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That splendid gospel shout of faith, “For freedom Christ has set us free,” came out of St. Paul's struggle with other Christians who were trying to obey the law of God as they saw it. St. Augustine uttered his great dictum, “Love God and do as you will,” in the midst of a thoroughly unpleasant fight against Donatist Christians who wanted to preserve the holiness of the church as they conceived it. Had there been no theological controversy in the church, we would have inherited no Nicene Creed. We would probably know little about Athanasius's ideas of the incarnation or about Luther's insights into justification by faith. Both doctrines were honed by disagreement.
Matters were no different in the formative years of our own Anglican tradition. Indeed, seventeenth century churchmen established Chairs of Controversial Divinity in their universities. Archbishop Ussher was once professor of theological controversy at the University of Dublin. Archbishop Laud established his theological reputation in acrid (and often arid) debate with “The Jesuit Fisher.” In that era “sacred polemics” was a recognized branch of theology. And from that era we might well all borrow an admonition and a prayer as guidelines for our present Christian fight.
The admonition comes from one of our greatest Anglican theologians, Richard Hooker, whose Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity contains a theory of the church and its ministry which every Episcopalian should read, mark and inwardly digest. In an age when scurrilous defamation of one's opponents was accepted practice, Hooker was a model of Christian courtesy. One of his sharpest attacks on his opponents, both Puritan and Papist, was his justly famous and judicious statement: “Think ye are men [his consciousness had not been raised]; deem it not impossible for you to err.”(1)
The prayer is drawn from the diary of William Laud, ultimately the author of that incomparable prayer “For the Church” and its peace in The Book of Common Prayer. He made this entry when “The Relation of a Conference between William Laud and Mr. Fisher the Jesuit” went to press in 1623:
I am no controvertist. May God so love and bless my soul, as I desire and endeavor, that all the never to be enough deplored distractions of the Church may be composed happily, and to the glory of His Name.(2)
I, too, am no controvertist, either by training or temperament. I feel compelled to report that I have not heard a call from God to seek ordination myself, although I am convinced that many of my sisters in Christ have. What follows is, therefore, an attempt to think faithfully about this issue before the church—in the light of scripture, tradition and reason.
Last May the Reverend Jane Hwang, priest of the Church in the Diocese of Hong Kong, presided at Eucharists in the Dioceses of Southern Ohio and Washington. In those acts she embodied in her person and symbolized for us at least four of the major reasons why many theologians favor women participating fully in the ordained ministry of the people of God who are the Church.
She is, first, a human being created in the image of God. She evokes the doctrine of creation. She is, second, a forgiven sinner who has been incorporated into the Body of Christ, into the Second Adam. She evokes the doctrine of redemption. But she is also one who has been called by God and certified by the church as a person to represent Christ's mediating work, through the power of the Holy Spirit. And so she demands that we think of the work of the Spirit through the Church for his ministry to the world.
If it already sounds as if I were putting the whole weight of Christian theology on Jane Hwang's shoulders, that is perhaps no heavier than the weight of any priest's stole, properly understood. Yet there is a fourth dimension to be added. Every Eucharist is, in an important sense, a making present of the future—a foretaste of the Kingdom of God. And so through presiding at such a “messianic banquet,” the priest helps us participate now in that new age wherein all our cherished pigeonholes, stereotypes and categories are transcended. She helps us see what the Kingdom of God means.
Each of these four assertions is a bone of contention. Each needs some flesh upon the bone.
I
Our current debate about women in the church and its ordained ministry drives us all back to the question of whether or not women are fully human, in the same sense that our Lord was determined to be fully human in the course of Christian debate on that subject. On this issue scripture and tradition are ambiguous and reason alone says clearly, “Yes.” But, although we must acknowledge that the Old and New Testaments are less than one hundred per cent convinced throughout on the subject of the full humanity of women, we must acknowledge also that both creation myths in Genesis affirm that fact as part of their picture of creation. Let's take the older first. Enter Adam and Eve.
Ten years ago, the Adam and Eve story in Genesis 2 was thought to be an embarrassment to the cause of women's ordination. The report of the Bishops' Committee in 1966, for example, said, “It is not necessary to dwell upon the Creation Story, in which woman is created after man and taken from him....”(3) Recently, however, biblical scholars have made some acute observations about the text of Genesis 2 and 3, which deserve dwelling on. For when one rereads it carefully, without cultural blinders, a different emphasis emerges.
The 'adham, the first of God's creation, born of earth and spirit, contained within itself that which subsequently became man and woman. Until God creates woman, the term 'adham is generic, if not androgynous, that is, including within itself both sexes. After God builds woman, the Hebrew changes. The first specific term for man as male ('ish) occurs in the same verse (2:23) as the first specific term for woman as female ('ishah). In other words, as has been well pointed out, “sexuality is simultaneous for woman and man. The sexes are interrelated and interdependent. Man as male does not precede woman as female but happens concurrently with her.”(4)
What follows in Genesis is the familiar story of sin and judgment in which both man and woman are participant. And, according to this ancient Yahwist myth, it is after they became sinners that the man names his wife, “Eve” (3:20). Naming in the biblical sense is an act of domination. When man names woman, the Fall has already occurred.
Some four hundred years later, give or take a century, the editors of Genesis were more sophisticated in their anthropological mythology. According to Genesis 1 the climax of God's creative activity—once he has by fiat enlivened the universe with galaxies and goats, stars and seagulls—is the creation of human beings in his own image. It is unlikely that we can quote the text too often:
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. (1:27)
And God saw that it was good.
Tradition is, as we have already admitted, never in full agreement with God on this subject. It is not surprising to find some contemporary Christian women rejecting the authority of “the Fathers” altogether when they read such statements as that of St. Clement of Alexandria, “A woman should be covered with shame at the thought that she is a woman.” Yet even such a cultural chauvinist as St. Thomas Aquinas recognized the authority of the Genesis text. He might think, as his contemporaries did, that “the female requires the male, not only for procreation, as in other animals, but also for governance, for the male excels both in intelligence and in strength.” He also thought and said, citing Genesis 1:27 in rebuttal of 1 Corinthians 11:7, that “the image of God, in its principal signification, namely the intellectual nature, is found both in man and in woman.”(5) For St. Thomas, the “image of God” included the Trinity of Persons.
The biblical doctrine of creation, then, supports the conclusion that both men and women are capable of representing humanity before our creator, and that both women and men are capable of representing God before their fellow creatures in whatever sense any priest is said to have those representative functions.
Recently this argument from creation has been ably and sensitively presented by the Dean of Liverpool, Edward Patey. He points to the equally important text of Genesis 5:2:
On the day God created man, he made him in the likeness of God. He created them male and female, and on the day when he created them, he blessed them and called them man.
Only in their partnership, Dean Patey thinks, can man and woman be said to be made in the image of God. And, like St. Thomas, he relates this “image” to the doctrine of the Trinity. Men and women in partnership mirror an image of God who is his essential being is also being in relationship.
Patey's thinking on this theme leads him to conclude:
If it is true that God created man as male and female in order to reflect his image of Being in Relationship, and in order that in this relationship they might find their true humanity, then at every level of ministry, this relationship must be reflected. If God calls man to exercise priesthood, then that priestly vocation must be open to man in the sense in which Genesis declares he was created. ‘He created them male and female, and on the day when he created them, he blessed them and called them man.’ (6)
That conclusion makes any woman long for the sanity of vir and homo. But she and her brother should read it again. At every level of ministry our true humanity must be reflected.
II
When we turn from the order of creation to the order of redemption, the limitations of the English language evident in that last paragraph become even more troublesome. We believe that for our sake, for our salvation, God the Son became man. Much of the recent writing on the subject of the ordination of women recognizes that the symbolic language of Father and Son is not to be taken literally; it does not attribute sexuality to God. Theologians frequently cite the first of the Thirty-nine Articles to remind us that God is “without body, parts, or passions.” Yet the matter is different when we speak of the incarnate Lord. We believe that as a man he suffered, died and was buried. We believe that God raised him up. We believe that through his death and resurrection he has opened the Kingdom of Heaven to all believers.
All of this lies at the heart of the Christian faith. It summarizes our Good News. It also appears, at first hearing, to support one of the favorite theological arguments against the ordination of women to priesthood.
When we say that Jesus Christ was a man, we affirm with full conviction that he was a male human being. As Professor Charles Price has noted, there has never been any serious question about this.(7) Skeptics have doubted the existence of Jesus, but no one, so far as is known, has ever suggested that he was a woman—in spite of the efforts of a certain type of Sunday School “art” to detract from his masculinity. Because Jesus was a male, some contemporary male priests conclude that the priesthood is necessarily male, since the priest is believed to function as an alter Christus. George William Rutler, for example, puts it this way: “The specially ordained priest, presiding at the Eucharist, is not Fr. Smith or Fr. Jones; he is a man, alter-Christus, in the divine economy in which the Christus was a man.”(8)
There are two serious problems with this line of thought. First, it suggests that the priest is ordained to do what only Christ can do and has done. He and he alone exercises the priesthood which effects our salvation.(9) Secondly, and equally important, it confuses the “scandal of particularity” with the meaning of the Incarnation.
It has always seemed scandalous to human reason that God chose to become incarnate in a particular human being, living in a particular country, at a particular time in history. Jesus of Nazareth was undoubtedly a male. He was also a first century Palestinian Jew. There is no more reason to argue that his priests must, therefore, be male, too, than there is to argue that his priests must, therefore, be Jewish or Middle Easterners, attend the synagogue, wear sandals, and speak Aramaic.
Precisely because he was a real human being, sharing fully all the particularities of our time-and-space-bound lives, so Christian theology has traditionally held, he was able to effect a new relationship between God and all human beings at all times and in all places. The great biblical image of Jesus Christ as the Second Adam, the firstborn of a new creation, has nothing to do with genes and chromosomes. “The new life” which is our great gift from God through Jesus Christ, is not limited to males only. Why, then, should males alone lead the people of God in the great thanksgiving for that new creation?
Whenever we speak about what God accomplished in Jesus Christ, we speak symbolically. But one of our continual temptations, along with the temptation to take our symbols too literally, is that of latching onto just one set of images to express our understanding of who Jesus Christ is and what he did. The New Testament teaches us otherwise. It offers a vast, rich vocabulary of images to stretch our thinking and increase our understanding. Along with the masculine imagery of son and father, it even offers some feminine imagery. And as contemporary theologians reflect on the symbolic character of priesthood in the Church, they are helping us to recover some of this feminine imagery which we have tended to ignore or obscure in our male-dominated culture.
The Lambeth Report in 1968 pointed suggestively to one such image:
There is great significance in the ancient imagery of the bishop or priest as father to his family or as representing Christ the bridegroom to the Church, his bride. This is an image of unquestionable value, a profound pointer to the truth. But the truth to which it points has been expressed with equal power by St. Paul in referring to his own relation to the Galatian church as that of a mother again in travail with her children (Galatians 4: 19).(10)
In his article, already cited, Charles Price has indicated another set of feminine images. Scripture and tradition speak of Jesus as the incarnation of the divine wisdom, a feminine figure in the thought and language of Israel and early Christianity. This idea lies behind such sayings of Jesus as “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem . . . How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings . . .” (Luke. 13:34).(11) To think of Jesus in such terms adds additional depth of meaning to the redemption which he brings. It reminds us of the ancient wisdom of the Fathers who argued passionately in the age of the Councils for the full humanity of Jesus. As they recognized, what he did not assume, he could not redeem.
The Christian who participates in that redemption is invited to participate in a more abundant life (including the life of the imagination) than most of our ecclesiastical experience to date has made possible. There is much to suggest that the visible presence of women priests will help us all grow into the fulness of the stature of Jesus Christ.
The insight that priests are stewards of God's symbols is an extremely important one in this connection. They are indeed actively concerned “for providing those images to our experiencing of life that will make some ultimate meaning possible for each of us.”(12) Rather than conjuring up echoes of my pagan past, or of the dark reaches of my unconscious psyche, such an affirmation speaks to me of the totality of our redemption. And this is what the Church should be speaking about to the world.
J. Robert Wright sees this as the most urgent theological reason for the ordination of women to the priesthood. It is a matter of making a true theological statement to the men and women of our culture. If it be true that “in Christ, God redeemed humanity, not just masculinity,” if it be true that “both men and women are now seen as equally members of the priestly body which is the church,” then it follows, as Wright argues, that both sexes should serve as ordained ministerial priests in that body. Because the church needs both men and women as priests “in order fully to represent its doctrine of redeemed humanity.”(13) And that representation is not just at the altar. It concerns our mission to proclaim the Gospel.
III
What else, after all, is the purpose of the church's ministry? I said earlier that the Reverend Jane Hwang, priest, represents Christ's mediating work through the power of the Holy Spirit, and that she demands that we think of the work of the Spirit through the Church for his ministry to the world. The third strong argument for the ordination of women is the argument for obedience to the Holy Spirit.
The ministry we are talking about in all this discussion is the ministry of Jesus Christ, which by definition means service to the world of the poor and oppressed, service to the world of those who are broken in body and in spirit. We are not, God help us, arguing about the job description of some well-fed suburban professionals who choose to wear clerical collars with their gray flannel suits.
This ministry has been entrusted by Jesus Christ to his Body, the Church, which has been called into being by the power of the Holy Spirit and which lives to serve the world by that same power. As the Joint Commission on Ordained and Licensed Ministries expressed it, “All members of the Body of Christ, both male and female, are called to the work of the ministry. The Holy Spirit gives all members of that Body the power to share with Christ the mission for God and for the world, regardless of their sex.”(14)
So far there would be little disagreement. It is the third step that causes the problem. What of the ordained ministry? The ordained ministry serves a representative role within the church, summing up and showing forth that ministry which derives from Christ through the church by the gift and power of the Spirit. It consists of those leaders of the people of God who have received a special call and who have been given a special gift by God the Holy Spirit to help the rest of us carry on our work, his work, more effectively.
The consequences of summing up and showing forth only a truncated ministry have been sharply perceived in the same report of the Joint Commission:
Every moment that the Church continues categorically to deny either the ordered priesthood or the consecrated episcopate to a person competent to hold those offices in our culture today, because she is a woman, it does far more than exclude one woman from a specific ministry or a specific apostolate. Such a denial is also a continuous signal from the Church that all persons in the category of woman are intrinsically inferior creatures who should also serve only as auxiliaries to men in the general ministry and the general apostolate of all believers. Untold numbers of women within and without the Church are receiving the Church's signals “loud and clear.”(15)
When we think of the ordained ministry in this context, it is well to look again at the arguments “from scripture and tradition” which relate the Spirit to special ministry in the church. All of the New Testament catalogues which list the gifts of the Spirit for ministry, such as that in 1 Corinthians 12, include offices other than bishop, priest and deacon. The threefold order of ordained ministry as we know it emerged gradually in the early church. Although it was already a part of our tradition by the middle of the second century, it has no clear New Testament support as the only possible way, or even the best possible way, of ordering the life of the church.
The Bible tells us that the Spirit blows where he chooses. It declares that God the Spirit inspires prophets to speak his word of judgment on ecclesiastical structures which impede his work in the world. It tells us that he continues to work in his church as the Spirit of truth to lead us into better understanding of his revelation.
A Roman Catholic biblical scholar at the University of Notre Dame has recently reexamined the New Testament evidence relating to our traditional threefold ordained ministry. He reminds us that there is no clear New Testament reference to any professional body of Christian priests, whether male or female. The Epistle to the Hebrews, which he considers the most important document for understanding Christian priesthood, talks of the way in which Christ revolutionizes the priestly concept so that priesthood is no longer a “fleshy” matter. For the author of Hebrews, Christ is a priest “not according to a legal requirement concerning bodily descent but by the power of an indestructible life” (Hebrews 7:16).
Apart from this concept of Christ's priesthood, developed in Hebrews, the stress of the New Testament is exclusively on the priesthood of all the faithful. The evidence suggests to this Roman Catholic that “any of these, men or women, could be called to a professional priesthood over and above the baptismal calling.” He concludes, “Perhaps one could summarize the concept of priesthood by simply stating that it is the Spirit, not the gender of the candidate that makes a person a priest.(16)
The work of the Holy Spirit has always threatened people who like things done only decently and in order, of course. The history of the church is full of our efforts to squelch outbreakings of spiritual power which rock the ecclesiastical boat. Yet our “mother, the Holy Spirit,” as Origen called her, has a way of taking us up by the hair and making us see new things.
The theological concept of tradition rests on such a notion of of the Spirit's continuing activity in the life of this community. Tradition is not a dead, cold past. Faithfulness to tradition means faithfulness to a living, growing, changing body of Christian experience. The notion of tradition does not compel us to believe that the Spirit departed from the church after the fourth Ecumenical Council, or that God is more interested in the past than he is in the future. On the contrary, the tradition points us forward to that new heaven and that new earth which has no temple and no need for priests, because all of God's servants see and know and worship him.
IV
The argument from the future, this future, has not, in my opinion, been sufficiently stressed in the current theological debate about the ordination of women. Yet it is implicit every time proponents of women's ordination bring out our favorite scriptural text:
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 (Galatians 3:27-28).
To our minds, Paul is clearly telling those Galatian Christians that because they have been baptized into Christ the earthly ethnic, economic, and sexual distinctions have been transcended. Christ makes them irrelevant.
But any nearsighted observer of the current scene can see that this fine and final equality is not the case either in our churches or in our wider society. And any reader of the rest of Paul's letters knows that Paul did not spend much of his energy combating the institutions of slavery or sexism in his own age. If Paul were so against distinctions of superior/ inferior status in the Body of Christ, why did he also tell slaves to obey their masters and wives their husbands?
The answer to that question, as any first year seminarian can tell you, is that Paul thought the present social order was almost at an end. He expected the Lord to return at any moment. Paul's ethical teaching is in the context of vivid and intense anticipation of the end of history, so there is no urgency about reforming society. The future is even now breaking in on the present. The night is far spent. The Day is at hand. Even so, come Lord Jesus!
Thus, the Galatians passage, too, is descriptive not of the present age of the church but of a yet-to-be-realized future state of affairs which the Lord will bring in his own good time. Does it apply only to the “eschatological woman,” to the female as, ultimately, she will realize oneness in Christ—after she is dead, perhaps, or when the Kingdom fully comes? So some critics say, especially those who are tired of seeing this Pauline text waved like a red flag. How to dismiss it? Call it “eschatological.” That will lock it safely in the closet until the last bell has rung.
The passage is eschatological, of course. The next sentence, which we are much less fond of quoting, makes that emphatic: “And if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to the promise” (Galatians 3 :29). So the Galatians red flag, read in context, is a superb expression of the already-but-not-yet character of Pauline thought and of our same Christian experience of the new life in Christ.
So how does Galatians 3:27-29 have bearing on present arguments for the ordination of women, except perhaps to suggest that they can already be ordained to the diaconate, but not yet. ?. . One answer—to me, a compelling answer— comes from the nature of the Eucharist.
Liturgical scholars and sacramental theologians alike are currently calling us to open ourselves to the future orientation in our Eucharist. “Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again.” This future orientation in the liturgical formula echoes that of Christ's words at the Last Supper in the synoptic gospels, where he refers explicitly to eating and drinking in the Kingdom of God. It reflects the two-dimensional thrust of Paul's remark in handing over that received tradition: “For us often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.” (1 Corinthians 11:26) The Eucharist continually reminds us that “Christianity is the religion of the Maranatha: 'Come, Lord Jesus.' ”(17)
The English title of the book from which that last quotation is drawn is, significantly, Christ the Sacrament of Encounter with God In the Eucharist, where we encounter the risen Christ, we encounter God. We encounter his reign, his kingdom, his new age now in our present age of the church. We participate now in the feast of the future, and we are strengthened to go forth to feed our hungry sisters and brothers.
One can only speak of this mystery in the poetic images of our tradition. Yet if we take any of these images with symbolic seriousness, meaning that they participate in that reality to which they point, we are invited to some exciting, indeed awesome, “role playing” every Sunday. We are invited to take our places around the table of the Lord in the Kingdom of Heaven. We are invited to act out our future freedom in this our mundane present.
Who presides at this Holy Mystery? Jesus Christ, author of the new creation, bringer of the Kingdom. Who can play his role in the Messianic Banquet? No one else. And yet, because of who he is and what he has done, any one else . . . Anyone who has been baptized into Christ, who has put on Christ, who has been called by God, who has been empowered by his Spirit and invested with authority by his church . . . Anyone who thus accepts the call to pick up the cross and become a slave of him whose service is perfect freedom. In Christ, in this sense, there is neither male nor female.
Notes
1. Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1954), Vol. 1, p. 143.
2. William Laud, Works (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1847-1860), Vol. III, p. 148.
3. Progress Report to the House of Bishops from The Committee to Study the Proper Place of Women in the Ministry of the Church, October, 1966," Journal of the General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, 1967, Appendix 35.9.
4. Phyllis Trible, “Eve and Adam: Genesis 2-3 Reread,” Andover Newton Quarterly 13 (March, 1973), 253.
5. ST I, Q. 93, Art.5. Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas (Anton C. Pegis, ed.), New York: Random House, 1945, Vol. I, p. 890.
6. Edward Patey, “The Argument From Creation,” Women Priests? Yes-Now! (Harold Wilson, ed.), Nutfield, Surrey: Denholm House Press, 1975, p.35.
7. C.P. Price, “The Argument From Theology,” op. cit., p. 59.
8. George William Rutler, Priest and Priestess (Ambler, Pa.: Trinity Press, 1973), p. 80.
9. Cf. Leonard Hodgson, “Theological Objections to the Ordination of Women,” The Expository Times LXX (April, 1966), 210-213.
10. The Lambeth Conference, 1968: Resolutions and Reports (New York: The Seabury Press, 1968), p. 107.
11. op. cit., p.62.
12. Urban T. Holmes, III, “Priesthood and Sexuality: A Caveat only Dimly Perceived,” Anglican Theological Review LV (January, 1973), 64.
13. J. Robert Wright, “Documentation and Reflection: An Address in favor of the Ordination of Women to the Priesthood,” Anglican Theological Review LV (January, 1973), 72.
14. "Report of the Joint Commission on Ordained and Licensed Ministries," Journal of the General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States, 1970, p. 532.
15. Ibid.
16. J Massyngberde Ford, “Biblical Material Relevant to the Ordination of Women,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 10 (Fall, 1973), 687.
17. E. Schillebeeckx, Christ the Sacrament of Encounter with God (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1963), p. 41.
Biography
MARIANNE H. MICKS was graduated magna cum laude from Smith College in 1945. She received a Master of Arts degree from Columbia University and holds a Bachelor of Divinity degree from the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, California. That school awarded her an honorary doctrate in divinity in 1968 and she has a degree as Doctor of Philosophy from Yale University.
From 1960 to 1974 Dr. Micks was at Western College in Oxford, Ohio, serving variously as professor, chairman of the department of religion, and dean of the college. Under the National Council of the Episcopal Church she was from 1948 to 1953 a student advisor at Smith and, from 1953 to 1956, an associate for university work at Berkeley.
She is the author of two books: Introduction to Theology and The Future Present: The Phenomenon of Christian Worship. Her articles and reviews have appeared in numerous journals, including the Anglican Theological Review and the Journal of Religion.
Dr. Micks presently serves on the Board of Trustees of the General Theological Seminary in New York, the Board of Trustees of Hollins College in Virginia, and the Committee of Women in Theological Education for the Association of Theological Schools.
A native of Seneca Falls, New York, Dr. Micks, since 1974, has been with Virginia Theological Seminary where she is professor of Biblical and Historical Theology.
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