To Cover or Not to Cover?

When the Apostle Paul commands women to cover their head in church, is he speaking about a local custom or something more? Paul does not leave us without a rationale or for a defense of covering the head. And the thing that is most astonishing here is that he appeals to creation, not to Corinth.

In other words, it seems that Paul is saying that women must wear head coverings in worship and that it transcends local customs. Today on Renewing Your Mind, we continue Dr. R.C. Sproul's series, The Hard Sayings of the Apostles, and today's passage certainly qualifies.

Here's R.C. now with a message titled, To Cover or Not to Cover. As we continue now with our study of the hard sayings, again we turn to the epistles of the New Testament.

And the one that we have today is important for several reasons and frankly for reasons far beyond the particular matter that is addressed in the text. And I'm referring now to this question of women wearing head coverings in church. I know that there are some churches that get into great controversy about this, but for the most part in the church today, at least in the American church, that tradition of women covering their heads in worship on Sunday morning has been abandoned. If you would go to the church that I attend, for example, on Sunday morning I can think of only two or three women who come to church wearing a hat. Whereas when I was a child, when I came to church, every woman was wearing a hat, and that custom and that tradition, as I said, has changed radically. And if you would come to my church and see two hats on Sunday morning, you could guess immediately that one of them was being worn by my wife and the other one by my daughter-in-law, and if you took my family out of the church there wouldn't be any hats in church on Sunday morning because I'm one of the last diehards on this particular tradition. But let's look at the text that has provoked this particular question. It's in the eleventh chapter of 1 Corinthians where Paul begins by saying in verse 2, Now I praise you, brethren, that you remember me in all things and keep the traditions just as I delivered them to you.

A quick word on that. The word tradition in the New Testament is the Greek word paradesis, and it is a root with a prefix attached to it, and it simply means that which is given across or given over. And we know that Jesus was in frequent controversy with the Pharisees over the subject of tradition. But the tradition that Jesus rebuked and admonished was the tradition of men. Now be careful here because when the apostles speak of tradition and the tradition, the gospel tradition, they're not talking about human tradition, but they're talking about that which has been handed over from the apostles to the church, from the Old Testament to the New Testament to that treasury of divine truth that had been passed on from generation to generation.

These were not traditions that were to be negotiated. This is God's tradition. But now Paul is speaking here about keeping the traditions as he had delivered them to you. So he's speaking of an apostolic tradition, and he says, But I want you to know that the head of every man is Christ, the head of woman is man, and the head of Christ is God. Every man praying or prophesying, having his head covered, dishonors his head. But every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head, for that is one and the same as if her head were shaved. For if a woman is not covered, let her also be shorn.

But if it is a shameful thing for a woman to be shorn or shaved, let her be covered. For a man indeed ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God, but woman is the glory of man. For man is not from woman, but woman from man. Nor was man created for the woman, but woman for the man. For this reason the woman ought to have a symbol of authority on her head because of the angels. Nevertheless, neither is man independent of woman, nor woman independent of man in the Lord. For as woman came from man, even so man also comes through woman, but all things are from God.

Judge among yourselves. Is it proper for a woman to pray to God with her head uncovered? Does not even nature itself teach you that if a man has long hair, it is a dishonor to him?

But if a woman has long hair, it is a glory to her, for her hair is given to her for a covering. But if anyone seems to be contentious, we have no such custom, nor do the churches of God. Now this passage is replete with difficulties for us living in the 20th century outside of the local situation of the Corinthian congregation.

And it raises a bigger question than the immediate question of head covering. And the question is this, what is the Christian's obligation with respect to keeping customs that were kept in biblical times? Virtually every biblical scholar recognizes the distinction between principle and custom. Principles are those commands of God that apply to all people at all time in every culture and in every life situation. Customs are those things which are variant local applications of principle. For example, in the New Testament the principle of tithing is there, and in those days it was done through the denarius or the shekel or whatever. Does that mean that the only way we can please God today is by paying our tithes and shekels or denaria?

Of course not. The monetary unit was customary, the clothing, styles, those are the things that are subject to change from culture to culture, from place to place. The principle of modesty applies to all generations, but how that modesty is manifested will differ from one country to another and from one time to another. We understand that those things are customary. But many times distinguishing between custom and principle is a relatively easy matter, but not always.

Sometimes it's excruciatingly difficult to make that distinction. Let me give you a principle to apply if you can't decide if something is a custom or a principle. The biblical principle would be whatever is not of faith is sin, and so the burden of proof is always going to be on those who argue that such and such a command is custom and not principle. If you're not sure, then the principle that applies is treat it as a principle, because if you treat a custom as a principle, the only guilt you bear is for being overly scrupulous. But if you take a principle of God and treat it as a local custom and don't observe it, you have sin against God.

So that, I think you can see, is a good practical principle to apply when you can't determine this. Well, in this text about head covering, there have been different positions taken by scholars and theologians on the text. There are four distinct elements here. One is that the text seems to suggest that Paul is saying that women ought to cover their head, and in some translations, to cover their hair with a veil as a sign of the woman's submission or subordination to her husband. Now, let's take those three, that women are supposed to cover their heads, cover it with a veil, and cover it as a sign of submissiveness to their husband. Now, how can we treat these teachings?

Well, here are the different options. We could come to this text and say all of those things are customs, that's all. That in the early church, it was part of the culture and part of the custom for women to be in submission to their husband. But the idea of wives being submissive to their husbands is not principial and does not apply to all Christians of all times of all cultures. But the whole thing is cultural.

And there are a vast number of people today who take that approach. And since the basic thing that is being symbolized is a custom, then obviously the symbol is a custom, and the means by which the symbol is demonstrated is a custom, so that it will all be a matter of custom, and so none of it would be binding upon us today. Now, the second possibility is all of it is principial, that Christians of all time and of all ages, Christian women should always be willing to show submissiveness and subordination to their husbands in church, and they should always and everywhere do it by covering their hair, and they should always and everywhere do it by covering their hair with a veil. That's why there are cultures today that insist that women wear veils in obedience to this passage because they're saying all of it's principial, none of it's custom, and we have to obey it all.

Now, there are two positions that are middle-ground positions. The most common one, among evangelicals at least, is this, that what is principial in this passage is the perennial responsibility of wives to be in submission to their husband. That principle is articulated again and again in Scripture, and that that principle abides. It's in the Old Testament, it's in the New Testament, it's in the future, it's always.

But that the symbol to indicate that submission is customary so that if one culture does it by covering the hair, another culture can do it some other way, and so it's not necessary to cover the hair because the covering of the hair is, as I say, customary. The argument that you read in almost every commentary on 1 Corinthians that supports that position is this. In fact, I can't remember reading a commentary on 1 Corinthians that didn't bring this up. That we know that in Corinth, which was a commercial center of the ancient world, and it was quite a racy environment, an open city with brothels and prostitution being widespread, similar to modern-day Amsterdam, if you will, that one of the signs of the prostitute was not a red light over her door, but it was the sign of the uncovered head. And Paul is saying, he's telling the Corinthian ladies, for heaven's sakes don't come to church looking like prostitutes. For heaven's sakes, in this environment, it's a scandal to be in a public place with your head uncovered, so Christians ought to be careful here to observe that and not give the appearance of evil. And so, as I said, I've read countless commentaries on 1 Corinthians that say the reason why Paul tells women to cover their hair is because of the problem of prostitutes in Corinth.

Now, here's the problem with that. I don't doubt for a minute that there was a problem with prostitutes in Corinth. And I think that it's very helpful to go and examine the cultural situation, the life setting in which that Scripture comes, to try to gain clues for understanding the whys and the wherefores of certain admonitions.

I think that's a very appropriate thing. I think, on the other hand, it's totally inappropriate to assign to Paul a reason for his saying something that is different from the one he himself gives. Paul does not leave us without a rationale or for a defense of covering the head. And the thing that is most astonishing here is that he appeals to creation, not to Corinth, where he appeals to man and woman as man and woman. And if anything transcends local custom, it is those things that are rooted and ordered in creation. That's why I'm very frightened to be loose with this passage, because the apostle doesn't say, keep your heads covered because you don't want anything to be thinking that you're a prostitute.

But he appeals, again, to creation. And he says that a woman is given her hair as a covering as part of her glory. Now, if there's anything that's foreign to our environment as this, as well as his statement that he sort of tacks on in there, doesn't nature itself teach you that it's a shame for men to have long hair?

Modern American youth is not going to be happy with that passage. But I noticed that in the 60s, when we had that phenomenon of the radical change of hairstyles where men started wearing their hair down to their shoulders and even beyond that, what happened to women's styles? The girls at that time were wearing their hair down to their waist. It's almost like there was a subliminal or unconscious battle to retain their sexual identity.

And it's funny to watch. I don't want to make too much out of this, but it's interesting to watch how hairstyles change and how there's this give and take between the sexes. When I was in high school, the thing to do was to wear a crew cut.

People think that's funny nowadays, but for years I wore a crew cut and the girls wore the Audrey Hepburn, that short cropped hairdo. As women's hair grew shorter, as the styles became shorter, men's hair got shorter yet and vice versa when men's hair grew longer. Because when Paul says it's a shame for a man to have long hair, you have to ask the obvious question, how long is long?

Long is a relative term, and it's got to be related to some norm or some standard. The only one that makes sense to me is the length of women's hair. So that when he says that it's a shame for men to have long hair, he's saying in comparison with women, obviously. But now what's this business about the woman's hair being her glory? Well, Paul appeals to creation, and in creation man is given the superordinate role. He's not superior to woman, but he's given the position of leadership, and the woman is given the position of subordination.

Is there any compensation for that? Yes, she gets her glory. She gets the special glory that the men don't get. And that glory, strangely to our ears, is related to her hair, that her hair becomes a symbol of the added glory that God adorns the woman with. Now that may sound, as I say, absolutely silly to our culture today and primitive, simplistic, and unsophisticated. But it's no small thing to recognize that universally, among the human race and in history, it's been a persistent thing that culture after culture after culture has regarded the female gender of the human species as the fairer sex.

Isn't that interesting? If you look in the animal kingdom, which is usually the more brightly and colorfully adorned? The male or the female? The male lion or the female lion? The male lion, the pheasant, the cardinal.

I mean, birds, animals. Traditionally, it's the male that gets all this special adornment, but not with Homo sapiens. With us, the beauty is focused on the woman. That's her glory, and it's symbolized by her hair, which identifies her as a woman.

One of the ways we historically and classically have been able to identify a woman coming from a distance is her hair. And so Paul says, when you come in the church, cover that glory. Cover it as a sign of submission. Then he says, of course, and do this for the angel's sake. Now, some have made bizarre interpretations of that, saying that, lest we tempt the angels, and that if the women don't have their beautiful glory covered that the angels are going to be tempted to come down and seduce them or rape them.

That's just nonsense. But the point is that for the sake of the angels is that we're talking about the host of heaven, and that when we come together in solemn worship and in the assembly of the saints, we come before the very presence of Christ and before the throne of God and the whole host of heaven. And in that heavenly sphere, there is an order that is established. The angels subordinate themselves to Christ.

Christ subordinates Himself to His head, the Father, in heaven itself. And man who is made in the image of God is called to subordinate himself to the heavenly powers, and the wife is supposed to show her submission to this whole cosmic order of the authority of God, of Christ, and of the host of heaven. Now, I realize that when styles and fashion change, and that the people today are not particularly scrupulous about this business of covering their head, that women today who come to church with their heads uncovered are not coming as an act of protest against the order of the universe or against the authority of Christ or even of their submission to their husbands.

I don't think that's what's behind all of this. But it does disturb me that the custom or the tradition of the woman covering her head in America did not pass away until we saw a cultural revolt against the authority of the husband over the wife, not just in the home or in the church, but in the whole of culture. And it frightens me that we're taking our cue not from the Scriptures, but from the culture or the fashions where we live. Now, again, I know scholars that I have the utmost respect for who disagree with me completely on this text. I don't want to be dogmatic about it. My own particular view is that Paul is appealing to creation and that Paul is saying that women ought to cover their heads.

It's a small thing. This is not the article upon which the church stands or falls. But I think that we should seek to be faithful in small things, that we may be prepared to be faithful in many things, and at least was important enough for the Apostle Paul to include it in his instructions to the church. That's such an important way to frame this argument. It seems that Paul is making the point that women throughout church history should follow. Yet, as R.C. indicated, this is not a primary doctrine.

It's not something that should divide the church. We've heard a compelling message from Dr. R.C. Sproul from his series, The Hard Sayings of the Apostles. You're listening to Renewing Your Mind.

I'm Lee Webb, and I'm glad you could be with us today. Throughout this series, R.C. answers puzzling questions that arise when we read parts of Scripture, questions like, do all of Paul's words have apostolic authority, or are there exceptions?

Does Paul teach that we can reach moral perfection in this life? Dr. Sproul's commitment to biblical inerrancy guides the answers we receive in this five-message series. You can request a digital download of the full series when you call 800-435-4343 and securely give a gift of any amount to Ligonier Ministries.

Or you can make your request online at renewingyourmind.org. And we are grateful for your generosity to Ligonier Ministries. And now before we go, here's R.C. with a final thought for us. If you are a woman who has listened to this message today, let me ask you please not to simply react to me or to Paul in this passage, but to think of the deeper question involved here, that which is far beyond issues of head covering and all the rest. Do you not, and I certainly should include the men in this too, do we not understand that to come into the presence of God is a sacred thing, that it is holy ground? And we have done all kinds of things in our culture to desacralize worship. Now, I realize that we can worship God anywhere, outside, you know, in a bar room if we have to. But there is a certain attitude or demeanor that we ought to bring with us when we come into the presence of God, particularly for the purpose of corporate worship. I'm afraid that our worship has become more and more casual, more and more cavalier. And what happens when that takes place is our adoration for the one we have come to worship. Our submission to His authority and to His will begins to be compromised. And so I urge you to understand this particularly difficult text in light of that higher question. Next week Dr. Sproul begins another series of hard sayings, this time looking at the difficult things that Jesus said. We hope you'll join us next Saturday for Renewing Your Mind. Copyright © 2020, New Thinking Allowed Foundation