The Silence of Women

Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church. [1 Corinthians 14:34-35 (NIV).]

The Apostle Paul’s passage contradicts many people’s ideas of women’s rights and freedoms. To others, it accords with their beliefs; but I suspect that those beliefs originate in this passage and did not arise organically and independently.

Question for thought: "Paul – huh?"

1. An injected passage?

Some scholars think that this passage does not come from Paul. They think that it was injected later by someone else with a smaller soul.

Strong evidence exists that some parts of the Bible were added after-the-fact. For example, Robert Alter is an excellent translator of books of the Old Testament, and he is a professor of comparative literature. He marvels of the excellence of the Hebrew poetry in the Book of Job. Mostly. He is far less impressed with the poetry of the speech that is attributed to Elihu. Also, after Elihu’s speech, the other speakers are referred to, but Elihu is not. Alter concludes that Elihu’s speech was added by a later, lesser poet, and that the final editor of the Book of Job blundered by keeping it in.

Maybe the 1st Corinthians passage was injected after-the-fact, not by Paul. But that conclusion is not frictionless. For one thing, that passage accords with what Paul said elsewhere. So:

A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. But women will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety. [1 Timothy 2:11-15 (NIV).]

It’s easier to say that one passage was jammed in after-the-fact; two is harder. You would have to believe that two like-minded persons coincidentally wanted to add to Paul’s letters their ideas about the silence of women. Or you would have to believe that the passages were added by one person, but after the letters had been accumulated together. But the accumulation of the letters from disparate parts of the known world suggests a later stage in the canonization of the Bible. In that case, it seems likely that someone else would then have noticed these additions and would have raised a hue and cry against this gloss on the words of the esteemed apostle.

Also, some argue these passages must be authentic because the Old Testament supports this theology of women’s subjugation. In Genesis 3, after Adam and Eve succumbed to the serpent’s cunning, God speaks to Eve. Eve is presumably a proxy for all women. He says: "Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you." (NIV)

2. The happy disunity of scripture.

In another post, I have a very un-troubled discussion of the fact that the Bible un-self-consciously says one thing in one place and another thing in another place. This happens without a doubt. ("Wildness and the Word of God". http://justsayinghere.blogspot.com/2012/07/wildness-and-word-of-god.html )

There are several valid explanation for these variations. I won’t go over all of those explanations here. But I will highlight one: the Bible is pastoral, and a stated principle might not apply to all persons, at all times, in all places. The Bible says different things in different places to allow the earnest seeker of guidance to discern what principle applies to his or her specific circumstance. What is true for him might not be for someone else; the Bible speaks to them both.

This truth applies to these passages about the silence of women.

3. Women as prophets.

The 1st Corinthians passage quoted above comes in context of Paul’s discussion of the value to the church of prophecy – hearing from God and speaking for God. In context, this 1st Corinthians passage says that women should not prophesy.

But women in the Bible were prophets. For example, shortly after Jesus was born, Mary and Joseph took him into the temple in Jerusalem. There, they encountered the prophet Anna. She prophesied over Jesus (not keeping silent). The gospel of Luke says:

There was . . . a prophet, Anna, the daughter of Penuel, of the tribe of Asher. She was very old; she had lived with her husband seven years after her marriage, and then was a widow until she was eighty-four. She never left the temple but worshiped night and day, fasting and praying. Coming up to [Mary and Joseph and Jesus] at that very moment, she gave thanks to God and spoke about the child to all who were looking forward to the redemption of Jerusalem. [Luke 2:36-38 (NIV).]

And Philip the evangelist had four daughters who prophesied. (Acts 21:8.)

The Old Testament prophet Isaiah called his wife "the prophetess". (Isaiah 8:3.)

Mirian, Aaron's sister, was a prophet. (Exodus 15.)

Huldah was a woman and a prophet. King Josiah sent a deputation to her to inquire of the Lord. That episode is described in 2 Kings 22.

4. Women as leaders.

The 1st Timothy passage says that women should have no authority over men. But in early times after the founding of Israel, Israel was ruled by "judges". One such judge was Deborah, who had more courage and brains than her male military commander. Her story is told in Judges 4-5. As Israel’s leader, she clearly had authority over men, Paul notwithstanding. She also was a prophet.

5. Women as teachers.

And even though Paul apparently did not want women to teach, a teacher he admired was a woman. Her name was Priscilla. She and her husband encountered a zealous but misinformed evangelist named Apollos. Priscilla and her husband took Apollos into their home and they both improved his understanding. (Acts 18.) Paul describes Priscilla and her husband as his "co-workers". (Romans 16:3.)

6. The first witness to the resurrection.

According to the tradition of the Gospels, the first witness to the empty tomb of Jesus was Mary Magdalene. She also was the first to see him, after he rose from the dead. Jesus instructed her to bear news of his resurrection to the others. (John 20:11-18.) This was a turning point in history, and Jesus gave the honor of being the herald of that turning point to a woman.

7. The apparent uniqueness of the silence of women.

So it is clear that the Bible is not single-minded in its counsel about the silence of women.

So the passages about the silence of women fit with the Biblical habit of saying one thing in one place and another thing in another place. But passages about the silence of women are also somehow different. This is true because Paul’s teaching about the silence of women seems, to the modern mind, singularly discriminatory. The discrimination is obvious. It is singular in the sense that, after the resurrection of Jesus, the grace of God exploded outward from the Jews to all peoples and nations in addition to the Jews. This is a great theme of the Book of Act and a preoccupation of Paul’s Letter to the Romans. The passages about the silence of women seem perversely contrary to this explosive spread of the grace of God.

8. The meaning of the silence of women.

Or are they?

I suggest that they are actually a token of freedom for women.

These passages must be considered in light of the other passages about women as prophets, women as leaders, women as teachers, women as heralds. These passages about the silence of women say what they say, but they can’t un-say the other passages that contradict them.

So a woman who is rudely shushed in church, literally or figuratively, can point to Deborah, can point to Miriam, can point to Isaiah's wife, can point to Huldah, can point to Anna, can point to Mary, can point to Priscilla, can point to the daughters of Phillip. And based on these she can shush back.

But here’s the thing: because of Paul’s passages, if she doesn’t want to, she doesn’t have to.

In my mid-teens, I absorbed from my career-driven mother a condescension toward stay-at-home moms. For a long time, I had a sense that women who did not work outside the home were old-fashioned. In my youthful mind, they were weaker and less valued than their liberated sisters. I think that many people today retain that condescension.

Paul corrects us. If a woman chooses to come under the protection and guidance and support of a man (who hopefully proves worthy of her trust), then Paul tells us that nobody may hold that against her. Nor is that woman compelled to hold that decision against herself.

Some women may prefer that psychologically restful role. I take this to be the implication of the unexpected popularity among women of the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy. I haven’t read those books, and I don’t endorse them. I only hold them up as credible token of resistance to the Helen Gurley Brown measure of feminine success. If it’s a poor example, forgive me.

9. Scripture is hard.

Sometimes scripture is plain and easy. Sometimes it is hard. I think the subject of this essay is middling hard. I also think that this essay does not begin to exhaust the importance of these controversial passages from Paul. Infinite is the variety of the human condition. Therefore infinite are the possible applications of various parts of the Bible to the human condition. That includes these controversial passages.

10. Freedom in restraint.

But for now I choose to interpret these passages in tandem with clearly contrary passages in the same Bible. I choose to see them as permission to women to choose the old ways. I choose to see them as freedom of choice for women who might not find to their liking a driven, world-beating lifestyle.

In the sixties, women became liberated from dependence on men. But if a woman’s only real choice were that form of liberation, it would be only half-liberation. These passages, in tandem with contrary passages, make it clear that women’s freedom to choose is not partial but complete.

Rick Santelli versus George Bailey

"All I want is freedom and community."

Francis Carney was a great professor, and I took every course that he taught. I have quoted him here, but that quotation was not his opinion. He himself quoted a former student, but only to mock him. To Professor Carney, freedom and community were opposites, and they were mutually exclusive. You could have one or the other, he told us, but you couldn’t have both.

1. Rick Santelli: apostle of every-man-for-himself.

CNBC on-air editor Rick Santelli famously condemned the economic bailout and the Obama administration. He asked people around him if they wanted their tax dollars to pay for their neighbors’ mortgages. His point of view, his choice between freedom and community, was as clear as natural gas.

Santelli is an apostle of every-man-for-himself. His rant was the spark from which the Tea Party exploded.

Here is that rant. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQQfzXQ6UjA&NR=1

2. George Baily and community.

But Santelli’s point of view is not the only light in the American political sky. There is an anti-Santelli. His name is George Bailey.

George Bailey was Jimmy Stewart’s character in the movie It’s a Wonderful Life. At a climactic point in the movie, Bailey’s savings & loan was threatened. His depositors - his shareholders - panicked and thought they’d loose all of their money. They crowded Bailey’s saving & loan and demand to withdraw their savings. In a Santelli-like assertion of every-man-for-himself, they sought to exercise their freedom.

George Bailey talked them down. He talked them down by explaining that they were invested in each other. He explained that their money wasn’t sitting in a safe: it funded the mortgages of their friends and neighbors. (That’s why George Bailey’s speech is so easy to contrast to Rick Santelli’s.) Bailey persuade his shareholders to take small portions of their savings instead of trying to draw out all they had, and he won for his savings & loan a reprieve from the forces that want to crush it, represented by the odious Mr. Potter.

Community scores.

Here’s a piece of George Bailey’s speech to his shareholders. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Er69b4HMl8 Here’s a longer version, giving the context of the first clip. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qu2uJWSZkck&feature=related

3. American politics and striking the balance.

I have argued before that politics in America is largely a calibration of the balance between freedom and community. http://justsayinghere.blogspot.com/2011/02/what-we-think-when-we-love-health-care.html

Fundamentally, I think that’s correct.

In 2008, America favored the balance suggested in the candidacy of Barack Obama over what John McCain offered. In 2010, the balance shifted away from community toward every-man-for-himself.

2012 is upon us. Campaigning has started. Once again, candidates take their place on a continuum between freedom and community. To me, all Republican candidates (except perhaps John Huntsman) represent an extreme argument against community and for every-man-for-himself. They want to arrest regulations. They want to return us to the days when corporations regulated themselves. Ron Paul goes so far as to call for the end of the Department of Homeland Security: let airline companies themselves take responsibility for their own security and the safety of their passengers.

Which is pretty much what we had on September 10, 2001.

4. Santelli and the world of tomorrow.

To foretell the future that the Republican candidates would propel us toward is as easy as looking at the past that was.

For example, at the outset of the 20^th Century, the federal government started to regulate food production because of scandals in the meat-packing industry. Upton Sinclair’s muckraking novel The Jungle provoked public outrage. The Jungle led to not-so-surprise inspections by Teddy Roosevelt’s administration that revealed the wretched, filthy, disgusting conditions of meat-packing plants. The only one of Upton Sinclair’s claims that inspectors could not find evidence to support was the claim of a man falling into a vat and being sold as lard.

Regulation of the food industry is community, and I don’t want to return to the freedom that existed before Upton Sinclair’s exposure of that industry’s filthy practices.

Those filthy practices arose from the pursuit of profit. That same pursuit led to the implosion Enron. And it led to companies like Goldman Sachs selling investments to their customers that were so bad that Goldman Sachs, for itself, made financial bets that those investments would stink and sink. Which they did. Goldman Sach’s customers were financially flayed, and Goldman Sachs made huge profits - profits from selling terrible investments to their customers, and profits by betting that those investments were the financial equivalent of bad meat.

That happens when a balance is struck too much toward freedom and too far from community.

5. Striking a balance.

I disagree with Professor Carney. I don’t think that freedom and community are mutually exclusive. But I think that it takes hard work to find the ideal balance between them. I’m suspicious of those that think that community - represented by regulation - has no role in a free society.

To see the future with the extreme embrace of freedom and the extreme rejection of community, you need only look at the past. And the past is the domain of poison, poverty, and Thalidomide babies without arms or legs.

And that sucks.

The Prisoner and the Politician, Part 3

(Parts 1 & 2 below)

7. Introduction, Part 3.

Part 1 compared two lives: a composite life-prisoner, and Newt Gingrich. Part 2 began to scrutinize the comparative virtues and vices of these men. Both have lied: Gingrich certainly, my client probably/maybe. Part 2 examined why.

8. The prisoner and the politician: comparison, continued.

 Let’s examine the comparative consequences of these character flaws, and other revelations.

d. The scope of their failings.Moral failings have consequences.

If my client lied about his knowledge of the murder of the house sitter, or his own participation in that crime, at least his lie had no scope. The commissioners and I were his audience, and we are few.

But Gingrich doesn’t lie to the few. He lies to a national audience. And he aspires to speak to the world as President of the United States with his unclean lips.

The scope of my client’s lies is minuscule. The scope of Gingrich’s lies is epic.

e. The effect of their failings.The consequences of my client’s – I suspect – minimization of his role in the murder is highly theoretical. A lie insults the dignity of the person lied to – here, the commissioners and me, whether we know of it or not. It has had no lingering effect.

When Gingrich lies, in addition to insulting the dignity of those he lies to, he deflects his audience from reality and molests their judgment. Based upon what Gingrich says, his credulous followers form opinions. Based on those opinions, they will choose candidates. And they will perpetuate his falsehoods among their friends and relations.

But almost worse than what Gingrich does to his credulous followers is what he does to his followers who penetrate his distortions. Because he is a hero to them, when they see him lie and rise, they are tempted to walk in his ways. This harms their integrity, and that potentially injures their personal and professional lives.

But Gingrich offends against more than his followers. He offends against the nation. Lies are toxic to our national lifeblood. On an individual level, any time we make an important decision – like whom to marry, where to invest our money – we crave accurate information. Who would marry if they knew that their would-be spouse was not kind, but cruel behind a mask of kindness? Who would invest their savings in a company, if they knew that the impressive company profits were only an accounting mirage? That's politics, too. America cannot sail itself to a safe and prosperous future under a delusion-based helm.

f. The burden of their failings.My client himself bears the burden his recent failing. He was caught with a cell phone, and he was denied parole. I have no doubt that he otherwise would have won release. As to his possible falsehoods, I feel no residual effect of this offense. Nor did the commissioners, if they were aware of it. I don’t think they shared my suspicion, because they said nothing. But minimization of personal responsibility for a crime is a fundamental reason for which commissioners deny parole.

Except in an eternal sense, Gingrich does not bear the burden of his recent failings; his followers and his country do. As Gingrich rises, we (potentially) fall.

g. Hypocrisy.My client is no hypocrite. He does not judge others harshly for what he himself does. He knows he has done evil. He hoped for mercy from the commissioners, but he was not dismayed when parole was denied. He did not complain about others who got parole who were, in his mind, less deserving.

Gingrich savages Democrats from his position of moral impoverishment. And as Speaker of the House, he famously made the case against Bill Clinton because of Monica Lewinsky. This, while he himself violated his vows to his second wife.

h. Goodwill.I don’t pretend that my client has affection for the commissioners who decide whether he goes free or stays in prison. But if nervousness is any indication, he fears them.

Gingrich possesses contempt for his followers. Contempt is the cause and effect of his falsehoods. Only contempt for his followers permits him to insult their dignity by lying to them instead of telling them the truth. And he necessarily must have contempt for people who cannot penetrate his transparent lies.


i. Humility and hubris.My client is humble. He doesn’t chafe under his daily routine, which is dictated by others. Others tell him when to rise, when to sleep; what to eat and when; what will be his occupation; what he may possess as property. He calmly accepted the decision denying him parole. He does not seek any lofty status in society. He just wants out. He knows he will always be under supervision, always be at risk for returning to prison. He accepts that.

Gingrich has wealth and power, and he seeks the highest power in politics. He considers his political rise more important than truth, and that is to say more important than God. Gingrich holds a bastard sense of entitlement to power – a sense of entitlement that overwhelms his fidelity to facts.

j. Future.If my client obtains his freedom, I have no doubt that he will lead a blameless life. For one thing, statistically, released lifers have a low recidivism rate. Also, after a deprived life, I expect the euphoria of freedom to choke out any depraved temptation that could cause his return to the futility of prison.

But it is hard to see a path to Gingrich’s rehabilitation. He has risen high in the world. He has the acclaim of millions. He has power, fame, and riches. And the consequence is pride. I see no catalyst that might alter the practices by which he has risen.


9. Conclusion.The life stories of my clients and Newt Gingrich are now being written. Some of my clients will achieve their freedom. Gingrich will rise, but I don’t know how high. But I predict this: in their small way, my freedom-gaining clients will lead good lives; and in his epic way, Gingrich will be a force for decline.