Modesty

Modesty is the virtue of confining one’s dress, speech, and bearing within the limits proper to purity, avoiding whatever is calculated to provoke lust in another.¹ It forms one part of chastity, alongside the inward restraint of conscience Reformed writers called shamefastness and the outward decorum they called gravity.¹ Scripture states the principle directly: women are to “adorn themselves in respectable apparel, with modesty and self-control” (1 Tim. 2:9), and the ornament God values is “the hidden person of the heart… which in God’s sight is very precious” (1 Pet. 3:3-4).

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession has no chapter treating modesty directly, and, unlike the Westminster Standards, it includes no commandment-by-commandment exposition of the moral law at all; Particular Baptist catechisms of the period, such as Benjamin Keach’s, followed the Westminster Shorter Catechism’s own structure rather than replacing it.² The fullest confessional statement comes from the Westminster Larger Catechism, which Keach himself treated as carrying real authority alongside the Confession.² Its exposition of the seventh commandment lists among the duties required “chastity in body, mind, affections, words, and behaviour… watchfulness over the eyes, and all the senses; temperance, keeping of chaste company, modesty in apparel,” and among the sins forbidden “wanton looks, impudent, or light behaviour; immodest apparel.”³ Modesty, on this reading, is not an isolated rule about clothing but one expression of the chastity required of the whole person. Thomas Ridgley’s commentary on the catechism states that the commandment “respects, more especially, the government of the affections, and the keeping our minds and bodies in such an holy frame, that nothing impure, immodest, or contrary to the strictest chastity, may defile, or be a reproach to us.”⁴

Biblical Basis

Paul instructs women to “adorn themselves in respectable apparel, with modesty and self-control, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly attire” (1 Tim. 2:9), pairing modest dress with the inward quality of self-control rather than treating it as a rule about clothing alone. Peter states the same priority from the opposite direction: “Do not let your adorning be external… but let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart… which in God’s sight is very precious” (1 Pet. 3:3-4). Reflecting on this text, Thomas Goodwin observed that a woman who once rated her own worth by “her face and good clothes” comes, through the gospel, to value instead the ornament that is “of great price” in God’s sight.⁵ Proverbs warns against the opposite extreme, describing a seductress in “the attire of a harlot” (Prov. 7:10); Thomas Watson drew the direct application that “a wanton dress is a provocation to lust,” naming a curled and towered hairstyle, a painted face, and exposed breasts as its marks.⁶

Historical Development

Reformed theologians folded modesty into their systematic treatments of chastity from the seventeenth century onward. William Ames’s The Marrow of Sacred Divinity (1642), a standard theology text at the Puritan-founded colleges of early New England, classified modesty as the inward form of chastity’s “shamefastness,” defining it as “a virtue whereby we contain ourselves within the bounds of fleshly desire” and pairing it with the outward decorum he called gravity.¹ Thomas Watson’s A Body of Practical Divinity (1692), an exposition of the Westminster Shorter Catechism aimed at ordinary church members rather than academic theologians, applied the same doctrine pastorally, listing “look to your attire” among specific “means to preserve chastity.”⁶ Thomas Ridgley’s A Body of Divinity (1814), a running commentary on the Westminster Larger Catechism, carried the same exposition into the nineteenth century, elaborating Q. 138-139’s pairing of “modesty in apparel” and “immodest apparel” as one part of the commandment’s larger demand for chastity “in body, mind, affections, words, and behaviour.”⁴

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t emphasizing modesty in dress unfairly shift responsibility for male lust onto women? Jesus’s teaching on lust in Matthew 5:27-30 places the moral fault on the person who lusts, not on the person looked at; commenting on this passage, Greg Palys states plainly that Jesus’s words “do not justify overly restrictive clothing restrictions or modesty codes.”⁷ At the same time, Palys argues that the same passage’s appeal to love of neighbor gives every believer, not women alone, a real though secondary responsibility not to become a cause of someone else’s stumbling (Matt. 18:6; Gal. 6:2).⁷ Modesty, on this reading, answers a shared duty of neighbor-love rather than assigning women sole responsibility for others’ sin.

Related Doctrines

References

William Ames, The Marrow of Sacred Divinity: Drawne out of the Holy Scriptures, and the Interpreters Thereof, and Brought into Method (London: Edward Griffin for Henry Overton, 1642), 369. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Alex Charles Scheiderer, “An Eternal Covenant” (PhD diss., 2022), chap. 3, “Benjamin Keach: Baptist Expositor of Puritan Doctrine,” discussing Keach’s reliance on the Westminster Confession and Larger Catechism as sources of some authority for Particular Baptists. ↩ ↩²
The Larger Catechism (London, 1648), Q. 138-139. ↩
Thomas Ridgley, A Body of Divinity, vol. 4, ed. James P. Wilson (Philadelphia: William W. Woodward, 1814), 9. ↩ ↩²
Thomas Goodwin, The Work of the Holy Ghost in Our Salvation, in The Works of Thomas Goodwin, vol. 6 (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1863), 495. ↩
Thomas Watson, A Body of Practical Divinity: Consisting of Above One Hundred and Seventy-Six Sermons on the Lesser Catechism (London: Thomas Parkhurst, 1692), 369-376. ↩ ↩²
Greg Palys, “Cut Off Your Hand, Save Your Soul: How the Outer Self Affects the Inner Self in the Fight against Lust,” Themelios 50, no. 1 (2025): 142-57. ↩ ↩²