Problems of Tradition

From Can Women be Priests? by Paul Lakeland, pp.15-29.

Theology Today Series, General Editor: Edward Yarnold, published by The Mercier Press, Dublin & Cork.
Republished on our website with the necessary permissions.

One of the areas in which discussion about women in the priesthood is most frequently conducted is that of tradition. The 1966 Anglican report Women and Holy Orders summed up one line of argumentation as follows:

It would be contrary to the tradition of the Church. from the time of the apostles. If it is to be maintained that tradition is wrong it has to be demonstrated, either that the apostles failed to divine or to implement the intention of Christ, if he intended women to partake in the priestly ministry, or that Christ erred in not declaring this to be his intention. Neither proposition can validly be maintained.

It is therefore quite legitimate to assert that the exclusion of women from Holy Orders is just part of the nature of things, in this case of the nature of the Christian Church.

This notion of tradition amounts to the unquestioning continuation of the practices of the apostles. If the apostles did not fail to carry out the wishes of Christ, the argument runs, then the tradition which has followed the apostolic practice is authentic and as right now as it was then. If, however, we wish to maintain that the tradition is wrong, then we have to show either that the apostles were mistaken or that Christ was wrong.

But is it true that tradition means following out the practices of Christ and the apostles to the last detail in an unvarying way? Why do we not ‘hate our fathers and mothers’ or, if our eye offends us, ‘pluck it out’? Why do we not sit down to a meal together, break bread at it in commemoration of the Lord, and pass around a cup of wine in memorial of him? It is no good attempting to explain in detail why we do not do those things. Perhaps some of them we should do. It must suffice to say that certain practices have died down and others have grown up, and that this is inevitable in any historical community, since it must have some contact with its times. And the times, after all, ‘they are a-changing’. So it would seem that the proponents of the strictly conservative view of tradition would have to prove either that all the sayings and doings of Jesus and the apostles have to be observed scrupulously, or they must show how a division can be introduced among them. This division would have to be based on saying that some traditions are somehow of more substantial importance to the content of the faith, while others are merely historically conditioned practices. Then they would have to show on which side of this divide the all-male priesthood should be placed. They could not presume that it should be placed on one side rather than the other; it is necessary to say that for this, this, and this reason an all-male priesthood belongs on this side of the tradition line. Tradition, in other words, is hardly an argument, still less a ‘clincher’.

Living tradition

The concept of tradition at work above can almost be equated with ‘the history of Church custom’. Let us try for a moment to understand tradition as permanence in change. In this view, both permanence and change are of the essence of tradition, a fundamental permanence in faith coexisting with a historically conditioned attention to detail. This is not a preliminary to saying that the ordination of men and/or women would fall into the second category, but it does avoid misusing the concept of the immutability of doctrine, employing it as some kind of vast umbrella under which whatever minor points of discipline we care to include can be smuggled into ‘the deposit of faith’. There is a vast difference between ‘tradition’ and ‘traditions’ or between ‘tradition’ and ‘a tradition’, and the view of tradition quoted above from Women and Holy Orders is in danger of confusing the two.

Whatever builds up the body of Christ is acceptable and desirable. ‘Betrayal of the gospel’ is the first and last test of the Christian inspiration of any practice. But the gospel is not just the printed page of the New Testament. It is the good news about Jesus Christ who brings salvation. In the writings of the four evangelists this good news has already undergone interpretation by being selected and ordered by the individual writer within the context of a particular community. The gospels (individual presentations of the gospel-the good news) are partially an account of something which was said or done or which happened, and partially attempts to draw out the significance of these words and events. That they were originally composed by and for an individual local church would suggest that the full significance of the Christ event was not settled definitively in any place or at any time. Matthew is not more or less Christian than Mark or John or Luke. Like the early churches of the evangelists, all periods have to rediscover the gospel for themselves, while remaining true to the revelation of God in Christ. The practice of the New Testament writers themselves is the ultimate justification for the idea of tradition as a living and thinking and breathing thing. It would be just as much a betrayal of the gospel to refuse here and now to reflect on the significance of Jesus of Nazareth as it would be to reject superficially everything in the gospels which seems alien to contemporary culture. In every age both the gospel and the Church, which strives to be its living expression, must be at once an inspiration to the times and a searching critic of its values.

The theology of tradition makes a distinction between apostolic and ecclesial tradition, a theory tied up with the belief that “revelation ended with the death of the last apostle’. This suggests too clean a break; the exercise of the human understanding and the reflection of believers upon the gospel continued, and was part of both the apostolic age and the post-apostolic time. It would be entirely false to try to draw a line after which everything and everyone had to fall into a wooden subservience to the belief that the apostles had ‘implemented the intention of Christ’. The apostolic age itself, as we have already hinted, was a time of pluralism; the fact that we can talk, for example, of a Pauline and a Johannine theology bears witness to this. As the apostles gave way to the bishops/presbyters of the early Church, in a way of which we know nothing in detail, so the apostolic age merged into the ecclesial age, and the tradition developed (not ‘left’) by the apostles continued to develop in the Church.

Preserving the interrelation without identification of word and interpretation in a way which would ensure that the gospel never changes but yet remains intelligible to each age is the function of tradition. And tradition is nothing more than its function. We might tentatively define it as ‘the continuity of developing understanding with the original interpretation’. Tradition, we might say, is the gospel living in the Church. How this tradition remains faithful to the gospel is the mystery of Christ’s promise of the Spirit ‘who will guide you into all truth’. The gift of the Holy Spirit to the whole body of the believing and praying Church is the basis of its permanence in truth. The problem is the identification of the ‘checks and balances’ which will enable us to recognise what is the work of the Spirit in the Church, and what is not.

An authoritative modern theology of tradition is contained in articles 7-10 of the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation of the Second Vatican Council, despite its having the limitations of all compromise documents. Article 8 expresses what we have said above about apostolic tradition and its merging into ecclesial tradition. What was handed on by the apostles

includes everything which contributes to the holiness of life, and the increase in faith of the People of God; and so the Church, in her teaching, life and worship, perpetuates and hands on to all generations all that she herself is, all that she believes.

After an intervention in the council by Cardinal Meyer on 30 September 1964, the last phrase of this text was shortened to its present form from ‘all that she herself is, all that she has, all that she believes’ (my italics). It is under the category of what the Church has, clearly, that customs and practices which have accrued in the course of history would be included, and the accepted revision seems to be an implicit recognition of the distinction much under discussion at the Council of Trent between traditions ‘which are concerned with the faith’ (quae ad fidem pertinet), and those which are not. (On this see Maurice Bevenot, ‘Traditiones in the Council of Trent’, in Heythrop Journal, 4 (1963) pp. 333-47.)

All this has obvious implications for our immediate purpose, since it is incumbent on us to consider whether the all-male priesthood is in fact part of what the Church is or believes, or is part of what the Church has. Is it a tradition intrinsically bound up with the nature of the Church, or a practice hallowed by usage? Answering this question is clearly one point at which opponents and proponents of women priests will diverge strongly, particularly if the opponents are literalists of the type considered above.

How to decide into which category the all-male priesthood falls is a far from simple problem. What we are attempting is an evaluation of different types of tradition, but the method suggested by Cardinal Meyer, namely, the use of scripture, is dangerously close to driving a wedge between scripture and tradition and reintroducing the two sources theory of revelation. It would be truer to say that the status of the all-male priesthood has to be assessed by a complicated process of interrelated research, study and reflection. The practice of the early Church, the scriptural authority for the practice, the anthropology of New Testament times, the legacy of Judaism and the influence of Greek thought have all to be taken into account. But they must also be made subservient to the fact that tradition is alive in the Church now as then, and that the Holy Spirit is with the Church, guiding into all truth. The intention of the Church has always been to build itself up as a community of believers, to ‘build up the body of Christ’, and fidelity to that intention in the Spirit is far more difficult and important than faithfulness to every detail of early Church practice.

If we now look back to that first quotation from Women and Holy Orders, it will be apparent how unacceptable it is. In its terminology history itself is static, and the Church dedicated to the preservation of a state of affairs exactly as it was received. Reflection on the meaning of aspects of that state of affairs would be acceptable: to question their existence would not. It would be possible to ask for clarification of the significance of a fact (For example, ‘What is the point or purpose of an all-male priesthood?’), but no more. This is the case: why is this the case? Never, should this be the case? And if, as so often happens, the answer comes back as ‘Christ said so’ or ‘the apostles did it’, then the unacceptable question ‘why?’ must be asked again.

There are traditions which are concerned with the Faith, and there are those which are not. Some non-scriptural articles of faith fall into the first category (for example, the Immaculate Conception and Assumption of the Blessed Virgin) and scholars have to try to understand them as best they can. Conversely, some scriptural traditions could have been otherwise and could be or have been changed. The use of wine at Mass today is dictated more by the fact that wine was the customary drink in Palestine at the time of Christ than by any claim that there is something special about wine itself that fits it for use in the Eucharist. Again, there is no doubt that some of the apostles were married, and a case could be made for saying that clerical celibacy actually involves the abandonment of an apostolic practice. Orders of widows, deacons and elders were important facets of early Church life, mentioned in the New Testament, that have all but disappeared in the modern Roman church. Clearly, then, there is a way in which the incorporation of scripture within tradition subjects that scripture to the developing understanding of the gospel, and it is within the compass of this developing sense of what the Church is that revisions can be made of all but the most basic ideas on which the Church is founded. The authority for this is the Holy Spirit acting in and through the Church, and, as we said above, the only problem is discerning where the Spirit is at work in the contemporary Church.

Reading the signs of the times

We measure our acts and words by the gospel, but the gospel is here among us now. Our times speak to us of Christ, as we speak to them of Christ. The one provides insights for the other. Hence, the political, social and cultural world of the late twentieth century is just as valuable for the understanding of our faith as Palestine in the time of Christ. Making the gospel real for us truly involves at some stage stripping away from it at least mentally all the historical accidents of that gospel. To take a simple example: it was by the Jews that Jesus was crucified. This is quite irrelevant to the meaning of the gospel for today, unless we are engaged in some attempt to synthesise Christianity and racial hatred. The significance of the crucifixion has to be sought in the fact of Christ’s death, not in that he was crucified rather than hanged, or that the veil of the temple was rent from top to bottom, or that they cast lots for his seamless garment, or that two thieves were crucified with him, or that he was offered vinegar to drink. Similarly, it is unimportant to us to know that some strange agency rolled away the stone from the door of the tomb, or that the winding sheets were neatly folded, or, pace the Church’s leading feminists, that it was a woman who was first to see Christ after his resurrection. The message is simple: Christ is risen.

Of course, it would be an arid religion that was reduced to a series of propositions from which to draw true but unsatisfying significances. The details of our religion give colour and depth and context. They provide in many cases a mythical vehicle for truths which otherwise could not retain the interest or quicken the imagination. The imagination needs so much to feed on; even for intellectual grasp of an idea it helps us enormously to have pictures to work with, and this is true by no means only for the so-called ‘simple faithful’. (Nor am I saying that the events I may appear to have dismissed in the last paragraph did not happen. Some did, and some probably did not.) More important still, the details of our faith remind us of the historical basis of the Church. We are a Church in history, and in that same history a real man of eternal significance lived and walked the earth at a precise time and place, and without that man we would have nothing of our faith. Anyone who seeks entirely to divorce the Christ of faith from the Jesus in history may succeed, but if he does so his Faith will be without roots in anything beyond his own intellect. Christ is not only the other, he is that man there, and he is God for all time.

Having said that, it is perhaps necessary for me to repeat myself. The details of Christ’s life, beyond the essential significance of what he did and who he was, are not of the essence of the faith. The essential truths of the faith - Trinity, incarnation, death, resurrection, salvation, Eucharist, love, service - are not culturally or historically reducible. That is to say, these ideas do not depend on the thought-forms of a particular civilisation or epoch but can and must be explained and expressed differently in different ages. If this is the case, then it would seem that we cannot be restrained from saying that what is culturally or historically reducible is ipso facto not of the essence of the faith. A church in history cannot be bound to a particular cultural style or historical epoch. It is bound to truth expressed in the culture of its own time.

As a result of this line of reasoning, it would seem that reflection in the here and now upon our faith in the light of the gospel, and reflection on the gospel in the light of the contemporary scene, are both justified in leaving aside that which is a culturally conditioned detail, although always remembering the ease with which something can be unfairly dismissed as ‘cultural conditioning’. Now whatever we make of the relationship between the positions of the sexes in society and their role-playing in religion, there is no doubt that from the point of view of salvation, Christianity sees no difference between them. This is the very least that can be claimed for a text from Paul that we shall consider at greater length later:

For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus (Gal 3.28).

I do not for the moment want to go into comparison of the relative significance of this and more obviously ‘anti-feminist’ texts in the Pauline epistles. It is enough to say here that the references to baptism and to being ‘in Christ’ make it clear that Paul is saying that membership of the ecclesial community is not divisive along any of the lines here mentioned. Other couplets could be added to eliminate our own prejudices: European and non-European, black and white, socialist and liberal, conservative and progressive, Catholic and Protestant.

It may be that other reasons can be brought forward for an all male priesthood (and some of them we shall examine in the following chapters), but our discussion here should have done enough to show that tradition cannot have the last word. It does not seem possible, on the one hand, to claim that all the traditions which come down to us from apostolic times are necessary to the preservation of the faith, particularly since we have abandoned some of them. On the other hand, it is not clear how a line could be drawn separating those of central importance to the faith, and those which are not, that would put the all-male priesthood on the ‘timeless’ side of the divide. Moreover, to say something cannot be done because ít has never been done before is a blueprint for stagnation. Despite all this, though, it is a sobering thought that women played in the early Church a far more important role in the organisation, administration and care of the community then they do now, a fact born out by the number of references to women in the greetings in the Pauline letters. The involvement of women in the life of the Church reached a peak with the fiat of Mary, experienced a three-year resurgence during Christ’s ministry, and has been running steadily downhill ever since.

Reading the signs of the times can of course be an excuse for canonising the fads of the present moment. Equally truly, the Church of the first or second or tenth or nineteenth century was just as capable of going wrong in its assessment of the times as we are. They did their human best, however, and we live in the Church which resulted from their more or less successful cooperation with the promptings of the Holy Spirit. But we do not rest at this point; we have to fulfil the same function for the sake of the Church of tomorrow. This reading of the signs of the times falls into two broad categories.

Firstly, we must accept, try to understand, and assimilate into our view of the world the findings of respectable scientific research. Human knowledge in the Church is not divinely inspired, and thankfully the lessons of Galileo and the evolution fiasco have to some extent been learned. In our present context, this will mean investigating the findingsof pyshology, physiology, sociology , history and so on in their studies of the nature of the relationship between the sexes. At the same time, religion seeks to some extent to transcend the mode of expression of a particular age, and one way it does this is to present its truths in the form of myths. The Adam and Eve story is precisely an example of an early attempt to do just that, and there remains much to be said for it if it is understood correctly (see Chapter two).

The second aspect of reading the signs of the times, and the more central, is the responsible and Christian action of looking at the world carefully, honestly and in the light of the gospel. Keeping our eyes open and our minds attuned to the world in which we must work out our salvation and be a light to the nations is one of the supreme Christian activities. Reading the newspapers can be a deeply religious exercise. This is in fact an aspect of a development in the religious thought of the twentieth century which sees God’s self-communication in history as ‘immanentist’ rather than ‘extrinsicist’. In other words, God is not seen to have revealed himself by communicating new truths to humanity through some messenger from the clouds; it is not as if an angel had arrived with a scroll containing new facts for our acceptance and digestion. Rather, God’s saving action in history, which has been going on from the beginning, has become progressively better revealed through the experience in history, first of Israel, and then in a supreme way in the person and life of Jesus Christ. Through this we now know more of God’s ways among men, and we know above all that he is operative here and now in history (immanent). So we don’t only pray: we also read the newspapers.

This ‘looking at the world carefully, honestly and in the light of the gospel’ is the essence of reading the signs of the times. The kind of phenomena which we shall inevitably observe and must examine critically yet sympathetically are (among many others) the growth of movements for the emancipation of women; the involvement of women in various ministries of the Church in non-ordained capacities; the decline in the number of men undergoing training for the priesthood; the numbers of women, admittedly small at the present, expressing a desire to serve the Church as ordained ministers of the Eucharist (priests). Such phenomena, in themselves incontrovertible, do not prove anything one way or the ether. What one interpreter will call clear evidence of the work of the Spirit another will put down to bad theology and disordered desires. The question is simply this: if it is true that the tradition against the ordination of women is a negative one (that is, all arguments so far presented depend on rationalisation of the fact that Christ did not do something), if the understanding of the nature of man and woman achieved through natural science at the present day discredits many of the presuppositions upon which the place of women in society was established in times gone by, and if there are signs at the present day that the Holy Spirit may be moving the Church to reconsider its theology of ministry, the burden of proof rests entirely with those who would wish to argue that the fact that the Church has never ordained women to the priesthood is conclusive evidence that she never can. In other words, it is not ‘quite legitimate to assert that the exclusion of women from Holy Orders is just part of the nature of things, in this case of the nature of the Christian Church’. The report of the Section on Renewal in the Ministry of the 1968 Lambeth Conference was more perspicacious when it pointed out that ‘the New Testament does not encourage Christians to think that nothing should be done for the first time’.

Misreading the signs

‘Living’ tradition and an immanentist understanding of revelation give immense theological significance to the present moment. The rejection of traditionalism in favor of the view of tradition we have sketched above implies that the task of the contemporary Church is to insert itself into and at the same time to react to the here and now, thus modifying the tradition which it simultaneously inherits and plays a part in. Unfortunately it is quite possible to misread the death of a belief in an extrinsicist revelation and in a tradition that spells out conformity to a dead age rather than to a living God. The Church as a believing and praying community assisted by the Holy Spirit is what gives continuity to the tradition. If, however, because of some blatant and indefensible injustice an entirely righteous anger is aroused, the result can sadly be the kind of irrationalism which turns reading the signs of the times into an excuse for a wholely undisciplined flight from sound methodology.

To be more specific: the opposite pole to traditionalism is what we can call liberationism. The liberation of women, if it means a social and legal equality with men, is a matter of justice, a duty in the light of Paul’s ‘in Christ there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ’. However, the liberationists turn liberation into an ideology. In itself it becomes the justification for the rejection of all argument which seems to support contrary positions. The liberationist fires are fuelled by the undoubted and sinful masculine stranglehold on the life and administration of the Church at all levels. But liberationists eschew theological argument. Their great weakness is to think that having seen through traditionalism means that the field is left clear for a combination of moral certitude, passion and common sense, that the Holy Spirit is stored up like some genie of old in the inkwell, and that a vague faithfulness to the ‘spirit of the gospel’ will ensure infallible rightness.

What, then, is the liberationist case? The argument runs as follows with apologies for the inevitable oversimplifications: certain theoretical presuppositions about women can be explained away as outdated biological and philosophical theories of sexuality. In this way the biblical doctrine of the creation and fall of mankind should be understood. The growth from this of Jewish rabbinical teaching about women helps to explain much in the Christian Church’s attitude to women, especially when we recognise vestiges of this in Saint Paul. Paul, however, did say in Galatians that before God there is no distinction between male and female in Christ, and the example of Christ himself is one of a previously unknown respect for and involvement of women in his ministry and apostolic community. Granted all this, the present situation in the Church, insofar as it is not explicable in terms of philosophical or scientific error, is due in part to male sexism. Two forms of this are current: one makes woman a kind of romanticised ideal far from the reality, and the other speaks of her status as ‘complementary, not equal’. The system of training in the Church works in such a way that only the most conservative reach the top, and therefore those at the top are the most committed to preserving the male-dominated status quo. The refutation of their theological arguments as sociologically contingent only clears the way for the realisation that the genuine source of their opposition to women in the church is the insecurity and identity crisis of the male clergy. Male clericalism is afraid of women. The Church is one of the clearest examples of a male chauvinist body, and women are prevented from taking their full part as equal members of a Church in which all positions up to and including the papacy are open to them. The growing involvement of women in ministries of service throughout the Church is a clear sign from the Holy Spirit, and the time to change is now.

Even such a brief caricature of the liberationist position contains a number of telling arguments against their opponents. Many clergymen, after all, have known no woman better than their mothers, and ambivalent attitudes towards the mother-figure may help to explain the twin poles of sentimental idealisation and rationalised complementarist subordinationism. Nevertheless, the liberationist position is not entirely satisfactory, and of the dozen Anglican opponents to the ordination of women, E. L. Mascall illustrated part of the problem well in his pamphlet Women Priests? (See bibliography).

It is furthermore important not to misunderstand the suggestions, (in some cases even the demands) emanating from certain Roman Catholic circles for the ordination of women to the priesthood. Some of these rest upon no theological basis at all and are merely typical of a temperamental desire to destroy all the inherited structures of the Church and to assimilate the Catholic religion to the trends and outlooks of the contemporary secularised world.

Dr. Mascall is, I think, wrong in his assessment, but it is wholly understandable that a theologian of his temperament and methodology could arrive at that impression. The liberationists do live in constant danger of antagonising their opponents to the point at which dialogue becomes an impossibility. Frustration pushes them to this stage, no doubt, but the language, of polemicism is not acceptable in theological debate. They would no doubt respond that the whole question of women priests, theologically, is a non-problem, and I would incline to support that view, but they do not do their case much good by the half-truths and emotionalism with which their arguments are well-salted.

To take a simple example. One writer asks: ‘How much longer can we allow man-made institutions to cripple the ambitions of half the Church membership?’ (Clara Maria Henning in Commonweal for 11 January 1974). It is possible to isolate here several unacceptable ideas; in the first place, the notion of the Church institutional as man-made is not entirely true, although its deficiencies can certainly be laid at the feet of the human element within it. But the least satisfactory note in Ms Henning’s remark is struck by the reference to ‘ambition’, an idea which has wholly to be rejected when we are considering the priesthood. The power-motif is an unworthy motive, whether for men or women. Again, Ms Henning’s claim that the female sex is crying out for an end to this male dominance in the Church is simply not true. What a pressure-group does is not representative of the whole, or there would be no need for the group.

But the theoreticians of liberation are useful. They are motivated by a genuine urge to redress a grievance in the Church, the existence of an oppressed majority. An examination of their arguments and appeals, then, although we might not agree with their methods, can reveal some of the difficult issues that have to be tackled in taking a more theoretical but more valuable and lasting line of argument. There is a serious need to search for the roots of biblical thought on sexuality, and to see how this stands up to the best modern thought on the matter; or, conversely, how modern reflection on man and woman looks in the light of the gospel. Again, it is most important to discover how much purely psychological factors play a part in opposition to women priests, and how much the incongruity of the idea is reducible to the fact that the priesthood has evolved along masculine oriented lines for two millenia. We want to know the truth about Saint Paul. Most important of all, we want to discover what women can bring to the priesthood which will deepen its effectiveness and its meaning. The liberationists force us to consider such questions, and so make their contribution to the debate.

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