A Conversation on Women’s Orders

A 3rd Century Icon from the Roman Catacombs, Showing "Woman in Orans," probably St. Mary shown in a traditional Roman motif, used in Pagan Art to depict the Roman Empress praying for the Victory of the Nation

Dear Bp. Joseph,

I find your views far too "Orthodox" and not filled with grace or love. If you want to be misogynistic and backward, you can go join the Orthodox Church, and leave us reasonable Anglicans alone. I find your stance on Women's Ordination to be truly reprehensible and unethical. You are forcing an opinion that emerged in the compromise of Constantinian Christianity as "original", instead understanding that the Early Church had women priests, seen in artwork in the Catecombs. Your view oppresses women and refuses to see them as equal in Christ. St. Paul tells us that "In Christ there is no male or female," and your view insist that there is a difference.

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Dear Fr.,

The A---'s definition of "biblical" obviously does not include the OT understanding of covenant or priesthood, and also avoids extending the family, which is God's basic unit of salvation, into the social context of the Church. All of this scriptural evidence points to headship of the man within the family, not in an abusive or oppressive manner, but in a real, biological and spiritual prerogative to protect and sacrifice for the sake of others. 

This is why God is "Father" and may be why Christ chose to incarnate as a man - not to oppress women, but to give otherwise broken and fallen men a cause greater than their own sinful selves and make them into something more than they naturally are, evil, brutish, and oppressive. This prerogative for love, sacrifice and headship is something that you clearly, personally exhibit. I thank God for it. I will strive for the same in my own priestly ministry. 

This is not to say that women cannot have all of virtues and ministries of the Holy Spirit. They obviously can, but they are not called to incarnate or represent the historical pattern of the church, or the headship of the family, in the same way. A philosophy that erases the difference between the sexes, that insists that men can be mothers and women can be fathers, is obviously wrong, not only biblically, but biologically and psychologically. We cannot replace one another. We need each other and complement each other with roles that neither parts of the dichotomy can fully play.

A Man and Woman, along with Child holding a Book, in Orans before an Enshrined Cross on a Christian Ossuary 

The Early Church did not have women officiate the Eucharist, not because they were denied roles in the Church, but because the Liturgy was not seen, primarily as ministry, but as mystery. A mystery was a human act, a story or drama, that allowed the human, limited by time and space, to enter into a heavenly reality or a historical setting that would otherwise be outside of their capacity. This is not a Greco-Roman "innovation" or a departure from the Old Testament by illicit Early Church Neoplatonism. This is what the Jews knew themselves to be doing at Pascha, when they all entered into the Egyptian captivity, plagues, renewal of covenant, waters, Law, sacrifice and peace of the Promised Land at the foot of Mount Saini, with Moses, the Children of Israel and all their generations. By taking in the meal, they partook of everything that came before, in history that otherwise would not be "present". They do this through the "likeness" of the things partaken with the things they "symbolize" (from the Greek, "Symbolon", which means "to bring together"). Christ makes these connections for us clear when he said "Do this in anamnesis of me." And, so it has been from the very beginning. Women were not excluded from ministry, but from the mystery of representing the historically male Christ. 

I find the position of ordaining only men to the episcopate, a function that is merely a fully-empowered presbyterate, head of an otherwise equal college, inconsistent with your stance on WO and self-contradictory as a whole. If one is allowed, then the other follows by nature of the shared priesthood. Disallowing the consecration of women, publicly acknowledging there to be no biblical or traditional evidence for WO and then continuing to allow it shows the inconsistency and political thinking behind the A---'s position. This is a problem that both our Orthodox and Roman brothers have called us on, and challenge our ecclesiology, because we acknowledge them both to be a part of God's true Church.

I personally like and esteem many women clerics. I believe women have a huge, irreducible part of the ministry of the Church and that the greatest Christian in history, The Blessed Virgin Mary, was both a woman and the example to which all men must strive, and women play the most important part of evangelism within the church through their role of godly mother. 

However, I cannot allow my personal likes or desires to inform the clear biblical and apostolic evidence that delineates this argument, by choosing scholars to read who confirm my bias with speculation on a "hidden history" of the early church, deciding which of the biblical commands are "just cultural" and which parts St. Moses or St. Paul really meant; or by reading recent reports that claim innovation in the spirit of the Reformation (which, if anything other than returning to Scripture and the unbroken practice and teachings of the Undivided Church, is heretical). I believe those committed to the Scripture and Tradition have been far too quiet in protesting the abuses of bishops who have innovated through their own personal perceptions of what Scripture means, afraid to look uncool and out of step with the times, rather than seriously committing to and upholding the Tradition of 2000 years that they were charged to uphold, and that they took vows to protect. 

Thus, respectfully, I remain at odds with the A---'s findings on WO. 

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Dear Bp. Joseph,

This is not the traditional argument against WO. As you know, St. Augustine and St. John Chrysostom were misogynists and proponents of slavery. Anglicans are Reformed, and therefore, not bound by "Tradition", but free off the shackles of man's commandments by returning to Sola Scriptura. We reject parts of biblical culture, the Jewish covenant, law, circumcision and its male-centric theology today, therefore, biblical commands must conform in a flexible, analogical way to our cultural sensibilities, rather than us bending to theirs and trying to keep some "Amish" or "Hasidic" cultural construct. This flexibility and cultural sensitivity is true, contextual, incarnational, missionary Christianity.

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A Roman Ivory Carving of Women in Orans around a Christian Altar, from the 5th Century

Dear Fr., 

This argument against "Tradition" would be true if: 1) The Anglican definition of Tradition is that it is "disagreeable with Scripture", but a position holding a dichotomy between the two is more in line with the Anabaptists and the Radical Reformation, 2) That an argument from Scripture is different than an argument from Tradition, and 3) That the argument within Tradition excluding WO is merely attributable to false cultural constructs, misogyny, and a hatred for women. 

Let's deal with each one of these perceptions one at a time. 

As it stands, the first argument is not an authentic representation of the Anglican position on Tradition, according to Cranmer, Hooker, Jewell, or any other known authoritative source within Anglicanism, even factoring Luther's influential understanding of the use of Tradition. It does not conform to the Anglican use of Tradition as a Hermenuetical Tool for understanding Scripture, not as a rule unto itself or a source up and against Scripture. Like I said above, this application of Tradition is more in line with the Radical Reformation and Anabaptist theology. 

The second argument does not factor the process of Scriptural preservation, which is dependent upon a tradition that is enlivened with the presence of the Holy Spirit, so that the natural process of entropy and drift do not pollute or eradicate the original meanings of Scripture over time and cross-cultural transfer. This is the underlying assumption in Anglican biblicism, and one of the reasons why nascent Biblical Criticism was the handmaiden of liberalism and apostasy. If the Bible is wrong, we believe wrongly and for naught, and Christianity is ultimately a convenient cultural construct for those in power. Scripture must be preserved, and the only mechanism for its preservation is cross-generational transfer, which is another way of saying "Tradition." In order to offhandedly dismiss tradition, this mechanism must be dealt with, which leaves us with no cultural or biological mechanism for the continuation of information. To be a biblicist is to be a traditionalist, in that we believe that the Holy Spirit was imparted at Pentecost to the Church, the pillar and ground of all truth, to lead and guide us continually into truth. This process is why the Church Councils have such authority, it is also why we believe that the Scriptures that the Church received and canonized are both inspired and authoritative. 

Thirdly, the use of a few saints to prove that the Church was blindly misogynist is a an incomplete view, and does not conform to the Anglican understanding of Saints and Fathers, which are received in that they agree with Scripture and the Councils of the Church, a truly Catholic definition, and not in places of their own opinion in deviation or difference. This being said, I will not belabor the women saints and mothers of the Early Church. Illuminators of Armenia and Assyria, monastics, great ascetics, martyrs, sages, deaconesses and abbesses - women were not excluded from the life and ministry of the Church. They were excluded from representing the historical Christ as officiators of the Lord's Supper and from taking headship over the male heads of families, both due to Pauline theology. 

The first point of St. Paul's understanding of Ecclesiology and Christology is that the Church functions as an icon of Christ, who functions as an icon of God. This iconic view made the Church view its sacraments very much along the lines of sacred mysteries, which in the ancient world were dramas meant to communicate divine narratives that illuminated or saved the viewer. This view, as foreign as it is to us today, raised in an invisible barrier of media surrounding us and teaching us under the guise of entertainment, was central to how illiterate people's learned the Scriptures and is integral to non-western cultures today. It is also a characteristic of Postmodernism, which has been trained by technology to think in pictures rather than words. Thus, the Eucharist was both a sacramental action, keeping the commandments and the promises of Christ, and also the fundamental presentation and exposition of Scripture and God's economy of grace, in which mankind, his family and his culture, could be penetrated with the very Presence of God. The second aspect of St. Paul's theology was his maintenance of family and societal norms of order and headship, which were present in both Hebrew and Greco-Roman society, and are still present in all but the first world West today. Some may like to argue that St. Paul merely "accommodated" his contemporary culture, but if that were the case, he would not have offered cosmological arguments based on the creation of mankind, and he would also not advocated for radical egalitarianism of salvation and grace, which ran counter the Hebrew view of God's Covenant limited to men, and the Greco-Roman use of sex as an instrument of suppression and violence. The Early Church believed St. Paul meant what he said, and so, while acknowledging female apostles, saints and martyrs, and later greats as "Equal to the Apostles", they maintained a male-only presbyterate in conformity to received truth and submission to biblical revelation, acknowledging the limits of our iconographic imagination. God obviously has allowed all food, clean and unclean, to be eaten for our nourishment and exhortation, but the Church has always faithfully upheld only bread and wine (as per Christ's Command) as sufficient icons of the Body and Blood for God to enter, enliven and use for our reception of Grace and spiritual transformation. So it is with women and the priesthood. 

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"Bp" Joseph,

Go f*** yourself! You are not Anglican and never will be. I'm grateful that the A--- would never consider you a real bishop! Go off to your little, poor, ridiculous "Continuing Church" and leave all of us real Anglicans alone! 

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Fr.,

I am profoundly saddened and quite a bit confused by your reaction to my explanation, as I am with the A---'s decision to uphold "dual integrities." At least the Commission on Women's Orders was willing to admit that this practice was unbiblical and against tradition, although they church decided to uphold it anyway. Your reaction shows me that there is more at stake here than just a difference of opinion - you are waging war on those with whom you disagree. Your desire to innovate and reject the Church's historical positions are understandable. It would be okay if we were Roman Catholic, where the power of the Holy Spirit's teaching authority is invested in the Magisterium and an official doctrinal position that allows for "development", or if we we Greek Orthodox and we were able to call another Ecumenical Council - but, we're not. Instead, we are in the inconvenient position of recognizing Scripture as fundamentally authoritative and the Tradition of the Early Church as its fundamental hermeneutical device. This is what makes us Christians in the Anglican Patrimony. We returned to the Scriptures, rather than opinion, agreement or experience, as our ground of authority. If something is not found in Scripture, it ultimately cannot be the teaching of our Church. If we are not in agreement with this understanding, we are not justified in our attempt at "Reformation", and we immorally split from Rome, which, oddly enough, is more biblical on this point than Anglicans are!

Please forgive me where I have offended you personally. It was never my intention to hurt or harass you. I must uphold right doctrine with all of my teaching, preaching and discipling, even if I personally struggle with how other people take offense. This is not my position, but the position of the Scripture, of the Church and of Christians everywhere. I am not set against you personally and I mean you no ill will. I am deeply saddened by how this wrong teaching has truly divided us and made our relationship irrecoverable, as well as destroying the doctrinal integrity of the Anglican Church.

An Icon of the Virgin Mary, Praying between two Open Bibles, in a Niche used for the Holy Eucharist