Good morning, welcome to the Faith Debate, I'm Troy Skinner. Pastor of Household of Faith in Christ, and the longtime host of The Faith Debate on News Radio 930 WFMD. Thank you so much for spending part of your valuable day with us today. We do not take it for granted. I appreciate it very much. If you'd like to follow us along online, maybe listen to the podcast if you didn't catch the whole show, or listen to previous podcasts. We tend to do our shows in arcs, and so if you catch a show that has a topic that's interesting to you, usually we did two, three, four, five, six shows on that topic, and you can go find those podcasts and listen to them in sequence. I would encourage you to do that. Is your headphones not working so well? Oh, need me to tweak anything over there? It's okay now? It's fine. It's fine? Okay. That's the voice of David Forsey. His headphones aren't cooperating. Snap, crackle, pop. I'm greatly offended his headphones don't like what I have to say. My headphones are loving what I have to say because they're working just fine. We're joined this week by Daniel Razvi once again. I think you might have heard him say something about snap, crackle, pop there in the background. Possibly. I'm not sure if the mic picked that up. And we're joined one final time for this arc of shows anyway by the author of The Head Covering, Josiah Bonjwani, and you can find his book online. Go to Amazon and just put in the head covering, Josiah, and bang, it'll pop right back up there. And I think he said it's like 12 bucks or something like that. So I mean, even in today's tough economic times, you can afford 12 bucks. And you know, when we started this arc of shows, this is show number five. I think most of us, maybe Josiah was the only one, but the rest of us might have thought, you know, we might do one or two shows on this topic, then we'll have to pivot into something else that's interesting to us because there's no way we're going to do a whole bunch of shows on head coverings. And here we are, show number five, still talking about head coverings. As I look at David Forsey, he's wearing a head covering. It's, uh, it's got an advertisement of some sort on the top of it. It's a company hat. Okay. And I, does this count? I'm wearing a head covering. Do my headphones count as a head covering? That is difficult. I guess you'd have to ask the Pharisees on Jesus's day. So I, as long as I'm wearing these headphones, I better be careful whether I pray or prophesy. I'll just say that. Um, so we're going to try to cinch things up a little bit, tie them up in a nice neat bow. You know, the, the, the church in recent decades has wrestled with this question. Josiah would argue that the Church hasn't wrestled with this question until recent decades, that it historically hasn't been an issue. I have to study the history of this, much less the deep theology of this, so I'm not in a position to agree or disagree with anything you're about to say, but if you want to take a couple of minutes here and talk about the historical context as the Church has related to this question of head coverings for women in the Church, what could you educate us about? Sure. In my book, The Head Covering, I have two chapters dedicated to the history of head coverings. In the first chapter, it deals more with modern history and how it fell out of vogue. The first wave of feminism hit America around 1850. And that's when head coverings started to fall into decline, but then around 1950, and my grandmother can attest to this too, that's when head coverings completely just like disappeared from the face of Western culture. Although it is practiced around most of the world still in Christian congregations, so maybe in the West it's a little different, but over in a lot of the rest of the world it isn't. However, if we go back through like the earliest history, I focused more on like the church period from maybe like 1 to 500 AD in my book. So, if you focus on like the day, it's the apostles and then after the apostles, their immediate successors in the church, you'll find that they all held the position that when women were praying or prophesying, they ought to cover their head with a cloth or a fabric covering. And when men were doing the same activities, they ought not to. And I could read a few quotes if you guys are interested. Sure. And this isn't as a rebuke, but it's just, you know, I've mentioned to Daniel in the past in different contexts how this is a radio show and it's supposed to be, you know, entertainment. It's a radio show gram, right? Good morning, everybody. Have a good time. And so we do want to have an, but it's ultimately primarily intended to be kind of a, educational ministry, right? A chance to help you to learn how to grapple with what the questions even are. Not necessarily always tell you what to think, although I'm gonna tell you what I think you should think, but to try to form your mind about how to go about thinking about these things so you can come to your own right biblical understanding of things. And so with that spirit behind it, and this again is not a rebuke, it's just a, I think Josiah's gonna probably agree with me, And we'll hear your objections in just a moment, I'm sure. Anytime you're dealing with the early church, patristic kind of stuff, we want to be careful about saying all the early church fathers held to this view or that view, because we don't know what all of them held to, because the evidence is scant. We have very limited information. I mean, it's 2,000 years ago almost. And this stuff was written on stuff that didn't last forever. It was subject to weather and humidity and bugs and fire and all that sort of thing. And so we don't have a lot to go on. religious baggage. I guess I should have specified all of the extant or presently existent writings of the Church Fathers. Right, so the best we could do is of the information that we do still have, which is quite substantial I would say. Like if you've ever seen the Antonicine Fathers it's like nine giant volumes of you know like small text double columns. So that would actually be what I would recommend doing. If you could go to those resources like the Antonicine Fathers. There's nine volumes on head coverings? There's nine volumes of their writings, which include sections and pieces here and there, you can find with the search engine, you know, including head coverings. But there's also a wonderful resource by David Brousseau called an early, it's called the Dictionary of Early Christian Beliefs. And you can find in there, just for the first 300 years, what the early Christians believed on numerous topics. So I will just throw that out. He doesn't really go into the post-Nicene fathers, which came later. Yeah, no, and this will be interesting. I do want to say that I find historical arguments and references to be at least interesting and generally helpful, but not ultimately persuasive. Yeah. And I just want to read you just one example. It's just kind of a fun example from Jerome. who was actually the translator, the first person who translated the Bible into Latin, for those who don't know. But I just found it an interesting quote. And a real scallywag, by the way, for those who don't know. But he said, it's unusual in the monasteries of Egypt and Syria for virgins and widows who have vowed themselves to God and have renounced the world and have trodden underfoot its pleasures to ask the mothers of their communities to cut their hair. Not that they afterwards go about with their heads uncovered in defiance of the apostles' command, for they wear a close-fitting cap and veil. No one knows of this in any single case except the shearers and the shorn, but the practice is universal and it is almost universally known. The custom has, in fact, become a second nature. It is designed to save those who take no baths and whose heads and faces are strangers to all ungents from the accumulated dirt and from the tiny creatures which are sometimes generated about the roots of the hair." So I just found that a kind of a fun quote. Of course, it's translated in a very old-fashioned style, but basically, People who had lice in their hair, little creatures generated around the roots of the hair, would cut their hair off, but they still would wear a head cover. And I just found that an interesting testament from history there. But there's lots of other passages you can read. Now, did you say you had something that was like within the first 150 years of the AD period? Because Jerome, that's like Constantine era. That's like the 300s. Yes, so I was saying that I have lots of quotes in my book from the first 500 years, but I do have Tertullian wrote an entire book on the subject of head coverings around the year 280 and there's early previous to him there's only one author we have whose writings are still excellent who discusses the subject head coverings it's only in one sentence and that is Irenaeus who says a woman ought to have a veil upon her head because of the angels so that might Yeah, we haven't touched on that. We've read the passage and we skipped right past the, because of the angels thing, because that's a whole nother slate of shows right there. What is meant by that? But not to get bogged down in what do we think that means, but I will say at the very least, to me, it just heightens the idea of the spiritual reality is really what's in view here. So you have other helpful quotes or anecdotes that we should touch upon? I'm also curious about the history of men's head coverings. Or being uncovered. Or like monks wear the little thing on the back of their head. Or rabbis. Like a yarmulke kind of a thing. That's a Talmudic thing, I think. But a lot of, even Messianic believers I've seen will wear yarmulkes during church services. I disagree with that, by the way. I'm sure you do. I'm just wondering, have we done equal studies on the history of men's head coverings in the early church? I have not personally focused on that as much, just because it's less of a debatable subject. That'll be his follow-up book, the non-head covering. But maybe that should be a follow-up book. Maybe I should add a few sections on that. That'll be cool. Does the Pope take his? Yeah, he still wears a little beanie. Does he take it off when he's praying or prophesying? Sometimes he wears a big tall hat, too. That's what I mean, yeah. I've had the same wonder, does the Pope take it off? I don't know. I don't think so. What about the Eastern Orthodox Church, since we're talking about the wide practice of women's head coverings in the East, right? We've talked about that earlier. Don't a lot of their church officials, men, wear some sort of headdress? They do. I actually am not exactly sure what their practice is during prayer and prophecy or services. That's a good question. I think the history thing can be, and this is not really related to head coverings per se, but again, following up what I said like five minutes ago, it's just, it's a caution. We can get ourselves in trouble. I think as Christians, sometimes when we, when we try to proof text and say, Oh, here's, particular verse ripped out of thin air that proves my entire point is like okay well let's be a little broader than that let's make sure we're reading it in context within the fullness of all of Scripture the totality of God's Word so be careful about being too quick to proof text and the other thing is the citing particular historical reference and again this is not it's gonna feel like I'm rebuking and it's not Because I do think there's value in talking about what somebody like, I mean, if it weren't for Jerome, we wouldn't have the Vulgate Bible, right? So, great important hero in the faith in so many ways, and yet I wasn't making it up. I was a real scallywag. I mean, if you look at his biography and his history, okay then. He had some issues and he had some theological blind spots. And Tertullian, you know, he was all over the map theologically, depending on which era of his ministry career you look at. One part of his career, he looks like an absolute faithful hero. And another part of it is he looks like a total, like, loser, like, oh my gosh, is he even Christian? And then at the very end of his life, it seems like maybe he kind of came back around to the right way of thinking. He was all, so anyway, we gotta be careful. There's a legal principle in the law, in modern law today, and I'm a lawyer, if I'm gonna go argue in court, there's rules of evidence. What evidence can you bring in to bolster your argument? And one of the things is, if you wanna bring in something that somebody said back a long time and they're not in court to also explain it, that's called hearsay, right? So you can't really bring that in, except, and there's a long list of exceptions to hearsay, You can. One of the exceptions to hearsay is to show what the state of mind and other things that they weren't, not to show the truth of what they're specifically saying, but what other people generally thought that they were speaking to and context. Right. So when you see there's a whole book written about, well, obviously you should have head coverings. Clearly there were people at the time that believed this and interpreted the passage that way. Not to say necessarily that Tertullian himself is right, or that all of his words are specific gospel truth, but only that the prevailing wisdom in the church seems to have been, wear head coverings. If you're a woman in the context of church. Or that it is a hot topic of conversation. So he felt like he needed to write something about it. Josiah might be able to speak to this, but there doesn't really seem to be a lot of books against the wearing of head coverings or why it's not that necessary or things like that. It's mostly just in passing, well, by the way, of course we do that. Hey, did you notice they cut their hair for lice, but they still wear head coverings? You know, that type of thing where it's not really being offered as evidence for here's why you should interpret it this way, but only to show that the early church, by and large, did interpret it that way. And I think Daniel's touching on what is, I think, a very important use and a reason to bring up the historical notes and the quotes, that sort of thing, is anytime you're going to take a strong theological position, you're going to write a book particularly, but even if you're in the context of a radio show and you're going to make a strong opinion that others find very disagreeable, and they're like, wow, you're a loony tune like you're way off on the deep end on this one like you're crazy nobody's ever thought that you can say well actually you know i've been trying to make my case from scripture and i'm making i think a pretty persuasive one and by the way there's a lot of guys whose names you know in church history who would agree with me so i'm not alone i'm not uh i'm not a wild-haired lunatic well i might be but you can't prove it necessarily, unless you're going to say that all these other guys were wild-haired lunatics too. Now it's possible that everybody, for example, most of the people in this room would have some affinity for the teachings of John Calvin. there are a lot of people in the American church particularly who are very opposed to what John Calvin and Calvinism stands for and all of that. So I could quote Calvin or Daniel could quote Calvin or whatever and we would say, see even John Calvin says and somebody like Josiah might say, Yeah, okay, you just undercut your own argument because I don't agree with a lot of John Calvin. So it only goes so far, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't on occasion point to, hey, Luther said this, Calvin said this, Augustine said this, Tertullian said this, Jerome said this. Those are all fine, but you have to keep in mind, Irenaeus, one of the early church fathers, a hero in the faith, I would argue, he, I was gonna say famously, but rather infamously, believed that Jesus was 55 years old when he died on the cross. Irenaeus. And that's one of the earliest sources, might be the earliest source we have outside of the Bible, that talks about the crucifixion and the age of Christ. And so we go, oh, we'll see, Irenaeus. And he sat under a real polycarp or whatever he sat under. He would know Yeah, so these early sources can get I'm not saying that they are necessarily wrong. I'm just saying be careful They have their place. It's important to cite them particularly in a book. I'm glad that Josiah put that in there It shows that he took a scholarly approach to this and he did his homework and good for him. This is just me kind of pontificating a little bit because What passes for strong argument on the internet these days? As you know, well George Washington said Yeah, well, who cares? Well, let me just throw in one more dimension to consider, too. So, you know, if we have a passage like this that people debate, what is the meaning? It's like, how do we arrive at truth? There's so many passages in the Bible that are unclear. It's like, how do we arrive at what the author originally intended? And it just so happens that the early, that the Bible wasn't written at the time that the first churches were planted by the apostles. So how did they teach the first churches. They taught them word of mouth. They delivered in words all their teachings, all the teachings that are now in the Bible. And those church leaders, they claim that they passed... The fullness of the canon wasn't written. Yeah, I mean the Old Testament was written, but the New Testament wasn't. Maybe parts of it were written at that point. Just to clarify, for the stickler who might be listening. Yes, okay. So, how did they receive this knowledge, right? They received it word of mouth from the Apostles. Like the Apostle Paul would have, you know, let's say planted a church, chose the church leaders, delivered to them in words of mouth. He maybe talked about head coverings. He says, he mentioned in this passage about head coverings in 1 Corinthians 11 that he had talked to them previously about it. So, He delivers the stuff word of mouth, and then they practice what he says. And that practice, in scripture, there's a reference to it where it says that is the tradition of the church. It gets passed down as tradition. So what's important about looking at the early church fathers is you see the Bible actually lived out the way the apostles taught them, word of mouth originally. So not everything every individual church father said is important, but what did they believe as a whole? It shows what the apostles taught them. Am I making sense? Sure, yeah. Again, I know I'm being a stickler now, but we can't know what the early church leaders thought as a whole because we don't have enough of a preserved record. But we have enough to give a reasonable guess at what they believed. What some of them believed. Yeah, we can make, and we don't even have to guess, we can know with certainty what some of them believed. We have to merely speculate as to how widespread that belief was because we have such a scattershot record of it. So that's my caution there. I'm not saying that that representative sample is necessarily wrong. I just, I can't take that to the bank and cash it. It's just a poll. It's like, you know, you take a sampling of society and you ask them some questions and you get a poll. So it's the same with the church fathers in this case. You can go to their writings and see, was there like 10 or 12 early church fathers that all agreed on this topic? Are there none that disagreed? Then there's a likelihood that they were, this is what they practiced at the time. What you're saying is you have not found anybody that disagreed on this topic. Anybody that said that there's no requirement for a physical covering for women in church. Now, talking about history, and this might have been where David was kind of going with some of his questions, either this week or previous weeks. It all runs together after a while, doesn't it? Because of the proximity, if the cultural context, and we have to remember, now Culture changes by the second. I mean, it's crazy how fast things change in a interconnected internet, multinational, global context. I mean, it's mind-numbingly fast. That is not most of human history. We've seen more change in the last five years than the human race saw probably over the course of 3,000 years combined. I mean, it's crazy how much change there's been. So, particularly back then, if you're talking about somebody who wrote something that was 100 years after Christ, 200 years after Christ, 300 years after Christ, the cultural context would be pretty spot on to what it was before. It hadn't changed that much, even though 300 years had passed. So if it was merely a, because some would argue that what Paul is writing there is talking to their context, and they understood it within their context, but when you apply it to a different context, that same spiritual truth is still true, but it needs to be applied in a different way. What would we say about, what would any of us say about that in response? I would say no, that the Bible was written to people in a, Ancient Near Eastern culture, specifically the Jewish people, and that we are grafted into that. And I think the Jewish culture, the Middle Eastern culture, is extremely important and vital for Christians to be aware of. And yes, certain things may look slightly different, but to the extent the Bible gives commands of how to act and how to behave, I think that's incumbent on all believers, regardless of what societies they're in and what time periods they're living in. And the Jewish people as a whole still exist. Their culture has been maintained predominantly throughout this time period, which is a very good lens to read the Bible through. You can see what the Jewish people, what their culture is like today, and it's very similar to what their culture has been like for thousands of years, and that's a good lens to read the Bible through. Yeah, I mean, one of the things that we do see in the New Testament, one of the first issues, the big issues the Church really faces, though, is the temptation for people to think, and the temptation for the Jewish Christians to teach that you needed to become Jewish in order to be Christian, right, in order to follow Christ, and become Jewish even just by taking on customs, practices, right, circumcision sort of being the keystone, right, of all of that, and, you know, the early Christian Church rarely very clearly in the New Testament laying out like like no you you know you become a Christian as a Greek and you are a Greek Christian you do not become a Jewish Greek Christian or a Greek Jewish Christian anyway I would I know where you're going with it, and I would agree in part, but I think maybe to answer my full answer to that would take a whole set of shows. Yes, we've talked about that before in some ways. But I would agree, just for the sake of the listeners, I do agree wholeheartedly that you don't need to do anything else to become saved, certainly not following any specific Jewish customs. You need to be saved by the blood of Christ. I would just follow up with something to the effect of, well, once you're saved, you're gonna want to follow God's commands, and those commands have not and will never change, and there may be some of those that I would think have not changed that maybe you don't feel the need to follow, so we differ on that, but that's something that we'll get to in a different show. I think this whole discussion has been really good, and I think it's very important because, you know, Troy, you sort of brought up several, like at the beginning when you first talked about this, like, hey, this is something that, pretty much nobody's talking about in the grand scheme right but not in the modern American church anyway correct the most important question nobody asks right but but it's it's there in scripture and you know there's no part of scripture where we should say well I'm not really sure about that. I don't really have an understanding for that because of the culture that I'm in, so I'm just gonna brush over that. Maybe you don't get it the first time around, that's okay, but you should circle back to those things. that are particularly difficult or don't make sense to you because it is still relevant to you in some way. And so we should all go back and wrestle with those things that seem strange or odd to us and see what it is that God has to instruct us there for our here and now. Well, before anybody else picks up the baton and starts running with it, we're going to pause here because we've got a little over a minute left in the show. So I think we've reached what feels like as close to a conclusion as we're going to get after this lengthy dialogue. I don't know that any minds have been changed. But I do think we've all had our minds at least slightly illuminated. Maybe we've been challenged by questions we haven't thought of before, or it's sharpened our arguments on questions we have heard before, or what have you. And if you're listening to what any of us had to say, hopefully it's got you thinking about things. And ultimately, what I would hope for you is that you would press into the Bible itself, read God's Word, and ask other people that you trust as good godly people for their insights and their thoughts. And this question and all questions in life, wrestle through them until you can try to figure them out. And you can't wrestle every question at once. So if this isn't your big bugaboo question, but you've got another big bugaboo question, okay, wrestle with God's word to figure it out. and then go on to the next question and wrestle with God's Word to figure it out. I promise you, you've got questions. Take the time to think what they are. Anyway, that's enough of my ending soliloquy. I think the voice you heard before mine was that of David Forsey. He's a pastor in the area. Before that, I think you heard the voice of Daniel Razvi, another pastor in the area. You can find him online at conqueredbylove.org. And the other voice you heard on today's show, the head covering. author Josiah Bon Joanni. You can find that book online at amazon.com. You can find me online at householdoffaithinchrist.com. Until next week, God bless.