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Most readers of the present book probably realize that the Orthodox Church is against the ordination of women. However, having little familiarity with the substance of Orthodox tradition and considering the Orthodox Church as being inherently “conservative,” “Eastern” and thus detached from the realities of the contemporary world, they may also discount easily the Orthodox witness in making up their minds on this burning issue.
All this makes my task rather difficult in presenting the Orthodox witness intelligently in the brief space which is being allocated to me in this book.(1) References to the brief statements—all sharply negative—made recently by vention of the Antiochian Diocese of America (a branch dependent upon the Patriarch of Antioch, now residing in Damascus, Syria), held in Montreal last summer, approved a statement proclaiming that “the Sacrament of the priesthood is reserved solely to men without prejudice to equal but different roles defined for women in the life of the Church.”(2) Archbishop Iakovos, the head of the Greek Archdiocese (in the jurisdiction of Constantinople), stated that he is not prepared even to discuss the ordination of women in the ecumenical dialogue and that, specifically, an eventual ordination of women by Episcopalians will raise a new obstacle on “the road hopefully leading to unity.”(3) There were no official statements by the hierarchy of the autocephalous Orthodox Church in America, but one of its leading theologians, Fr. Alexander Schmemann, published an open “Letter to an Episcopal Friend,” where he qualified an eventual ordination of women to the priesthood as being “tantamount to a radical and irreparable mutilation of the entire faith.”(4)
Finally,during a session of the Orthodox-Anglican consultation held at St. Vladimir's Seminary in Crestword, New York, the Orthodox participants drafted a statement which was accepted by their Episcopal collogues as authoritative and which is printed as an appendix to this volume.
None of these texts discusses the issue in any detail, and one would look vainly for such a discussion in the earlier tradition of Orthodoxy. Actually, the question of women's ordination was never even raised among Catholic Christians, Eastern or Western, until our own times. The recent debate on the subject did produce a literature, but it is mostly passionate and superficial. I will certainly not attempt to discuss all the arguments for or against the ordination of women, as they appear in the more serious publications, but simply try—as an Orthodox theologian, rather familiar with Orthodox mentality and theological literature, as well as a long-time participant of ecumenical dialogues—to point at those main and basic Orthodox positions, which explain the unanimously negative reaction of the Orthodox Church to the idea of ordaining women to the Christian priesthood. These can be summarized in five points:
1. Scripture and tradition bear unanimous testimony to the fact that Christ, the apostles and the ministers of the early church, as well as their episcopal or presbyteral successors throughout the ages were men, and not women. The proponents of the ordination of women know that very well. However, they do maintain that this was due to “historical conditioning” and, thus, does not belong to the substance of the Christian faith. However, the issue of the ordination of women involves not only scripture and tradition, as “authorities” for the Christian community, but is also a test of how the events to which these authorities witness must determine the life of the church today. The incarnation, the death and resurrection of Christ, the coming of the spirit at Pentecost lead to the birth of a church, whose teaching and sacramental ministries were held by men and women. Do we want to belong to that same Church? The fact that most pagan religions of the time did have priestesses, as well as priests, shows that a male priesthood was the sign of a specifically biblical, i.e. Jewish and Christian identity of the early church. The church today claims to be “apostolic.” This means that its faith is based upon the testimony of Christ's eyewitnesses; that its ministry is Christ's and is defined in terms of that unique unrepeatable act of God, accomplished in Christ once (cf. Hebrews 6:4; 8:28; 1Peter 3:18, etc.). No new soteriological revelation can complete or replace what Jesus Christ did “when the fullness of the time was come” (Galatians 4:4). The Gospel of Christ cannot be written anew, because “the fullness of time” came then and not at any other time. There is a sense in which all Christians must become Christ's contemporaries. Therefore, the very “historical conditioning” which characterizes the Gospel of Christ is, in a sense normative for us. The twentieth century is not an absolute norm: the apostolic age is.
2. However, the scriptural and traditional witness cannot and should not be used as pure “authority” to be believed quia absurdum. The biblical revelation is not a negation of nature but its salvation. The “new creation” does not suppress the “old,” but renews it and transfigures it. This point is very strongly and adequately expressed in the carefully worded Orthodox statement for the Orthodox-Anglican Consultation reproduced in the Appendix: “God created mankind as 'male and female,' establishing a diversity of functions and gifts; these functions and gifts are complementary but not all are interchangeable . . . There is every reason for Christians to oppose current trends which tend to make men and women interchangeable in their functions and roles, and thus lead to the dehumanization of life.”
3. The “appeal to nature” implied in the argument above can undoubtedly be interpreted as an apology for a “maledominated” society, unless one does not recognize, at the same time, the inalienably central role of women as revealed in salvation-history, a role which the Orthodox Church emphasizes with exceptional strength in its theology and its liturgy:
Women were the first witnesses of the Resurrection (Matthew 28:1-15; John 20:1);
Women are venerated by the Orthodox Church with the specific title: “equal-to-the-apostles” (St. Mary Magdalene, St. Thecla, St. Nino of Georgia, St. Olga and others).
And, of course, Mary, the Mother-of-God, is recognized as the “New Eve,” since, on behalf of all mankind, she accepted the will of God, announced by the angel, and thus became the human being closest to God, venerated in the Orthodox liturgy as “more honorable than the Cherubim and more glorious beyond compare than the Seraphim.”
Actually, there is no doubt in my mind that the Protestant rejection of the veneration of Mary and its various consequences (such as, for example, the really “male-dominated” Protestant worship, deprived of sentiment, poetry and intuitive mystery-perception), is one of the psychological reasons which explains the recent emergence of institutional feminism. But this psychological aspect of the issue may also have deeper theological roots. The teaching and sacramental ministry of the church is functionally christocentric: The bishop, or the priest, celebrating the Eucharist is doing what Christ did and, as such, is the “image of the Father” according to St. Ignatius of Antioch, writing around 100 AD.(5) But the life of the church is far from being limited to this ministry. The church exists because, initially, a woman, the Virgin Mary, was able to say “yes” to God, and thus received the Holy Spirit. Later, the Holy Spirit descended upon the whole church, not only on the apostles, or their successors—and spurred a multitude of ministries, including the prophetic, which always included women. And there is a very real sense in which, for example, monasticism, the prophetic function in the history of the Orthodox Church up to the modern times, together with other vocations, particularly in the field of social and educational services, are making the church to be truly the church and are fulfilled by women, better than by men, because they require intuitive virtues closely akin to femininity and motherhood.
In modern Orthodox theology, there exists a still undeveloped trend, which discerns in the Holy Spirit the divine foundation, or prototype of the feminine aspect of human personhood.(6) If developed in a proper context, this trend, which undoubtedly possesses strong biblical foundation (“And the Spirit and the bride say, Come” Revelation 22:17, etc.), would certainly help to understand how the inseparable, but distinct roles of the son and the spirit in the redemption of the world, are reflected in the inseparable, but also distinct functions of men and women in the life of the church. On the other hand, it would show also that a blank acceptance of “interchangeability” in the functions of men and women, is in fact a rejection of theocentricity in the understanding of man and a tragic surrender to a purely secular and, in fact, dehumanizing anthropology.
4. Most Orthodox observers of the present movement in favor of the ordination of women in Anglicanism cannot fail to see it as a typically western and medieval form of clericalism. The ordained ministry is interpreted primarily as a “privilege” which is denied to women. But what about the terrible spiritual risk of ordination? St. John Chrysostom and, more recently, John of Kronstadt (a parish priest himself) have insisted in saying that, proportionately, there will be many more priests in hell than laymen! One wonders then whether it is not a woman's privilege to be spared from a vocation to which God calls men in the mystery of his dispensation and which so many of them accept without thinking of all the implications. It is undoubtedly the same clericalism which leads to obvious misreading of Scriptural evidence, as if, for example, Paul, writing that in Christ “there is neither male nor female” (Galatians 3:28), was refering to the ministry and destroying the order of creation, and not simply affirming that the eschatological kingdom (already anticipated in the church) was open equally to all. Indeed, in the kingdom of Christ, there will be no sexual segregation, but neither will there be bishops, priests or deacons.
5. From the ecclesiological point of view, one finally wonders how a church which specifically insists on “catholicity,” that is on its unity with the apostles and the fathers, its acceptance of tradition, as it was authentically held in the past and is being held today by the ecumenical councils and the universal church, can decide an issue of that importance by majority vote at a national convention. Would it not be an obvious act of factionalism and separatedness?
What can be said in conclusion, particularly in terms of future relations between Anglicanism and Orthodoxy, if the decision in favor of ordaining women is taken by the American Convention of the Episcopal Church? Many of us like to think that these relations were “special” ones, that is, that there was a hope for seeing one day a “corporate” union between our churches on the basis of a common catholic faith and a single apostolic ministry. In any case, such was the assumption since the earliest contacts which were established between Anglicanism and Orthodoxy.(7) It is clear that this assumption will have to be abandoned and this will be a serious setback for the contemporary ecumenical movement.
Notes
1. A more detailed treatment of the subject by several Orthodox authors is forthcoming in St. Vladimir's Theological Quarterly, Vol. 19, No. 3, 1975.
2. The Orthodox Church, December, 1974.
3. The Orthodox Church, March, 1975.
4. St. Vladimir's Theological Quarterly, Vol. 17, No. 3, 1973, p. 239.
5. Trolles 3:1. For a more detailed discussion of this issue, see our book Orthodoxy and Catholicity (Sheed and Ward: New York, 1965).
6. See for example, S. Bulgakov, Uteshitel (YMCA Press: Paris, 1936; French transl. Le Paraclet: Aubier, Paris, 1946) and our article “The Holy Spirit, as God” in The Holy Spirit, D.Kirkpatrick, ed., (Tydings: Nashville, 1974), pp. 88--89.
7. See for example, G. Florovsky, “The Orthodox Church and the Ecumenical Movement prior to 1910" in A History of the Ecumenical Movement, Ruth Rouse and Stephen Neill, eds. (Westminster: London and New York, 1954), pp. 169-215.
The Reverend John Meyendorff is a native of Neuilly-Sur-Seine, France. He holds a Bachelor of Divinity degree from St. Sergius in Paris and a Doctorate from the Sorbonne, as well as an honorary Doctor of Laws from Notre Dame. He is married and the father of four children.
ln his academic work, he has specialized in Patristics, Eastern Christian Theology, and Byzantine and Eastern European Medieval History. He is the author of eight books, including The Orthodox Church (which has been printed in six languages), Orthodoxy and Catholicity, Christ in Eastern Thought, Marriage in Orthodox Perspective, and Byzantine Theology.
Father Meyendorff is currently professor of Church History and Patristics at St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary in Crestwood, New York and is the editor of the St. Vladimir's Theological Quarterly. He is also a professor of history at Fordham University and lectures on Orthodox Theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. He is a member of the board of scholars of the Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies, Harvard University. In addition, he is chairman of the Faith and Order Commission for the World Council of Churches.
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