Fr. Stephen De Young: Verse 22: “Therefore, tongues are for a sign not to those who believe, but to unbelievers, but prophesying is not for unbelievers but for those who believe.” So when I’m speaking—if I go out and speak in different languages, that’s to reach different people with the Gospel, to communicate to them. That’s the goal: to bring them into the community, with the wisdom and the guidance in those things. I’m not just going to go out into the street. Like, we don’t send our monastic elders: “Hey, go wander out into—”

Man: The mall.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, into the mall, “and just start handing out words of wisdom to passersby.” It might be effective sometimes—who knows how God would use it?—but that’s not the place where that happens. [Laughter] So, speaking different languages, he’s saying this kind of thing is for outreach, or what we would call outreach, whereas prophesying is to build up the body itself.

“Therefore if the whole church comes together in one place and all speak with tongues, and there come in those who are uninformed or unbelievers, will they not say that you are out of your mind?” [Laughter] So this is sort of chaos, where you’ve got different people speaking different languages and praying in different languages, and it’s just sort of confusion. Someone has come in from the next city over and— [Laughter] “What is this?”

“But if all prophesy, and an unbeliever or an uninformed person comes in, he is convinced by all, he is convicted by all.” So these are both situations that aren’t actually going to happen. You aren’t going to have a situation where literally everyone is speaking a different language. These are the two extremes. And you’re not really going to have a situation where everyone is a monastic elder in the entire community and is deeply wise. But he’s saying, hypothetically; St. Paul is saying: Hypothetically, if everyone was speaking in different language and somebody walked in the door, they’d think you were drunk and insane. [Laughter] But if people came in and everyone was full of wisdom and was offering them this spiritual wisdom and this truth, they’d be drawn in, they’d be convicted. They would surely become part of the community. So, again, which of these two should you be pursuing as a member of the community?

“And thus the secrets of his heart are revealed; and so, falling down on his face, he will worship God and report that God is truly among you.” So this is why this is the path for everyone to pursue.

Verse 26: “How is it then, brethren? Whenever you come together, each of you has a psalm, has a teaching, has a tongue, has a revelation, has an interpretation. Let all things be done for edification.” So amongst our many problems at the church in Corinth is that apparently we have a lot of people who want to be the leaders. [Laughter] Right, when you come together, everybody says, “I want to speak.”

Man: It sounds sort of like a Quaker meeting.

Fr. Stephen: “I want to lead this.” We talked about—back when we were going through Acts, we talked about that a little, like how could St. Paul just walk in and start preaching. We talked about how this model today of: there’s this rabbi who’s the reader of this synagogue and who preaches there every Saturday, every sabbath—that model is part of Rabbinic Judaism centuries later, and is really sort of patterned after the way Christians started organizing things. That in the first century at most of these synagogues, they didn’t have a full-time scholar, a full-time rabbi who lived there necessarily, but people would travel, and a lot of times it would just be one of the elders of the community, one of the older men, and they would take turns. Those who were literate would take turns doing the Scripture reading, would take turns doing the explanation and the preaching and share what they had to share.

So this was normal in the Jewish synagogues, that there was not this sort of one permanent clergyman kind of structure at this time. That’s why we see things like Jesus in the synagogue at Nazareth gets up and reads from the Isaiah scroll, or St. Paul can walk in and speak. There’s a remnant of this still, for example, in the bar mitzvah service, where one of the rites of passage where a boy now becomes an adult member of the community is that he reads from the Torah publicly; he reads the Scripture publicly. Because that goes back to the time when him becoming an adult man meant he would now be in the cycle of those who would read in the synagogue.

Man: I was in a synagogue once, and the rabbi was preaching, and this old man stood up and said, “No, Rabbi, I don’t think it’s like that,” and began to disagree with the interpretation of the lesson. Nobody was upset. This was evidently…

Fr. Stephen: Everyone who’s of a religious background tends to see other religions in terms of their own religion.

Man: Yeah, sure.

Fr. Stephen: And as Christians we tend to see, because most of our churches, regardless of what type of Christian you might be, most of us—unless you’re a Quaker [Laughter]—have one sort of primary clergy person at our local parish church, and so we tend to assume that, well, there’s a rabbi like that at the synagogue and imams at a Muslim mosque get ordained by somebody, right?—which isn’t true—and we just sort of assume, and that’s not really the case.

So what’s happened is that some of that, that looseness, has been carried over into the church in Corinth, and it’s way too loose in the sense that it’s not “Well, we’re going to take turns” or something, or “These are the people who are older, who are respected, who will share with us.” It’s just… Everybody shows up like: “I wanna…! I’ve got something to say!”

Verse 27: “If anyone speaks in a tongue, let there be two or at the most three, each in turn, and let one interpret.” So if anybody shows up and they’ve got something they want to say in another language, don’t have more than two or three. [Laughter] And this is just very bare-bones practical: and have someone there who can interpret what they’re saying to everybody else.

“Though if there is no interpreter, let him keep silent in church, and let him speak to himself and to God.” So if there’s no—if you’re the only one there who knows that language, then you don’t need to speak to anybody in that language; just pray. God understands you, so pray and God will understand your prayers.

“Let two or three prophets speak, and let the others judge.” That “let the others judge” is what you saw in that synagogue. [Laughter] So he’s saying at most two or three people get up and share some wisdom, effectively preach. This is another thing that people don’t realize. People sometimes go and read St. John Chrysostom’s sermons and say, “Wow. Those are awfully long.” I mean, if you read some of them out loud—some of them aren’t that long, but if you read some of them out loud it’d probably take you 40 or 45 minutes. And what people don’t realize is, at that time, for example when St. John was a presbyter in Antioch, all of the presbyters preached every Liturgy, followed by the bishop. [Laughter] So everyone at the church, all the presbyters—that’s just St. John’s homily! There were probably four or five other homilies from other presbyters, and then the bishop would run anchor and bring it home and preach last.

So what St. Paul’s pointing to here is not just some sort of Jewish thing that died out quickly in the Church. This is how it was done in the Church, and they clearly had much longer attention spans than we do today for some reason, unless you’re in Africa, where I understand they still like a good long sermon and a good long service as a cultural thing. But, yes, this was followed by the Church for centuries after this.

“But if anything is revealed to another who sits by, let the first keep silent. For you can all prophesy one by one, that all may learn and all may be encouraged.” So he’s saying: Take your turn. Wait. [Laughter] Do all this in good order. Don’t interrupt each other. Don’t try to get the other guy to wrap it up. Don’t start playing music like at the Oscars, play them off. And that’s putting a limit on the “let the others judge.” [Laughter] This shouldn’t look like a political debate; this should be in good order.

“And the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets. For God is not the author of confusion but of peace, as in all the churches of the saints.” So when he says “the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets,” he’s saying: If you’re really a prophet, if you’re really one of these wise people who should be sharing, then your spirit is subject to you; you can control yourself. Because he’s saying: Keep silent until the other one is speaking. And if you can’t, if you don’t have that level of self-control, then you’re not a prophet, and you don’t need to be speaking at all; you need to learn yourself first before you’re going to try and teach other people.

And then “God is not the author of confusion but of peace”; when he says, “in all the churches of the saints,” I think that’s a very modern translation. What it literally says, the word that we translate as “church” literally means “assembly” or “gathering,” and “saints” of course we talked about at the beginning of 1 Corinthians means “holy ones.” So St. Paul’s making a reference here to God in the assembly of the holy ones. What St. Paul is doing is he’s comparing: he’s talking about God in his heavenly council in heaven with his holy ones, with the angels. What is that like? Peace, calm, good order. He’s saying that’s what your worship should be like. It should reflect that.

Man: It’s so easy to misinterpret this stuff, because I interpreted that as: You should behave like other, better churches do. That’s how I read that.

Fr. Stephen: Right. [Laughter] Which of course they wouldn’t know, because odds are good most of them haven’t gone traveling around to a bunch of other assemblies, all of which would be liable to have their own problems. Now we’re going to get to yet another non-controversial passage. [Laughter]

Verse 34: “Let your women keep silent in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak; but they are to be submissive, as the law also says. And if they want to learn something, let them ask their own husbands at home; for it is shameful for women to speak in church.”

This is one of the most badly translated passages in the New Testament! [Laughter]

Man: My sister would not like this at all.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! [Laughter] This is one of the most badly translated passages. Now, it is not that St. Paul is here teaching the opposite of what it looks like; it is not that St. Paul is here saying, “Yeah, you should have women priests.” He’s not. And it would have been crazy for him to do that in the first century AD, especially being a Jewish person, because they had had female priests in the old covenant. So it’s not—when I say it’s badly translated, I’m not saying…

Man: That it’s the opposite.

Fr. Stephen: That it’s 180° wrongly translated, but it is wrongly translated in the sense that what it conveys, what the English here conveys to modern readers is not what the original words would have conveyed to the original readers. That’s what I mean by badly translated.

So a couple of points: We’ll start with “let your women keep silent in the churches.” We hear that and we say: Tell all the womenfolk to shut up. [Laughter] Right? But you have to understand, again, what went on in synagogues in the first century. What was the place of women in synagogues in the first century?

Man: Well, they sit separately apart in Orthodox synagogues now.

Fr. Stephen: Now. And what was the place of women in pagan worship? Primarily sexual, as we already talked about.

Man: Right. They were temple prostitutes.

Fr. Stephen: So he already, in his previous conversation about women and modesty, was saying: Well, none of that! To put it bluntly—and we may have mentioned this before in that context—the ancient world and Greco-Roman culture in particular, which means the culture in which all of the people in Corinth were raised, did not think women were equally human to men. That’s not an exaggeration. Greco-Roman society had the idea that humanity was sort of a sliding scale, and free Roman men were at the top of that scale, and then you went free Roman women and then children and then slaves and then what we might call peasants are down there.

Man: And freedmen are in there somewhere.

Fr. Stephen: That’s free Roman men, was up at the top—who were Roman citizens.

Fr. Stephen: But they still distinguished. “Oh, he’s a freedman. He used to be a slave, so he can’t be equal to a freeborn Roman.”

Fr. Stephen: Well, no, then you get into social class, too. There’s also just wealth [which] plays into this, and political power, yeah. I mean, we can go: there’s probably 13 grades on this scale, but women are well down there. Even the women who are at the highest level are well below the men at the same level, in their understanding. I know I’ve used this example before, that Aristotle said that women—being born a woman was essentially a birth defect, that all fetuses tried to develop into men, and some of them didn’t quite make it and came out as women.

Man: [Laughter] I remember that.

Fr. Stephen: That was his—yeah. And Plato spent the whole Symposium arguing in favor of pederasty because that was the only way someone could find love, because love could only exist between equals, and no man could accept a woman as an equal. That’s Plato. So this is the culture they’re living in.

So their understanding… St. Paul has just reoriented their idea of the purpose of language and leading worship how? It’s now about teaching and building up and edifying. To the pagan world, that was not possible for a woman. The pagans thought women can’t be educated like this. They can’t understand these things; they’re girls. They’re women. This is one of the really…

Man: I’ve even read Victorian statements of that…

Fr. Stephen: Oh, yeah! It went on for a good long time, yeah. There’s still people that way out there. [Laughter] But that’s one of the reasons why it’s so shocking in the gospels: the first witnesses to Christ’s resurrection are a bunch of women, who couldn’t… They couldn’t serve as witnesses in court, because their testimony was considered completely unreliable in the ancient world. But those are the people whom Christ chose to be the first witnesses of his resurrection—and the disciples even say that.

In the story of the road to Emmaus, when Christ comes and is talking to them on the road and they haven’t recognized that it’s Jesus yet, and they’re telling him about all the crazy things that have happened in Jerusalem, they say, “Oh, well, there was this person, Jesus of Nazareth. We thought he was the Messiah, but the Romans killed him. Hey, you know what happened after that that was crazy? These women showed up and said the tomb was empty and he was risen from the dead! Bah-hah!” And they even translate it into English: “But it seemed to us an idle tale.” [Laughter] Like, oh, that’s crazy. You crazy women, you’re just crazy with grief. We know you’re sad and you’re making up crazy things. Right? That’s how they looked at it.

So when St. Paul here says that they’re to keep silent, this is as opposed to: Oh, who cares what they’re doing? Let them go and gossip in the back. They can’t learn anything anyway. It’s getting away from the synagogue idea where the men will be over here studying the Scriptures; you ladies go talk about recipes over there in the corner.

Man: I think I remember there being a curtain or something where the women…

Fr. Stephen: Well, yeah, in the Temple, there was the court of women. Women couldn’t go as far into the Temple as men. St. Paul is breaking this down. They need to be there and be silent, why? Because they’re also to be learning; they’re also to be hearing and listening and understanding what’s happening. And that’s what’s translated here as “they are to be submissive” means “they’re to be under instruction,” the way a student is submissive to a teacher. They’re engaged in this relationship with the Church leadership, too, where they’re being built up and learning the faith.

And the part, “if they want to learn something, let them ask their own husbands at home,” this isn’t as opposed to—he isn’t saying: oh, hey, be quiet here in the church and go ask your husband to explain it to you when you get home. This is him placing a responsibility on husbands to help the relationship that’s taking place, because the husband, no matter what social class he is, is going to have had more educational opportunities than the wife, because husband and wife are going to be the same social standing. So that means, it’s saying, it’s putting the responsibility on the woman not only to listen and to be taught and to seek to understand herself within the gathering for worship, but also that if she doesn’t understand, that she continues, that she talks to her husband, and her husband is responsible for helping her get up to speed. And this extends also, then, to the children in the family, who also need to be educated, and it’s the responsibility of the parents to make sure that they understand what’s going on.

Man: But there are women leaders to the extent that Paul mentions them and says things to them and about them in his letters.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Phoebe’s a deaconness. St. Phoebe, yeah. And Ss. Priscilla and Aquila—Priscilla’s the wife, and she’s mentioned first every time the two of them are mentioned. So that’s not what it’s about, because what’s this whole section about? We’ve got to take this in context of the whole section. This whole section is talking about the order. It’s what’s going on in terms of what the leadership is doing in the worship and now leading into this section which is all about order: you speak in turn, not more than so many people, you only use languages if there’s someone there to interpret to everybody else. This is all about order.

So he finishes with: it’s shameful for women to be talking in church. He’s talking about… It would be as if, when we came here to church on Sunday morning for Liturgy, all the men went into the nave of the church for the service, and all of the women stayed out in the narthex and just drank coffee and talked and chatted while the men were in church. St. Paul is saying that’s shameful. They need to be in there in church, too, listening, learning, and it’s the husband’s responsibility to help and make sure that happens in the home, and it’s the wife’s responsibility to ask her husband to be actively trying to learn and understand. This is a responsibility on her, too; she didn’t have that responsibility before. It was just sort of keep an eye on the kids and hang around and talk to the other women— This is placing a responsibility… —and let the husband take care of all the spiritual work, which was fostered by… it was an unfortunate fostering…

This is another thing we’ve already seen in 1 Corinthians, when we saw what St. Paul did with the theology of circumcision in terms of baptism. Because with circumcision in the Jewish world, in the Torah, obviously it was just men who were circumcised. So what made female children part of the covenant was being married to a circumcised man or being the daughter of a circumcised man. And the fact that he was circumcised, dedicated to God, made the whole family holy. St. Paul uses that theology in various ways, but one of the ways that theology was misunderstood was: Oh, well, it’s just important what the paterfamilias does religiously. The kids don’t need to understand—at least the female children don’t need to understand; the sons who will later be fathers, well, they have to be educated so they can take their spot as father later, and the wives don’t need to understand. That was a misapplication that St. Paul’s correcting.

Just as when he talked about baptism and he talked about being married to someone who wasn’t a believer, he said that either the husband being baptized or the wife being baptized made the whole family sacred. He extended that to both men and women having this same standing and footing before God. That’s exactly what he’s doing here in a practical way in terms of the teaching ministry of the Church, that both men and women are subject to the teaching ministry of the Church and to coming to learn and understand their faith, and men are responsible for helping them do it.

Verse 36: “Or did the word of God come (“originally” is added) from you? Did the word of God come from you, or was it you only that it reached? If anyone thinks himself to be a prophet or spiritual, let him acknowledge that the things which I write to you are the commandments of the Lord. But if anyone is ignorant, let him be ignorant.”

So first he says—and again, this part about women gets sort of pulled out of context and then doesn’t get interpreted in terms of what came before it, and nobody looks at what comes after it as being related—he says, “Did the word of God come originally from you, or was it to you only that it reached?” What was he just saying? He was just saying: Women have a responsibility to learn; the husbands have a responsibility to help teach. So the point St. Paul is making is: because remember, someone taught you! You didn’t just wake up one morning and have the Gospel in your brain. Someone taught you, and you’re not the only one it was taught to. So you’re part of this community that is learning first and teaching second.

“If anyone thinks himself to be a prophet or spiritual, let him acknowledge”—now of course “spiritual”: we talked about capital-S. If anyone there is claiming they’re a prophet—if you’re claiming you’re one of the wise people, if you’re claiming that you possess the Holy Spirit, then you should be the first one to acknowledge that what I’m telling you comes from God.

Man: You should recognize it.

Fr. Stephen: Because he’s predicting that some of these people, those same ones whom he’s talking to, who are “Ooh, ooh, Mistah Cah-tah!” who are butting in and wanting to jump up and cutting of other people and putting themselves forward, might object to what St. Paul’s saying, but he’s saying: If you’re really one of those people, then you’ll recognize that what I’m saying is true. So that’s why he says, “But if anyone is ignorant, let him be ignorant,” meaning if you don’t think, if you don’t recognize this as coming from God, that means you’re ignorant. And if you’re ignorant, you don’t need to be teaching. If you’re ignorant, you don’t have anything to be explaining to anyone. You’re still learning, not a teacher.

“Therefore, brethren, desire earnestly to prophesy, and do not forbid to speak in tongues.” So this is his conclusion to this section. He says, summarizing: “Desire earnestly to prophesy.” Seek after wisdom. Seek the spiritual way of life, meaning the Holy Spirit, this ascetic way of life, following Christ to learn wisdom. He says, “Do not forbid people to speak in languages,” but “let all things be done decently and in order.” Follow this order and this structure.

Man: So he suddenly sums up what he’s been trying to say.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah! Not just this chapter; the last three chapters. So that’s where we’ll end for this evening. When we come back, which will be right after Pascha, then very appropriately we’ll get into chapter 15 which is all about the resurrection. Until then we’ll be having Presanctified Liturgies on Wednesdays. Thank you, everybody!