It would seem, in chapter 11,
that the sisters at Corinth gave the assembly a good deal of trouble, and that
they had forgotten entirely their due relative place. No doubt the men were at
least as much to blame. It is hardly possible that women should ever put
themselves forward in the church unless Christian men have deserted their true
responsible position and public action. It is the man’s place to guide; and
although women may assuredly be far more useful in certain cases, still, unless
the man guides, what an evident departure from the order God has assigned to
them both!

 

Thus it was at Corinth. Among
the heathen, women played a most important part, and in no quarter of the
world, perhaps, so prominent a one as there. Need it be said that this was to
their deep shame? There was no city in which they were so degraded as that in
which they attained such conspicuous and unnatural prominence. And how does the
apostle meet this? He brings in Christ. This is what decides all. He affirms
the everlasting principles of God, and he adds that which has so brightly been
revealed in and by Christ. He points out that Christ is the image and the glory
of God, and that the man stands in an analogous place as connected with and
distinguished from the woman. That is to say, the woman’s place is one of
unobtrusiveness; in fact, she is most effective where she is least seen. The
man, on the contrary, has a public part—a rougher and ruder task, no doubt—one
that may not at all bring into play the finer affections, but which demands a
calmer and more comprehensive judgment. The man has the duty of the outward
rule and administration.

 

Accordingly, the apostle marks
the first departure from what was right by the woman’s losing the sign of her
subjection. She was to have a covering on her head; she was to have that which
indicated as a sign that she was subject to another.* The man seemed to have
failed just in the opposite way; and although this may seem a very little
thing, what a wonderful thing it is, and what power it shows, to be able to
combine in the same epistle eternal things and the very smallest matter of
personal decorum, the wearing of long hair or short, the use of a covering on
the head or not! How truly it marks God and His Word!

 

(*Ed. note:There is no warrant
whatever for the notion, so prevalent today, that the woman’s hair is the
covering spoken of in 1 Cor. 11:5, 6. "For if a woman be not covered, let
her hair also be cut off. But if it be shameful to a woman to have her hair cut
off or to be shaved, let her be covered" (v. 6 JND). The covering and the
hair are clearly distinct in this verse. May we also consider whether the
tendency today toward getting away with as small a head covering as possible is
glorifying to God and whether it befits the truth—that of the woman being
hidden and subject—depicted in this symbol.)

 

It was out of order for woman to
prophesy with her head uncovered; man’s place was to do so. He is the
"image and glory of God" (v. 7). The apostle connects it all with
first principles, going back to the creation of Adam and Eve in a very blessed
manner, and above all bringing in the second Man, the last Adam.

 

The first part of 1 Cor. 11 has
nothing to do with the assembly, and thus does not dispose of the question
whether a woman should prophesy there. In fact, nothing is said or implied in
the early verses of the assembly at all. The point primarily argued is of her
prophesying after the manner of a man, and this is done with the greatest
possible wisdom. Her prophesying is not absolutely shut out. If a woman has a
gift for prophesy, which she certainly may have as well as a man, for what is
it given of the Lord but for exercise? Only she must take care how she does
exercise it. First of all, he rebukes the unseemly way in which it was done—the
woman forgetting that she was a woman, and the man that he is responsible not
to act as a woman. They seem to have reasoned in a petty way at Corinth that because a woman has a gift no less than a man, she is free to use the gift
just as a man might. This is in principle wrong; for after all, a woman is not
a man, nor like one officially, say what you please. The apostle sets aside the
whole basis of the argument as false; and we must never hear reasoning which
overthrows what God has ordained. Nature ought to have taught them better. But
he does not dwell on this; it was a withering rebuke even to hint at their forgetfulness
of natural propriety.

 

(From Lectures
Introductory to the Study of the Epistles of Paul the Apostle.)