The main point: The Spirit gifts every Christian to bless the Church in its gatherings. But this does not mean that chaos should rule in the Church. God is a God of peace, not confusion. Christians therefore should be self-controlled, out of love for one another and reverence for God. Under certain circumstances this will mean that some have to hold their tongues and remain silent during worship meetings, so as not to cause confusion or disorder. (On the issue of women being silent in the Church, see below.)
As with all the instructions given in 1 Corinthians 11-14, Paul is speaking into the particular situation of the Church in Corinth, specifically about how they behave as they worship together. And it seems as if they had some pretty unruly worship services! Paul has already instructed the Corinthians on being one Body with many parts, all gifted by the Holy Spirit; on how the one true marker of the Christian life was not one of the spiritual gifts, but rather a love that endures forever and puts others ahead of oneself; and on how in the context of worship it is important that believers and non-believers alike be able to understand what is being said. And now he deals with disorder in worship
But who doesn’t like a little disorder? After all, the complaint of many people inside and outside the Church is that the meetings are too predictable, too boring, too orderly. But Paul is not advocating for quiet, boring services. He assumes, in fact, the occurrence of tongues, interpretations, prophecy, revelations, hymns, and more. He teaches that everyone who comes to the assembly has something to give, something that the Spirit has blessed them with so that they can bless and build up the rest of the Church. His instructions about orderly and peaceful worship, then, are not given in order to quench the Spirit, but in order to create an environment in which the Spirit can be heard through everyone. Far from silencing anyone (which this passage is often used for), order in the Church ensures that everyone can use their gifts to bless the Church in an appropriate, edifying and God-honouring way. Without any order or restrictions, chaos will reign, and only the loudest voices or most influential people will be heard. The regulations given by Paul here allow for a truer freedom in worship. And it is left to the whole body, under the direction of the Word and the Holy Spirit, to ensure this order and freedom.
Because the issue of tongues was a big one in Corinth, Paul gives some specific regulations for their use. For the public assembly, they must be accompanied by interpretation. And even then the worship gathering must not be dominated by them. It seems that in Corinth many people were speaking in tongues all at once, making interpretation impossible. So only two or three people should speak in tongues, and one at a time, allowing for interpretation. Paul then applied the same kind of regulations to the gift of prophecy, adding that the prophecies should be judged and weighed by the rest of the assembly. Prophecy does not have its own independent authority. It must be judged by the Church, weighed against Scripture.
Paul asserts that it is the Holy Spirit who gives the gifts, but he also teaches that the speaker and prophet have control. They are not in an ecstatic trance, as was common in pagan worship. They can stop speaking, hold their tongues, wait their turn, and defer to one another. And they should exercise this self-control and peace, because that is what God is like. Pagan cultic worship was full of frenzy and disorder. But God is not like that, and Christian worship should reflect the character of God. The Corinthian worship, in its disorder and confusion, was not loving to one another and not reflective of God. Some people had to restrain themselves in order to stop contributing to the confusion. So there are times when it is God-honouring and appropriate for people to remain silent in the Church, if it builds up the Body and brings peace. This is a message for “all the Churches of the saints” (verse 33b). Many translations have linked that verse to the instructions about the silence of women. It makes more sense, though, to connect it to the ordering of tongues and prophecy which reflects the order and peace of God (verses 26-33a).
Now let’s look at verses 34-35, about women not speaking in the Church. Few Churches act out the simplest reading of these verses, which is that women should remain absolutely silent in Church. That doesn’t just mean preaching or teaching; that means praying, singing, doing children’s time, reading announcements, saying hello, etc…Even those who believe that women shouldn’t preach or teach have given up this most basic reading. So already we have some interpretation happening.
And we need interpretation, because it seems impossible that Paul is actually saying that women must remain totally silent in the Church. In 1 Corinthians 11:4-5 Paul assumes that women will be praying and prophesying in the Church. In other letters Paul commends various women as prophets, deacons, even apostles (eg. Rom 16:1-12; Phil. 4:2-3). And in Acts 2:17-18 it is announced that sons and daughters, male and female servants will prophecy. All believers who are filled with the Holy Spirit can prophesy, and the context for this prophecy is the building up of the Church. In fact, if women are not allowed to speak at all in the Church assembly, then it must mean that the rest of 1 Corinthians 12-14 – which instructs believers on how to build up the Church with their Spirit-given gifts - must apply only to the male members of the Body of Christ! So it seems the verses in front of us cannot mean that all women should never talk in Church. What do we do with these verses, then?
One very respected theologian, Gordon Fee, believes that these two verses are not actually part of the canon of Scripture. This is because he finds them out of place in the passage, which is all about the regulation of the use of spiritual gifts and which flows more naturally if the two verses are omitted; because they contradict the rest of Paul’s message, which states that all are meant to prophesy or bring hymns or tongues etc…; and because some textual evidence supports the possibility that they were added by a later editor (see Fee, Gordon, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, pp.699-708.) This is a strong argument which should not be quickly dismissed, and which Fee is not alone in holding.
So there is a question about the authenticity of these verses. However, given that they are not actually missing from any known manuscript of Scripture, and that the Church has traditionally accepted them as part of sacred Scripture, the question still must be asked: what happens if we accept these verses as written by Paul? None of the “solutions” offered are free from difficulty. We simply don’t know, aside from educated guesses, what was going on in Corinth at this time that caused Paul to give the corrections he did.
Some have suggested that women were allowed to prophesy and pray, but not to teach, preach, or weigh the prophecies of others. But this passage is not about preaching and teaching at all, and Paul does not limit the gift of discernment (nor any other gift) to men alone. And prophecy was designed at least in part to teach everyone (1 Cor 14:31), so women who were prophesying were teaching. Others have suggested that Paul was quoting here from the letter the Corinthians had sent to him, so that it was the Corinthians, not Paul, who really wanted women to be silent. But there is no indication here that Paul is quoting anyone (whereas in other places it is clear), and there is no evidence elsewhere that the Corinthians held this kind of view.
One popular notion is that the men and women were split up into different rooms or sections for their Church meetings, and that the women were idly chatting too much and interfering with the worship of the men. But this probably wasn’t the way the home churches were set up, and verse 35 shows us that the women in the Church in Corinth weren’t idly chatting; they wanted to learn. This, Paul agrees, is a good thing, just as speaking in tongues is a good thing. But asking questions in the middle of the meeting, as it appears the women in Corinth were doing, was not a good thing. It caused disruption and confusion just as speaking in tongues in a disorderly and unintelligible way caused disorder and confusion.
But why were women told to not ask questions in this context, and not men? If the women in Corinth were asking questions during the time that Scripture was being taught, as seems likely, then they were probably causing offence by doing so. As Craig Keener points out, questions were normal in public lectures, but they were asked in an orderly way, and it was considered rude to ask irrelevant questions, or questions that could be answered on your own time through your own study. And women were far more likely to be uneducated or unfamiliar with public lectures at that time, so they were far more likely to be asking irrelevant or inappropriate questions while the Scripture was being taught. This was shameful and scandalous in the culture that the Corinthian Church wanted to reach with the gospel. Thus, the Corinthian women’s silence, in this particular case, would be loving and God-honouring to the rest of the Body. The women here were being asked to submit, as the Law required, to the needs of Church peace.
But Paul was still in favour of their learning more by asking questions. So he points out that there was another venue in which they could ask questions and learn what they wanted to know: asking their husbands at home, who were probably more educated than they were. This is the most progressive program for the education of women at the time! Far from belittling the women, it assumes that they can and should learn the things they are wanting to know, and addresses the inequality of Scriptural education between men and women. It asks husbands to take responsibility for ensuring that their wives receive the education they are looking for. (A modern application of this principle could be ensuring that those who have not had the same educational opportunities as others, regardless of gender, have access to classes in which they can be taught Scriptural basics.)
The careful conclusion we come to is that, if these verses are authentic, they are a correction given to the Church in Corinth. There is a message here for us, but the letter is not written to us. We therefore believe that this passage does not prohibit women from speaking in the Church today. The passage does not address preaching or teaching, and the cultural situation that made it necessary for the women in Corinth to save their questions for their husbands at home no longer exists in much of the world. This interpretation does leave open the possibility that there may be cultures in the world today that are similar to that of Corinth, and in which women might still cause scandal by asking questions in the Church. But it insists, as Paul did, that Christian men in those cultures work towards resolving any inequalities in education the women face, so that they can participate more fully in Church gatherings. The Church must work to change those cultures from the inside out, and it must not simply be content to adopt the prevailing culture.
We also believe this passage does not prevent women from exercising any role or gift in the body, as we see women in these roles and using these gifts in other parts of Scripture, and as we receive Paul’s instruction from this passage that “all may prophesy…so that all may learn and all be encouraged.” The case-specific instruction given here fleshes out the same principle that underlies all regulation of Christian worship: act in love towards one another, and do not cause confusion or disruption in worship, so that all within the Church can understand and be built up, and all outside the Church can hear the message of the Gospel. The Scriptural principle to which we are called here is order and peace in worship, not the silence of women.
This discussion on the issue of women in the Church is limited by time and space. Here are some of the resources that were used in researching this passage, if anyone wants to do more study.
Blomberg, Craig, 1 Corinthians, The NIV Application Commentary
Rediscovering Scripture’s Vision for Women, Lucy Peppiatt
Women and Worship at Corinth, Lucy Peppiatt
Unveiling Paul’s Women: Making Sense of 1 Corinthians 11:2-16, Lucy Peppiatt
Carson, D.A., Showing the Spirit
Cunningham, Loren and Hamilton, David, Why Not Women?
Fee, Gordon, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, NICNT
Grenz, Stanley and Kjesbo, Denise, Women in the Church
Keener, Craig, Paul, Women and Wives
Martin, Francis, The Feminist Question
Pierce, Ronald, and Groothuis, Rebecca, Discovering Biblical Equality
Webb, William, Slaves, Women and Homosexuals
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