The challenge, and the insurmountable problem, was to work out the conflict between the intersection of the old world and the new in the present. Paul tried his best to provide guidance and instruction. He stressed and sometimes even demanded what he believed was the ideal, but the cost of denying one reality at the expense of another often proved too great.
Albert Schweitzer once characterized the teachings of Jesus as “interim ethics.” He was thinking of the ways in which an apocalyptic view of history could radicalize one’s ethics to a degree that would be foolishly impractical if the “end” did not arrive as expected. In other words, an individual who believed that the end of history was very near might well choose to “turn the other cheek,” forgive enemies, refrain from resisting evil, or sell what he has and give to the poor. This is what Schweitzer meant by “interim ethics,” meaning they made sense only if God’s intervention to bring about justice in the world did in fact come. In a world that continued on, generation after generation, one might even consider such ethical standards to be unjust since they would enable oppression and wickedness to thrive.
Paul’s ethics were decidedly apocalyptic, but he took things a step further, giving a new definition to the idea of radical. He asked that people behave “as if” the heavenly transformation had already taken place, even if by every visible indication it had not. This perspective profoundly affected his views on human sexuality, economic and social inequities, and religious and ethnic divisions.
NEITHER MALE NOR FEMALE
Let’s begin with Paul’s view of men and women. He describes to his followers in Galatia the ultimate ideal of God’s kingdom: “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave or free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ” (Galatians 3:27–28). Clearly Paul did not imagine that these ethnic, economic, and gender categories had somehow magically disappeared through the act of baptism into Christ—or did he? His letters are filled with instructions about how to handle various problems related to ethnicity, economics, and gender, as well as similar problems, but on another level he expects the new reality “in Christ” to have raised his followers far above the fray of all human failings and disruptions. What does Paul mean by his claim that sexual distinctions between male and female no longer exist in the one body of Christ?
As a Jew Paul believed that God had created humans as male and female in the beginning: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). The very first command God gives Adam and Eve in the Genesis account is “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it,” which certainly puts God’s positive blessing upon reproductive sex (Genesis 1:28). Throughout the creation story everything that God has made is pronounced as good, and at the end the whole is declared “very good.” This notion that a good God created and blessed the good earth is fundamental to most forms of Judaism in this period. In certain Hellenistic and gnostic systems of thought the physical creation was viewed negatively, the unfortunate creation of an inferior deity, so that the “fall” of humans into the lower world, and their fracture into male and female, was seen as a problem from which one needed to be “saved.” Recall the Greek understanding of the physical body as a repository for the soul, something to be discarded so the soul could be free.
Paul is no gnostic. He accepts that human sexuality is part of the intended order of God’s good creation. He also accepts the notion in Genesis that the woman is to be subject to the man, and is, in that sense, inferior to the man. He writes the Corinthians: “For a man ought not to cover his head since he is the image and glory of God; but woman is the glory of man. For man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man” (1 Corinthians 11:7–8). Paul has been blessed as well as damned for these clear and definitive words.1 What he says here has put him at the center of heated discussions about the role of women in the church and society that are as active today as they were anciently. The difference is that the Church largely went the way of Paul, especially from the second century A.D. on, so that the emphasis in the Hebrew Bible regarding the essential goodness of the physical creation and blessings upon male and female sexual union were muted in contrast to Paul’s otherworldly perspectives.
The context of Paul’s declaration was a controversy over whether women in the Corinthian church should pray or prophesy in the group gatherings with their heads covered or uncovered. The covering referred to is not a cloth or veil, even though some English translations give that impression—it is the woman’s hair. Paul addresses the issues of both hair length and style.2 He explains: “If a woman has long hair, it is her pride. For her hair is given to her for a covering [i.e., veil]” (1 Corinthians 11:15). Paul insists that if a woman has shorter hair, or puts her hair up in common Greco-Roman style, exposing her neck and ears, she is getting out of her place in God’s created order, as well as being immodest.3 In contrast, a man with long hair shames his head. Men submit themselves directly to God, while women are to bow their heads to their husbands, with their long hair as a sign of that submission: “For a man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God; but woman is the glory of man” (1 Corinthians 11:7).
Paul bases his position on his assertion that there is a rigid hierarchy of the created order, moving from God, to Christ, to the man, and last of all, at the bottom of the chain of authority—the woman: “But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a woman is the man, and the head of Christ is God” (1 Corinthians 11:3). For a woman to wear her hair immodestly dishonors her “head”—referring to her husband as her head, as well as her head itself, a kind of play on the word. Paul then says something commentators have puzzled over for the past eighteen hundred years. A literal translation reads: “Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man. On account of this a woman ought to have power [Greek exousia] on her head, because of the angels” (1 Corinthians 11:9–10). Some have taken this to mean a “symbol of authority,” that is her covered head, but grammatically the noun is active, not passive. The reference is to something the woman controls, not something that controls her. The idea is that the woman who covers her head exercises power or authority over her head, and thus does not expose it to immodesty—namely to the lustful gaze of the angels! Here Paul likely alludes to the story in Genesis where the angels or “sons of God” lusted after women, left their proper place in heaven, and came down to earth and impregnated them (1 Corinthians 11:10; Genesis 6:1–2).4 The woman was made for the man, not for these rebellious angels, so in the dynamic, charismatic manifestation of prayer and prophecy, when the heavens are open and the spiritual energy is flowing from heaven to earth and back again—a woman must guard herself.