Headship and Authority in 1 Cor. 11

This past Sunday, our senior minister approached with some trepidation 1 Corinthians 11:2-16, the passage which speaks of the subordination of women and their need to wear head coverings.  Also on the agenda was 1 Cor. 14:34-35, which states "Let your women keep silent in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak, but they are to be submissive, as the law also says.  And if they want to learn something, let them ask their own husbands at home; for it is shameful for women to speak in church"—although in the event, the sermon confined itself to the first passage.  These passages naturally can be quite a source of discomfort to churches committed, as ours basically is, to an “egalitarian” rather than “complementarian” position (though I hate those labels!) and to the legitimacy of women's ordination.  But really, they will be a source of discomfort for almost any Christian today, however "complementarian."  After all, Paul seems to go beyond a mere outward subordination to suggest that women are naturally inferior: women come from men, and are made to serve men.  Men stand in the same relation to women as Christ does to the Church.  Ouch.  Paul accordingly commands behaviors that only a few radical fringe groups of conservative Christians would actually observe—head coverings for women, silence of women in church.  

So I was genuinely interested in hearing what an egalitarian interpretation of these verses would look like.

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Appealing to Caesar

In accounts of Christian's political responsibilities, it is not uncommon to hear appeals to the way Paul used his Roman citizenship and the Roman political system.  These range from the fairly modest--"Paul's appeal showed that the Roman Empire, for all its evils, could still serve a useful purpose and Christians need not completely separate themselves from an unjust political system"--to rather more robust claims that Paul's actions somehow constitute a ratification of the goodness of the Roman order and proof that Christians should be enthusiastic citizens of earthly polities.

In A Secular Faith, Darryl Hart steers toward the latter approach, using Paul's example in favour of his thesis that Christians must have "hyphenated identities" as inhabitants of the spiritual and earthly kingdoms.  (The real problem with this claim is that in fact he is calling not for hyphenated, but bifurcated identities, not for 'Christian-American' but for 'Christian//American'; but more on that another time).

But what was Paul actually up to?  And what lesson does his appeal to Caesar actually offer?

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The Debt of Love: Romans 13:1-7 in Context

Regular readers of this blog know that I have an annoying habit of dropping enigmatic hints about my research on Romans 13 (which I did initially more than two years ago and have been chipping away at again over the last year or so), implying that it contains the answer to this or that problem in ethics or political theology, but providing precious few details.  Well, I don't think my reading of this passage gives all the answers, but it does, I think, provide a more helpful starting-point not only for understanding this section of Romans, but for hopefully for understanding many issues in political theology.  So, I will stop being enigmatic and share an excerpt from a paper I'll be giving at the SBL Int'l Meeting next week containing a very concise version of one of the key lines of argument--the literary structure of the passage in context.  Bits of this appear in previous posts, but this is much more systematic, I hope.

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Can we explain Paul's admonitions in 13:1-7 within the same logic of love that dominates the surrounding context?  

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Set Free for Service: Kasemann on Rom. 13

In his 1969 article “Principles on the Interpretation of Romans 13,” Ernst Kasemann offers what may be the best discussion of Romans 13 I have yet come across (and I’ve come across several dozen).  What is most remarkable about the article is that he succeeds in doing this despite resolutely refusing to take into account the context--the end of chapter 12 and 13:8-10--no, Romans 13:1-7 must be interpreted, he doggedly persists, as an independent unit.  Oddly, though, the resulting interpretation he offers is one that fits like a glove into this context, and which absolutely demands to be read in continuity with these flanking passages.  In other words, his conclusion would make much more sense and be much stronger as the result of an exegesis of 12:9-13:10, not merely 13:1-7.   

I shan’t try to summarize the whole article here, but I’ll try to cover a couple key bases and then share some of the particularly fine quotes toward the ends.  Kasemann surveys the basic existing interpretive options for Romans 13 (those existing as of 1969, at least; several more have arisen since) and says that the basic problem with all of them is that they want to reverse the priority of Paul’s command and the grounding he gives that command; they want to shift the emphasis from the concrete ethical directives to the abstract metaphysical principles that they feel must underlie these directives.  The history of the interpretation, he says, “suffers from its conception of the real problem as lying not in the content of the exhortation as such but in the basis on which it is made.”  Although of course the latter is important, he says, “I believe it to be an error to make this the pivot of the whole thing....the tenor of the passage is not didactic as if the parenesis were a conclusion from a thesis.  The stresses must not be incorrectly interchanged; otherwise we shall almost inevitably find ourselves on a path which does not correspond to the emphasis of the passage.”

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Romans 13 and the Law of Love

As I’ve mentioned in a previous post on the subject, one of the keys to the reading of Romans 13 that I’ve been working on is to read verse 8 as if it reflects back on vs. 1-7.  This seems a rather natural thing to do, especially in view of the clear verbal connection between v. 7 and v. 8, but in the dozens of commentaries I’ve consulted, I have searched almost entirely in vain for a commentator who made any use of 13:8 to help interpret Paul’s message in 13:1-7. 

Until I came to Calvin (or rather, returned to Calvin--the first time I looked at his commentary on the passage, a year and a half ago, I didn’t even notice this juicy tidbit).  Calvin does not follow the practice of most commentators in isolating 13:1-7 as an independent section, but handles chapter 13 as a whole, and doesn’t see any major break between 7 and 8.  This means that when he comes to “Owe nothing to anyone except to love one another,” he reads it, as I do, as saying, “Recognize that all your various duties are in fact nothing more or less than specifications of the call to show love to all.  In other words, these responsibilities I have just been telling you about--obeying the magistrate--are to be understood as part of what it means to exercise Christian charity.”  Wow.  This is what I would call a big deal.  But Calvin, alas, is not doing quite what I’m trying to do.  Let’s look at exactly what he says:

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