Ordaining women is rational Unlike the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Eucharist
Jr, David R Carlin
DAVID R. CARLIN, JR. ORDAINING WOMEN IS RATIONAL That doesn't make it Christian As everyone knows, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger's office) has declared...
...First they gave up the Trinity and the divinity of Christ...
...Then there is a God who is one and three at the same time, again close to a contradiction...
...Further near-contradictions follow: bread and wine that are really the body and blood of Christ, and a church notoriously sinful yet perfectly holy, without spot or blemish...
...In a spirit of uni-versalism, they now give equal honor to all great religions, including Native American faiths...
...Kant, with his Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, represented this movement at its intellectual best...
...Personally, I have always felt that God, if he had to have a chosen people, should have picked the Greeks, who were much more fun than the ancient Hebrews...
...they are multiculturalists...
...A God with a chosen people offends what William James called our "sentiment of rationality...
...At all events, a God with particularistic preferences is scandalous...
...Late in the seventeenth century, John Locke, than whom few thinkers have ever been more reasonable, wrote a book titled The Reasonableness of Christianity, in which he did two things: explained how thoroughly compatible with reason the essential doctrines of the faith are, and dropped as inessential those doctrines that did not meet the test of reason...
...There is no question that the ban on women's ordination is inconsistent with the canons of Christianity...
...as a result, it, too, has gone into a state of decline, first in Europe, more recently in the United States...
...By the way, I personally favor ordaining women, and I feel sorry for the pope that he doesn't agree...
...ORDAINING WOMEN IS RATIONAL That doesn't make it Christian As everyone knows, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger's office) has declared that the ban on women's ordination is something the Catholic church teaches infallibly...
...Nor is it much consolation to say, "But this exclusion is limited to the priesthood...
...But the really heavy-duty attempt came in modern times, and we are still living in the midst of that effort...
...Or rather, God being omniscient, I suppose I was consulted and my advice rejected...
...On the other was the Christian camp, which continued the pruning work of Locke, discovering, and therefore dropping, more and more traditional elements of Christianity that failed the reasonability test...
...But this is no evidence that it is inconsistent with Christianity...
...it doesn't apply to anything else...
...and a resurrection from the dead on the third day...
...But Christianity, it should be remembered, is replete with elements offensive to rationality...
...The announcement, along with the shocked reaction to it that has come from many Catholics, reminds me of Dorothy Parker's famous lines of doggerel: How odd Of God To choose The Jews...
...Indeed it is just the sort of thing you'd expect from a religion that has important elements of nonration-ality built into its very essence...
...Eventually they even gave up God (though he's still available as an option for those who like to believe in that kind of thing...
...and the appearance of the formerly dead man to hundreds of his followers...
...Then, turning to the realm of miracles that are merely physical, not logical, there is a virgin birth...
...The Unitarians were the reasonable Christians par excellence...
...And don't universalistic rules dictate that God should treat all his children as equal...
...not to mention thousands of lesser miracles, from both biblical and postbiblical times...
...Then they gave up Christianity itself...
...I would have preferred an Old Testament made up of Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Plato...
...For religion to have an effective hold on people, it appears that it has to have a certain element of the "unreasonable" about it...
...In a priest-ridden church this is no small exclusion...
...Alas, I was not consulted...
...and the Vatican is telling us that this is what God has when it comes to the priesthood...
...they honor the great prophets (for example, Buddha, Jesus, Emerson, Oscar Wilde...
...And if it has no numinous element, how can it be religion at all...
...If religion becomes perfectly reasonable, where will its "numinous" element be...
...On the one hand were the so-called Deists, who, concluding that Christianity was beyond all hope of rational rehabilitation, opted instead for a purely philosophical religion...
...But so does a God with a chosen gender...
...To begin with, the central personality in the religion is both human and divine, a combination of attributes that comes close to being a contradiction in terms...
...It, too, has become increasingly reasonable...
...If God is the God of all humanity, isn't it shocking that he (please pardon the pronoun) would have a "chosen people...
...Shouldn't a universal God, as opposed to a tribal deity, operate by universalistic rules...
...In short, they are as reasonable as anyone could possibly want-and as a result they have long been an endangered species in the genus of organized religion...
...In the eighteenth century, theistic rationalism divided into two camps...
...The road Unitarianism raced down has been followed slowly and reluctantly, with occasional meanderings into the nearby woods, by liberal Protestantism generally...
...This is especially true in modern times, with our truncated conception of reason: mind being seen as little more than a receptor of images and a manipulator of symbols, not as an organ for grasping the objective truth about reality...
...But then again, I've always felt sorry for God that he didn't agree with me on making the Greeks the chosen people...
...In antiquity Do-cetism was one such attempt, Arianism another, Pelagianism a third...
...they are non-sexist, nonracist, nonhomophobic...
...it is part of the "deposit of faith...
...Just as universalism is eminently rational, so there is something irrational-or at all events, nonrational-about particularism...
...There is a fancy name for the point Parker was getting at: "the scandal of particularism...
...but it never amounted to anything as an independent religion...
...In the course of history attempts have been made to render Christian doctrine less offensive to reason...
Vol. 123 • January 1996 • No. 1
