My church has been slowly inching through Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians for a while now, and we have finally arrived at the point I have been anticipating—1 Corinthians 11:2-16, the head covering passage.

I was recently persuaded, with the help of some faithful reformed fellows over the past year, of women covering and men uncovering their heads in the public, organized worship of God. As those in agreement can attest to in this day and age, my wife and I now find ourselves in the minority in our local church body. So naturally, we have been prayerfully anticipating this passage being preached at church as we approached chapter 11.

Our pastor and most (if not all) of our covenant brothers and sisters in our church do not agree with us, and I would like to point out that this is not a jab or an attempt to undermine the teaching of my pastor.

Our main preaching elder at our church is a great personal friend of mine, a very sharp and devout student of Scripture, and I am in full submission to the elders that God has appointed over my life. I trust this brother as much as you can trust another man. And he must teach the word as he believes it to read, I will never knock him for that, because I and everyone else are forced to do the same.

I know this might be shocking, but two Spirit-filled Christians can look at the same passage of the Bible and come away with different conclusions. I know, I know, that’s hard to believe. But it happens, guys. This is not something I would break fellowship over, obviously. Nor do I believe you should, reader.

I would like to lay out my case for why I believe the apostle is teaching that men should remove physical coverings from their heads, and women should wear physical coverings on their heads, while engaged in public organized worship. I will lay out a few possible interpretations and walk through the text to see which exegetical interpretation is most consistent logically and hermeneutically, and how it is that we who affirm physical head coverings find ourselves in the minority these days. So let’s dive in.

“For her hair is given to her for a covering”

This likely is the most common interpretation, and it is the one I held to before being convinced otherwise through the Scriptures: the head covering that is being referenced in this passage refers to hair, not an additional covering worn over the hair (a hat, a scarf, etc.).

The main crux of this argument hinges on verses 14-15, at the end of the passage:

14 Does not nature itself teach you that if a man wears long hair it is a disgrace for him, 15 but if a woman has long hair, it is her glory? For  her hair is given to her for a covering.

Well, there you have it. Paul exhorts women to cover their heads in public worship; their hair is given to them as a covering; therefore, by having hair, they are in keeping with the apostolic teaching. But not so fast.

This interpretation cannot logically follow in light of verses 4-6:

[4] Every man who prays or prophesies with his head covered dishonors his head, [5] but every wife who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head, since it is the same as if her head were shaven. [6] For if a wife will not cover her head, then she should cut her hair short. But since it is disgraceful for a wife to cut off her hair or shave her head, let her cover her head.

Let’s examine verses 4-6 by reading through the passage through the lens of the covering mentioned being hair to see if it’s consistent. I will put my alterations to the text in bold letters.

[4] Every man who prays or prophesies with hair dishonors his head, [5] but every wife who prays or prophesies without hair dishonors her head, since it is the same as if her head were shaven. [6] For if a wife will not have long hair, then she should cut her hair short. But since it is disgraceful for a wife to cut off her hair or shave her head, let her cover her head.

Do you see the problem here? If this were a viable interpretation of the text, and the only covering being mentioned by the apostle was her hair, then that would make verses 4-6 redundant and virtually nonsensical.

“If she won’t have hair, then she should shave off her hair”. “If she doesn’t have long hair, then she should cut her hair short”.

And that’s not to mention the guys. If the covering being either prescribed (women) or denied (men) is hair, what about the hirsute brethren amongst us? The apostle Paul would be safe, the prophet Elisha the baldy would be good to, but what about me? Am I to shave my head for church on Sunday in order not to offend my God in worship? Of course not.

So it is my opinion, using the same hermeneutical consistency I would employ in the rest of the letter to the Corinthians, that the covering cannot be hair. Hair is a natural covering, to be sure, just as the apostle says in verses 14-15. But that is not the only covering, and the symbolic covering that Corinthians were commended for observing was not just having short or long hair.

Get ‘Em To The Greek

This one sort of flows out of the previous interpretation, but has to do with a translational liberty present in some Bible translations in verse 16 (italics added):

16 If anyone is inclined to be contentious, we have no such practice, nor do ^qthe churches of God.

This argument goes like this: “The apostles and churches of God have no such practice as head coverings, therefore, as a part of God’s church, we should not either.”

Pretty straightforward. This one, I believe, is maybe the easiest to deal with. First, it requires you to identify what the head coverings are. Commonly, those who would hold to this view would also affirm that the hair is a natural covering, and therefore is what the apostle is talking about in the rest of the passage up until v.16.

However, this can’t possibly be so, because if the hair is the covering, and it is shameful for a woman to have short or shaven hair (vv.5-6), and the church has no such practice as women covering their heads in worship, then is the Apostle saying that they have a bunch of shameful women in the house of God? Of course not. If he acknowledges short hair is disgraceful on a woman, and long hair is disgraceful on a man, why would he then say at the end of the letter, if hair is the covering again, “we have no such practice”. This is illogical.

But moving on from the hair, I’m getting itchy just talking about it. Paul, in the opening of this letter commends the Corinthians for “remembering him in everything and maintaining the traditions as he delivered them to them” (v.2). He then explains and grounds the tradition of head coverings in corporate worship at length, just to go on at the end to say basically “but we don’t do that here”. Clearly, this doesn’t make much sense.

“We have no such practice”, is better rendered as “we have no other practice”. You will find this rendering in translations such as the CSB, NASB, NIV, BSB, etc. This makes much more sense in the flow of the text, because it rightly indicates that what Paul is saying here is that “if anyone is contentious, we have no other option for you”. Basically, it’s this way or nothing. There is no other proper way to conduct yourself in the house of God than this.

This variant can be confusing on it’s face, however, it again requires you to determine that Paul is definitely not talking about coverings over (or not) the hair, for it to be very confusing. The clean reading is that Paul commends the women for covering, the men for uncovering, and it’s God’s way or the highway, because He determines what is the proper worship of Himself.

The Cultural Context

Next up, we have the Corinthian cultural contextualization. It goes like this:

“Yes, Paul clearly is exhorting women to cover with a physical covering over their hair, but this was only relevant to the Corinthians in their time. It was common in those days that prostitutes, slaves, or generally promiscuous women did not wear coverings or wore specific hairstyles to signify their objection to male headship or signal their illicit practices. Therefore, since our culture no longer has this issue or imagery associated with being uncovered (or covered), we are no longer required to wear head coverings.”

While this one, I think, gets closer to the money, because it rightly concludes that the covering cannot simply be hair, it recognizes a physical covering, it also cannot work, given the context of the passage. Paul does not root his reasoning in temporary human cultural fashion standards that change over time, but in creation, authority, and angels.

Paul says, “the head of every man is Christ, the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God” (v.3), then marches us straight back to creation: “For man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man” (vv.8–9). That is not Mediterranean sociology; that is pre-Fall theology. He layers it further in the Imago Dei—“man…is the image and glory of God, but woman is the glory of man” (v.7)—and then, as if Genesis were not weighty enough, he adds, “That is why a wife ought to have a symbol of authority on her head, because of the angels” (v.10). Angels, it seems, are not confused by first-century dress codes. When Paul builds his case on creation, authority, glory, angels, and even “nature itself” (v.14), he sounds less like a man baptizing local custom and more like a herald insisting that corporate worship visibly reflect the order God stitched into the world at the beginning.

My friends, is Christ still the head of every man? Was woman made from and for man? Is man still the image and glory of God? Do angels still joyously observe the worship of the saints before God? Or did all of this stop being true when Corinthian fashion trends fell out of style? Though we do enjoy their pillars still to this day, the basis of Paul’s arguments and reasoning has no indication of being exclusive to only the Corinthian church and ancient context; it is transcendent. It is grounded in headship, creation, and nature itself, and therefore still binding today.

Let us not forget, this “cultural context” argument is the same method deployed by liberals to justify women preaching in light of 1 Corinthians 14:34-35. Liberal theologians love to allow women preachers on the basis that “that was just in the 1st century church, Paul said that”. The bolder ones would even go as far as to say “that was just Paul’s opinion.” If we rightly protest them by saying, “Paul roots the prohibition of women preachers in creation”, why are we shooting ourselves in the foot a few chapters earlier by making the same error?

Additionally, some would deny altogether the context being about physical coverings worn over the hair (or not for men), but rather simply that Corinthian prostitutes and proto-feminists just shaved their heads; this argument is dealt with in the previous paragraph. It can’t simply be about the hair.

There is another, more recent argument that the context is not avoiding looking like some Corinthian hussy in church, but that simply Greco-Roman women, once married, would wear their hair bound up, instead of down or in some other style, but the same logic above applies.

When And Where?

Some doth now protest: “Since Paul is talking about praying and prophesying, shouldn’t women throw their bonnets on whenever they pray over dinner or throughout their day?”

Beginning in 1 Corinthians 11, Paul turns his attention decisively to the gathered assembly. He signals the shift with repetition: “when you come together”. In 11:17–18, he rebukes them “when you come together as a church.” In 11:20, “When you come together, it is not the Lord’s supper that you eat.” In 11:33, “when you come together to eat, wait for one another.” The issue is not private spirituality but public worship; how the covenant people conduct themselves when assembled before God. Chapter 12 regulates the use of spiritual gifts in the body, not as private endowments but as contributions to the gathered church. Chapter 13 reminds them that even the most spectacular gifts are noise without love—again in the context of corporate exercise. Chapter 14 makes the setting unmistakable: “When you come together, each one has a hymn, a lesson, a revelation, a tongue, or an interpretation” (14:26). Paul then orders prophecy, tongues, silence, and evaluation so that “all things should be done decently and in order” (14:40). This is liturgical legislation.

Placed at the head of that section, 1 Corinthians 11:2–16 is not a random excursus on hairstyles but the first corrective in a sustained treatment of corporate worship. Paul is not drafting a universal hat policy for every whispered “bless this food” at the dinner table; he is ordering the visible life of the gathered church. The whole section sits inside the “when you come together” context (vv.17–18, 33), where he corrects abuses in corporate worship—Lord’s Supper chaos, prophetic disorder, liturgical confusion.

When he speaks of women praying and prophesying (v.5), he is addressing public, assembly speech later regulated in 14:26–33, not private devotions over casserole. And when he adds, “because of the angels” (v.10), he lifts the matter into the heavenly gallery, where the church as the church stands before God. If this applied to every private prayer, we would need emergency headgear for midnight petitions and snack-time gratitude. But Paul writes as an apostle shaping covenant worship, not as a tailor of domestic minutiae.

The dinner table already lives under a husband’s headship; the corporate assembly must visibly proclaim it.

Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better

We’ve now handled the common objections to men uncovering their heads from any physical covering while in church. Men should not have to show up to church looking like Mr. Clean, and they should not be donning the officially licensed headwear of their favorite sports team in the house of God. But that’s not really what we focus on today, is it? We never really focus on that, and gloriously, the remnants of our formerly robust Christian society still hang in the air. Even unbelievers, when they awkwardly walk into a church building with their religious zealot of a grandma or cousin, to appease them, leave their lids in the car. Why? That’s just the way it is.

In our post-modern liberal, fourth-wave feminist society, we pretty much only focus on the archaic and oppressive practice of women wearing a head covering during church service. How dare some poor defenseless woman put a piece of cloth on her head for God, who laid down His rights, and condescended to take on the most supreme form of humiliation on her behalf.

Or worse yet, her caveman of a husband or father requests it of her.

The “Easter Bonnet Rebellion” of 1969, put on in Milwaukee by the feminist organization NOW (National Organization for Women), had the stated objective of obtaining “full equality for women in truly equal partnership with men” in religious institutions, by women gathering to publicly burn their head coverings in effigy on the streets. The event was headed up on Resurrection Sunday in 1969 by Dr. Elizabeth “Betty” Farians, known as the “national voice for catholic feminism”.

Equality with men in religious institutions is not a goal that women should have. In fact, it is a direct result of the fall. Genesis 3:16 reads:

 To the woman He said,
“I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing;
    in pain you shall bring forth children.
Your desire shall be for^[a] your husband,
    and he shall rule over you.”

Rightly understood, the desire that a wife has for her husband, as a part of the curse, is not a sexual desire for him, or a desire for his company; those are good things. The desire that a wife sinfully has for her husband as a product of sin entering the world is for the authority that he has over her, the same authority that her head covering symbolizes in corporate worship.

In Two Centuries of Costume in America (1903), a book cataloging the trends and changes in dress in America through the centuries, author Alice Morse Earle states that for over 200 years, women almost always wore head coverings, noting: “One singular thing may be noted in this history, – that with all the vagaries of fashion, woman has never violated the Biblical law that bade her cover her head. She has never gone to church services bareheaded”. 

I would like to pose to you, dear reader, that it was not through exegetical study that brought the modern church into the majority view that Paul was not requiring head coverings for women, as a symbol of male headship and submission to their fathers or husbands, but a desire to appease the rabid feminists of America from thinking we were a bunch of backwards, misogynistic, oppressors. We wanted to be cool too.

I am not making the claim that this is why someone who disagrees with me today disagrees with me on head coverings, but rather this is why the idea was broadly accepted over time. Again, there are faithful, and well-studied men who disagree with me, some of whom are close personal friends and mentors of mine, who have given much thought to this. But I believe the original seed of breaking away from and challenging this apostolic tradition was rooted in cultural compromise, not rigorous Scripture reading.

All in all, I will sit in the church with nothing on my head but what the Lord gave me, where everyone disagrees with me, with my beautiful wife and her elegant head covering, knowing that the grace of Christ is sufficient to cover all of our mishandlings of Scripture, of which I am sure I have many. And we will rejoice together in heaven on that glorious day.