The Dress Code He Condemned

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In 2012, we turned the Believethesign website from a site that promoted William Branham into one that examined him honestly. Barry Coffey responded that year from the pulpit at Hickory Bible Tabernacle with a six-part series called The Present Truth.

If you want to listen to all or part of the entire series, please click here. All of the timestamps in our article refer to the part of the series being examined. You are currently in the part of the series that is highlighted:

• Part 1 - The Test That Fails Its Maker
• Part 2 - The Photograph That Proves Too Much
• Part 3 - The Absolute He Would Not Apply
• Part 4 - What Heresy Actually Means
• Part 5 - The Dress Code He Condemned
• Part 6 - The Defense That Says "Stop Looking"

The Dress Code He Condemned

A Response to Barry Coffey's "The Present Truth," Part 5

Partway through this sermon, Barry Coffey held up a photograph of Amish people and told his congregation something true. He said their dress-based sense of superiority was "a real spirit." He said that of all the times you are not supposed to judge by appearances, "that's the one case where you're allowed to tell people it's not what's on the outside, it's what's on the inside that matters." He objected to "the holier than thou attitude" and "this idea that we're better than you because we dress this way."

He was right. Every word of it.

Then, about forty minutes later, in the same sermon, he preached his own dress code, women must never cut their hair, never wear "britches," never go sleeveless, and he told a wife she must defy her own husband to keep it. He said it was not legalism. He said it was obedience to God's word.

He condemned the thing and then he did the thing. This is the whole sermon, and it what is strange is that the contradiction is not hidden. It is right there on the surface, spoken aloud, forty minutes apart.

Let's look at the evidence.

What Barry Coffey Argued

This was the evening service on August 5, 2012, a continuation of that morning's message, from the same text in 2 Peter 1. The argument runs like this.

Your "absolute," he says, regulates your conduct. What you hold dear shapes how you dress, how you spend, how you marry. Then he turns to Luke 11:52, where Jesus tells the lawyers, "ye have taken away the key of knowledge." That key, Coffey says, is moral wisdom, knowing "things lawful and unlawful for Christians." Without it, and without the Holy Spirit, you would think mixed bathing and movies were fine.

There is a real moral standard, he argues, because a counterfeit proves a genuine, and that standard is spelled out in Scripture. From there, he moves to holiness, and holiness, in this sermon, means a specific list: uncut hair on women, no trousers, no sleeveless dresses, no television. He backs each with quotes from William Branham. And he insists these are settled: "the words went forth," so it does not matter what anyone does now, and it does not even matter, he says, what Branham's own family wore.

He is careful to say holiness is "not just a dress code," that humility and purity and God's presence are the real thing. I want to credit that. He knows, at some level, that a list of garments is not the same as a holy heart. But then he preaches the list anyway, as binding, as God's word, and tells a wife to break with her husband over it.

I want to be fair about what is good here. Coffey is right that there is a real moral order. He is right that not everything is permitted. He is right that a counterfeit implies a genuine. Those instincts are sound. The problem is what he does with them, and the fact that he does the very thing he spent the first half of the sermon condemning.

He Condemned Dress Codes, Then He Preached One

Set the two halves of this sermon side by side.

In the first half, Coffey walks through the dress codes of other groups. The Muslim hijab, which he finds funny to watch someone eat spaghetti in. The Catholic habit. The Hasidic Jews with their specific rules. And the Amish, at length, whom he had lived near in Ohio. Of the Amish he says the dress-based superiority is "a real spirit," that they are "a long way from the light of this hour," that they will "shut you off in a heartbeat" the moment you challenge their traditions, and that he has "a real objection to the holier than thou attitude" that goes with dressing to signal you are better than other people. And then the line that undoes everything that follows: "that's the one case where you're allowed to tell people it's not what's on the outside, it's what's on the inside that matters."

In the second half, Coffey preaches his own code. Women's hair is never to be cut. Women are never to wear trousers. Sleevelessness is immodest "by any stretch." No television. These are not preferences, he says; "the words went forth," and a wife must keep them even against her husband's wishes.

Now ask the questions Coffey asked of the Amish, but ask them of his own church:

• Is this an externally enforced dress code? Yes.
• Is it imposed on children from an early age? Yes.
• Is it treated as a mark of holiness, a sign of separation from people who dress otherwise? Yes, explicitly.
• Does it carry a sense that "we are more separated than you"? The whole sermon says so.

Every single charge Coffey levels at the Amish lands on his own congregation without one word needing to change.

And here is the part that should stop us. He already told us the answer. When it was the Amish, he said it plainly: it is not what is on the outside, it is what is on the inside. He stated the exact principle that dismantles his own dress code, and then, forty minutes later, bolted it shut for his own people. You cannot condemn dress-based holiness in one group and preach dress-based holiness to another in the same sermon. But that is what happened.

When the Prophet Could Not Keep His Own Rule

The strangest moment in the sermon is when Coffey confronts an obvious problem and waves it away.

Someone had evidently pointed out that William Branham's own wife and daughters did not keep these standards. Coffey does not deny it. He quotes Branham himself admitting that his wife "takes Becky apart every day" over sleeveless dresses, and that he "constantly fussed" at his children about tight clothing. Coffey's response: "it doesn't matter what Brother Branhm's family wore. Because the words went forth."

Say What? The standard is so absolute that the very household of the man who delivered it could not, or would not, keep it. And Coffey treats that as irrelevant, a fact about the family, not a fact about the rule.

But it is a fact about the rule. When a teaching cannot be lived even in the home of the prophet who received it, that tells you something. And the record is worse than Coffey lets on. William Branham did not merely fail to enforce the hair rule; he and his wife began trimming their daughter Rebekah's hair before she was old enough to ask for it. The man who taught that a woman's uncut hair was a divine command did not apply it to his own young daughter. He preached, by his own admission, a standard his family did not hold, and he set it aside in his own nursery.

Coffey feels the force of this, because he does something remarkable: he distances himself from Branham to keep the teaching. "Brother Branham is not my standard," he says. "They're not my absolute." He has to push the prophet's actual life to one side in order to preach what the prophet said. That is the tell. When you must set aside how a man lived in order to defend what he taught, the teaching is in trouble.

The Pants on Women Issue

The Bible is a book organized around two covenants: one between God and ancient Israel and one between God and you! Focus on the second one. The covenant between God and Israel is obsolete. Read it for historical context and inspiration.

Wait a minute... Did I just call part of the Bible obsolete?

Actually, it wasn’t me. One of the authors of our Bible calls part of our Bible obsolete.

If you had an overwhelming amount of debt that you wanted to rid yourself of, one option would be to declare bankruptcy. In that case, your obligation would not be fulfilled, just removed. But if someone came along and paid off your debt, the obligation would be fulfilled and the burden of fulfilling that obligation would be removed as well. Jesus fulfilled (as in ended) the necessity of the Jewish law. Just as you don’t abolish a home by completing its construction, just as you don’t abolish a flight plan by landing a plane, just as you don’t abolish a homework assignment by completing the assignment, Jesus did not abolish the law when he fulfilled it. But in fulfilling it, he made it... obsolete.

Paul says in Romans 7:6:

But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code.

The Greek word that Paul uses that we translate as "obsolete" is παλαιότης, which refers to something in the state of being superseded or obsolete,

This statement of the old covenant being made obsolete is made clear in the book of Hebrews:

In speaking of a new covenant, he makes the first one obsolete. And what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away.

To be clear, obsolete doesn’t mean bad. Obsolete means something new and better has come along. Cassette tapes are obsolete, but they’re not bad. Back in the day, cassette tapes were cutting-edge technology. Cassette tapes were the first technology to create the possibility for portable personalized music, until CDs came along, and now CDs are obsolete. Not because they’re bad. Because something better has come along... streaming. Each of those technologies played a critical role in the evolution of music storage and portability. They were necessary steps to get where we are today. The same is true of God’s covenant with the nation of Israel. Sequential.

N. T. Wright summarized it perfectly when he wrote:

The Torah [law of Moses at Sinai] is given for a specific period of time, and is then set aside—not because it was a bad thing now happily abolished, but because it was a good thing whose purpose had now been accomplished.

To love the way Jesus called us to love requires a complete break with the inspired but retired, beautiful but obsolete, old covenant. As long as we continue mixing old with new, we will never be free to love as we have been called to love. Until we dispense with the old and embrace the new, our love will be leverage. And love that is leverage is no love at all.

Deuteronomy 22:5 is obsolete. Move into the new covenant.

And if women's pants are actually a man's garment, ask this question: Would Barry Coffey wear a pair of women's pants? LOL! Not a chance! Why? Because they are not a man's garment.

Serpent Seed, Asserted as Fact

Something shifts in this sermon compared with the earlier ones. In Parts 1 through 4, Coffey mostly defended a method, break into the spirit, hold the absolute, wear the label of heretic. Here he begins asserting the distinctive doctrines themselves as settled truth. Three times he states it plainly: "I believe that serpent seed is eternally right because it's according to God's word."

In my response to Part 4, I set out the historic definition of heresy, drawn from the writings of Alan Hirsch: heresy is a fragment of real truth extracted from its context and inflated until it becomes the whole, so that "truth thereby becomes fragmented." Serpent seed is that move in its purest form. It is a doctrine read into the text, not out of it. The New Testament never says the serpent had physical relations with Eve. Second Corinthians 11:3, the verse most often pressed into service, says only that the serpent "beguiled Eve," nothing more. Acts 17:26 says all men descend from one man, Adam, not two. Romans 5:12 says sin entered the world through Adam. The doctrine has to be imported, and where it came from is not a secret: it traces through British Israelism into the Christian Identity movement and the Ku Klux Klan, and Branham's own first pastor, Roy Davis, became a Klan leader.

I am not going to relitigate the whole doctrine here; the record is laid out on this website. My point is narrower. Coffey has now stopped defending a way of arguing and started asserting the fragments as the whole. That is not the faith of Paul before Felix, who added nothing to what was written. It is the very thing the word heresy was coined to name.

The Woe He Preached Against Himself

The center of this sermon is Luke 11:52: "Woe unto you, lawyers! for ye have taken away the key of knowledge." Coffey reads the "key of knowledge" as moral wisdom, the code of holiness, and warns that false teachers take it away by diverting people from the standard.

But read the whole passage, and it turns in his hand. Jesus is not rebuking the lawyers for failing to enforce dress standards. He is rebuking them for the opposite. Two verses earlier: "ye lade men with burdens grievous to be borne, and ye yourselves touch not the burdens with one of your fingers" (Luke 11:46). The woe is against religious experts who bury ordinary people under man-made rules while keeping God at a distance. And the "key of knowledge" is not a list of prohibitions. Coffey quotes the definition himself, from John 17:3: "this is life eternal, that they might know the only true God, and Jesus Christ." The key is knowing God. Not knowing the dress code.

So here is the irony, and it is a hard one. Jesus's woe in Luke 11 falls on exactly the kind of religion this sermon is preaching, the multiplication of external rules, the burden laid on the shoulders of the ordinary believer, the confusion of holiness with conformity. Coffey took a text that condemns rule-heavy gatekeeping and used it to justify rule-heavy gatekeeping. The woe was never against people who stopped enforcing the code. It was against people who built the code in the first place.

And so we have to ask the question we address in this separate article: Are Message Ministers modern day Pharisees?

When Reasoning Became the Serpent's Tool

There is a moment I cannot pass over, because it is the most troubling line in the sermon. Coffey describes a woman who asked Branham why she could not dress as another churchgoing woman did. Coffey's verdict: "that's reasoning." And then: "Satan caused her to reason over God's word. Anyone unclear about how Eve got in trouble in the Garden of Eden? She reasoned, didn't she?"

Think about what has just been said. Reasoning is now the serpent's instrument. The faculty of thinking through a question is how Eve fell.

Two things. First, this is self-defeating on its face. Barry Coffey has now preached five sermons of sustained argument, a "reasoned defense," his word, apologia, built to answer this website. You cannot spend five sermons reasoning and then tell your people that reasoning is how the serpent works. If reasoning is satanic, the whole series is too.

Second, it is simply not what happened in the garden. Eve's sin was not that she thought carefully. It was that she disbelieved and disobeyed a clear command of God. Reason, rightly used, does the opposite of what Coffey fears. It was reason that God appealed to: "Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD" (Isaiah 1:18). It was reason the Bereans used when they "searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so," and Scripture calls them noble for it. The serpent's method was not reasoning. It was the same method this sermon uses: "Don't think about it, just believe what I say."

A Word About Where the Standard Came From

I have tried, through all five of these responses, to be firm about facts and gentle about people, and I want to keep that here, because this next point is heavy.

Coffey presents the hair and dress teaching as pure obedience to God's word. But the teaching does not come from a neutral reading of Scripture. It comes from William Branham, and Branham's teaching on women is documented, and it is ugly. He taught that a man had the right to divorce a wife who cut her hair. He said, in his own recorded words, that he "hated women," that certain women were "not worth a good clean bullet," and he mocked a woman who wore makeup as "Miss Dogmeat." This is not my characterization; it is his own language, preserved on his own tapes, and laid out with references on this website.

I raise it for one reason. When a teaching about how women must dress and wear their hair, a teaching used to tell a wife to defy her husband, originates with a man who expressed open contempt for women, that is relevant to whether the teaching is really "God's word" or one man's prejudice dressed in a Bible verse. The people keeping these standards deserve to know where they came from. That is not an attack on them. It is the respect of telling them the truth.

Scripture, Handled Rightly

Three more scriptural passages in Part 5 are turned to say things they do not say.

1 Timothy 2:9, "modest apparel."

Coffey reads this as a fixed garment list, no trousers, no sleeves, uncut hair. But the verse is about respectability and self-restraint, not a catalogue of banned clothing. In its own context, it warns against ostentation, "gold, or pearls, or costly array", the opposite problem from the one Coffey applies it to. Turning "modest and self-controlled" into a specific hemline is Branham's reading, not Paul's.

1 Corinthians 11, head covering and hair.

The covering Paul discusses was a culturally specific sign, in first-century Corinth, most likely a marker of a married woman. The nearest modern equivalent is a wedding ring, not a lifelong ban on scissors. Building a permanent, universal law of uncut hair on this passage reads far more into it than the text will bear.

This is actually a position that was passed down to Branham from the Holiness movement. It is also still preached by the United Pentecostal Church. We go into detail as to why the doctrine is wrong in this article.

Jeremiah 35, the Rechabites.

Coffey uses this to say a rule handed down generations ago binds you forever. But that is not the point of the chapter. The Rechabites' abstinence from wine was their own family's voluntary vow, and God never called it His command. Jeremiah holds them up only as a rebuke by contrast: if this family keeps its forefather's word, how much more should Judah keep God's word? The passage contrasts human faithfulness with Israel's unfaithfulness to God. It says nothing about turning a preacher's cultural rules into permanent divine law. To use it that way, Coffey has to assume the very thing in dispute, that the dress rules are God's commands rather than one man's.

An Honest Invitation

I began with the thing Coffey got right, and I meant it. He is right that there is a real moral order. He is right that holiness matters. He is even right about the Amish, that a dress code worn as a badge of superiority is "a real spirit," and that in the end it is what is inside that counts.

I am only asking him to believe his own words when he says them about his own church.

Because the people in those pews have been handed a heavy load. They have been told that the length of a woman's hair and the cut of her clothes are the measure of her holiness, that a wife must break with her husband over a hemline, that questioning any of it is how Eve fell. That is precisely the burden Jesus lifted off people's shoulders in Luke 11, the grievous weight the gatekeepers laid on them while they themselves would not touch it with a finger. The gospel is not a dress code. Holiness is not a garment. "Man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart."

Rather than the Message, rules-oriented, Pharisaical holiness, a more biblical approach is that used by John Mark Comer:

I used to weigh potential behaviors with the question, Is this sinful or not? But now that I better understand the gospel and its possibility of “life that is truly life” with Jesus, my new question is, Does this move me toward Jesus or away?

There is a greater than William Branham, and He did not come to measure your hemline. He came to give you rest, and He said His burden was light. Bring the heavy load back to Him and see if He does not lift it.

That is not lowering the standard. That is finding the real one.

Come and reason. Five responses down. One to go.

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