Kephalé, the English Word "Head," and a Tradition of Misreading the Bible

Recently I posted a short sermon I gave for part of a Men's Day observance in a Baptist Church.  I have long had mixed feelings about Men's Day.  It is not one of those days that fits into the centuries-old church calendar that observes days for the saints and an annual cycle of seasons that brings attention to the anticipation, the birth, the life, the passion, the resurrection, and the reign of Jesus Christ.  It is, however, part of another liturgical calendar that evolved over decades to address certain aspects of church life.  There is a Women's Day, and there is a Men's Day, and in some churches these are big annual events.

These days have significance in a number of ways.  Women's Day has its origin in a 1906 proposal by Nannie Helen Burroughs, who suggested a day when women in National Baptist Churches could lead in educating and motivating the churches for Foreign Missions.  It's purpose then includes promotion of missionary work, fund-raising for missions, and elevation of women to the opportunity to lead, speak out, and exercise gifts in the church.  It was of a piece with the rise of Women's Clubs organized for community betterment, including the kind of work done by Ida B. Wells-Barnett in the anti-lynching campaign and the founding of black educational and social institutions.

Men's Day does not have the same specific historical origins, but seems to have grown up in many ways as a complementary observance to address the need for men to take up their part in the work of the church, to serve, to teach, and to lead.  It is not uncommon for it to include a theme around the "missing" men in the life of the churches that seem often to be populated primarily by women.  So Women's Day is on one hand an effort to elevate the place of women in institutions that display a tradition of patriarchy, and Men's Day is on the other hand an effort to draw in and encourage more male discipleship.

Having grown up Baptist, whether among white or black Baptists, I have worshiped and served in institutions steeped in patriarchal tradition.  In my early adult years, I realized the failure of such churches to listen to the message of Pentecost and the momentum of the New Testament writings toward full equality of men and women in families, in church leadership, and in relation to God.  And still today, that tradition weighs heavy in the churches with which I associate. 

I'm not saying there has been no change.  I commune now in a church which has women in all levels of leadership, including ordained ministers and deacons, as well as various offices and roles of influence.  It is not surprising at all to have a woman preach, pray, or lead worship in any way.  Even so, the rhetoric of hierarchy and male leadership still crops up at times, and it remains assumed by many in the community of faith.  Moreover, our church is on the more progressive end of a continuum; we have not had a woman as senior pastor, but women's calling and capacity for leadership is not a question.  On the other hand, many churches with which we cooperate and associate, probably a very large majority of them, continue to exclude women from official recognition in church leadership, such as preaching, serving as a deacon, or receiving ordination.

So I always approach Men's Day and Women's Day with a level of trepidation, knowing how they easily become a platform to recite and reinstate patriarchal structures as if they are the absolute command of God for human flourishing.  The assumed primacy of the male in family, church, and society remains a powerful idea.  I am always thankful, as I was on the night that I preached about the sin of seeking to control the world and the people in it, when the observance does not morph into a rally for boosting the patriarchy.

There is an important agenda in black churches when it comes to encouraging men to rise into their gifts and callings.  The events around the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Travon Martin, to name only a few, symbolize the difficulties black men face in trying to make their way in U.S. society.  The deeply imbedded prejudices and fears which assume to know that black men are up to no good stand in the way of education, jobs, economic stability, and empowerment.  We ought to be encouraging black men to defy the social pressures and assumptions that would try to keep them marginalized.  That's why I believe in the agenda of Men's Day.

Womanist thought seeks to expand our notions of gender politics and community responsibility to avoid pitting some people against others.  As Marcia Riggs has demonstrated, the heritage of the Black Women's Clubs is not elevation of women at men's expense, not elevation of the middle class at the poor's expense.  It's core was the motto, "Lifting As We Climb."  Womanism shares that spirit of believing that the it is not possible for some in the community to achieve what is good for them if they do so by holding down or putting down others.  It must be a general community uplift, a devotion to the common good.  To use biblical language, it is a commitment to having "no one in need among us."

Men's and women's achievement and advancement go hand in hand.  In this way, the church seeks to fulfill the message of the Apostle Paul to the Galatians, when he told them that their baptism gave them a new birth into a new world and a new life.  They were changed beings, no longer defined by the biases of culture from which they had come.  It was a new culture of equality:

As many of you who have been dipped in the dye of Christ have also gotten dressed up in Christ.  There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, not male and female, but all are one in Christ Jesus (my translation).

Those so-called natural divisions which would divide us are not any longer relevant.  There is a new kind of freedom for living according to the gifts that the Holy Spirit gives freely to whomever the Holy Spirit wills.

The pentecostal faith of the church acknowledges that the first bearers of the gospel of the resurrected Lord were women who went to his tomb on Sunday and discovered he was risen.  Mary Magdalene, one of his companions in life was the one who first met him in the resurrection.  Jesus' followers remembered how he did not care about the disreputable behavior of talking with a divorced and cohabitating Samaritan woman, outcast by her community.  They remembered that he praised Mary of Bethany for her devotion to learning that traditionally was a role assigned to men only.  And Peter preached from the Prophet Joel's words which said that both men and women would prophesy, that is they would preach and deliver a word of God.  Remnants of the early church in the New Testament writings indicate the leadership of women like Lydia, Phoebe, and Chloe.

Not all New Testament texts are so easily wrenched from patriarchal thinking.  Among the ones that is commonly used to justify patriarchy is 1 Corinthians 11.  It contains a formulaic set of parallel statements that seem at first to be a claim on behalf of hierarchy in patriarchal form.  That is because of the word "head" in English, translated from the Greek kephalé.

In English, the "head" man is the one in charge.  We have "Department Heads" and "head linesmen" and most prominently, "heads of state."  In English history, the beheading of Charles I was a public symbol of removing the monarchical authority from over the people.  So the English word "head" connotes hierarchy and authority.  There is a concept of "headship" in English that tampers with our cultural biases when we read verse 3.

But I want you to understand that Christ is the head of every man, and the husband is the head of his wife, and God is the head of Christ (NRSV).

Greek is not the same.  Certainly Greek culture has its own symbols of hierarchy and a heritage of patriarchy.  Yet the language does not rely on the image of the head to portray hierarchy and authority.  There are many meanings, both literal and figurative, for the word kephalé.  It can mean the anatomical head on a human or other animal.  It can mean a part of a plant that in certain ways is similar to the head on an animal.  It can mean the top piece, or crowning piece of something (not to be confused with the English crown as a symbol of rulership).  It can often mean the headwaters of a stream, and by analogy the source of something. 

Lexicons of ancient Greek language give many possible meanings for the word kephalé, but there seem to be no instances which indicate that Greeks used it to mean the boss, the ruler, the one in charge.  I am thankful for the summary of various sources assembled by Laurie Fasullo of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, as she made the case that it is inappropriate to insert "headship" as authority into a reading of Pauline texts and other New Testament texts.  I will not try to duplicate all of her interesting and excellent work. 

If 1 Corinthians 11:3 should not be read to indicate that there is a grand hierarchy in which women or wives are ontologically subordinate and men in authority, then how should we read it.  Fasullo and others convincingly argue that talking about heads here is best understood as emphasizing the unity of the two elements being named.  Christ is clearly not eternally and ontologically subordinate to God.  So some other relationship is being indicated here.  If Paul is speaking in his rabbinic voice, then he may be pointing us back to the Genesis story of the woman's creation from a rib of the man, and thus saying that the man is the source of the woman, and thereby we see that they are made of one substance and inseparably linked.  In the same way, humanity is linked to Christ, who is the true human, the Second and True Adam, and thus the source of the man.  Christ, the beloved, is eternally begotten of the lover, the Father, and is inseparably linked and coequal, fully God.  To say head here is to use the word in its sense of being the source and therefore the same.

Wayne Grudem is the primary scholar in defense of the notion of "head" as "headship."  Scholars who disagree with him have offered a pretty strong critique of the arguments he published in the 1980s.  So in 2001 he published an updated argument to take on various newer scholarly works with which he disagreed.  He attempted to import the popular U.S. evangelical notion of hierarchy equivocally called equality through a conception of "complementarity."  Complementarity is the evangelical/fundamentalist word for equality of status combined with differentiation of roles, with those superordinate and subordinate roles ontologically and essentially mapped onto gender.

Grudem accused his opponents of claiming their sources make arguments that are not actually present, or what one would call an "argument from silence."  Lacking any direct claim, they claim too much for his interpretation.  Yet he does the same, claiming that the misreading by Catherine Kroeger of Chrysostom's comments on 1 Corinthians 11:3 failed to recognize that Grudem's position was required to make sense of them.  Yet Grudem ends up contradicting Chrysostom, not agreeing with him.  He claims the subordination of Jesus Christ as an essential status, taken on voluntarily, and yet by implication from eternity to eternity.  This is exactly what Chrysostom is battling, so it makes no sense that he would have agreed with Grudem's subordinationist theology of the Trinity, even though Grudem believes that it is obvious and entailed in his words.

It seems, therefore, that the traditionalist view, bolstered by its champion Grudem, continues to rely on this equivocal use of the term equality to deny the very coequality of the persons of the Trinity as as way to justify an eternal inequality called equality in the subordination of women to men.

Did Jesus subordinate himself, take the form of a servant, and become like us?  Yes.  And Jesus has been highly exalted.  The subordination of one person of the Trinity to another is shared among all three persons.  This is the nature of the perfect communication of all things between the persons, coeternally existing in coequality, supreme communicability, complete consubstantiality, perfect configurability, and unsurpassable mutual intimacy. 

Can women reasonably respond to Christian faith through similar voluntary subordination?  Could a marriage reasonably allow one person to exercise most or all leadership?  Yes to both of these.  Many blessed unions have appeared in cultural conditions of patriarchy.  Yet the Letter to the Corinthians cannot be used to demand that this is the inherent ontology of God's creation of humanity.  Thus, a marriage can also reasonably allow partners to find their path of mutual submission (Ephesians 5:21) and offer themselves to one another as servants, bucking the cultural expectations so that both live into the image of Christ.  Nothing in this text says a man should claim his right to be in charge. 

What that means is that contrary to their claim to read the plain sense of the text, using a grammatico-historical method of interpretation to find the one meaning of the text, evangelicals are using an allegorical method of interpretation.  This is exactly what I heard recently.  Taking the English use of the word "head" in its symbolism as authority and ruler, the interpreter began to discuss the various features of the head and their significance for leading and being in charge.  In similar manner, the other parts of the body which are not the head were held up in contrast (feet, tail, etc.) to indicate what a person in charge was not supposed to be.  It is an abuse of allegory to do what allegory often does--reinforce cultural assumptions. 

A colleague of mine, Curtis Freeman, has written a scholarly article on 1 Corinthians 11:3, criticizing Grudem's readings of the theologians of the early centuries of the church.  I look forward to reading that when it is published soon, and I will plan to share a link to it or summary of it when it becomes available.

The Maker and Appraiser, part 2
Jeremiah 18:1-11

(This was the Men's Day message for the 8 am service at Mt. Level Missionary Baptist Church on September 9, 2007.)

If we turn to today’s text, I think we can gain some solid footing for an answer. Jeremiah’s prophetic hermeneutic urged the people of Jerusalem in his day to think again about the measure of a man. He told them about going down to the potter’s house to watch the skilled craftsman work. The potter was throwing clay on the wheel. He was shaping it with his hands and maybe with some specialized tools of the trade. A lump of clay that seemed ready for service was being transformed into a pot, a vessel, a useful implement and a thing of beauty. But somewhere along the process, things went wrong. The clay took on a mind of its own. It warped and got out of shape. A crack appeared in the soft clay that would be a fatal flaw in light of the purpose the potter had for the vessel. As Jeremiah said, the vessel “was spoiled in the potter’s hand.” What had begun to look like a fine clay pot turned out to be a warped, cracked, useless vessel.

Had it been our day, in our throwaway society, we might have tossed it in the landfill and run out to Wal-Mart to replace it with something else we can throw away next month. Sometimes that’s the way our society deals with boys and men, too. When they get out of hand, when their problems get too big to handle, when their frustration builds up to the point of lashing out, we give up on them. The problems seem to hard to solve, so we throw them away. Put them out of school. Put them out of the house. Put them in the jail. Put them out on the street. Put them in the ground. But human beings are not throwaway commodities. We are not single-use, disposable items. Thank God for showing Jeremiah another way.

When the vessel was spoiled, the potter did not throw it away. The potter reworked it. He found the hard spot in the lump of clay and worked it with his hands until it become smooth and malleable. He kneaded the place that had cracked back into the rest of the lump to get rid of the variations in moisture and flexibility and build up the stability in the clay. He wanted the lump of clay to have the character required to make a pot hold together, be useful, and last a long time. He wanted it to be sturdy so that it could be adorned and display the beauty and goodness that already lay within it as a potentiality. So Jeremiah said, “he reworked it.”
The skilled potter did not go out on the street and grab someone who knew nothing about the craft to ask, “What should I do with this?” No, the skilled potter was both the maker and the appraiser. The potter knew how to make a pot, and he also knew a good pot from a bad pot. He knew good, reusable clay when he examined it. He had the ability to judge when a pot was spoiled in the making. He could appraise the measure of a clay pot.

I went outside this week and found a surveying crew next door. Someone is thinking about buying the house there. They want to know exactly what piece of land they are buying. Now I could have walked over and told them that as I see it, the property line runs along this driveway and this fence, comes to about right here and runs up through those bushes to a spot on the hill. But they don’t want that kind of sloppy guesswork. They want someone who knows how to spot and measure the lot. The survey crew was skilled, had precise equipment, and was trained to locate each corner of the lot.

Another example more directly about appraisal may be helpful here. Apparently it has become very popular to go to a big meeting hall, carrying some old stuff from your house, and ask experts how much it is worth. I’ve seen a couple of television programs that show people telling a story about a piece of furniture, a photograph, a sports souvenir, or some other item. Then an appraiser responds with some historical information, offers a few tidbits of trivia, and finally states an estimate of the dollar value of the item. It’s not a wild guess, but it’s based on experience of seeing other similar items and evaluating their condition. An appraiser knows a lot about certain kinds of items and is therefore qualified to make a statement about their value.

The potter was both the maker and the appraiser. Who knew more about the pots than the one who made them? He could tell when they would function and when they would fail. He could evaluate their strength and stability. He could appraise their usefulness, their value, their worth. And if he saw that they fell short of what they should be, he could rework them. It was his skill that gave them their value in the first place. He used high quality materials and high quality methods to produce a high quality product. He put high quality labor into the task and took pride in doing good work. And when he needed to, he reworked the pot to make sure it met the standards of quality that matched the vision of the maker.

Thanks be to God for the potter that reworked the clay. On Men’s Day, we need to praise the God who reworks spoiled lumps of clay. We need to call on that same God to rework our spoiled lives and make us useful, good, beautiful vessels for God’s service. God will rework us. Turn to your neighbor and say, “Neighbor, God will rework you.” We need to admit our sins, the ways that we have been spoiled for service to God, and pray, “God, rework me.” Say it with me, “God, rework me.” And Mt. Level needs to be ready to let go of the pebbles that are mixed up in our clay, the cracks in our vessel, and cry out, “God, rework us.” We know we are flawed as persons and as a congregation. We know we leak and can’t sit right without wobbling. We know we do stuff we don’t need to do while we let slip away things we ought to have done. But the God who is like the potter has no intention to toss us in the trash heap.

God will rework us. It may not all feel good. An effective muscle massage may have to work some sore spots to get the tightness and knots out that are keeping us down. A successful cycle of physical therapy means fighting through some tears when the pain seems more than we can bear. But all through the struggle, and waiting for us at the other end of the struggle is the God we know in Jesus Christ. God has already envisioned what we are to become. And God’s purpose for men, and for all of us, is that we grow up to the measure of true humanity in Jesus Christ. Jesus is the measuring tool. And God is able to appraise the measure of a man because God’s own self became flesh, became clay, and lived among us. He has thorough inside knowledge of what a human being is capable of being. He is the maker, he is present in creation with us, and he is the appraiser, the measurer. God knows the measure of a man. God has shown us the measure of a man. God will rework us into the measure of a man.

A good measuring tool must be precision made. If you are trying to measure a board, you don’t want a measuring tape that marks off a foot as 12 inches, give or take an inch. You need to know precisely how many feet and inches you measure. Otherwise what you build will be crooked and unstable. If you are trying to measure a piece of fabric, you don’t want an inch to be sometimes longer and sometimes shorter. You want a tape that is precise. Otherwise, the waistband may not go around you when you finish, or one leg of the pants may be shorter than the other.

Well, Jesus is the precise measuring tool for humanity. He is begotten from eternity, the very Word of God, the true Adam, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith. He is Alpha and Omega, the first and the last. He knew temptation just as we do, but he did not give in to sin and evil. He was faithful to the end. He loved those God had sent his way to the end, even to his death on the Cross. He is the firstborn of the dead, the firstborn of many brothers and sister. He is the measure of humanity. He was loving, just, and merciful in the use of power. He took time to give of himself to those who could not repay him, and he took the lowest place when he could have tried to claim he highest place. He was the same non-violent, faithful friend in private and public, in comfort and in trouble.

Today on Men’s Day, I profess to you that Jesus is the measure of a man. And just as God raised him from the dead, God will rework you and bring you from death to life, out of darkness into his marvelous light. God will rework us. God, rework us. God, rework us. Say it with me, “God, rework us.”

Perhaps this morning you have come to see that the flaws and irregularities of the way you are living have spoiled you as a vessel of love, as a vessel of service. This may be the day when you need for the first time to say, “God, rework me.” This may be your hour to come to Jesus, to call on him to be the Lord of your life. If you want to place your life into the hands of the potter who is your maker, who measures by a righteous standard of love and grace, then come to follow Jesus today.

Perhaps you already have started down the path of following Jesus, but you find yourself wandering and going astray. Maybe you simply have lost the passion of bringing good news to the poor and setting at liberty those who are oppressed. Maybe you have left off the weightier matters of justice and mercy, and find yourself going through the motions of tithing your mint and your cumin. Your heart is on treasures that rust and rot and can be stolen away. This may be your day to come to God and say, “Rework me to be a useful vessel for your service. Restore unto me the joy of my salvation. Make me a channel of blessing to all those I meet.”

There may be someone here who is a follower of Jesus but is not a member of a congregation in Durham. Maybe you are actively looking for a church home. Or maybe you have been drifting without committing yourself to be part of the work of a church. If the Holy Spirit is prodding you to put your life alongside the lives of others who are serving God here at Mt. Level, then don’t resist. Come and unite with this congregation today, so that God can rework all of us together to be a better witness to God’s love in this community.

The doors of the church are open. Whosoever will may come.