Full Question
What is the relationship between the contexts when sisters are covered (1 Corinthians 11) and when sisters keep silence (1 Corinthians 14)? If a sister ought to pray and prophesy with her head covered, then the set of contexts in which she keeps silence does not coincide exactly with the set of contexts in which she is covered. That is, there are contexts when a sister is not ‘in ecclesia’ when she is covered.
The men who are prophets themselves when in ecclesia either speak or ‘hold their peace’ (keep silence (1 Cor 14:29-30, compare vv. 34-35)), and so parallel the men and the women altogether. The same is true for different reasons of anyone who speaks in a tongue, with or without an interpreter (vv. 27-28).
Answer
The question you pose is about reading: How do we read 1 Cor 11:5 and 14:34-35?
First, while we can say that sisters were praying and prophesying ‘in ecclesia’, this presupposition of v. 5 is not an expression of permission, obligation or approval. There is therefore an ambiguity in your “a sister ought to pray and prophesy with her head covered”. Is this an ‘ought’ relating to praying and prophesying or an ‘ought’ relating to the covering of the head? V. 5 is not an instruction relating to a practice; it is a critical remark about a form of behaviour. The behaviour criticized is the failure to wear a head-covering.
Second, the range of contexts in which sisters were praying and prophesying is not known from v. 5 but vv. 2-16 is about ‘in ecclesia’. The harmonization (which I have heard elsewhere) between v. 5 and 1 Cor 14:34-35 which affirms that 1 Cor 11:2-16 is not ‘in ecclesia’ while 1 Cor 14:34-35 is ‘in ecclesia’ doesn’t work for reasons laid out in the original article.
Third, there is no formal contradiction in logical terms between vv. 34-35 and v. 5; this is the case both for the logic of ‘ought’ as well as ‘is’. The implied ‘ought’ of v. 5 relates to coverings whereas the ‘ought’ of vv. 34-35 relates to speaking. We know the focus of v. 5 relates to coverings because of the arguments that follow which relate to covering rather than speaking.
Finally, as vv. 34-35 is an instruction about speaking ‘in ecclesia’ whereas v. 5 is not an instruction about speaking, your “if…then” argument doesn’t work. Not only is the “if…” clause ambiguous about what the ‘ought’ relates to, but the “then…” clause mixes an implied ‘ought’ in “keeps silence” with an ‘is’ in “when she is covered”. The question of whether the obligatory contexts coincided is different from the question of whether the actual contexts coincided. The information to affirm a “does not coincide” judgment for either type of context is not there in the text. What we have is an implied instruction for head-coverings and an explicit instruction for silence for the ‘in ecclesia’ context.
“The Valley of the Shadow”