My wife and I grew up in an Anabaptist church setting that attempted to shed modern theological innovations in favor of returning to the pure, simple faith of the apostles and the early church. As I learned about church history for myself, I began to see that our churches were largely just rehashing the same debates the Church at large has worked through since the early church. So as I gained an appreciation for the broader Christian tradition, I also started to question some of our church's particular distinctives.

One of those was the practice of head coverings: women wearing a cap or veil.

At the time, only a few denominations that I was aware of (the Amish and Mennonites) still practiced the head covering, and it tended to be lumped in with other counter-cultural expressions like long dresses and plain clothes.

There was the passage in 1 Corinthians 11 which talked about it, of course, but the prevailing interpretations of the day argued that the "covering" was supposed to be long hair, and hinged their argument upon technicalities of the Greek text. I didn't know enough Greek to decide if it was a fair argument or not. Ultimately, I decided to simply abide by the practice of whatever church I belonged to. For many years, once we were married and began attending a Baptist church, we did not practice head covering.

But I was never fully satisfied with that conclusion, and recently I was prompted to revisit the question as our church preached through the book of 1 Corinthians.

The Plain Text

In his series, our pastor did not adopt the interpretation I'd heard years before - that the "covering" in 1 Corinthians 11 is long hair - but instead made the case that he believed the covering was a 1st century cultural practice which Paul encouraged as an appropriate reflection of Scriptural truth about headship.

I don't bring this up to set this as an argument against my pastor, but to credit him with forcing me to reckon with my own assumptions. He refuted my objection that I couldn't find the answers without a command of Greek, and prompted me to dig into the historical/cultural practices of head covering.

Where, it happened, I found unexpected answers.

The plain reading of 1 Corinthians 11:2-16 can be summarized like this:

1. When praying or prophesying, if a man has his head covered, he dishonors Christ; if a woman has her head uncovered, she dishonors her husband, just as she would dishonor her husband if she were shaved bald.
2. This is because the man is the image and glory of God, while the woman is the image and glory of the man.
3. Nature models this for us by showing that it is good for the man to have short hair and the woman to have long hair.

This left me with a few questions:

• What exactly was the 1st century practice of head covering?
• Did they have the same notion of long hair as a "head covering"?
• Did the early church (which understood Paul's Greek far better than me) understand this to be a cultural practice?

The Historical and Cultural Context

This time, I decided not to simply accept modern analyses, but to follow them back to primary sources from the original time period. I wanted to know, in context, what the people living in the era of 1 Corinthians and the early church had written.

What I learned was that all three dominant cultures in the church - Greek, Roman, and Jewish - were familiar with and practiced (to some degree) a cloth covering upon the head. The details of the practice varied depending on time and place, but there was a general sense across all three cultures that it was modest and appropriate for a woman to cover her head. Roman men tended to worship with heads covered (capite velato); Greek and Jewish men worshipped with heads uncovered (until the latter began covering for prayer in the post-Temple period).

Universally, the early church connected Paul's commands with these cloth coverings with which they were already familiar. ¹ There were no sources, at all, that argued or implied that "long hair" was the appropriate covering.

(I did find modern analyses that cited original sources in defense of the idea, but when I went back and actually read those original sources, I could only conclude that those modern authors had not.)

At this point I was satisfied with ruling out the position that the head covering was intended to be "long hair." The early church, after all, understood Greek better than I. If they universally understood Paul to be using hair as a reason for covering rather than the covering itself, I could be reasonably confident that the interpretation did not hinge upon Greek technicalities.

This left one final question: was this a local practice, or a church practice? Was the church adopting the head covering from the pagans around them, simply because it sent the right message in that culture? Or did the head covering have deeper and more enduring roots?

Paul based the practice of the head covering upon three things: the Creation order of headship; the angels; and the testimony of nature. Notably, he did not defend it based on its meaning in contemporary culture. So, I suspected I knew what I would find, but I set out to answer the next question.

When did the church decide the head covering was no longer relevant to their culture?

The March of Progress

For hundreds of years after the apostles, the Gospel spread from its nest in Judea to the ends of the earth, touching and transforming wildly different cultures. Along the way the church debated, argued, and even fought over the importance of different doctrines. The East and West split in the Great Schism, and then the West split again in the Reformation.

Remarkably, one of the few areas they remained united was the uncontroversial practice of the head covering. It was simply accepted and taught as fact, from John Chrysostom to John Calvin to John Wesley.

Then modern liberalism began to replace the church's commitment to Scripture with something else.

The earliest source I could find who argued that the head covering was a contemporary cultural practice, rather than an enduring command, was a liberal German theologian named Hermann Olshausen, who wrote in the early 1800s:

...we are not to regard this in light of a command, but as good counsel justified by the period, and it would be unnecessarily precise to require that the representations here laid down by the apostle should be literally followed in all ages. ²

Olshausen, it should be noted, also rejected the inspiration of Scripture.

The practice of head covering nevertheless continued to be mainstream in the church until around the 1950s. Feminist organizations like NOW (the National Organization of Women) campaigned hard against head coverings because of what they represented - the proper headship order.

WHEREAS, the wearing of a head covering by women at religious services is a custom in many churches and whereas it is a symbol of subjection within these churches, NOW recommends that all chapters undertake an effort to have all women participate in a "national unveiling" by sending their head coverings to the task force chairman immediately. At the Spring meeting of the Task force on Women in Religion, these veils will then publicly be burned to protest the second class status of women in all churches. ³

And they were, remarkably, successful.

At this point it was clear to me that head coverings were not merely an appropriate cultural symbol for headship back in the first century; they had continued to be an appropriate symbol into 20th century America, and still challenged the world with God's truth about headship. The American church, unfortunately, elected to yield to political pressures rather than standing for that truth.

Conclusion

This is not the first time the American church has had to struggle its way back from positions it has capitulated. In the 1960s, the Southern Baptist Church declined to condemn abortion as murder, but has repented and regained that ground; recently, some denominations have been regaining a firm stance on women in ministry as well.

A few American denominations never abandoned the head covering, and it seems to be much more common in the church globally. But some are beginning to recover this symbol too - embracing what Scripture teaches about the headship order, and then bravely signaling that to the world.

As for me and my house, we will do the same!