Haircuts & Head-coverings
A Grace Hill Library Paper
Haircuts & Head-Coverings
Unravelling the confusion of 1 Corinthians
Here’s a confession. 1 Corinthians 11 is one of my favorite passages in the New Testament. It’s also one of the most confusing. But my curiosity was piqued years ago, and I haven’t put it down since.
We’ll also look at the equally perplexing line in 1 Corinthians 14:34–35; these two should be examined together. In chapter 11 Paul expects women to pray and prophesy out loud, in church (when we get through all of the confusing bits, that remains quite clear), and then in only three chapters, appears to prohibit women ever opening their mouths. These two sections, written by the same author, in the same letter no less, demand some explanation.
Reading 1 Corinthians 11:2–16 is one of the passages that makes me feel most like an archaeologist, digging up an ancient culture. There is a lot that we still don’t fully understand, and it’s clear Paul is writing to a first-century Corinthian audience, and not to a 21st-century Californian. Why is Paul concerned about head-coverings, hair length, and headship? Is Paul primarily talking to married couples, or to men and women in general? A quick look through modern translations will reveal that there is no consensus among scholars.
Perhaps Paul thought his explanatory phrase, “because of the angels,” would clear things up, but I’m pretty sure most of us become even more confused at that point. I like to imagine Paul setting down his pen after writing verse 10—“For this reason a woman should have a symbol of authority on her head, because of the angels”—wondering if he shouldn’t clarify what he meant by those angels, then deciding: “no, I think I’ve said quite enough; there’s no way they won’t understand that reference!” Perhaps 2,000 years ago that was true. But no longer.
Start With Clarity
These are genuine puzzles, and we’ll deal with them. But before we get to the confusion, let me start with what’s clear. And the clear call from this passage is the most profitable for today’s church.
Paul’s primary aim is to describe what should happen when the community gathers for worship. He proceeds to use the exact same phrase for what men and women should do in the church service:
“Every man who prays or prophesies”—“Every woman who prays or prophesies” (1 Corinthians 11:4–5)
Whatever distinction Paul is drawing about the coverings, the activity itself is completely symmetrical. Men and women are both praying and prophesying out loud in church. This is not in question. Paul isn’t carving out an exception for women to occasionally contribute. He’s describing the ordinary shape of a church service and assuming both are participating.
Let’s talk about prophecy, because I believe many of us hold too narrow an understanding of this term. Prophecy in the Bible is not mere “future-telling,” although this is sometimes included. The prophets in the Hebrew Bible were often preaching God’s Word into their contemporary context, calling people back to the Torah, and revealing God’s displeasure at the current injustice and oppression happening within Israel. When they pronounced future judgment, it was directly related to the problems with the current state of the society. Paul uses the term in the same way. 1 Corinthians 14 as a whole is a good distillation of what he means when he talks about prophecy. In verse 4 he explains, “those who prophesy build up the church.” In verse 25, prophecy is the way unbelievers are called to account and drawn to worship the one true God. Prophecy, in many ways, is the Bible’s word for “sermon.” In English we reach for the term “preach,” when the Bible would more likely use “prophesy.”
Paul expects men and women to “pray and prophesy.” Since these are the only two activities Paul mentions, it is possible he is referring to the entire worship service: Prayer is everything we do that is directed toward God—worship, praise, intercession. And prophecy is everything we do that is directed toward each other—speaking God’s word, declaring God’s truth, opening Scripture for the community. I’m persuaded that these two terms are Paul’s way of summarizing the entire gathering. But whether or not the term “pray and prophesy” encompassed every aspect of a church service, what matters is that men and women are both called to the exact same list.
That’s the clarity. Now let’s deal with the confusion.
Married Couples Only? To Whom is Paul Speaking?
To begin with, let’s clear up whether Paul is directing this toward men and women generally, or to the specific relationship between husbands and wives. In English, we can choose from a variety of terms like husband, wife, spouse, partner, and sometimes, more colloquially, “my man,” “my woman.” Greek and Hebrew simply used the term for man and woman—anēr and gynē—to refer to husband and wife as the context required.
Compare various English translations and you’ll quickly see how much of a live issue this remains. One standout passage for me is verses 4 and 5, where the ESV says, “Every man who prays or prophesies”—which seems to universalize the command to all men—but then states, “Every wife who prays or prophesies”—which seems to narrow the call to women who are married.
Here is why this is important: I’ve been in many conversations where this exact passage is utilized in multiple ways. Sometimes to dictate how church leadership is ordered, other times to describe the divine hierarchy of husbands over wives, and other times to attempt a merging of both. However, there are some clear markers that compel me to translate this entire passage as man and woman. The context is clearly leadership during a church gathering. The wider context of chapters 10–14 is focused on the community gathering and the order of worship.
It is true that Paul links this passage to Genesis 2 and the formation of the first human couple, but the way he uses this reference is to establish the interdependence of men and women more broadly, not as a specific explanation of individual marriage. Even if we wanted to also apply chapter 11 to the marriage covenant, we should note that this does not seem to be its primary focus.
Man is the head of the woman—the case of kephalē
The word kephalē—the Greek word for “head”—appears in verse 3 in a context where it’s clearly not referring to the body part on your shoulders. “The head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ is God.” So what does it mean?
In English, we use “head” as a metaphor in two main ways. The first is leadership—head of state, head of a company. The second is source or origin—the head of a river, the trailhead. In English we tend to reach for the leadership meaning more readily, so that, if I were to come across the word “head” on a page with no context, my first instinct would be to infer a body part, second would be leadership, and last I might infer its meaning was source.
But in Greek, it’s almost exactly reversed. To explain, we need to wade through some ancient language research. Deep breath.
In Greek literature, when kephalē is used metaphorically—when it’s not describing a literal biological head—it most often refers to source or origin, not authority or leadership. The Greeks had another word they preferred when they meant leader: archē. In contrast, the Hebrew Scriptures do regularly employ the head-as-leader metaphor. The Hebrew word rosh is used for “head” in both its literal and its metaphorical-leader sense.
Then came the translators who produced what we call the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, referred to as LXX), and they almost always chose archē—not kephalē—when rosh meant leader. In other words, these Greek-speaking Jewish scholars would come across the Hebrew idiom that uses head as leader, search for an equivalent way to communicate leadership to the Greek world, and forgo the direct translation of “head” for a more suitable translation of “leader.”
I did my own digging through the Greek and Hebrew biblical texts, and found one noteworthy example where the Greek translators stayed with kephalē: Deuteronomy 28, where the Israelites are told that if they obey God they will be the “head and not the tail.” Here, the text is using the entire body of an animal as the metaphor for leading versus following, and the translators kept “head” and “tail” to preserve the original Hebrew image intact. They were honoring the Hebrew idiom—keeping the matched body-image together—not reaching for a Greek concept of leadership. When the meaning was unambiguously “chief” or “ruler,” they switched to archē instead. That is what makes Deuteronomy 28 the exception rather than a counterexample. As the scholar Heinrich Schlier summarizes in the standard Theological Dictionary of the New Testament: “It will be seen that in secular usage, kephalē is not employed for the head of a society. This is first found in the sphere of the Greek Old Testament.”
This conclusion goes back at least to 1954, when the biblical scholar S. Bedale published a landmark study in the Journal of Theological Studies establishing the problem precisely: “In normal Greek usage, classical or contemporary, kephalē does not signify ’head’ in the sense of ruler, or chieftain, of a community.” This was not Bedale’s personal opinion but a summary of what the lexical data showed. Gordon Fee’s exhaustive commentary on 1 Corinthians, one of the finest in scholarship, confirmed and extended Bedale’s findings.
Wayne Grudem pushed back with a survey of 2,336 examples of kephalē in Greek literature, claiming to find 49 instances where it means “authority over.” Fee’s response is detailed. Of those 49 claimed instances: twelve are New Testament passages Grudem has simply pre-decided mean “authority over”—the very passages under debate, not independent evidence; eighteen more are from the Septuagint, which are precisely the exceptional cases showing LXX influence rather than ordinary Greek usage; and for most of the remaining nineteen, there is genuine scholarly dispute about whether any metaphorical authority sense is intended at all. Fee also finds Grudem’s conclusion—that no instances of kephalē meaning “source” or “origin” exist in secular Greek—plainly mistaken, given what Philo alone demonstrates. What Grudem’s survey established, Fee concludes, is at most that “leader” is a conceivable reading in certain contexts; it does not establish “authority over” as the natural or standard meaning, and it does not eliminate “source” as a live option.
If Paul were simply trying to describe a leadership hierarchy, he would have reached for archē. He doesn’t. But this alone is not enough to prove our case. Paul was fluent in both Greek and Hebrew, and perhaps he wanted to use the metaphor of leadership-as-head from his Hebrew roots. After all, it seems there is some fixation on head-coverings and hair length in the Corinthian church. Perhaps Paul is simply capitalizing on their own culture to make a larger point about leadership and order. However, the context of this chapter points in a different direction.
Look at what Paul does right after verse 5. He doesn’t stay in the abstract—he goes to Genesis 2. “Man did not have his origin from woman, but woman from man.” He’s referencing, of course, the story of Adam and Eve, where God formed Adam from the dust and then took from his side to form the woman. Adam was, in the most literal possible sense, the source material from which Eve was taken. Paul is grounding his whole argument in an origin story. This is important for another reason—many have assumed that Paul’s discussion about head-coverings and hair length was culturally conditioned for the Corinthian context, but that’s not where Paul focuses his argument. He grounds it not in what the neighbors might say, but in the Creation. We’ll come back to this.
It’s important to note that this is a very live debate. Two sources that have informed me on both sides are Wayne Grudem’s work on the complementarian side (Recovering Biblical Manhood & Womanhood) and Gordon Fee’s 1 Corinthians commentary for the egalitarian side (NICNT). Because of the lexical and exegetical arguments I’ve shared above, I’m persuaded that “head” in verse 3 means “source.” Paul’s overarching theme is more in line with origin and interdependence than hierarchy.
I conducted my own study of the New Testament use of the term kephalē and concluded that “source” is consistent with the rest of Paul’s letters as well. This survey is found in Appendix 1 at the end of this paper.
Excursus: Headship, the Trinity, and the Athanasian Creed
Before we move to head-coverings and a lesson from an Egyptian Pharaoh, I want to name a larger debate that the word kephalē has been placed in—one that reaches well beyond 1 Corinthians 11. If you’re new to Trinitarian theology, this section is worth the effort. And if you want to skip ahead to the head-coverings argument, that’s fine too. But I think understanding what’s at stake here is one of the most important things the gender conversation needs.
What is the Trinity, briefly?
Christians have always believed in one God who exists as three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is not three gods, nor one God wearing three different masks at different times—it is a mystery at the heart of what the Christian tradition means by God. The persons of the Trinity are genuinely distinct (the Father is not the Son), and yet fully and equally God (the Son is not less divine than the Father).
How the persons of the Trinity relate to one another is a question the early church spent centuries hammering out, largely in response to a teaching called Arianism, which held that the Son was a lesser or created being. The results of those debates were codified in a series of creeds—formal statements of belief agreed upon across the church. The most precise of these is the Athanasian Creed. Unlike the briefer Nicene Creed that most Protestants know from worship, the Athanasian Creed—likely composed in the 5th or 6th century, drawing on the work of the 4th-century theologians who definitively defeated Arianism—spells out the Trinity with considerable precision. Its language has direct bearing on this debate.
What the Athanasian Creed says
Here is the creed’s core statement on the equality of the divine persons:
“So likewise the Father is almighty, the Son almighty, and the Holy Spirit almighty. And yet there are not three almighties, but one almighty—So likewise the Father is Lord, the Son is Lord, and the Holy Spirit is Lord. And yet not three Lords, but one Lord—In this Trinity none is before or after another: none is greater or less than another.”
And then, crucially, when the creed turns to the incarnation—to Jesus Christ as both God and human—it makes a critical distinction:
“Equal to the Father, as touching His Godhead: and inferior to the Father as touching His Humanity.”
That second line is the hinge. Subordination belongs to Christ’s humanity, not to His eternal Godhead. When the New Testament speaks of Jesus obeying the Father, praying to the Father, being sent by the Father—the creed insists we read those texts through the lens of His human nature, His mission as the incarnate Son come to save us. They are not descriptions of an eternal hierarchy within God.
The theological term for what the creed protects here is eternal generation: the Son is eternally begotten of the Father, not created at a point in time, and the distinction between Father and Son is one of relation, not of authority or rank. That has been the church’s understanding for sixteen centuries. This aligns perfectly with what John wrote: “the Word was with God, and the Word was God—all things came into being through Him.”
Why this matters for kephalē
The complementarian reading of kephalē as authority doesn’t just affect how we read 1 Corinthians 11—it has been used to build a much larger theological argument. The argument, developed especially by theologian Wayne Grudem, goes like this: just as the Father has authority over the Son while the two are equal in essence, so the husband has authority over the wife while the two are equal in personhood.
To be fair to Grudem: he explicitly rejects the idea that the Son is a lesser being. He distances himself from Arianism by name. His claim is that while the Son is fully and equally God, the Son has an eternally subordinate role—a difference in function, not in nature. This is what theologians call Eternal Functional Subordination, or EFS. He describes the Father as having “the role of commanding, directing, and sending,” while the Son has “the role of obeying, going as the Father sends, and revealing God to us.” The husband’s role, in this framework, mirrors the Father’s; the wife’s role mirrors the Son’s.
The problem is that the Athanasian Creed won’t allow it. As much as Grudem wants to distance himself from Arianism, the statement “eternally subordinate” pushes right up to, and possibly crosses that line. The creed declares “none is before or after another: none is greater or less than another”—and then restricts any language of inferiority to Christ’s incarnation, to the humanity of Jesus only. Grudem’s framework requires an eternal differentiation by authority among the divine persons; the creed grounds differentiation in eternal generation (the Father eternally begets the Son), not in authority. Those are fundamentally different things. Authority-hierarchy was precisely what the creed’s framers were ruling out.
There’s something worth sitting with here. The early church fathers who shaped these creeds were not egalitarians in any modern sense. They lived in profoundly hierarchical societies and had no stake in 21st-century gender conversations. And yet they drew a hard line: the eternal life of God cannot be ordered by authority differentials. Basil of Caesarea—one of the great Cappadocian theologians of the 4th century who helped defeat Arianism and whose work shapes our understanding of the Trinity to this day—was careful to distinguish “God is head of Christ as Father” from “Christ is head of us as Maker.” Those two relationships operate on entirely different planes. Basil recognized that collapsing them would distort both the doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine of God’s relationship with creation. The Athanasian Creed codified that instinct.
It is worth noting that Basil’s own use of the term “head” in the quotation above almost certainly means “source.” The reference comes from his comments on John 15:1, found in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (2.8). There Basil is describing the relationship of the vine to the branches and insists that the Father is source to the Son in a completely different way than the Son is source to humanity—which is to say, Basil himself reads kephalē as source, not authority, in the very passage where he draws the distinction that protects Trinitarian orthodoxy.
Complementarian critics of EFS
What makes this debate particularly striking is that in 2016, the most pointed critics of Grudem’s EFS position were not egalitarian theologians but complementarian Reformed ones. Carl Trueman—a Presbyterian church historian, professor, and one of the most respected voices in conservative Reformed theology—and Liam Goligher—a Reformed pastor at Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia—published sharp critiques arguing that EFS departs from Nicene categories in ways the tradition simply cannot support. They share Grudem’s view on gender roles in marriage; they do not share his Trinitarian reasoning.
In the years following, Grudem has clarified his stance, but continues to maintain his basic EFS framework. For him, the very definition of Father and Son demands an authority-hierarchy. Critics have suggested he is working backward from a conclusion rather than toward one—that if the Father eternally begets the Son, this relationship must entail some form of ongoing ordering. As we’ve already seen, the creeds, Basil of Caesarea, and many others have no problem affirming the eternal begetting of the Son without calling upon eternal subordination.
More recently, Matthew Barrett, a complementarian Baptist theologian, wrote a full-length book called Simply Trinity (Baker, 2021) making the same case. When the people who agree with you on gender still say your Trinitarian framework is broken, the problem isn’t partisanship. It’s creedal theology.
There is also a historical observation worth making. The EFS-gender argument—the idea that the Father-Son relationship in heaven prescribes the husband-wife relationship on earth—did not exist before the 1970s. Kevin Giles, who has written extensively on this history (The Trinity and Subordinationism, 2002), documents that this precise form of the argument emerged in the context of the gender debate of the 1970s, not prior to it. Many scholars read this as a case of the theological argument following the conclusion: a gender position went looking for a Trinitarian foundation, and found one in a reading of the Son’s role the church had never previously endorsed. That doesn’t automatically make the position wrong, but it is a reason to scrutinize it carefully.
A layered metaphor
My own reading tries to let the metaphor do more than one thing at once. Paul may be using kephalē in a deliberately layered way: the church in Corinth has some customs about head-coverings and hair length and Paul is using that to his advantage. But he’s not pressing the metaphor so far as to promote some of the later heresies that seeped into the church. Basil’s instinct was right—the same word can do different theological work in different relationships. The Father and Son relationship is not the same as the Adam and Eve relationship, and kephalē doesn’t have to mean identically the same thing in both clauses of verse 3.
What the Athanasian Creed makes clear is that we cannot push the authority relationship so far that it subordinates the Son’s divinity. The earlier Nicene Creed’s phrase, “begotten not made,” stops us from going too far in the other direction and supposing that “source” might mean that Christ Himself was once created. The creeds give us a guardrail that protects from either extreme.
Here is one reflection to highlight just how different kephalē and archē are: If Paul had written archē instead of kephalē in verse 3—“the archē of Christ is God”—he would have handed the Arians a proof-text. The word choice matters.
See more on this in Appendix 1.
Head-Coverings, Hatshepsut, and Leading as Yourself
So Paul is grounding 1 Corinthians 11 in an origin story, not a hierarchy. And then he does something puzzling: he spends most of the passage talking about head-coverings and hair length.
The usual read is that Paul was simply accommodating culture—women should cover their heads in church because it would be immodest or socially awkward for them not to. It’s often suggested that a woman showing off her hair in public would have had the same social impact as showing up to church in a revealing bathing suit. But this reading doesn’t hold up when we look at the text or the Corinthian context.
First, if this was Paul’s attempt to concede to a cultural norm, this passage does a poor job of it. Why would it only be immodest to let your hair down when leading from the front? If the issue was how the society would perceive the Christian community, we should expect Paul to give them a dress code that applied at all times. When he offers his reasoning, he does not cite cultural norms but Genesis.
There’s also a problem when we look at the other religions of Paul’s day. In the Jewish tradition, it was men who covered their heads when praying—the practice of the kippah and the tallit goes back to the temple period. In the Greco-Roman world, there’s good evidence that men also covered their heads in acts of religious worship. One of the most vivid examples is a famous statue in the National Museum of Rome depicting Caesar Augustus, acting in his role as Pontifex Maximus, covering his head with a prayer shawl to offer sacrifice at a temple.
Both the Jewish and Greco-Roman cultures Paul was writing within had men covering their heads in worship. Paul does the opposite. Men uncover; women cover. He’s not caving to the surrounding culture’s modesty expectations. He’s charting a third way, specifically different from both Jewish and Greco-Roman religious practice, and he roots it in creation rather than convention.
What I find most compelling is the why. A few years back my daughter Jane did a school project on ancient Egypt, and that’s when I first came across the story of Hatshepsut—a woman who ruled Egypt as Pharaoh in the 15th century BC. Statues of her survive from antiquity. And in those statues, Hatshepsut is wearing a fake beard. Everyone knew she was a woman; she was ruling Egypt wisely and well. But when she sat on the throne to deliver a royal decree, she put on the beard, because that was the convention for the one who held that position.
I think Paul would have found something wrong with that. Not that Hatshepsut was ruling—of course she could lead. But she was having to masquerade as something she wasn’t in order to do it. What Paul seems to be saying in 1 Corinthians 11 is that women lead as women. Men lead as men. The head-covering is a cultural marker that distinguishes the sexes without asking women to become men.
That resonates with something from my own life. When I first started preaching, I learned by copying. Specifically, I was copying my mentor Ryan—his cadence, his structure, his illustrations, his whole approach. For years, I was basically just channeling him. And I think that’s natural early on; you learn by imitating people you admire. But eventually I started finding my own voice. I realized I had a different angle, a different set of instincts that God had given me specifically. I didn’t have to lead like Ryan. I could lead as myself.
Paul is saying something like that here, from a different angle. Women don’t have to put on a beard to preach. They lead as themselves, with the cultural markers of who they are. The head-covering, whatever its precise significance, is the symbol of that—not of subordination, but of distinction. Women lead as women in their own God-given authority, not by becoming something else.
We still don’t fully understand why Paul chose head-coverings and hair length as the specific markers. Two thousand years of cultural distance makes that piece harder to recover. But the principle is clear enough: distinguish the sexes without erasing them, and don’t ask a woman to become someone else in order to be heard.
“Authority on Her Head”: What Verse 10 Says
There’s one more important move in this passage. Verse 10, in most translations, reads something like: “a woman ought to have a symbol of authority on her head.” Other translations render it: “a woman ought to have authority over her head.” The question is whose authority?
The complementarian reading takes this as a symbol of someone else’s authority over the woman—specifically the husband’s authority, or a male leader’s authority. The head-covering, on this reading, is the sign that she’s operating under a male structure of accountability. Various church traditions have used this in different ways. Some allow women to preach and teach, so long as they are not the lead pastor. Others use this verse to require that the only way a woman can enter ministry is in a shared partnership with her husband.
But that’s not what the Greek says. Gordon Fee, in his commentary, works through every instance of this particular phrase in ancient Greek literature, and the conclusion is consistent: the phrase “to have authority on one’s head” always refers to one’s own authority. It isn’t a phrase used for being under another’s authority. It’s a phrase for having authority yourself.
According to Fee, verse 10 is saying: when a woman prays or prophesies in the gathered church, she has her own authority to be there. It’s her commission, not someone else’s leash. She’s been called by God to speak. The head-covering is the symbol of that calling—her authority to stand before the congregation. This is also where verse 16 fits: “But if someone wants to argue about this, we don’t have such a custom, nor do God’s churches.” (CEB) Paul is offering a tangible way to distinguish the men and women of Corinth and show that women have just as much authority to pray and prophesy as God leads, but he’s not creating a universal dress code.
As for “because of the angels”—I’ll be honest, nobody really knows what that means, including the scholars who have spent the most time on it. Some see a cryptic reference to whatever was going on in Genesis 6:1–4. At the least, Paul seems to be gesturing toward the sacred reality of gathered worship—the sense that when the church assembles, the spiritual realm is present and witnessing. Whatever the angels are doing there, it seems to underscore the seriousness of the moment. I’m comfortable sitting with that mystery rather than pretending to resolve it.
Interdependent and Distinct: The Goal of 1 Corinthians 11
By the time Paul gets to verses 11 and 12, he’s ready to say what all of this is for. Not just rules about head-coverings—a vision of what human life together in the church actually looks like.
“Nevertheless, in the Lord woman is not independent of man nor man of woman; for as woman was made from man, so man is now born of woman. And all things are from God.”
The mutuality is the point. There’s an origin story in Paul’s argument—Adam as the source of Eve—but it doesn’t stop there. Now every man is born of a woman. We’ve now looped back around. There are at least two significant applications for our world today.
First, men and women are different. This connects back to what I said in my earlier Counterparts article. In the truest sense, the sexes were created as “complementary.” That term is now loaded with baggage because one side of this debate coined it as their own, but the Bible never seeks to erase the distinction of men and women. We should not either. And just like our Hatshepsut illustration: it is not necessary to pretend to be something we are not just to fit a perceived role.
There are two extreme reactions in our modern society to which 1 Corinthians 11 might speak. On the one hand, some have tried to erase any distinction between the sexes altogether, imagining men and women as completely interchangeable. On the other, there are those who would establish a battle between the sexes, believing that one is better off without the other entirely. But Paul will not allow either extreme.
Men and women remain genuinely different—that’s what the head-covering argument is trying to recover, even if we’re still cloudy on the specifics of how it worked in the Corinthian context. Paul says, lead as yourself. Pray and prophesy as yourself. Bring what you specifically have to bring. The Jews were doing it one way, the Romans another, Paul paved a third way.
But Paul also took great care to emphasize that we are not separate. We need each other, and are the source of one another. Shortly after stating that the man was the source of woman, he turns it around by reminding all men that they too had their origin in the womb of their mother. Distinct, and interdependent.
I recently discovered the musical term counterpoint. My family fell in love with Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton and for a long time that was all we listened to. Miranda has a talent for weaving in an alternative melody that could almost seem to compete with, but actually serves to elevate the first melody in fresh and exciting ways. That is a counterpoint. The famous composer Johann Sebastian Bach mastered this technique hundreds of years before Hamilton.
Men and women are created as each other’s counterpoint. Not the same melody, played in unison. And not the melodies of two completely separate songs. But counterparts woven together to produce a symphony that could never be achieved without the other.
Interdependence doesn’t mean sameness. It means that what you have, I lack. It means we’re not complete without each other. In Genesis 2, God declared, “It is not good that man is alone,” and Paul’s vision of the gathered church offers a way for men and women to mutually contribute out of the gifts and callings they have received. Different. Together. Each one praying and prophesying as exactly who they are.
Mutual leadership is the goal of 1 Corinthians 11. And that’s why what Paul writes three chapters later sounds so shocking.
The Apparent Contradiction: 1 Corinthians 14:33b–36
And then we get to chapter 14:33–35.
“As in all the churches of the saints, the women should be quiet during the meeting. They are not allowed to talk. Instead, they need to get under control, just as the law says. If they want to learn something, they should ask their husbands at home. It is disgraceful for a woman to talk during the meeting.”
Three chapters after Paul took for granted that women were praying and prophesying out loud in church, here he is, apparently, saying quite the opposite. I’ve spent a long time sitting with this passage, and I’m convinced Paul is saying something quite different.
When you sit down with 1 Corinthians 14:33b–36, there are several interpretations that have been offered.
Some simply assume Paul contradicts himself. He says one thing in chapter 11 and something incompatible in chapter 14, and you have to decide which one to follow. If chapter 14 is the correct teaching, and women must be completely silent in worship, then chapter 11 has to be reinterpreted to fit.
Alternatively, Paul was describing a different kind of gathering, or highlighting a very specific role or context. Different ideas about the context of both chapters 11 and 14 have been proposed. The same issue about whether Paul means women or wives holds here as well, and perhaps Paul is making a marital comment rather than a church-leadership comment.
One reading understands chapter 14 to refer to a contextualized issue in the city of Corinth—a group of women taking over in a way that is not orderly. Therefore, not a universal command, but an instance of Paul giving direction about how to deal with these specific women.
The one I find most compelling is that verses 34–35 are not Paul’s own words at all. They’re a quotation: Paul is citing back to the Corinthians something from their previous letter to him, then rebutting it in verse 36.
Here’s why that reading holds up.
A universal command? What to do with verse 33
First, let’s deal with the choice translators face about the end of verse 33. The full verse, without punctuation, reads, “for God is not a God of disorder but of peace as in all the churches of the saints.” The original Greek manuscripts had no punctuation, and so later translators have to figure out where to put every comma, period, and paragraph break. It’s normally an easy task, but check various translations for this passage, and scholars can’t quite make up their minds. The ESV makes a full paragraph break in the middle of verse 33 so that “As in all the churches of the saints” becomes the introduction to verse 34. The NIV keeps that phrase as the conclusion of the previous paragraph so that verse 34 begins a new section. The importance of this choice is fairly obvious: either Paul is laying down a universal command that he teaches in all the churches—which would make the more contextualized interpretations impossible—or he is addressing something specific to the Corinthian community. None of Paul’s other letters teach this sort of rigid silence of the female sex, which sheds doubt on the universality of this command.
All of this seems to point toward the conclusion that we are dealing with something specifically Corinthian, and therefore should keep verse 33 intact. So let’s turn to what Paul says in verses 34–35.
Whose idea? Why I don’t think Paul wrote these verses
Remember, just three chapters earlier, Paul assumes that women pray and prophesy out loud in church. He didn’t carve out exceptions or add qualifications. For Paul to then turn around and say women must never speak at all would require him to completely contradict himself within the same letter—and Paul is a careful, cohesive writer. I assume Paul is brilliant and very intentional throughout. Either he completely changed personalities between chapters 11 and 14, or something else is going on.
Second, the phrase “as the law says” creates massive problems. Paul was, in his own words, a Hebrew of Hebrews and a Pharisee of Pharisees. He had likely memorized the Torah by his teens. He doesn’t misquote the law, and he doesn’t quote something as law that isn’t there. And the statement “women should be silent” is not in the Hebrew Bible. You can read from Genesis to Malachi—this command does not exist.
Throughout this letter, Paul has repeatedly addressed highly specific conduct of the Corinthian church. He has received a letter from them (7:1), heard from “Chloe’s people” (1:11), and perhaps others (11:18), and is writing his letter in response to some alarming details. Paul also repeatedly quotes back to the Corinthians something they wrote so that he can comment. The most familiar example is “all things are lawful for me” in chapters 6 and 10. Paul is citing a Corinthian slogan before correcting it. In other letters, it might feel more of a stretch to argue that Paul is quoting someone else’s words, but the Corinthian letters are full of this, and they are not always marked out by a phrase like “and now I’m quoting your letter.”
Remember that there was no punctuation in the original manuscripts. It’s very possible that verses 34–35 are a quote from the earlier Corinthian letter—perhaps they were writing to Paul about their new ideas on church governance, and Paul is taking the time to quote and correct them.
Think of what happens on our smartphones today when we reply inline to a previous message—the phone pulls the message we’ve selected into a block quote before attaching the reply underneath. We don’t have to add the phrase, “And now I’m responding to your earlier message.” It simply does it for us.
So who is invoking “the law” to silence women? Not Paul. Someone in Corinth is. This is Corinthian theology, attributed to the Torah without any actual basis in it. And Paul, knowing his Scripture front to back, is quoting it back to them so that he can correct it.
Paul’s correction: dismiss this idea from your gathering
The final straw: verse 36. The Greek word that opens it is ē—often translated “or,” sometimes left untranslated entirely in modern English versions. It’s a disjunctive particle: it marks a mutually exclusive alternative, a sharp rhetorical break. The King James Version captures it:
“What? Came the word of God out from you? Or came it unto you only?”
That’s not the language of agreement. That’s a rebuke. When I was growing up, it was slang to simply interject, “Not!” when we disagreed with something a friend just said. Paul has just quoted back their bad theology, and now he’s interjecting, “Not!” His sharp rebuke follows: do you think you can just invent God’s word? You should recognize, he goes on, that what I am writing to you is the commandment of the Lord. The ē marks the turn—verses 34–35 are the Corinthians’ position, verse 36 is Paul’s response.
I want to pause and take the pushback seriously, because many thoughtful readers land in a different place on both of these passages, and I don’t think they’re simply ignoring the evidence.
A careful complementarian could argue that Paul really did mean chapter 14 as a universal silence—that chapter 11 describes a different kind of gathering, perhaps informal or household-based rather than the official assembly. Others have reversed the argument: Paul was allowing women to pray and prophesy in some limited ceremonial sense, and the real issue in chapter 14 is something entirely different—a specific disruption in the Corinthian community rather than a general command.
On kephalē: Grudem’s survey of 2,336 Greek examples did attempt to establish “authority over” as a legitimate reading, and he argues the lexical case isn’t as settled as Fee and Bedale suggest. I’ve engaged his arguments seriously, and I understand why complementarian readers find them compelling. On the head-covering itself, some argue that Paul’s principle is permanent—not a culturally-conditioned third way between Jewish and Roman practice, but a timeless marker of creational order that applies in every culture.
What keeps bringing me back is the cumulative weight. The interpretation that Paul really did silence women has to explain away chapter 11, where Paul’s clearest statement on the subject is that women do exactly what chapter 14 seems to say they are supposed to never do. The kephalē-as-authority reading has to explain why Paul grounds the whole passage in a Genesis origin story rather than a hierarchy argument—and why the Trinitarian costs of pushing that reading into the eternal life of God gave pause even to 4th-century theologians who had no stake in the gender debate. Each of these defenses requires more explaining-away than the reading I’ve laid out.
Putting the Two Passages Together
Read carefully, 1 Corinthians 11 and 14 cohere.
Chapter 11 assumes that women are praying and prophesying out loud in the gathered church. It provides a cultural framework for how they do that—a way of honoring the distinction between men and women without asking women to become men in order to be heard. Hatshepsut can lead. She just doesn’t have to put on the beard.
Chapter 14, on the reading I’ve laid out, quotes and refutes a piece of Corinthian theology that was trying to silence women by misattributing patriarchal custom to “the law.” Paul’s rebuttal—“What? Came the word of God out from you?”—is a dismissal of that silencing, not an endorsement of it.
These two chapters are not exceptions to the pattern we’ve been tracing through this series. They’re a clarifying instance of it. Paul knew women leaders by name: Priscilla, Phoebe, Junia, Euodia, Syntyche. He traveled with them, wrote about them, commended them to churches. He wasn’t writing them out of the picture in chapter 14. He was writing back to a community that was trying to do exactly that, and he was telling them no.
Women in the early church led as women, with their own authority, in their own voice. That’s the picture in chapter 11. That’s what Paul defends in chapter 14.
Where This Leaves Us
Several more hard passages to go.
Next time we’ll be in 1 Timothy 2—the famous “I do not permit a woman to teach” passage. There’s a Greek word in that verse that appears nowhere else in the entire New Testament, and understanding it changes the whole shape of what Paul is addressing. We’ll take it slowly.
After that: Ephesians 5 and 1 Peter 3, the household code passages about wives and husbands. That one lands squarely in the question of marriage, but has also been used to infer roles within the church.
If you’ve been following this series from the beginning, you know the trajectory. The more carefully these passages are read in their own contexts, the more coherent the picture becomes. We’re not recovering a novel reading of Scripture. We’re recovering an original one.
A Survey of kephalē in the New Testament
In my own quest for understanding, I have conducted an even more thorough study of the New Testament’s use of kephalē I will include here. A simple search for the lemma kephalē finds 75 instances of this Greek term in the New Testament. Take out the obvious references to the body part, and we are left with the following 15 occurrences.
Of the 15 non-biological occurrences, the majority either support ‘source’ or are semantically neutral; none unambiguously require ‘authority over’ as the meaning.
‘Cornerstone’ — Matthew 21:42; Mark 12:10; Luke 20:17; Acts 4:11; 1 Peter 2:7
These five passages all use the compound phrase kephalē gōnias (“head of the corner,” or “cornerstone”), which is a fixed idiom quoting Psalm 118:22. Because it’s a compound idiom rather than an independent metaphorical use of kephalē, its evidential weight for the kephalē debate is limited. A cornerstone is the first stone laid in a foundation which provides the position, alignment, and structural integrity of all other pieces.
Synecdoche: Acts 18:6; 18:18; 21:24
Acts 18:6 “your blood be on your own heads.” This is technically a synecdoche rather than a metaphor — a figure of speech where the part stands for the whole. In this case, the “head” stands for their responsibility, their culpability, their very life. This does not factor into the question of the authority or source metaphor, but is a well-known idiom to this day.
Acts 18:18 Paul cuts his “head,” but most translations rightly say, “hair.” This is another instance of a synecdoche (see note on Acts 18:6; the synecdoche also appears in Acts 21:24)
Our Primary Text: 1 Corinthians 11:3
1 Corinthians 11:3 is our primary text in the main article, and I argue that “source” is the most likely meaning. Particularly since Paul grounds this passage by linking Genesis 2, where Adam is the source material for the formation of Eve. (The term “head” in 11:5-10 is most often interpreted as the physical body part, but there are some commentators who see a call back to the metaphors in verse 3 in the various uses of “head” in verses 5-10.)
Headship in Ephesians
Ephesians 1:22 Christ is given as “head over all things in/to the church.” It is possible to go both ways with this verse. Let’s look at the full context from 1:10-23. God’s plan is to unite all things in heaven and earth in Christ (v. 10); we await our inheritance promised by the Holy Spirit (v. 11-14); Paul prays for us to know the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us (v. 19); Christ is raised far above all rule (archē) and authority — which certainly also indicates that Christ Himself is the preeminent authority; God places all things under his feet (v. 22 — also a metaphor for authority); and finally, Christ is given as head to the church which is His body, “the fullness of him who fills all in all.” (v. 22-23).
Admittedly, this one could go either way, but by no means is “source” ruled out. The metaphor of head here is that the church is Christ’s body and is filled with the fullness of Him; there is a major theme of Christ’s authority over the powers, but it goes hand-in-hand with the power, the inheritance, and the blessings flowing from Christ to the church. See the treatment of Colossians below where I believe Paul also combines leadership and source terms in a similar way.
Ephesians 4:15 “We are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ.” This verse leans more toward “source.” Verse 16 reads, “from whom the whole body, joined and held together... is equipped… and builds itself up in love.” The “from whom” phrase indicates that Christ as head of the body is its source. This is not to diminish Christ’s authority — He is our supreme Lord — but the head metaphor here is giving us a complementary truth.
Ephesians 5:23 “For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church.” The controlling term, “submit,” is found in verse 21 where everyone is submitting to everyone in Christian love and reverence for Christ. Verse 22 doesn’t actually contain the verb “submit” and translators must pull it from verse 21. I see verse 21, ‘Submit to one another’ as the controlling heading for the entire section. Each of the 6 movements that follow: wives > husbands; husbands > wives; children > parents; parents > children; slaves > masters; masters > slaves, should be seen as sub-headings under verse 21. In other words, Paul is giving us six examples of what “Submit to one another” looks like in a real household and community.
I recognize why modern readers would infer that “head” means leadership and authority in verse 23 because of its connection to the verb “submit,” but let me lay out why “source” works even here:
When we turn to verse 25-28 we see more clearly what Paul meant by Christ as “head.” And we don’t find an authority structure, just Christ giving his life to sanctify His bride, presenting her as holy back to Himself. Husbands are then told to do likewise. The one thing Paul tells the husband to do as head is to be the first to die for his bride. The commands Paul gives husbands in verses 25-28 are defined by sacrificial love, not directive authority. It’s noteworthy that Paul does not use the term “obey” (hypakouō) until 6:1, where children are told to obey their parents. We will discuss this passage even more in our upcoming article for this series.
We might wonder if submission and headship, based on this passage, looks like this: The man is commanded to die for his wife, and the wife is commanded to let him.
The Decisive Case of Colossians 1 & 2
Colossians 1 and 2 give us one of the most glorious descriptions of Christ in the New Testament. And I think it remains a primary place to see Christ’s preeminent authority and rule over all the powers, rulers, and leaders, as well as the church. Christ is indeed King of kings, Lord of lords. However, the poetry of these verses can hold multiple concepts together at once. Without diminishing at all the authority of Christ over the cosmos, it is also true that Christ is the source of all rule and authority. I believe the use of our term kephalē in Colossians more directly speaks to this.
Colossians 1:18 Speaks of Christ as the “head (kephalē) of the body.” He is also the beginning (this is the term archē), the firstborn, the preeminent of all things. The use of both kephalē and archē in this chapter should not be ignored.
Greek had a word for authority and rule — archē — and Paul uses it twice in this passage. In verse 16 it names the cosmic powers Christ created and transcends — “thrones, dominions, rulers [archai (pl.)], and authorities [exousiai].” In verse 18, it names Christ’s own primacy: he is the archē, the firstborn from the dead, preeminent over all things. Paul is not shy about the authority language when he wants it.
A note for readers unfamiliar with Greek: archē holds together two ideas that English splits into separate words — “beginning” and “ruler.” In ancient Greek thought, these were the same concept: the one who comes first sets the terms for everything that follows. To be first is to rule. This is why Paul can use archē in verse 18 to mean both “the first from the dead” and “the one whose authority now orders the new creation” — not two meanings forced onto one word, but one Greek idea that English requires two words to express.
Reading kephalē as “authority” in this passage produces a redundancy: Christ would be the authority-head of the church AND the archē — two authority terms where one would suffice. The more economical reading is that Paul is deliberately combining two concepts in one breath: archē for Christ’s primacy and rule, kephalē for the organic relationship with His body. Colossians 2:19 confirms which is which: the Head is the one “from whom the whole body is nourished.” Authority terms do not nourish. Sources do.
Colossians 2:10 Christ is the “head” of all rule and authority. Reading “head” as source here makes an even stronger Christological point: Not only does Christ supersede all rulers but the very capacity to rule — authority and power itself — originates in Him.
Colossians 2:19 We are commanded to hold fast to our Head, “from whom the whole body is nourished.” Again, the idea of Christ as the source of our nourishment and growth is more obviously the point rather than a statement about his leadership over us.
Conclusion
The result of this survey shows that none of the 15 non-biological uses of kephalē unambiguously require “authority over.” Several seem to directly suggest ‘source’ as the dominant metaphor. This strengthens my claim that Paul’s choice of kephalē in 1 Corinthians 11:3 — rather than archē — is not incidental. It is consistent with how he uses the word everywhere else.
Works Cited & Further Reading
Primary Sources
Athanasian Creed. In Schaff, Philip. 1890. The Creeds of Christendom, with a History and Critical Notes: The Greek and Latin Creeds, with Translations. Vol. 2. New York: Harper & Brothers.
Basil of Caesarea. Epistles 236. In Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 8. Eds. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace. Buffalo: Christian Literature, 1895.
Works Cited
Barrett, Matthew. Simply Trinity: The Unmanipulated Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2021.
Bedale, S. “The Meaning of kephalē in the Pauline Epistles.” Journal of Theological Studies n.s. 5, no. 2 (1954): 211–215.
Fee, Gordon D. The First Epistle to the Corinthians. New International Commentary on the New Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987. Rev. ed. 2014.
Giles, Kevin. The Trinity and Subordinationism: The Doctrine of God and the Contemporary Gender Debate. Downers Grove: IVP, 2002.
Grudem, Wayne, ed. Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: A Response to Evangelical Feminism. Crossway, 1991. Rev. ed. 2006.
Grudem, Wayne A. 2004. Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine. Leicester, England; Grand Rapids, MI: Inter-Varsity Press; Zondervan Pub. House.
Schlier, Heinrich. kephalē. In Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, vol. 3. Ed. Gerhard Kittel. Trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964.
Further Reading
Fee, Gordon D. “Praying and Prophesying in the Assemblies.” In Discovering Biblical Equality: Complementarity Without Hierarchy, eds. Ronald W. Pierce and Rebecca Merrill Groothuis. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2004.
Groothuis, Rebecca Merrill, and Ronald W. Pierce, eds. Discovering Biblical Equality: Complementarity Without Hierarchy. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2004.
Johnson, Alan F. “A Meta-Study of the Debate over the Meaning of “Head” (Kephalē) in Paul’s Epistles.” Priscilla Papers 20, no. 4 (2006).
Keener, Craig S. Paul, Women & Wives: Marriage and Women’s Ministry in the Letters of Paul. Peabody: Hendrickson, 1992.
Payne, Philip B. Man and Woman, One in Christ: An Exegetical and Theological Study of Paul’s Letters. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009.
Wright, N. T. Paul for Everyone: 1 Corinthians. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2004.
