View source for A response to Bernard's views on women's hair

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= Rebuttal of Bernard's Position on Women's Uncut Hair =

Bernard's position in ''Essentials of Holiness'' is clear and unqualified. Under the heading of appearance, he lists "cut hair on women" as something Christians must abstain from, placing it in a category he describes as "biblical, and therefore universal and unchanging." He writes:<blockquote>"Since God asks women to have long hair, they should not trim it or otherwise seek to shorten it deliberately." </blockquote>He cites 1 Corinthians 11:5–6 and 13–16 as his primary support and asserts that "the Bible always links this practice with shame and unnaturalness."

Every one of those claims is either wrong or a significant overreach. 

== Using Gordon Fee's Commentary on 1 Corinthians 11:2–16 ==

Gordon Fee (May 23, 1934 – October 25, 2022) was an American-Canadian Christian Pentecostal theologian who was an ordained minister of the Assemblies of God (USA). He was professor of New Testament Studies at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada and is widely regarded as the most prominent Pentecostal theologian of the last 100 years.

He succeeded F.F. Bruce to become the editor of the notable evangelical commentary series, the New International Commentary on the New Testament. He was also a member of the committee that translated the New International Version (NIV). Gordon Fee's commentary on 1 Corinthians is widely regarded as the leading commentary on that book.
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== What the Passage Is Actually About ==
The first problem with Bernard's reading is that he has identified the wrong issue. He treats 1 Corinthians 11:13–16 as Paul's direct instruction about hair length. But Fee's exegesis of the entire passage demonstrates that Paul's primary concern throughout 11:2–16 is the practice of some women praying and prophesying without a head covering of some kind, whether a cloth veil or some form of external covering. That is the problem Paul is correcting. The hair argument in verses 14–15 is not the main point. It is an analogy — a supporting illustration — used to reinforce the argument Paul has already been making about coverings.

Fee is direct about this. He notes that the problem Paul is addressing "has to do with her head being 'uncovered' while praying and prophesying," and that is established by "the two explicit expressions of the problem (vv. 5–6 and 13)." The question of hair enters only in the third and final section of the argument (vv. 13–16), and even there, Fee argues, it functions as an analogy pointing back to the earlier concern, not as a freestanding command about hairstyle. If you want to know what 1 Corinthians 11 is about, it is about women wearing something on their heads in the Christian assembly. It is not primarily about whether women may trim their hair.

Bernard has extracted the analogy and treated it as the command.
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== "Nature" Does Not Mean What Bernard Claims ==
The heart of Bernard's argument is verse 14: "Does not the very nature of things teach you that if a man has long hair, it is a disgrace to him, but that if a woman has long hair, it is her glory?" He reads "nature" here as an appeal to the created order, to something God has built permanently into the fabric of human existence. Because "nature" teaches it, the distinction is universal and binding in all cultures and times.

Fee dismantles this reading directly. He writes: "Paul is not arguing that men ''must'' wear their hair short, or that women ''must'' have long hair, as though 'nature' meant some kind of 'created order.'" Fee explains what Paul does mean: <blockquote>"it is a question of propriety and of 'custom' (vv. 13, 16), which carries with it 'disgrace' or 'glory' (vv. 14–15). Hence, this is an appeal to the 'way things are,' which the NIV translators have rightly put into a corresponding English idiom ('the nature of things'), that is, to the 'natural feeling' that he and they shared together as part of their contemporary culture."</blockquote>In other words, "nature" in verse 14 is Paul's shorthand for "this is how things are done among us in this culture and it feels right to us." It is not a theological declaration about the created order. Fee adds that "the very appeal to 'nature' in this way suggests most strongly that the argument is by way of analogy, not of necessity."

The proof that this cannot mean a universal creation principle is sitting right in Acts 18:18. Luke records that Paul himself "had his hair cut off at Cenchreae because of a vow he had taken." Fee notes this directly: Paul "had apparently worn long hair for a time in Corinth as part of a vow. But the very nature of the vow — both letting the hair grow long and cutting it again — demonstrates the 'normalcy' of shorter hair on men, as is also evidenced by thousands of contemporary paintings, reliefs, and pieces of sculpture." Long hair on men was culturally unusual in the Greco-Roman world. That is what made it feel like a "disgrace" to Paul and his audience. It was a cultural norm, not a creation ordinance.

If the "disgrace" of long hair on men is grounded in Greco-Roman cultural feeling rather than in created order — and Fee demonstrates that it clearly is — then the parallel "glory" of long hair on women is grounded in exactly the same cultural soil. You cannot selectively apply one half of the comparison as a universal principle and treat the other half as culturally limited.
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== The Hair Argument Is an Analogy, Not a Direct Command ==
Fee is careful about what Paul actually does with hair in verses 14–15. The argument is not "women must have long hair because nature commands it." The argument is "nature shows that a woman's long hair is her glory and serves as a natural covering for her; by the same logic, she should maintain a covering when she prays and prophesies." The hair observation supports the covering argument. It does not stand on its own as a direct command about what women may do with their hair.

Fee's own words: "just as before (vv. 5b–6), Paul is arguing by analogy that, since women have by 'nature' been given long hair as a covering, that in itself points to their need to be 'covered' when praying and prophesying."

The direction of the argument runs from the natural phenomenon of a woman's hair toward the cultural practice of wearing a covering in worship. The goal of the argument is the covering. The hair is the supporting evidence. Bernard has reversed the logic by treating the supporting evidence as the command and ignoring the actual conclusion.

This matters because Bernard uses verses 14–15 to derive a prohibition on cutting hair, but Paul never states that prohibition. Paul says long hair is a woman's glory and that it functions as a natural covering. He does not say "therefore women must never cut their hair." He does not set a minimum length. He does not use the word "trim." He does not issue any command about hair length at all. The command he issues in the preceding section is the covering command: "let her be covered" (v. 6). Bernard's specific rule — no deliberate shortening of a woman's hair under any circumstances — has no direct textual support in this passage or anywhere else in Scripture.
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== What the "Shame" of Cutting Hair Actually Refers To ==
Bernard says "the Bible always links this practice [cutting women's hair] with shame and unnaturalness." He derives this from verse 6: "if it is a disgrace for a woman to have her hair cut off or her head shaved, then she should cover her head."

But Fee explains carefully what Paul is actually doing with this verse. The reference to a woman having her hair "cut short" or her head "shaved" is used as an analogy for why praying uncovered brings shame, not as a direct declaration that cutting hair is inherently sinful. The shame in this case, Fee notes, "seems clearly to be related to her becoming like a man with regard to her hair," which by analogy suggests that the Corinthian women "were blurring male/female relationships in general and sexual distinctions in particular."

The specific scenario Paul invokes — a woman's head being shaved — was in Paul's cultural context associated with prostitution or punishment for adultery, both circumstances of public disgrace. He is using that cultural association rhetorically to make his audience feel the force of the analogy. If you accept that a shaved head on a woman is disgraceful (and his audience certainly would), then you should also accept that praying uncovered brings a parallel kind of shame.

Paul never says in this verse that cutting hair is a moral violation. He says a specific cultural understanding of what constitutes shame supports his argument about the covering. Bernard has again taken the analogical vehicle and mistaken it for the command.
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== Paul Himself Calls This a "Custom" ==
The most decisive point against Bernard's position comes from the verse he rarely quotes in connection with this passage: verse 16. Paul closes the entire argument with these words: <blockquote>"If anyone wants to be contentious about this, we have no other practice — nor do the churches of God."</blockquote>Fee's analysis of this verse is important. He writes: <blockquote>"That he is dealing strictly with 'custom' (church 'custom,' to be sure) is now made plain, as is the fact that this argument, for all its various facets, falls short of a command as such."</blockquote>Paul's concluding appeal is not to a creation ordinance, not to a moral absolute, and not to an explicit divine command. It is to what the churches currently do. The word Fee uses is "custom." It is not the language Paul reaches for when he is laying down something as a fixed and universal moral requirement. Compare Paul's language in 1 Corinthians 6:18 on sexual immorality ("flee from sexual immorality"), or 1 Corinthians 10:14 on idolatry ("flee from idolatry"), or Romans 13:13 on drunkenness and debauchery. When Paul is dealing with clear moral commands, he issues them directly as commands. Here, he makes a complex multi-part argument and then concludes by telling the contentious to look at what the other churches do. Fee's observation is apt: this argument "falls short of a command as such."

That does not make it unimportant. Fee is not saying Paul's concern was trivial. He is saying that the character of Paul's argument here is different from his direct moral commands, and that matters enormously for how we apply it.
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== The Cultural Transfer Problem ==
Even granting that Paul's instruction about head coverings was binding for Corinth, Fee raises a serious question about whether it can simply be lifted out of that context and applied universally. He writes: <blockquote>"the very 'customary' nature of the problem, which could be argued in this way in a basically monolithic cultural environment, makes it nearly impossible to transfer 'across the board' to the multifaceted cultures in which the church finds itself today — even if we knew exactly what it was we were to transfer, which we do not."</blockquote>There are two problems Fee identifies. First, we do not know with certainty what the actual covering practice was that Paul was defending. There are genuine scholarly debates about whether he means an external cloth covering, a certain hairstyle, or something else. Second, even if we knew, the cultural dynamics that made the issue significant in Corinth — specifically, what counted as shameful or appropriate for women in that social context — do not straightforwardly translate into twenty-first century contexts, let alone the variety of cultural contexts the church now occupies globally.

Fee adds a pointed observation about what happens when literal application is attempted: <blockquote>"it would seem that in cultures where women's heads are seldom covered, the enforcement of such in the church turns Paul's point on its head, by calling unnecessary attention to the women that should be reserved for God alone."</blockquote>If the point of the custom was to maintain the conventional appearance of respectable women in worship so as not to bring unnecessary attention or shame on the assembly, then requiring a practice that is genuinely unusual in the surrounding culture does the opposite of what Paul intended. This is exactly the kind of contextual intelligence that Bernard's application lacks.
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== What Paul Actually Prohibits — and What He Does Not ==
Let us be precise about what this passage actually forbids.

Paul argues that women should maintain a customary covering when praying and prophesying in the assembly, because to do otherwise would be culturally shameful in the Corinthian setting and would blur the distinction between male and female. He uses the cultural observation that long hair is a woman's glory and natural covering to reinforce the argument for an external covering. He appeals at the end to what the churches commonly do.

What he never says, anywhere in the passage:

#He never says women may not cut or trim their hair. 
#He never sets a minimum length. 
#He never states that any deliberate reduction in a woman's hair length is sinful. 
#He never says this rule applies "regardless of culture," as Bernard asserts. 
#He never frames this as a creation ordinance that transcends cultural variation.

Bernard's prohibition — "women should not trim it or otherwise seek to shorten it deliberately" — is not in this passage. It cannot be derived from what Paul says without filling in a significant gap with an assumption that Fee's careful exegesis shows the text does not support.
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== The Honest Question This Raises ==
Bernard's rules on hair length and head covering are among the most distinctive and visible markers of UPCI women. The social cost of questioning them is real. But the honest reading of 1 Corinthians 11 through the lens of careful scholarship does not produce what Bernard claims it produces.

What Paul gives us is a culturally embedded argument for maintaining appropriate gendered distinctions in worship, argued through the norms of his specific time and place, and concluded with an appeal to church custom rather than a direct divine command. Fee's summary captures it well: "the very fact that Paul argues in this way, and that even at the end he does not give a commandment, suggests that such a 'church custom,' although not thereby unimportant for the Corinthians, is not to be raised to canon law."

'''A rule you can derive from careful reading of this text:''' maintaining visible distinctions between men and women in worship matters, and in any given cultural context the church should act in a way that honors rather than blurs those distinctions.

'''A rule you cannot honestly derive from this text:''' women may never trim their hair under any circumstances.

Bernard has elevated a pastoral application for a specific cultural situation into a universal, timeless command binding on all women in all cultures. That is not exegesis. It is the kind of burden-laying Jesus reserved his sharpest words for.
----''This rebuttal engages David K. Bernard,'' Essentials of Holiness ''(Hazelwood, MO: Word Aflame Press, 1989), pp. 28–29, and Gordon D. Fee,'' The First Epistle to the Corinthians, ''Revised Edition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), pp. 542–586, on 1 Corinthians 11:2–16.''


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[[Category: UPCI Doctrines]]
[[Category: Legalism]]
[[Category: Women's hair]]