The Quiet Woman

I have been told that the quiet woman is a thing men made. That when I teach a woman to keep silent in the assembly, and teach my daughters the same, I am teaching them to be small so that men can feel large. My answer is a single word, and Peter chose it before I did: God calls the quiet woman precious.

Before I say a word about women, the order comes to me. A few days ago I sat down in my chair to pray with a hood on my head, and I pulled it down before I began. I do the same on a walk. Nobody sees me on a walk. Paul says the angels do. The instruction that puts a covering on her head when she prays takes the covering off mine, on the same grounds, in the same sentence, and a man who demands her sign while ignoring his own is the very figure my critics describe. I refuse to be him. The order of God binds the man first, and the man who will not carry his part has no standing to speak about hers.

Paul silences men first

Read the chapter the critics quote and count. Paul commands silence three times in 1 Corinthians 14, with the same word each time, and the first two land on men.

“but if there is no translator, he must keep silent in the church, and let him speak to himself and to God” (1 Corinthians 14:28 LSB).

“But if a revelation is made to another who is seated, the first one must keep silent” (1 Corinthians 14:30 LSB).

“The women are to keep silent in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak, but are to subject themselves, just as the Law also says” (1 Corinthians 14:34 LSB).

The tongue-speaker without a translator is silenced. The prophet with a word in his mouth is silenced the moment another receives a revelation. Then the women are silenced. The verb, the chapter, and the reason are the same, and Paul states the reason between the second command and the third: “for God is not a God of confusion but of peace, as in all the churches of the saints” (1 Corinthians 14:33 LSB). No one has ever called verse 28 domineering. No one has accused Paul of oppressing prophets. The silence is an ordering of the assembly so that God’s peace governs God’s house, and men stand under it before women do.

What the silence is, and what it is not

Restraint runs both ways here, and I owe the text both. The silence Paul commands is the silence of her own voice before the assembly. She does not lift it to teach the church, to judge the prophets, to correct it, to pray aloud on her own, or to put a question to it. Paul’s own example of what stays out of the meeting is the mildest thing anyone can say in one, a question, and even that goes home to her husband. That is what the command forbids, and I will not soften it.

It does not forbid her voice in the congregation’s one voice. When the church sings, she sings, because Colossians 3 and Ephesians 5 command the whole body to sing. When the church says amen, she says amen. When the church confesses with one mouth, hers is in it. Paul is silencing a woman’s single voice sounding before the gathered church, seated or standing, in a prayer, a prophecy, a question, or a lesson, and he is silencing nothing else. A man who stretches the verse to muzzle her singing has added to Paul exactly as the man who deletes the verse has subtracted from him.

And the silence is an assembly rule. Paul names his location twice, “in the churches” and “in church,” and he never extends it past the door. The same Scripture that seats her quietly in the assembly puts wisdom in her mouth everywhere else.

“Strength and majesty are her clothing, And she smiles at the future. She opens her mouth in wisdom, And the instruction of lovingkindness is on her tongue” (Proverbs 31:25-26 LSB).

That is the quiet woman on Monday. Titus 2 has her teaching the younger women. Acts 18 has Priscilla, with her husband, explaining the way of God to Apollos. The assembly is ordered one way and the rest of life is ordered by wisdom under the same headship, and a woman who knows the difference is free in both.

The daughters

The sharpest form of the charge is that I teach this to girls. I do, and here is what I teach them, because the verse that seats a woman quietly in the assembly is a verse about learning.

“A woman must learn in quietness, in all submission” (1 Timothy 2:11 LSB).

The verb in the command is learn. Paul assumes she is being taught, and in Corinth he says who is responsible for it: “if they desire to learn anything, let them ask their own husbands at home” (1 Corinthians 14:35 LSB). The silence in the assembly lays a duty on the man at the table. A father who teaches his daughters the order of God’s house and teaches them the wisdom of Proverbs 31 at his own table is doing what both verses require. A father who says hush and teaches nothing has taken the verse that commissions him and used it to excuse himself. He is the domineering man, and Paul has no more patience with him than my critics do.

So my daughters learn the whole of it. They learn that the assembly has an order and that the order is God’s. They learn to sing loud in it. They learn to open their mouths in wisdom at home, in the marketplace, and among the women. And they learn that the man who is to teach them will answer to God for whether he did.

Precious in the sight of God

Now to the word itself, and to the One who chose it. Peter speaks of a woman’s beauty, and he calls the quiet spirit her adornment.

“Your adornment must not be merely external—braiding the hair, and wearing gold jewelry, or putting on garments; but let it be the hidden person of the heart, with the incorruptible quality of a lowly and quiet spirit, which is precious in the sight of God” (1 Peter 3:3-4 LSB).

Mark whose sight that is. The quiet woman is precious to God. Peter names the one Judge whose sight matters and leaves every other judge out of the sentence. God looks at her and counts her precious, and he names her quietness as the adornment God sees, an adornment that does not perish when the gold does. A man could not have invented this, because a man cannot make anything precious in the sight of God.

Then Peter says what such a woman is like, and it is the opposite of small.

“For in this way in former times the holy women also, who hoped in God, used to adorn themselves, being subject to their own husbands, just as Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him lord. You have become her children if you do good, not fearing any intimidation” (1 Peter 3:5-6 LSB).

She fears no intimidation. That is the woman who has taken her place in God’s order. Her back is straight. She has nothing to prove to the room because her standing was settled before she entered it. The world’s woman is the anxious one, measuring herself against every eye in the building. Sarah’s daughter smiles at the future.

And Peter closes the passage with the husband, as he must.

“You husbands in the same way, live with your wives in an understanding way, as with a weaker vessel, since she is a woman; and show her honor as a fellow heir of the grace of life, so that your prayers will not be hindered” (1 Peter 3:7 LSB).

She is a fellow heir. The man who treats her as anything less has his prayers refused by God. There is the domineering husband, in the text, under judgment. The order of God has never protected him. It is the order that convicts him.

What the other religion made

Set the quiet woman beside what the world’s religion has produced, and grieve. Men abandoned their posts first. Fathers stopped teaching at their tables. Husbands stopped carrying the weight that verse 7 lays on them. Into the ground they left empty came a doctrine that told women their glory was in being seen and their freedom was in being unbound, and the women who believed it are its casualties. They were taught to price themselves by the eyes of men. They were taught to display what God gave them to guard. They were taught that a child in the womb is a claim against their liberty. They were sold a confidence that has to be renewed every morning in a mirror, and it never holds.

Calvin saw it coming in the sixteenth century, preaching on this very passage. If women were permitted to go with their heads uncovered, he said, “they will eventually be allowed to expose their entire breasts, and they will come to make their exhibitions as if it were a tavern show.” Four and a half centuries later, his prediction stands on every screen and street corner. He needed no prophecy for it. He believed that God’s order holds the world together and that its removal would not stop at the head.

Restored for her sake

I want the quiet woman back for her own sake. God made male and female in His image, and the two together display Him in a way neither does alone. A woman in her place shows the world something of the church in her place before Christ, which Paul calls a great mystery in Ephesians 5. She carries the glory of God’s redemptive order in her ordinary conduct, and the angels see it.

What I want for the women who read this is what Peter promised Sarah’s daughters: standing before Christ as a fellow heir, confidence that fears no intimidation, joy that does not depend on being looked at, a mouth full of wisdom and a house full of order, and a beauty that does not perish, because God Himself has called it precious.

The critics say the quiet woman is a man’s invention. She is God’s delight, and He said so first.