A response to Bernard's views on makeup and women's adornment
This is our series of articles analyzing David Bernard's position on holiness. You are on the page that is in bold. Click on the links to go to a particular chapter:
- Links to Bernard's other books
- An analysis of Bernard's ''Essentials of Holiness''
- A response to Bernard's views on women's hair
- A response to Bernard's views on makeup and women's adornment
- A response to Bernard's views on women wearing pants
- Does Speaking in Tongues Prove You're Saved?
- Is baptism necessary for salvation?
- Modern day Pharisees?
Rebuttal of Bernard's Position on Makeup and Women's Adornment
Using Fee, Grudem, and Geisler
"The Bible always links makeup with evil." That is Bernard's claim in Essentials of Holiness, and it is the load-bearing wall of his argument that Christian women should never wear cosmetics. If that claim is true, the prohibition that follows at least has a scriptural foundation. If it is false, the entire structure collapses.
It is false. And the problems with Bernard's position go well beyond the simple factual error, extending into the misuse of prophetic literature, a classic logical fallacy, a misreading of the New Testament's actual concern, and — most seriously — the addition of human rules to the gospel of grace that Paul spent an entire letter warning against.
The Claim That Cannot Survive Contact with the Text
Bernard supports his "always linked with evil" assertion primarily with two texts: Jeremiah 4:30 and Ezekiel 23:40.
Jeremiah 4:30 reads: "What are you doing, you devastated one? Why dress yourself in scarlet and put on jewels of gold? Why shade your eyes with paint? You adorn yourself in vain. Your lovers despise you; they seek your life." This is prophetic poetry. God is addressing unfaithful Jerusalem through the voice of the prophet, using the extended image of a woman desperately trying to seduce a lover who has already turned against her. The lover who now seeks her life is the foreign nation Jerusalem had pursued through spiritual infidelity. Jeremiah is not issuing a rule about cosmetics. He is using the image of a woman making herself up for a man who wants her dead as a metaphor for Israel's futile political maneuvering. The eye shadow in the poem is doing the same work that "scarlet dress" and "gold jewelry" do — they are the props of the metaphor, not the subjects of the command.
Ezekiel 23:40 is the same kind of text, only more elaborate. It comes from Ezekiel's extended allegory about two sisters, Oholah and Oholibah, who represent Samaria and Jerusalem and are depicted as prostitutes committing adultery against God by pursuing foreign nations. The painting of eyes appears as part of the vivid, deliberately shocking imagery Ezekiel uses throughout this chapter to confront Israel with the horror of their spiritual infidelity. To read a command about eye shadow out of this text is to treat the allegorical furniture as though it were the subject of the sermon.
You cannot derive a binding moral rule from a metaphor's incidental details. If you could, these same passages would also teach that wearing a scarlet dress is sinful (Jer 4:30), that sending for a bath and putting on jewels is sinful (Ezek 23:40), and that serving men "food fine-prepared" is sinful (Ezek 23:41). Nobody reads those conclusions out of the text. Bernard selects the eye paint because it fits his existing conclusion, while ignoring every other detail in the same imagery. That is the very definition of selective reading.
The Counter-Evidence Bernard Does Not Mention
The claim that the Bible "always" links makeup with evil fails for another reason: there are clear counter-examples that Bernard does not address.
In Esther 2:12, each young woman underwent twelve months of beauty treatments before being presented to the king — "six months with oil of myrrh and six with perfumes and cosmetics." The entire account in Esther is told with no hint of condemnation, and Esther herself is one of the most positively portrayed women in the Old Testament. Her beauty preparations are simply part of the story, treated as normal, not morally fraught.
Ruth 3:3 records Naomi's instructions to Ruth before she went to meet Boaz: "Wash, put on perfume, and get dressed in your best clothes, then go down to the threshing floor." Naomi is not counseling immodesty. She is preparing Ruth for the moment that will lead to her marriage and eventual place in the genealogy of Israel's greatest king. The account is entirely approving.
Song of Solomon describes a woman's adornments as beautiful and desirable throughout: "Your cheeks are lovely with ornaments, your neck with strings of jewels" (1:10-11); "How beautiful you are, my love, how very beautiful!" (4:1). There is no disclaimer, no hesitation, no suggestion that this beauty is somehow spiritually compromised.
Three passages directly contradict the "always" in Bernard's claim. When a key factual premise of an argument is demonstrably false, the argument built on it cannot stand.
The Logical Problem: Guilt by Association
There is another text Bernard likely has in mind even if he does not always cite it directly: 2 Kings 9:30. "When Jezebel heard about it, she put on eye makeup, arranged her hair and looked out of a window." Jezebel was wicked. Jezebel wore eye makeup. Therefore eye makeup is wicked.
This is a textbook logical fallacy. Its technical name is guilt by association, but you do not need to know the technical name to see the error. Jezebel also ate food, wore clothing, and looked out windows. The narrative condemns Jezebel because she was a murderer, a promoter of Baal worship, and a persecutor of the prophets of God. Her eye makeup is atmospheric detail, not the source of her condemnation and not the point of the story. If the presence of eye makeup in a negative narrative made eye makeup sinful, then the presence of bread and clothing in the same negative narratives would make bread and clothing sinful by the same logic.
Geisler's systematic theology is careful to distinguish between what a text reports and what a text prescribes. Many things are described in Scripture without being endorsed. Many things happen in narratives without the narrative teaching that those things caused the spiritual failure described. The method of reading a condemnation into an incidental detail because it appears in a negative story is not exegesis. It is eisegesis with a preloaded conclusion.
What the New Testament Actually Says — and Does Not Say
Jesus never spoke about cosmetics. Paul never addressed them in any of his letters. The book of Acts records no controversy about them. No apostolic epistle, no church council, no pastoral letter in the New Testament raises the question of whether women may wear makeup.
The one New Testament text that addresses the question of women's adornment most directly is 1 Peter 3:3-4: "Your beauty should not come from outward adornment, such as elaborate hairstyles and the wearing of gold jewelry or fine clothes. Rather, it should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God's sight."
Bernard treats this as a prohibition. But read the verse carefully. It says beauty should not "come from" outward adornment — meaning outward adornment should not be the source or center of a woman's identity and worth. It does not say outward adornment must be eliminated. The contrast is between where a woman's real beauty originates, not between the presence and absence of any visible beauty practice.
The proof that Peter is talking about emphasis and priority, not absolute prohibition, is hiding in plain sight in his own words. He mentions gold jewelry and fine clothes alongside the adornment he is contrasting with inner beauty. If the verse prohibits jewelry and fine clothes as such, then virtually every Christian woman who has ever lived — including those in the most conservative Oneness churches — has violated it, since they all wear clothes. Nobody reads "the wearing of fine clothes" in this verse as a prohibition on wearing clothes. The verse is about not finding your worth and identity in external things. It is not a rule that removes those external things.
Grudem's Systematic Theology articulates an interpretive principle relevant here: when a passage is making a comparative or emphasis point (this, not that), it should not be read as an absolute prohibition of the "that" unless the context clearly supports it. A married woman instructed to "honor your husband, not your career" is not being told to abandon her career. A believer told to "seek first the kingdom of God" is not being forbidden to also buy groceries. Reading 1 Peter 3:3-4 as a prohibition on adornment rather than a call to prioritize inner character is a failure of basic interpretive care.
The Galatians Problem: Adding Rules to the Gospel
Here is where the argument becomes most serious, because the problem is not just that Bernard misreads a few texts. It is that the structure of his argument is the exact structure Paul spent the entire letter to the Galatians opposing.
In Essentials of Holiness, Bernard presents a set of appearance standards — no makeup, no jewelry, women's hair uncut, women in skirts — as "biblical, and therefore universal and unchanging." These are placed in the same category as the prohibition on sexual immorality, murder, and idolatry. Following them is presented as necessary to "pursue holiness," which Bernard has already argued is required for salvation. The net effect is this: faith in Christ, plus the new birth, plus conforming to these appearance standards, constitutes genuine Christian life.
This is exactly what Gordon Fee identifies in his Pentecostal Commentary on Galatians as the modern form of the Galatian error. Fee writes directly about Pentecostals in his reflection on Galatians 1:6-9: "Is it not possible that in our eagerness to 'help God out' as it were, we have added conditions to grace that lie on the 'law-keeping' side of things that have almost nothing to do with the gospel itself? It is amazing how historically Pentecostals, who often know about the Spirit the most, trust him the least, and have found it easy to add external regulations regarding food, dress, and entertainment, as a means of 'hemming people in.'"
Fee is not being casual about this. He is comparing this pattern directly to the error of the Galatian agitators, the same people Paul says are "perverting the gospel of Christ" (Gal 1:7) and against whom Paul pronounces an anathema if they continue to preach "a different gospel." The agitators were not immoral people. They were Jewish Christians who believed that faith in Jesus was the starting point but that additional religious observances were required to complete one's standing before God. Paul's response was not to say they had made a minor mistake. He said they had abandoned the gospel.
Fee continues: "Is my identity to be found in some modern form of 'circumcision' rather than in trusting God's grace, so that his Spirit produces his character in me (5:22-23)?" The specific items on Bernard's appearance list are the modern form of circumcision — the observable markers that distinguish the in-group from the out-group, the visible signs that you have "completed" your Christianity by conforming to a set of external requirements that Scripture never actually imposes.
The agitators appealed to Scripture too. Circumcision was in the law of Moses. The Sabbath was in the law of Moses. Food laws were in the law of Moses. They were not inventing requirements out of thin air. But Paul's response was that adding those observances to faith in Christ as conditions for full standing before God was a fundamental betrayal of what Christ accomplished. The question for Bernard is this: what makes adding "no makeup" to the gospel any different?
The Works of the Flesh: What Paul Actually Condemns
When Paul wants to describe the life that stands in opposition to the Spirit, he provides his own list in Galatians 5:19-21. It is worth looking at what is on it and what is not.
Paul's list of the works of the flesh includes: sexual immorality, impurity, debauchery, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, and orgies.
Fee's commentary on this list makes two observations that matter here. First, this is not primarily a list of bodily sins. Fee notes that "for the most part the various sins are not the kind associated with internal warfare within the human breast," but rather visible behaviors that destroy individuals and community. The central cluster — hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions, envy — are relational and attitudinal sins. Second, Fee notes that what is "missing" from the list is as significant as what is present. The list does not include greed, theft, or violence. It does not include dress codes or cosmetic practices. Paul tailored his vice list to the actual problems tearing the Galatian churches apart — which were relational and communal, not aesthetic.
Makeup is not on Paul's list of the works of the flesh. Not because Paul forgot it, not because he hadn't thought about the issue, but because it is not the kind of thing that constitutes a "work of the flesh." The flesh in Paul's theology, as Fee explains, refers to "life before and outside of Christ" characterized by values that "stand in absolute contradiction to God and his ways." That is a description of idolatry, sexual immorality, and the breakdown of community relationships. It is not a description of a woman applying concealer before she goes to church.
The Structural Error in Bernard's Method
There is a deeper problem underneath all of these specific misreadings, and Grudem's Systematic Theology helps name it. Grudem argues that one of the marks of a healthy relationship to Scripture is learning to distinguish clearly between what the text actually says and what we are reading into it, and that the weight we assign to a claim should be proportional to the clarity of the biblical support for it. The clearer the text, the stronger the command. The more ambiguous or inferential the support, the more tentative the conclusion.
By this standard, the prohibition on murder carries absolute weight because Scripture is absolutely clear. The prohibition on sexual immorality carries absolute weight because Paul addresses it directly, repeatedly, and explicitly. The prohibition on makeup carries no weight at all, because there is no direct New Testament command prohibiting it, the two Old Testament texts usually cited are prophetic metaphors with nothing to do with cosmetics as such, the New Testament silence on the subject is complete, and the positive examples of women using beauty practices in the Old Testament directly contradict the "always linked with evil" claim.
What Bernard has done is treat a conclusion drawn from prophetic metaphors, selective association, and an emphasis passage read as prohibition as though it carries the same authority as Scripture's direct moral commands. That is not how to handle the Bible. It is the very method that produces the kind of external rule-keeping Paul calls a betrayal of the gospel.
The Pastoral Reality
Women in UPCI churches grow up learning that the absence of makeup is one of the markers of their consecration to God. The teaching is reinforced from the pulpit, from peer pressure, from the associations built between "wearing makeup" and "living in the world." By the time a woman has been in this culture for years, the prohibition feels like it comes straight from God's heart.
But Bernard himself says, correctly, that "God does not give human beings the right to change His message." The problem is that no prophetic metaphor about spiritual adultery, no matter how evocative, and no narrative detail about Jezebel's appearance constitutes God's message prohibiting cosmetics. The message he is claiming God gave is one Bernard has assembled from misread texts, a logical fallacy, and a selective reading that ignores the positive evidence.
The fruit of the Spirit is "love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control," as Paul lists in Galatians 5:22-23. Fee notes: "Against such things there is no law." The Spirit produces character, not a dress code. Genuine holiness forms people who love well, who are kind in the face of hostility, who bear with one another over the long haul. Those are the marks by which Paul says you can tell a Spirit-led life from a flesh-driven one.
A woman who wears foundation and mascara to church on Sunday morning and loves her neighbors, forgives her enemies, and tells the truth is more holy in Paul's sense of the word than a woman who has never touched a makeup brush but carries bitterness, judgment, and contempt under a spotlessly plain face. Bernard knows this at some level — he says it himself when he insists that holiness flows from the inside out. The problem is that his practical section does not trust that claim enough to follow it.
This rebuttal engages David K. Bernard, Essentials of Holiness (Hazelwood, MO: Word Aflame Press, 1989). Counter-sources: Gordon D. Fee, Galatians: Pentecostal Commentary (Blandford Forum: Deo Publishing, 2007), on Galatians 1:6-9 and 5:13-26; Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994); Norman L. Geisler, Systematic Theology vol. 1-4 (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 2002-2005). Key passages: Jeremiah 4:30; Ezekiel 23:40; Esther 2:12; Ruth 3:3; Song of Solomon 1:10-11; 2 Kings 9:30; 1 Peter 3:3-4; Galatians 5:19-23.
Footnotes