Women and Worship: Corinth

Women and Worship: Corinth April 22, 2015

Lucy Peppiatt WTCIn her very important new book Women and Worship at Corinth, Lucy Peppiatt contends there are no fewer than six reasons to examine afresh the passages in 1 Corinthians about women in worship.

Before I get to her reasons, I want to post six slogans in 1 Corinthians — that is six lines that even the NIV puts in quotation marks as lines expressing the views of others. How does one detect these kinds of slogans or the rhetoric of the Corinthians in a letter that does not say “Now I’m quoting something from someone else”?

Discernment occurs through literary and theological sensitivity, and after reading these slogans or expressions (or even claims in full sentences or more) you may well be saying to yourself, “Yes, I think these are slogans etc and I’d like to see how people discern them.” Here are a few largely indisputable slogans and then six reasons Peppiatt provides for finding insertions of what others are claiming — more than slogans — in other passages in 1 Cor 11-14.

I want this to be clear; Peppiatt sees more than simple slogans at work in 1 Cor 11–14; she sees the rhetoric of others turned against them by Paul. (See here for her reconstruction of the text with their terms in italics.)

1Cor. 6:12   “I have the right to do anything,” you say—but not everything is beneficial. “I have the right to do anything”—but I will not be mastered by anything. 13 You say, “Food for the stomach and the stomach for food, and God will destroy them both.” The body, however, is not meant for sexual immorality but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body.

1Cor. 7:1   Now for the matters you wrote about: “It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.” 

1Cor. 8:1   Now about food sacrificed to idols: We know that “We all possess knowledge.” But knowledge puffs up while love builds up.

1Cor. 8:4   So then, about eating food sacrificed to idols: We know that “An idol is nothing at all in the world” and that “There is no God but one.” 

1Cor. 10:23   “I have the right to do anything,” you say—but not everything is beneficial. “I have the right to do anything”—but not everything is constructive.

1Cor. 15:12   But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?

How do we detect the use of what others are saying in a letter of Paul? She gives six reasons:

1. The confusion of the texts.

Making sense of these passages for any reader, scholar or otherwise, is hugely challenging, and they absorb the commentators with their exegetical possibilities and puzzles. They are riddled with inconsistencies, contradictions, and confust ing messages and are marked by serious textual and exegetical problems. Yet, despite a plethora of problems with the text, theologians, biblical scholars, and churchmen and women alike continue to hold doggedly to the notion that these verses in their entirety reflect Pauls views. The bewildering corollary to this is that those who hold these views begin by admitting their own and everyone else’s inability to make sense of the passage under consideration, then go on to outline the astonishing array of interpretations of the terms used within the passage, before finally offering their own interpretation of how it might possibly be read as a coherent whole (5).

Others give up trying to make sense of Paul and simply state that he must have been confused himself, and still others—in relation to the women passages—just accept (either cheerfully or disgustedly) that Paul was blatantly patriarchal or possibly just a misogynist (5).

2. Paul’s overall message to the Corinthians. [The principle here is theological vision and consistency and coherency.]

… the call to Christlikeness should be lived out by taking the lower part and preferring others (6).

In the light of these observations, we need to be clear, therefore, about what precisely Paul might be saying in chapter 11, for example, if we think that he is now suddenly concerned with establishing or maintaining boundaries based on the glory of men to guard both men and women from “shame” in worship. S Similarly, we need to give coherent reasons for why he encourages women to pray and prophesy in public worship while simultaneously telling them to be silent. These are some of the themes that emerge in this book (6).

3. Paul’s wider thought. [Eschatological inauguration in the here and now.]

My premise, therefore, is that Paul’s eschatology not developed as a longed-for future hope to be realized with the return of Christ, but that the coming of Christ into the world, and the gift of the Spirit, has already radically changed human relations in the here and now (7).

4. A discernible pattern.

The first is the obvious “breaks” in the text where we know that there is a shift in thinking, or where Paul appears to be contradicting himself. The second is the use of the rhetorical question (8).

5. Where the logic leads… If we follow the logic of these passages, where do we end up? Do we end up where Paul says we should? or at something like Colossians 3:11 or Galatians 3:28?

6. Historical reconstructions. Peppiatt’s honesty is admirable: her work, like everyone else’s, requires some historical reconstruction, and is not full of certainty.

So although we may not shy away from the study of historical data and the process of historical reconstruction, we need to handle historical reconstructions judiciously on the grounds that there is a substantial amount of speculation, prejudice, wish fulfillment, and subjectivity involved in reconstructing the situation in Corinth.

I come back to the slogans above: the logic used to discern those slogans is the same logic she uses to discern the rhetoric of the opponents in 1 Corinthians 11-14. Are you willing to listen to this kind of argument?

Is there not a potent irony at work: That those who already know where Paul must end up (hierarchy) are silencing an interpretation that might be listening more carefully to the original silencing by Paul himself?


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