Robert Service Historian Quotes

Churchill created the Royal Naval Air Service, which had fifty planes by 1914, and pioneered the concept of aerial bombing of Zeppelin airship aerodromes and German lines of communication. The first successful launch of a plane off the deck of a battleship took place in January 1912, and some military historians see Churchill as the father of the modern aircraft carrier.

When 1 Corinthians 14:34–35 is read as a quotation representing a Corinthian practice (which D. W. Odell-Scott argued for in 1983, Charles Talbert argued for in 1987, and Peppiatt has argued for again more recently51), Paul’s purpose seems clear: to distinguish what the Corinthians were doing (“women be silent”) and to clarify that Christians should not be following the Corinthian practice (“What!”). While I cannot guarantee this is what Paul was doing, it makes a lot of (historical) sense. First Corinthians includes several non-Pauline quotations already, and the wording of verses 34–35 is remarkably close to Roman sources. As Marg Mowczko observes, “The view that 14:34–35 is a non-Pauline quotation is one of the few that offers a plausible explanation for the jarring change of tone which verses 34–35 bring into the text, as well as the subsequent abrupt change of topic, tone, and gender in verse 36.”52 If Paul is indeed quoting the Roman worldview to counter it with the Christian worldview, then his meaning is the exact opposite of what evangelical women have been taught. Could it be that, instead of telling women to be silent like the Roman world did, Paul was actually telling men that, in the world of Jesus, women were allowed to speak? Could we have missed Paul’s point (again)? Instead of heeding his rebuke and freeing women to speak, are we continuing the very patriarchal practices that Paul was condemning? As a historian, I find it hard to ignore how similar Paul’s words are to the Greco-Roman world in which he lives. Yet, even if I am wrong and Paul is only drawing on Roman sources instead of intentionally quoting them for the purpose of refutation, I would still argue that the directives Paul gave to Corinthian women are limited to their historical context.53 Why? Because consistency is an interpretative virtue. Paul is not making a blanket decree for women to be silent; he allows women to speak throughout his letters (1 Corinthians 11:1–6 is a case in point). Paul is not limiting women’s leadership; he tells us with his own hand that women lead in the early church and that he supports their ministries (I will discuss Romans 16 in the next section). Maintaining a rigid gender hierarchy just isn’t Paul’s point. As Beverly Roberts Gaventa reminds us from earlier in 1 Corinthians (12:1–7), Paul’s “calling to service is not restricted along gender lines so that arguments about complementarity find no grounding here.”54 By insisting that Paul told women to be silent, evangelicals have capitulated to

The attempt to create a total cultural environment and to silence or intimidate opponents is part of a campaign that had once seemed promising, even to those—yourself included—alarmed at the irrationality and anti-intellectuality unleashed by many of the most vocal proponents of the new fundamentalism. But concepts with some genuine merit—like “privilege,” “appropriation,” and even “microaggression”—were very rapidly weaponized, and well-intentioned discussions of “identity,” “inequality,” and “disability” became the leading edge of new efforts to label and separate the saved and the damned, the “woke” and the benighted, the victim and the oppressor. Concepts useful in careful and nuanced discussions proved strikingly “amenable to over-extension,” as the cultural historian Rochelle Gurstein put it, and ideas suitable for addressing “psychological distress” were forced into the service of efforts to “[redress] the subordination of one people by another,” yielding not significant redress but a new wave of puritanism and a culture of suspicion