"For it is a shame for a woman to speak in a church"

 "...For it is a shame for a woman to speak a church" (1 Corinthians 14:34)

That verse above is quite the stirrer. On one hand, it has Christian feminists in a flurry trying to explain it away by questioning the setting, the speaker's (Apostle Paul) frame of mind, his personality style, etc (or that he was just calling out noisy and gossipy women). And on the other hand, it has been weaponized by those who believe the voice box in the woman was a design flaw by God.

Let's move past this quickly as there is much to get into. The sobering reality is we are bound by our mental frames when we read the Bible. We are constantly interpreting scripture in light of our individual personalities, life experiences, perspectives, and aspirations. That is why two people will read the same bible verse and get two separate meanings from it. And many read scriptures to find arguments for or against whatever the hot topic of the day is. 

This approach to scripture study is a clear recipe for error, because our interpretation of scripture will always be limited by our perception and level of understanding. We are instructed to handle the word of truth rightly with integrity (2 Timothy 2:15). We have to move past our mental frame - which is defined by our level of understanding - and look to the Holy Spirit for an elevated perspective when interpreting the scriptures.

So if we recast this verse, sans the women's rights agenda, what will it tell us? It is clearly a commentary on gender expectations in church, but what is it really saying?

The context of 1 Corinthians 14 was church order. And this starts with order in the ministry of spiritual gifts and then goes into this verse.

The argument that the Apostle Paul was referring to specific women gossiping does not quite hold, as that was not his typical communication style. If there was a specific issue caused by an individual or group he would pointedly call names (Demas in 2 Timothy 4, the Cretans in the Letter to Titus, Euodia and Syntyche in the Letter to the Philippians), or give sufficient description to point out their behavior (e.g. the man having an affair with his father's wife in the first Letter to the Corinthians). And he adopted this style consistently in the letters he wrote to the churches. This verse was clearly about women in general.

So what is it saying about women (and men)? 

There are distinct roles both genders have played out since the beginning of time. No matter what side of the women's rights discourse you fall on, you would agree history has mostly followed this pattern: Men charting the course, determining the routes to follow, discovering new territories; and women fixing norms and lifestyles, turning settlements into society. The men forage and find edible plants or game, the women convert these into a meal. The men establish the civilization, the women embed the culture. In summary, the men have been the Navigators, the women the Nurturers. 

These are complementary roles. If the ground is tilled and seeds are planted but no nurturing is done, nothing will grow. If no one goes out to explore to find better spaces, food and other vital resources will run out, threatening the survival of the group or species.

These role definitions have been construed as outworkings of a system of oppressive patriarchy. And like everything in this fallen world, it has been subject to abuse. But this is quite the chicken-and-egg conundrum: do the genders play these roles because it is in their nature, or because they have been conditioned to do by society? Can any external motivation convert a naturally risk-averse individual to an explorer? What is the guarantee anything would change if this "societal conditioning" got eliminated by some miraculous stroke overnight?

The bottom line is this is where we are, and as the natural, so goes the spiritual. In the Christian faith, men are also expected to utilize their natural strengths as Navigators: testing out spiritual revelations for soundness, establishing what is accurate, and then handing these over to the women to embed as doctrine in the home and church. 

This role expectation plays out throughout the Bible: most of the spiritual authority figures were male (e.g. Moses, Samuel), and they established the direction on what was right and wasn't for the people group of Israel. Jesus reinforces this principle when He asked the Samaritan woman to call her husband when she starts to ask Him about spiritual truths. This is so he'd be there to listen to whatever message Jesus gave her, and filter it to discern whether it was true or not. And the woman, having no husband, went to call the MEN in her town to come and listen to Jesus and filter the message He would share with them. There are more examples but this spills into a broader discourse on discernment and church leadership so permit me to stop here with these few ones.

When there is a gap in this authority role, and men are not doing the job of filtering spiritual messages for consumption by churches and homes, women step into those positions, which neither history nor societal conditioning has equipped them for. And problems are bound to happen here. And since the entire book of first Corinthians is about Paul addressing challenges propping up in the newly planted church in that city, this brings us to the titular verse.

Back to that verse. "For it is a shame..." The question here is, shame for whom? The woman speaking, or the men not doing the speaking? Many have interpreted it to be the former, but take a second look in light of the above, and you might realize it is actually the latter.

The interpretation of this scripture for our times is two-fold. For the men, it is to wake up to their responsibilities as authorities and spiritual filters against false doctrine in the church. And for the women, it is to trust that the role delineations are not about subjugating them, but about making the church more effective in operation and impact (which is the central message of that 14th chapter: church order).

For the women: let me expand a bit on the last point. Recasting this verse from the misogynistic frame it has commonly been interpreted in will require an honest assessment of the concept of roles. At our workplaces, most of us would find it weird if we got to work and met someone from another unit seated at our desks, doing our job, just because they believed they had the skill to do so. It is well understood that in the workplace, everyone does the work they were hired to do, no matter how qualified they are to do other people's work. As business owners, we would not be amused if we hired someone as a sales supervisor and walked in the next day to find them sitting in the administration office, trying to do the admin staff's work for them. This is the principle of roles in practice, and we know this is good because it drives efficiency. So the question we women need to ask ourselves is this: how come efficiency in spaces where we earn a living is acceptable, but not in the body of Christ?

Back to the men: the body of Christ is suffering a deficit in true male leadership. And because nature abhors vacuums, women will step up to play this role and will keep speaking even though this is less than ideal. So instead of using this verse as an occasion to grumble about "noisy" women, feel the sting of the indictment this verse was originally intended to be, and step up to be the change.