Women's ordination

...Jesus not only chose no women as his apostles...

...Men are called on, rightly, to exhibit aspects of the personality that have traditionally been considered feminine (for example, men are asked to be nurturing, caring, tender, and so forth), and we allegedly admire women for traits that are traditionally considered masculine, like physical courage, or emotional detachment in critical situations...

...Their function was not eucharistic, but their disappearance as an order within the church is, to say the least, interesting...

...A number of Orthodox have argued that this ought to be taken up at the pan-Orthodox synod we have been talking about for decades, and it should...

...but it is not now a part of Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy...

...It seems to me that these are a few of the questions that have yet to be answered well by opponents of women's ordination...

...This is now a part of Anglican tradition, which remains divided on the question of the ordination of women...

...Does the representation of Jesus become important primarily because of his maleness...

...It is, after all, a role-no one claims that a priest is really inherently better than the people he ministers to, though he is expected not to be worse, an expectation that is too frequently frustrated...

...It would at least shift the whole argument into the place where it belongs: the tradition within which women and men have always been baptized into the fullness of Christ's life, within which some of them have been set apart and consecrated for specific roles, within which men have been exclusively ordained to the priesthood, for reasons which should be defended better than they have been, if they have the strength their advocates maintain they do, and within which women once had a richer symbolic place than they do at present, for reasons no one can defend very well.an defend very well...

...What I want to do here is indicate some questions that ought to be considered, more than they have been, by people on both sides of the issue...

...It should, to say the very least, be tentative about drastic change...

...The offices of bishop and deacon preceded the institution of the priesthood, and we know that women were deacons in the early church...

...he chose no gentiles...

...So far this looks like an argument against the ordination of women...

...Neither, really, does anyone...

...Jesus did not choose women as the apostles of his church, though women were among his most important first followers and had a prominent role-unusual, given the surrounding cultures-in the early church...

...And he may have...

...Why can't a woman fulfill a priestly role...

...When did women begin to lose a role which the church once felt was appropriate, and for what reasons...

...There was in both the Eastern and Western churches the order of women deacons...

...Both of these objections can be defended...

...If traditions are so thoroughly limiting, how could these departures happen...

...Rome (with the efficient top-down style that has been both an ecumenical and doctrinal problem and an administrative strength) could move toward the change much sooner...

...But what argument could possibly be offered against women deacons...

...If Jesus was only a male sadly influenced by the Jewish religion and its patriarchal traditions, and if the idea of God the Father is merely a reflection of patriarchy's hold on the limited imaginations of a few thousand years' worth of worshipers, then a couple of important questions follow: who would want to be a member of a church which depended on such limited resources...

...If the monastic spirit is not truly at the center of the church, that is the church's sorrow...

...A couple of thousand years' worth of tradition should not be thrown over lightly, in the light of that fact...

...Since then I've done more reading on the subject and have come to believe that most people on both sides have closed their minds on the subject and fail to hear the important questions the other side raises...

...However, traditional Christianity, until the division between East and West and later the Reformation, did believe that the Christian tradition was guided by the Holy Spirit...

...In addition, to the extent that the priest in some sense takes the place of Jesus within a liturgical service, and to the extent that such ideas as "God the Father and God the Son" are not merely patriarchal reflexes but important revealed symbols, a reasonable argument can be made for a male priesthood...

...The tradition may be more than its origins, but it cannot and should not be separate from what it has been, nor should what it has been be seen entirely in terms of more recent secular understandings...

...My response is that unless you begin to accept the notion of women as essentially better than men, essentially different in their ways of responding to power, this does not seem to be an especially strong point...

...How do you explain the obvious radical departures Jesus made from what preceded him, by speaking to women as directly as he did (the woman at the well, for example, something apparently a potential source of scandal), and there were, Paul's letters make clear, a number of women prominent in the early church...

...I don't know...

...But there are some equally important questions and considerations that have been dealt with too easily and lightly by proponents...

...To say that a woman cannot symbolically represent a man could be to reduce maleness to a merely genital level...

...Considering the fact that whatever the status of women in the church (and there is some impressive historical evidence that it was once better than it is at present), there is no real evidence that women were ever ordained to the sacramental priesthood...

...A woman who is a strong advocate of women in the priesthood told me, "Since it does have to do with power and status, whether it should or not, let's open it to women and maybe that will begin to change things...

...The roles were symbolically feminine...

...I say "allegedly," because I have worked with and for women who are in fact disliked for exhibiting qualities that would be considered admirable in a man...

...I can see how a traditionalist could disagree with the choice of some Anglican churches to ordain women as priests and bishops on the strength of a majority vote...

...Again, the lay origins of monasticism-which was, among other things, the way in which the church avoided falling completely into its era's equivalent of secularism, once Christianity became a legal and established institution-are very much to the point, and the monastic life is not closed to women...

...If tradition can be so tragically limited in its origins, why be a Christian, a Jew, or a Muslim...

...That question in itself matters deeply...

...The reason the issue shouldn't go away is that it raises important questions not only about the most obvious topic-the place of women in the church-but also about what we mean by ordination in the first place...

...To the extent that such symbols as God the Father and God the Son are symbolically important, the question must still be asked: why can't a woman represent Jesus (if that indeed is what a priest does, which is itself an important question...

...For that matter, what about the departure Abraham makes from what preceded him, if it is correct that the story of Abraham and Isaac was in part a rejection of human sacrifice, which may have been acceptable within the tribe at an earlier period...

...There is not a lot of clarity about the role played by the first eucharistic ministers, or even the content of the first eucharistic services...

...Certainly when Jesus speaks of longing to gather the children of Israel to himself like a mother hen he moves away from images of divine masculinity to something very feminine...

...Even if this were the case, men played women in the theater during Shakespeare's day...

...If the culture we live in believes it can see the rest of history as if from a height, with a clarity unknown to humanity until now, a traditional religion can at least accept the value of some of the criticism without succumbing to the hubris...

...Those who oppose the ordination of women make some impressive arguments...

...The development of tradition was not seen merely as a process of cultural accretion, but was guided by the continuing life of the Spirit in the church...

...When I wrote about this once before I received two sorts of letter in response...

...One way of explaining might be to say that changes do in fact come, and the call for women's ordination could be a case in point, one to which Jesus, in our time, might have responded...

...and it raises essential questions about the symbolic nature of gender...

...But what opponents of women in the priesthood have not looked at sufficiently is the demonstrable fact that at some point women began to lose important symbolic positions within the church...

...I know from previous experience that writing about it can be perilous (or, anyway, as perilous as anything in a writer's life can be, in a profession which has paper cuts as its most dire hazard...

...One sort called me hopelessly male chauvinist and tradition-bound...

...When I wrote about the issue last, I argued that to the extent ordination has anything to do with status or power there is a good reason for any Christian to avoid it...

...Why not...

...The very early Didache, for example, omits the words of Jesus at the last supper in its description of the Eucharist...

...There are, however, some very good arguments against this point of view...

...Monasticism is a way of life, but the priesthood is a limited function-essential, but limited to the specific things the priest is made competent for by ordination...

...I can see how a traditionalist could argue that because women had not been ordained priests in the whole of the tradition, whatever other changes may have happened within it, they should not be ordained now...

...But beyond this level is the question of whether it is the maleness of Jesus that connects him to God the Father...

...it can say, "Yes, but...

...I think Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, and Margaret Thatcher are sufficient arguments against essential differences in the way women use power, but apart from this there is the most basic problem: the clericalism that remains a major Christian problem, and sees the laity as, somehow, clients of the clergy...

...Another is the question of symbolism...

...One of these is the issue of power...

...another sort wondered why I didn't call down fire on those who advance the cause of women's ordination, and condemn the idea unequivocally...