Ask Sanityville: Would retaining head coverings have prevented feminism?

Hey Joel,

Sure thing. What I meant was simply this:

For the first 1900 years of the church, women covering their heads was the universal practice, across an extraordinarily diverse range of societies with all kinds of widely different cultural practices and symbols. Then the West figured to solve the social issues of the industrial revolution by treating women like men (suffrage etc), and within 50 years the Western practice of covering women’s heads was in precipitous decline. Within another 50, the idea of recovering the practice was widely regarded as a return to oppression.

This is the social milieu in which arguments about symbols no longer communicating what they have universally communicated arose. There are obvious parallels between this reasoning, and the kind of arguments you see feminists making about “head” really meaning “source,” about “weaker vessel” referring only to physical strength, about “Eve was deceived” having no connection to women not being allowed to teach, etc.

In short, when new arguments are being innovated that coincidentally were never required prior to a new and wicked sea change, and which coincidentally conform to that new and wicked sea change, the natural presumption is that those arguments are concessions to, and rationalizations of, the new and wicked sea change.

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This is not the reasoning I advanced. How is my reasoning obviously feministic, other than I arrive at a conclusion with which you disagree?

Joel, it may be helpful to re-read the thought sequence here. I am indeed responding exactly to what you said.

Mr. Roberts, do you have a video or article somewhere that outlines your thinking on this issue? I skimmed through the titles on your YouTube channel, but didn’t see one about this specifically.

If one is attempting to critique another’s reasoning, a starting point ought to be engaging with what the other has actually said, not inventing a narrative that one imputes to the other.

I think you have me mixed up with Alastair Roberts. I can give you an outline of his thinking, however.

The principles remain; the headcovering is cultural.

I have written on this topic, but it’s no longer on the web, and nowhere near as fascinating as I find Alastair Roberts’ writing, even when I disagree.

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LOLOL my bad!! I don’t know how my eyes pulled the wool over- wait, that metaphor doesn’t work…

I did read Roberts instead of Robertson. And I didn’t even realize the I versus A in your first names.

So you’re saying the Actual Alastair Roberts thinks headcovering is no longer necessary?

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Yes, though he is a bit more involved than that.

He recently posted a video on the image of God in women which I believe stemmed originally from 1 Corinthians 11:8-9. I think it’s quite insightful.

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9 posts were split to a new topic: Is our beloved Alistair Robertson the same man as Alastair Roberts?

To confirm: Your original reasoning was this:

Yes?

Oh, in case it was in doubt, I’m a 4.

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Yes, Alistair.

I don’t see what is feminist about a view that head covering may no longer serve the same symbolic function at our present time but another symbol might.

Edited to add: or in a different culture.

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You know, I agree here, though not in the way you might suppose, and certainly not to the point you’d draw from it. I refer you to The Theological Dictionary of the New Testament under the article for the veil: κάλυμα kaluma. To summarize what you find there:

  1. We have evidence for the practice of women wearing veils that are textual and graphic, the latter in the form of statuary, coins, medallions, and frescos.

  2. These sources are non-Christian, rather Greco-Roman. For this reason, they are especially useful for evaluating a common and mistaken notion about the deployment of headcovering in Corinth in the First Century.

  3. In non-religious contexts, women are routinely portrayed with and without headcoverings. There are no contexts where covering of women is either mandatory or prohibited.

  4. In religious contexts (portrayals of female deities, female worshipers of any sort of deity), females (goddesses or worshipers) exhibit the same diversity in practice - sometimes with veils, sometimes with none. No pattern related to context is provable.

Things change dramatically, however, when we move to eastward. There lived a Roman statesman and historian named Dio Cassius (c. 155 – c. 235), many of whose works, including speeches, have survived. One of these speeches, referenced in the TDNT article above, was delivered in Tarsus, Paul’s home town (!). In its introduction, Dio Cassius comments favorably on the Eastern practice of the women being veiled in public, evidently viewing a number of these in the crowd gathered in a public square to whom he addressed himself from a balcony.

Two implications may be drawn from this. First, that what Dio Cassius was commenting on was not an ordinary custom by women in the Greco-Roman West. Second, it validates in summary fashion what the article on the Veil in TDNT also reports - in the Greco-Roman west, there was no pan-cultural practice regarding the veiling of women.

Add to this, Tertullian’s aplogia for the veiling of virgins notes that Jewesses in North Africa were recognizeable because they (like the women Dio Cassius noticed) veiled themselves in public.

How does this bear upon Paul’s 16 verses devoted to this topic in the First Corinthian Epistle?

First, it shows how utterly erroneous the notion that Paul was taking the Corinthian Christian women to task because they were flaunting a common custom. In Corinth there was no common custom regarding the covering of women.

Second, in a culture where there was no common custom regarding the veiling of women, Paul is imposing an Eastern and Jewish cultural custom upon the Christians who inhabited a Greco-Roman culture!

Fast forward 2,000 years, two millennia in which Christians followed the Apostolic teaching of Paul (until the middle of the 20th Century, that is), and ask yourself - what becomes of those rationales bandied about for dismissing Paul’s teaching? If those rationales “work” today, they should have worked just as well in Paul’s day, wouldn’t you think?

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Once again, misunderstood :slight_smile: I was communicating Alastair Roberts’ view, not my own.

I agree with you, and have done my own fairly extensive reading of (translated) original sources and secondary sources. My conclusion is that there is very little support for understanding headcovering as cultural. The writings of present day non-Christian historians rarely support the cultural view, though the changes to their conclusions about veiling over time don’t speak well to the reliability of their conclusions for our purposes :).

As much as I like Bruce Ware, after tracking down the sources he cites, I could not see how they support his arguments at all (if you are aware of them). His writings recieved virtually no attention outside of Christian circles last time I looked. But again, does that matter one way or the other?

My understanding is that headcovering, even though it is misunderstood, should still be practiced, even as the Lord’s Supper was still practiced in light of accusations of cannibalism.

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My wife has corrected my memory on her wearing of a headcovering. It came up when we were reading through 1 Cor. 11 in our family devotion, and I wondered out loud whether that still applied, but I never suggested to my wife that she should do so. While I was researching the question and consulting with my fellow elders on Session, my wife started trying out wearing a head covering and doing her own research. After several months had gone by, I decided that wearing a head covering was no longer applicable for the reasons I give above, and I told my wife that, and she immediately decided to no longer wear a head covering.

So she’s firmly in the category I describe. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Resurrecting an old thread. We’re a 4 as well, maybe 5.

We’ve gone perma-covering Like the Puritan women of old. This way the wife is covered whenever praying, along with the all of the other “niceties” of honoring the creation order. It just so happens to give feminism the bird and that’s nice too.

She gets asked about it a lot. She wears the Israeli tichel style, as seen in this link. to make it obvious that this is not just a fashion item, but a religious statement.

Are you Muslim? No, but she made a Muslim friend at the park and has now shared the gospel with her.

Are you Israeli? No. But the lady who asked it engaged in a long conversation about 1 Cor 11.

Perhaps the biggest issue that has come up has been the issue of authority in the family. Many women in our church view submission to their husbands as “he has to do his part or I’m not budging, and then only maybe”. To see a wife lovingly don the headgear when asked and to wear it with pride (in the good sense) has caused a bit of a stir.

Not just “is this biblical” - hello bonnet-wearing puritans; but perhaps the biggest question of them all in our day — if the wife is convinced 1 Cor 11 is cultural but the husband not — what happens when the husband asks to don the funny hat, so to speak, and all the time. A real test of the health of the man-woman dynamic in your church. Can help to root out some underlying problems. Highly recommended - 100%.

How could anyone tell you didn’t need your wife’s permission to instruct her to wear a head covering? I assume it was the wife’s idea, when I see one…

Assume no longer!

You’d have to get to know the couple obviously, but it should become apparent then.

This has come up in our church. The Session believes that 1 Cor 11 is cultural, but if a husband thinks otherwise, the wife should submit to her husband and wear a headcovering.

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Would retaining head coverings have prevented feminism?

In a word, no. I know from my associations with fundamentalists of various hues that it is too easy to insist on ‘outward conformity to the law’ as a substitute for true obedience. My guess is that if the ‘dam’ had not given way at this point, it would still have given way at many other points, and indeed did so.

On an unrelated note, I really don’t like seeing men in church who are wearing hats, but I imagine I’m showing my age.

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