The Men are in Control: Women and Worship at Corinth

Another Sunday for the ladies at the First Church of Corinth

I’ve just finished reading Lucy Peppiatt’s Women and Worship at Corinth, which I shall be reviewing for Theological Book Review. Towards the end of the book, in the concluding chapter, Peppiatt summarises:

Paul addresses a number of problems in the public worship [at Corinth]. The first is that women are being made to veil when praying or prophesying, and being made to do so in a coercive manner. The second is that the men that Paul is addressing are behaving selfishly and greedily at the Lord’s Supper. The third is that the Corinthians (or some of them) are exercising spiritual gifts in an unloving and unhelpful way, possibly preventing others from taking part in bringing prophetic words, hymns, and revelations to the gathering, acting independently, or ignoring some parts of the body. The fourth is that the “spiritual” tongues speakers have implemented a strange practice of babbling in tongues all at once on the grounds that this is a powerful witness to unbelievers. The fifth is that they are subjecting married women to remaining silent. We know that he thought that their meetings were doing more harm than good. The section on worship [1 Cor. 11–14] includes at its heart 1 Corinthians 12:31b—13:13, in which Paul describes the “more excellent way,” the way of love, which must underpin all Christian worship and life together lest the church become a discordant and harsh noise to those around it. It begins and ends with two passages on the treatment of women in public worship. Traditionally, these have been read as Paul endorsing some sort of repressive or constraining practices in relation to women for the sake of propriety. I contend, however, that he is saying the opposite, and freeing women from these very practices. If this is true, then, interestingly, Paul begins and ends his section on public worship by addressing the oppression of women, and coming out as strongly as possible against it.

Lucy Peppiatt, Women and Worship at Corinth: Paul’s Rhetorical Arguments in 1 Corinthians (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2017; originally published by Cascade Books, 2015), p. 135; cf. pp. 10–11

Peppiatt contends that the Corinthian church was effectively dominated by a certain type of authoritarian Alpha-male Christian leader:

[Scholars ask us] to imagine all kinds of scenarios in order to make sense of Paul’s thought, but all are predicated on the assumption that it is the women [at Corinth] who are rebellious and noncompliant. I question, however, whether it really is easier to imagine a group of wild and rebellious women who are so uncontrollable that they need the intervention of the apostle than it is to imagine the existence of a group of spiritually gifted and highly articulate male teachers who were both overbearing and divisive men. I propose that in a relentlessly patriarchal society, it is more plausible to believe the latter might be the case, that under the men’s influential leadership, certain oppressive practices had been implemented, and other destructive and selfish practices had remained unchallenged. (p. 10).

According to Peppiatt’s argument, the sections in 1 Corinthians 11–14 that appear to sanction the silencing of women and other liturgical oddities (11:4-5b, 7-10, 14; 14:21-22, 34-35) are in fact Paul’s quotations from the Corinthian church’s male leaders, reproduced in order to be refuted. I find Peppiatt’s claims more than feasible.