meant in the 14th chapter of that same letter that women could not teach from the Bible during the community’s time of worship. There must be a reasonable, contextual and practical explanation like, for instance, women who were less educated having more questions that would steer the community into tangents during their worship time. I know a lot of evangelicals who get quite anxious about my cultural explanations, as if it is watering down the Word of God, but honestly, I doubt too many women in your congregation wear head-coverings to the service and that’s exactly what I Corinthians 11 calls for. And, of course, these same defenders of the Word of God would naturally explain the absence of head-coverings in their congregation as forsaking an unnecessary cultural obligation of a bygone era. And, of course, the head-coverings example is the tip of the cultural ice-berg. We could go on and on and on, offering one ‘Biblical’ principle after another that is no longer followed in our congregations: what about adulterers being stoned to death [Deut 22:22] or clear commands against divorce and remarriage [Mark 10:1-2] or the acceptance of slavery, polygamy and the treatment of women as property? I’m not saying that any of these should be followed to the letter, but simply advocating for a more complex, nuanced biblical reading strategy.
RW: It just seems like you are advocating for positions that our society at-large seems to be very passionate about…like you are caving into the cultural climate. These are convenient, popular positions to take on these issues right now. Don’t we need to be ‘countercultural’ with sexuality and gender issues?
AT: It certainly seems to some that my positions are part of the slippery-slope of a culture gone awry. But I’ve got three points to make here.
RW: You’ve always got ‘points.’ Why do you need to be so ‘orderly?’
AT: When you are compelled by a new paradigm and have pretty much staked your life on it, and you are constantly being placed in the position of defending it, then you’ve got to be structured. Here’s why I don’t think I’m caving in: (1) sometimes, society at large actually needs to critique the Body of Christ—history reports this happening in Western civilization. The Enlightenment thinkers, many of them non-Christians, were the ones who influenced societal decisions about the separation of Church and State and freedom of speech and religion and dispelling the myth of the divine-right-of-kings. ‘Secular’ philosophers, many of them full-fledged atheists, led the way on these issues as the Church mostly pushed back. Society had to critique the Body of Christ as it was in its majority form; (2) when we are dealing with these sexuality and gender issues, we are confronted with groups of people who have been marginalized. The voices of women and gays/lesbians, and those advocating for them, have had very little say with the regard to both church policy and societal mores and laws. They’ve been silenced by power structures that haven’t given them a say. This, again, is anti-Christian; and (3) I’m starting with the Bible. I’m not just, like some Christians, shrugging my shoulders and saying society is right about this, ‘anything goes.’ No, I’m not arguing for anarchy or chaos or an ‘anything goes’ attitude. I’m arguing against absolutism and domination. These methods are not biblical no matter how you slice it.