The Implications For Social Structures
THE IMPACT
What, then, was the impact of this radical worldview on male/female relationships? We begin by noting that in the new creation both of the essential matters from the first creation — mutuality/ complementarity and differentiation — are restored. It is the new creation, after all. This can best be seen in two passages in 1 Corinthians — 7:1-40 and 11:2-16 - where some women (apparently) in the believing community have overdrawn the implications of their new eschatological existence.31 That is, they appear to have been arguing for, or assuming, a “mutuality” without “complementarity,” as well as for the elimination of differentiation. This Paul simply will not allow since these, too, are a part of the creation, both old and new.
What most likely lies behind this is their view of speaking in tongues. In 13:1 Paul says, “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels.” This may have been a reference to the Book of Job, where Job’s daughters are given a waistband to put on, by means of which they are transported into heaven by the Spirit, and by the Spirit speak the dialect of the angels. This appears to have been a common understanding, that the one speaking in tongues was speaking the language of heaven.
A kind of ultimate “spirituality” seems thus to have set in at Corinth, which included a disregard for the body. Very early on Christians got messed up about the body’s being a good thing (given that God created it). Such a view goes back at least to Paul’s Corinth. Because they were already speaking the language of the angels, some of the women considered themselves already as the angels (who neither marry nor give in marriage, Luke 20:34-36) and thus were arguing for no sex in marriage (7:1-16) and were also removing a symbol of differentiation (11:2-16).
Paul corrects the former abuse by insisting that each person’s body does not belong to oneself, but to the other (7:3-4) - not in an abusive, possessive way, of course, but as gift to the other person. Because of mutuality and complementarity in the marriage relationship, every husband and every wife must be in continuing sexual relations with each other (v. 2) and must stop defrauding one another on this matter (7:5). Thus this passage radically alters the sexual relationship within marriage. Instead of the more common pattern of sex as something the husband does to his wife for his sexual gratification, sexual intimacy is a celebration of belonging to one another, where one’s “body” is not one’s own private possession; rather, both partners give their bodies for the other in a relationship of mutual love.
In the same way Paul argues in 11:2-16 that wives continue to wear the head-covering because it served as a symbol of differentiation between men and women. Although it is often suggested otherwise, 32 this passage has nothing to do with the subordination of women to men — a view arrived at by making verse 10 say the opposite of what Paul in fact asserts. The Greek text cannot be more clear, that a woman has authority over her own head “because of the angels.”33 If there is still plenty of obscurity about the latter phrase (I think it relates to their being like the angels), there is no question about who has authority over what. The woman in Christ has authority over her own head, even with regard to the traditional head-covering. But Paul wants her to use that authority to maintain differentiation in the new order. That the issue has to do with differentiation between male and female is found in the rhetoric of verses 5 and 6. If she insists on removing the familiar sign of differentiation, Paul argues, why not go the whole way of “shame” (to herself in this case) and have her head shaved or shorn — in that culture evidence of the “male” partner in a lesbian relationship.34
The bottom line issue in this text has to do with “shame” (see w. 4, 5, 6, 13, 14) in a culture much like present-day Asian cultures, where shame counted for everything. With a wonderful word play on “head” — where the issue literally lay — Paul argues that the wife was shaming her husband (her “head” from v. 3) by removing the symbol of differentiation, just as a husband would have shamed Christ by wearing the wife’s symbol.
In response Paul does not subordinate the woman, but rather insists that she maintain this symbol of their differences. In a purely ad hoc way, Paul argues in verses 7-9 that a wife should not shame the one whose glory she is by creation. To be sure, that is often read as referring to subordination. But nowhere else does “glory” appear in Scripture as having to do with subordination. The woman, rather, is seen as complementary, the glory of the man, as is evidenced in the narrative of Genesis: she was made from man and for man (w. 8-9), not to be subordinate to him, but as his glory, to complement him. That she has regained her place of mutuality lost in the Fall is made clear in verses 10 to 12. Immediately following verses 8 and 9, he concludes by first stating the reality of the woman’s own authority over her (now literal) head: “For this reason, the woman has authority over her own head because of the angels.” “Nonetheless,” he qualifies in verse 11, with both 8 and 9 and now 10 in view, the wife is not to exercise her “authority” as one who is independent of her husband; nor are they to understand verses 8 and 9 wrongly: because “in the Lord” there is total mutuality. After all, God has ultimately reversed things — man now comes from the woman — so that “in the Lord” neither is independent of the other, because “everything comes from God.”
Thus, the thrust of this argument is twofold: that the woman should continue with the cultural symbol of differentiation because of the issue of shame — but that this should not be understood to mean subordination, but mutual interdependence in the Lord. The new creation has not removed mutuality and differentiation, but has restored it. In the Lord male and female are both one and different. Thus men and women equally pray and prophesy, the two basic forms of worship in the Christian assembly (which took place in homes), but do so as male and female, not as androgynous beings.