A reading of 1 Corinthians 14:33b-34a

1 Corinthians 14:33b-34a is one of the “hard texts” of the New Testament. The RSV translates it as:

As in all the churches of the saints, the women should keep silence in the churches.

Besides the fact that this is a hard saying, a textual difficulty is that earlier in the letter, at 11:5, Paul has no objection to women prophesying or praying (it seems very likely that praying would be out loud), though it has been suggested that this was outside of a liturgical context. Nor does later Church practice prohibit women from joining in vocal prayer during the liturgy.

I assume that the second "the churches" means "the churches of Corinth", while the first "the churches" refers to the churches more generally. And yesterday at our Department Bible study, I was struck by the fact that the “As” (Greek hōs) that begins the text can be read as “In the manner of”. On that reading, the first sentence of the hard text does not say that women should keep silent in the Corinthian churches. Rather, it says that women should keep silent in the Corinthian churches in the way and to the extent to which they keep silent in the other churches. In other words, women should only speak up in Corinthian liturgies at the points at which women speak up in non-Corinthian liturgies. This is compatible with women having various speaking roles—but only as long as they have these roles in “all the churches of the saints.”

(Note, however, that some versions punctuate differently, and make “As in all the churches of the saints” qualify what came earlier rather than what comes afterwards. My reading requires the RSV’s punctuation. Of course, the original has no punctuation.)

On this reading, the first sentence of the text is an application of a principle of liturgical uniformity between the churches, and Paul could equally well have said the same thing about the men. But the text suggests to me that there was some particular problem, which we can only speculate about, that specifically involved disorderly liturgical participation by Corinthian women, in addition to other problems of disorderly participation that Paul discusses earlier in the chapter.

The difficulty for my reading is the next sentence, however:

For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as even the law says. (1 Cor. 14:34b, RSV)

I would want to read this with “speak” restricted to the kinds of speech not found in the other churches. Perhaps in the other churches, there was no “chatting in the pews”, or socializing during the liturgy (Mowczko in a very nice summary of interpretations notes that this is St. John Chrystostom’s interpretation).

Another interpretation is that “the law” here is Roman law or Corinthian custom (though I don’t know that in Koine Greek “nomos” can still cover custom, like it can in classical Greek), so that Paul is reprising a motif of noting that the Corinthians are behaving badly even by their own cultural standards.

I don’t know that my reading is right. I think it is a little bit more natural to read the Greek as having a complete prohibition on women speaking, but my reading seems to be grammatically permissible, and one must balance naturalness of language with consistency in a text (in this case, consistency with 11:5). And in the case of a Biblical text, I also want an interpretation compatible with divine inspiration.

Contraception, liturgy and self-giving

Alice has a paper due the day after Thanksgiving. She’s already gotten all the extensions she can, and she can’t get it done except by working through Thanksgiving. She is thinking of not going to the big Thanksgiving dinner that her grandfather organizes every year, even though it brings together relatives she hasn’t heard from for a long time, has much warm family fellowship, and great food. But then she has an idea: “It’s better to attend distractedly than not at all. The table is big and my laptop is small, so I can easily put my laptop beside a plate, and then I can write all the way through dinner and finish my paper. And I’m good at multitasking, so I can still have an ear out for interesting bits of conversation, and occasionally I can put a forkful of food in my mouth or make a friendly remark to someone. It would be permissible for me to skip the dinner completely, and this is better than skipping it.”

Bob has a major exam on Wednesday. It is his habit to attend Mass daily, both for the spiritual benefits and because there is an incredible organist. He could skip Tuesday Mass, but reasons much as Alice does: “If I skip Mass, I get none of the spiritual and musical benefits. I’ll just bring my tablet, sit in the back pew so the bright screen doesn’t disturb anybody, study hard and I’ll at least get some of the benefits of Mass. After all, there is nothing wrong with my skipping Tuesday Mass, and this is better.”

Alice is being obtuse about human relationships and Bob doesn’t understand the kind of participation the Mass requires. There are some activities that one should give oneself pretty completely to—or not do them at all.

What if Bob says something like this? “But I go to Mass on many days when I’ve already spent hours working hard, and I’m really exhausted, and barely able to pay any attention to what the priest says. There is nothing morally wrong with attending Mass on days like that. But today I’m still fresh, and multitasking today I can participate at least as well as singletasking on a bad day.” And Alice can say something very similar—after all, very tired people can go to Thanksgiving dinner, too.

But that’s still not an excuse. For when one goes to Thanksgiving dinner or Mass, one should give oneself to it as much as one can (within some reasonable limit of what counts as “enough”). Both Alice and Bob are going to be deliberately withholding themselves from participation. But on the days when they attended while really tired, they weren’t doing that—they were giving what they could (it would be different if Bob ran a marathon in order to be too tired to follow the Gospel reading!).

Now, consider a common response to John Paul II’s argument that contraception is wrong because it deliberately blocks the total self-giving in sex. “Granted, contraception blocks an aspect of the union as one body. But a partial union is better than no union at all, and a couple is morally permitted to refrain from union for good reasons.” But that’s like Alice’s and Bob’s initial argument. And there is a case that can be made that sex is a liturgical kind of act, akin to Thanksgiving dinner or the Mass, and that in these kinds of liturgical acts one can’t participate while blocking an aspect of one’s participation—one needs to give one’s all, or not at all. It is better not to have sex at all than to have it while blocking one’s participation.

And then there is the riposte: “But the Catholic Church says it’s permissible to have sex while infertile. And contracepted sex has in it everything that infertile sex does.” But that riposte is just like Bob’s suggestion that studying at Mass with his tablet still leaves him as much (or more!) function as attending Mass on the days when he is really tired. Yes, that’s true, but it misses the liturgical meaning of deliberately distracting oneself with the tablet.

If it is objected that sex isn’t analogous to Thanksgiving dinner or the Mass (though I think it is), we could think about the case of Carl who is a professional movie reviewer. His wife would like to have sex with him, but he needs to watch and review a boring movie by tomorrow. So he sets up a laptop by the bed, and unites with his wife while watching the movie. Ugh! It would be better not to have sex at all.

Leviticus and a life of liturgy

I finished reading Leviticus. I had never read all of it before. It took a while to get any significant benefit from it, but finally things started coming together. Here are some unoriginal reflections. The text contains a welter of regulations about various aspects of life. In the first century AD, some heretical groups found the regulations so arbitrary that they rejected the Torah as something not fitting to a reasonable God, and some more orthodox Christians tried to find far-fetched allegorical readings of them (the Epistle of Barnabas, while well-meaning, and an interesting early witness to the Christian opposition to unnatural sexual activity, is a particularly egregious example). But textually these regulations are anchored in exhortations that the Israelites should be a priestly people, holy even as the Lord is holy.

Rudolf Otto has famously criticized the modern misunderstanding of "holy" as "superlatively morally good" for leaving out the numinous, the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. Indeed, if we read "holy" in Leviticus as "superlatively morally good", we will throw up our hands in despair, as the early groups I had mentioned did. The prohibition on eating hares surely is not in itself requires for superlative moral goodness. But neither does it appear right to read the text as simply exhorting us to be mysterious, awe-full and fascinating.

Rather, "holy" in the text tends to carry the connotation of "consecrated": holy to the Lord. A priest is, of course, consecrated to his deity, and his life is a life of liturgical service to his deity. There is no surprise if this liturgical service involves actions that are strange, for instance ordained by ancient tradition, held to be revealed by a deity, and so on. It is no surprise if a priest of a religion should be commanded to wear only certain kinds of clothes, eat only certain kinds of foods, perform special actions on special days, and so on.

What is surprising, however, is the notion of a whole people that is set apart, holy, consecrated in a priestly way, and perhaps also the notion of a service to the deity that encompasses all of the servant's time. But once we have the notion of a priestly people, and of liturgical services that encompasses all of a priestly person's time, that these people should have strange rules is no more surprising than that there should be regulations as to which direction around an altar a priest should proceed, or what material his knife should be made of. Liturgy, the priest's business, is full of rules that are not of the priest's making, rules that go beyond moral requirements. In fact, the existence of such rules seems central to liturgy—a liturgy that is created ad hoc for one occasion is either an oxymoron or at least deeply defective.

One thing we can learn from Leviticus, then, is the idea of a whole life lived as liturgy. And while the specific rules no longer literally apply in the Christian era, the idea of a whole life of service to God, a life of liturgy, is intensified in Christianity, in at least two ways. The first way is through every Christian's participation in the sacrifice of Christ, a participation more intimate than that of the Israelite in the Levitical sacrifices, because Christ the High Priest lives through us. The second, and liturgically very significant, intensification is that in the Eucharist all Christians need to participate, in a completely real way, in the quintessentially priestly action of eating of the sacrificial victim.

At the same time, we also see from Leviticus that even in a priestly people there can be distinctions between priestly roles. The priesthood of all believers does not entail that all believers are priestly in an equal way. Each Christian has a priestly role deeper than that of even the Israelite levites, but this is quite compatible with some Christians being ordained to an even deeper participation in Christ's priesthood. In fact, it seems that hierarchicality is an important part of a priestly people, just as priesthoods seem to be innately hierarchical.

The deposit of faith

Consider the following objection to the Catholic faith (this is based on something I got by email): Catholicism includes a large number of detailed and substantive doctrines that do not seem to be derivable from God's revelation as completed by around the time of death of the Apostles, even though the Catholic Church herself claims that revelation was completed by around the time of death of the Apostles.

Consider, after all, something like the doctrine that Mary was free of original sin from the first moment of her conception. This is a detailed and substantive doctrine that seems to go far beyond the information given in Scripture and what we know about the faith of the first century Church from non-Scriptural sources. The objection is an incredulous stare at the possibility that such doctrines could be derived from revelation as completed by around the time of death of the Apostles. But:

1. Twenty simple axioms of Euclidean geometry generate an infinity of detailed and substantive theorems. These theorems are such that there is no prima facie way to see that they would follow from the axioms. It can take centuries and centuries for humankind to discover that they can be derived. It should, thus, be no surprise at all that we can derive from a set S of propositions new propositions that are details and substantive, and that seem to go far beyond S. This is particularly true when S is not a list of twenty axioms, but includes about 27,570 verses of the Old Testament, about 7956 verses of the New Testament, as well as decades of Apostolic preaching which Catholics think became embedded in the tradition of the Church, particularly in her liturgy.

2. Furthermore, unlike the development of geometry which is as far as we know is typically done by the unaided human intellect, the development of Catholic doctrine is claimed to be done by the human intellect guided by Holy Spirit.

3. Moreover, the Scriptures and the Tradition of the Church not only contain particular doctrinal axioms from which we can derive further propositions, but contain ways of reasoning or rules of inference that embody an understanding of how God deals with the world. Prominent among these is typology. In the New Testament and the Church's liturgy, we learn that God works through parallels. The people of Israel pass through the sea; Christians pass through baptism. Adam sins and from his sin comes death; Christ conquers sin and from his conquering sin comes life. The New Testament (Luke 24:27) says that all of the Old Testament scriptures tell us about Christ. Thus there may be substantive ways of reasoning embodied in Scripture, liturgy and theological practice, ways of reasoning that include typological reasoning. These ways of reasoning are, plainly, more than just formal rules of logic. They are based, rather, on an understanding of God as acting in certain ways (maybe with certain motives), as producing a certain kind of deeply interconnected history.

And new insights might well come from this. Christ corresponds in an important way to Adam; but Mary in the Church's understanding corresponds in an important way to Eve. Just as Eve was created without sin, so, too, Mary was created without original sin. Now it is true that prima facie one might have tried different typological correspondences--one might, for instance, make Mary's being conceived in sin be parallel-by-contrast to Eve's being sinless (as Christ's raising us is parallel-by-contrast to Adam's bringing death on us). Working out a deep understanding of the typology here, and connecting it with many other aspects of Christian doctrine, is going to be difficult. It may take centuries, thus, for the Church to settle on a particular understanding, e.g., to see that the parallel between the new creation in Christ and the old creation in Adam does in fact call not just for Christ the new Adam to be without original sin, but Mary the new Eve as well, but of course with her freedom from the weight of original sin flowing from Christ's redemption, just as our Church's freedom from the weight of original sin does.

Conclusion: It should be no surprise if from a very large body of axioms, which includes substantive rules of inference, one could derive many doctrines that one is individually surprised by.