Last week I got a text from a man at church, whose work I highly admire, asking me how I would interpret 1 Corinthians 14:34-36. Secret confession: I’m split in my reaction to these questions. First, I love that someone wants to dig deeper.1 I love to talk about it.2 But it also takes a lot of work to walk through these verses. There’s a reason that people are still arguing about what the Bible says about women. The verses seem contradictory, clear in some places until held beside another, confusing. I’ve talked about it a lot (on the blog, on Instagram where much of it still lives in highlights, and even some here on Substack) and it’s tiring. How have we done such a bad job teaching that we are so stuck on these verses and how to interpret them?3 Please, ask away here. This is a collective weariness with the church, not you in particular.
I have zero intention of answering all the questions about this passage. My goal is to complicate how you read it. I also want you to understand that people who use these verses to limit women’s ministry and authority have as much to reconcile as people who do not believe these verses limit women.4 We should seek for a cohesive interpretation as much as possible.
1 Corinthians 14:34-36 is set in a chapter where Paul is admonishing the believers at Corinth to desire spiritual gifts. I would suggest reading the entire book and finding your place in the whole letter before attempting to sort out these verses. If you do that, you’ll notice that the book starts with Paul getting a report from Chloe’s people (1 Cor 1:11). There is a woman leading at least one part of the church. They are known by her name.
In chapter 11 (another highly disputed chapter), Paul instructs the believers about how women and men should prophesy. The issue is never whether women should prophesy but how they should. As you come deeper into the book, you’ll notice by chapter 14 that the whole focus is on prophesying and speaking in tongues in the gathering of the believers. Paul doesn’t call it preaching. No one person is giving a sermon. In fact, Paul wants every single one of the believers to prophesy.5 He wants them to desire to prophesy (14:1). When one prophesies, they spoke for the strengthening, encouragement, and consolation of the people (14:3). He wishes that all of them spoke in other tongues but even more that they prophesied (14:5). It would be very fun to walk through this whole chapter with you. It kindles a fire in my heart to read it: desire to build up the church, seek spiritual gifts! But there’s not time for that here.
Paul says that when they come together, each one has something: a hymn, a teaching, a revelation, another tongue, an interpretation. It is all to be done for the building up of the believers (14:26). Paul gives guidelines for speaking in tongues and talks about taking turns and then he says “For you can all prophesy one by one, so that everyone may learn and everyone may be encouraged.”
Then after that, all of a suddenly he said that women should be silent
they aren’t permitted to speak but to submit themselves
as the law also says
If they want to learn something
ask their husband at home
because it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church.
What? What happened to everyone prophesying? Everyone speaking in tongues? Everyone building up the body? Before we freak out, let’s give Paul a little credit. And read the Bible forward.
First “should be silent” in verse 34 is the same as “to keep silent” in verse 28. And not only in verse 28, but also in verse 30. Paul appears to be correcting excesses in their ministry to one another in their gatherings. There are times to speak and times to be quiet. Women are not the only ones who are to be silent (at least part of the time).6
Second, the Greek word “women” is the same as the Greek word “wives.” You’re supposed to be able to tell from context which one is meant. That was probably much easier for the people who received the letter than it is for us. Was this directed to all women or was it directed specifically at wives?
Side note: Why Not Women is a great book and I just found that you can borrow it from the Internet Archive and read parts (or all!) of it. If you only have time for part of it, read chapter 14 and 15, pages 185-204. That will be way better than my attempting to summarize it! Just stop reading this and go there now.
Oh, you’re still here? Fine, I’ll carry on.
There are many ways to approach this text. I think the simplest way to put the burden on proof on people who want to silence women. There are many things we will never know for sure about certain passages of Scripture, but we can certainly say that some stances would disagree with other parts of Scripture or the overall story of Scripture. We either take this text literally and do not allow women to speak at all in church or we interpret it in light of something. Few people think this verse demands women never speak in church. If you let women speak—at all—you have to explain how you interpret this passage.
Paul has already said that he wants women to speak. Prophesy. Speak in tongues. He’s said it multiple times.
Submission is the attitude of learning (the verse does not say to men).
The law of God never says that women are to submit to men. The Greco-Roman law did; it was part of their household codes. In fact, the hierarchy of men over women was part of the Roman hegemony. This belief kept the empire in line. Cults (which Christianity would have been considered) would have been evaluated for their ability to fit into this hegemony.7
If they want to learn something: this implies that the speaking they were supposed to stop was stemming from a desire to learn. Were they asking questions? Women were not usually given the same access to education as men were. In fact, if this was referencing wives and husbands, husbands were often quite a bit older than their wives as well. Telling them to ask their husbands at home makes sense because their husbands would have been more educated. They could have stopped constantly interrupting the gathering and learned in outside settings.
We often skip over it but Paul wanting the women to learn was radical. Most of antiquity would have considered women learning a waste of time. Plutarch, for example, “tells us that most men did not believe that their wives could learn anything.”8 But Paul encourages them to learn and tells them appropriate ways to do it: ways that will not detract from the building up of the church which is his focus this entire chapter.
The last line, “because it is disgraceful for women to speak in the church” digs straight into semantics of the Greek language to interpret. I encourage you to go to Why Not Women and read what it says. I know a little Greek. Not enough to argue with anyone about it. May more people say that.
Our interpretation of difficult passages has to be cohesive with our interpretation of the story of Scripture and especially our interpretation of the books themselves. It is very hard to walk away from 1 Corinthians believing that Paul is silencing women unless you only read those verses with no context.
It is hard to believe that Jesus appeared first after his resurrection to a woman and sent her to tell the rest of the disciples but wants women to be quiet after that.
It’s hard to believe that men and women are alike called to come to the stature of the son of God but that women shouldn’t use their voices to build up the body of Christ.
It’s hard to believe that God created women and men in God’s image and gave them the same responsibilities in the beginning before sin and that in the end after sin we are again aiming at the same future, yet that never comes into play in the kingdom now.9
But even if you disagree with all of those statements, you still have to interpret 1 Corinthians 14:34-36 in light of chapter 14 and in light of the entire letter. A letter that recognizes women leaders, teaches women how to prophesy, and instructs everyone to desire to prophesy and speak in tongues.
It is literally impossible to take these verses at face value in context, though people often try to pretend that it’s only those defending women in ministry that don’t read it literally. You cannot read all of chapter 14, including those verses, and not be confused.
I’ve also found that I enjoy it much more with someone I know than I did fielding it from strangers on Instagram. I prefer a conversation to a monologue. If this post feels like a monologue, it’s doable for me because it sprang from a conversation.
It really makes me think that we know Bible verses but not the Bible.
It’s my biggest pet peeve that people assume that complementarians have a cohesive worldview and it’s mutualists who have to do something with the problems of their interpretation.
What exactly constitutes prophecy is a different debate. We only see what it does. And it sounds like preaching the truth.
I’m quite sure that I read a study of where else that word translated “silence” here is used in Scripture. I can’t find it right now though.
Brace yourself for this one. I downloaded Instagram again to snag these from a highlight because I knew I had quotes there. Because it’s IG, I don’t have full citations. “Because of the importance of household relationships for social stability, religions introduced into the empire by foreigners were judged in large part by whether or not they complied with the expectations for household relationships.” Karen H. Jobes in her commentary on 1 Peter. “It was important that despite the subversive elements of Christianity in the heart of the Greco-Roman society, there were ways in which Christians could be seen adhering to the codes and upholding rather than threatening the fabric of society.” Lucy Peppiatt. “This meant that any change to the hierarchal structure of the family was a challenge to the right of the Romans to rule the world, since that structure presented the rational for Roman hegemony. Any group that argued that men and women were equal, for example, that children also had rights over against their parents, or that slaves were the equal of their masters would be open to charges of treason.” Introducing the New Testament- Achtemeier, Green, and Thompson. “During Paul’s time, ‘persecuted or minority religious groups suspected of being socially subversive’ used house hold codes to ‘show they upheld traditional Roman values’.” Craig Keener, IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament.
Discovering Biblical Equality, 157.
See Revelation 22:5 for our future.
“How have we done such a bad job teaching that we are so stuck on these verses and how to interpret them?” I think about this a lot.
To support your point further on Rome, Alice Evans, PhD who writes “The Great Gender Divergence,” just published a piece this morning about the differences in status and expectations between patriarchal and hierarchical societies and egalitarian ones, citing Rome’s institutionalization of gender deference.
“It's hard to believe that God created women and men in God's image and gave them the same responsibilities in the beginning before sin and that in the end after sin we are again aiming at the same future, yet that never comes into play in the kingdom now.” Love these points, but this one left me curious:
When I was at FLI being taught RBMW, I always heard the teaching go that “through Christ, we can be redeemed *into the fulfillment of* our God-given gender roles and (as the gaslighting went), un-upset by hierarchical differences.”
My question then: Have you heard complementarians sight redemption of equality between men and women in the end times using Rev. 22:5? Or are you using that passage to argue, “well, how do you explain this?”
So many good things here, Lisa. Thanks for taking the time to write, wearying as these conversations may be.
Lisa, thank you for taking us along on this deep dive! So helpful!