Recent Theological Studies on the Issue

Prophetic Violence and Institutional Priesthood

by Carroll Stuhlmueller, C.P

New Woman, New Church, New Priestly Ministry

Proceedings of the Second Conference on the Ordination of Roman Catholic Women
November 1978, Baltimore, U.S.A. pp 126-132.
Published on our website with permission of the Women's Ordination Conference

Carroll Stuhlmueller, C.P., president of the Catholic Biblical Association of America, is chairperson of the Department of Biblical Literature and Languages at the Catholic Theological Union, Chicago. He edited Women and Priesthood-Future Directions and has pub-lished widely in areas of Scripture, particularly the Old Testament.

Violence is a most difficult topic to deal with. I think every speaker who has touched the subject realizes that s/he becomes a lightning rod for violence. Curse songs, for example, the most violent part of the Old Testament, have been removed from the sacramentary and prayer of the Church since Vatican II. Peace is what we proclaim, the Biblical Vision. The peace of Jerusalem where all the nations are flowing up, nations who have beaten their swords into plowshares. And yet no city suffered violence like Jerusalem. It suffered violence from within when it murdered its prophets; it suffered violence as the prophet Habakkuk argued with God when people more wicked than Jerusalem destroyed Jerusalem. But Jerusalem in Hebrew means “a city of Justice,” and that means an outcry against injustice. It also means “Shalom.” It is not called Jerushalame, but Jerushaliem, somehow suggesting a complementary of two parts. I’d rather say it is not male-female, but that it is a complementary of liberation and violence and victory and peace at once. Another difficulty about the topic of violence is that it is perhaps part of religion because biblical religion has its roots in the secular history of humankind. Religion, may I suggest, is born out of secular acts of violence and liberation! The secular act of Jesus who died under the secular governor Pontius Pilate; the secular act of violence of Israel coming out of Egypt. A religion is born out of a secular act of liberation; the Israelite people came out of Egypt and as Christians we celebrate the resurrection, a liberation from death. Now if you notice what happens at this point, a religion born of a secular act of violence and liberation is put into the hands and custody of a priesthood who want to control it peacefully and tranquilly and with prosperity. I suggest further that the role of the prophets throughout the history of Israel and the Church is to bring the roots of religion from the secular, clashing against what has been institutionalized in liturgical celebration, and to keep the interaction going. Our perception of God whom we celebrate is in a kind of vision of peace. We are always struggling toward this peace by our opposition to injustice, and this brings violence to our planet as a result. The role, then, of prophecy is not to destroy priesthood but to purify it and transform it and, to be blunt, to keep religion in contact with its roots, which are earthly.

Concerning prophetical violence, we begin with Jesus, who said, “The kingdom of God has suffered violence and the violent take it away.” (Matthew 11:12) All the prophets speak prophetically until John, “he is the Elijah who is to come.” But who is Elijah? According to the book of Malachi (3:1-2), “I send you Elijah the prophet before the day the Lord comes, the great and terrible day, who will endure the day of the Lord’s coming? The Lord is like a refiner’s fire." But that same Elijah in 1 Kings 19, heard the Lord at Mount Horeb: “but the Lord was not in the strong wind, rending mountains... He was not in the earthquake but in a tiny whisper and said, ‘Elijah, why are you here?’ And Elijah replied, ”I have been most zealous for the Lord God of Hosts." That’s not a gentle voice, that’s war language!

Elijah continued, “The Israelites have forsaken your covenant, torn down your altars, put your prophets to the sword and I alone am left.” And the Lord said, “Elijah, go and anoint Hazael and Jehu. And if anyone escapes the sword of Hazael, Jehu will kill him.” That’s what the gentle voice said.

But we move on and this is where prophets are prophets to prophets. A couple of centuries later, the prophet Hosea had a child, the first born, and the Lord said, “Give him the name Jezreel, for it will not be long before I make the House of Jehu pay for the bloodshed at Jezreel and I put an end to the sovereignty of the House of Israel.” (Hosea 1:4-5) Amos, a fellow prophet, announced the end of the reign of Jeroboam of the line of Jehu (Amos 7:9} and also said to the high priest, “You say, ‘prophesy not and preach not!’ Well now, says the Lord, your wife shall be a harlot, your sons and daughters shall fall by the sword.” (Amos 7:16-17) And to the prophet Hosea, the Lord said, “Go and marry a harlot.” (Hosea 1:2) Notice what is happening — prophets suffer the agony of prophecy. They have suffered the violence that they inflict upon society.

Let’s turn now to the institutional priesthood. It too begins in Old Testament times with violence. Jacob blessed his twelve sons in Genesis 49. To Simeon and Levi he says, “Brothers, indeed you are weapons of violence.” They slew the inhabitants of Shechem. “Therefore,” he said, “let my soul never enter your council, you slew people in your fury. Cursed be that fury. I will scatter you among Jacob and disperse you among Israel.” (Genesis 49:5-7) Levi would have no property because of the violence with which they killed. But then the Bible picks up that idea of no property and we read in Numbers 18:20 that the Lord said to Aaron and the Levites, “You have no property and no heritage and no portion. I will be your portion and your heritage among them.” Notice that what was at first a curse is now an act of blessing upon Levi. And in Numbers 3, the Lord said to Moses, “It is I who have chosen the Levites, they are mine.” But then we come to the prophet Hosea:

With you is my grievance, oh priest, my people perish for want of knowledge. You have rejected knowledge, I reject you as priest. You feed on the sins of my people. You are greedy for their guilt. (Hosea 4:4-8 passim)

And from Malachi: “From the lips of the priests they seek knowledge but they have turned away from knowledge. I will make you contemptible.” (Malachi 2:7-9) Priesthood ends as it started, scattered and contemptible.

To summarize: the line of survival is with priesthood, but the force that makes survival worthwhile is with prophecy. Priesthood provides survival but only prophecy makes survival worthwhile. One time in Japan I met a young man who said, “Why should I be converted? I have no sins. Why be baptized?” And searching for an answer, I said: “Maybe for my sake.” Meaning not because I want to feel good if you’re converted and baptized but because that is how I am redeemed.

Prophecy presumes institutional structures. When it began in a classical model of Amos in 750 B.C., it presumed an Israel, a religious structure, a liturgy already there. And it came forth with violence to purify and transform. Let me give an example. Israel came out of Egypt and celebrated with its pascal meal. And if you recall in Exodus 12 they were to eat the pascal meal with staff in hand, ready to march to freedom that very night. Once they arrived at freedom and settled down, liturgy changed. It should change. Deuteronomy 26 says, “When you and your family together with the Levites and the aliens gather together, make merry over the good things that have been given to you.” But once they began to make merry, they began to oppress by the merriment of their liturgy. Amos says, “Sure, folks, come to Bethel and sin. And come to Gilgal, another big sanctuary, and sin the more. Every morning bring your sacrifices and proclaim your free will offering.” Then comes the line that, like the stiletto, gets to the heart: “So you love to do. You get a kick out of that liturgy, don’t you, folks?” Their liturgy was perfect, legitimate, valid, they loved it, and they oppressed by their liturgy.

In Isaiah 1 we read again that the problem was not liturgy but bad liturgy. And when wouId the redemption of their liturgy come about? Where God says, “Bring no more your worthless offerings, your incense, your new moons, your holocausts.” (Isaiah 1:13-18 passim) The Hebrew has almost vomited it out. What does the Lord ask? Something so secular as to hear the orphans’ cry and to defend the widow. The orphan, the widow, the dual stereotype of the oppressed in ancient Israel. Isaiah did not say, “you can reform liturgy by looking at your rubrics or at the validity of your orders. Reform your liturgy by the secular concerns for the oppressed. They did. And that concern for the oppressed produced a new liturgy.

And we read in Psalm 22, the passion psalm, “God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” But it leads to the liturgy of the oppressed:

He has not spurned the wretched persons in their misery, the anawim, the poor, shall eat their fill and those who seek the Lord shall praise him. May your hands and your heart be ever happy. (Psalm 22:25-27)

A new liturgy comes about for the poor of Jerusalem, but then that became a privileged role, a people who are now professionally the anawim, professionally the Lord’s poor, professionally the disciples. At that point Malachi comes forward: “From the rising of the sun to its setting my name is great among the nations.” (Malachi 1:11) What he is saying is that what you are doing out there in your synagogue in the diaspora is better in God’s eyes than the liturgically perfect, liturgically valid liturgy at Jerusalem.

Prophecy as it challenges and inflicts violence, suffers violence itself. The prophet Hosea suffered more the violence of love, and was forced more by God to remain faithful in the midst of infidelity. When he brought Gomer back, he said: “Many days wait and I will wait for you.” The violence is such, however, that he cannot immediately be husband to his wife. Gomer was not really the adulteress wife; she was the adulteress priesthood. In Hosea 4 and 5 Gomer symbolized the harlotry of the priesthood. To correct the harlotry of the people, Hosea says: “There is no fidelity, there is no mercy, there is no knowledge of God in the land.” What must we do to have the pure religion accepted by God? Something as secular as the following: no more false swearing; no lying and murder; and no more stealing and adultery.

Hosea went back to the stern desert ideals of Moses and the Decalogue and said, “Let’s put aside all these casuistic laws, all these ways of justifying what we know is wrong. Let’s go back to those stern demands of the Lord that come right out of secular common sense.” When Hosea got down to that basic human fibre and made elemental demands on the people, he could speak eloquently because he had suffered so much violence in his own prophetical heart. Jeremiah wanted to run away and be finished with it all. He argued with God all the time:

God, you duped me and I let myself be duped.
You were too strong and you overcame me ...
I say to myself that I won’t mention you anymore . . .
but then it becomes like a fire burning in my
heart, and imprisoned in my bones, and I grow
weary holding it in and I cannot endure it
any longer. (Jeremiah 20:7-9 passim)

He ends this section of verse with “Why did I come forth from the womb to see sorrow and pain and to end my days in shame?” In this phrase Jeremiah is reverting to Chapter 1 when God says,

“Before you went forth from the womb I knew you.” And Jeremiah, who is almost at the end of a ministry says, “Why did I come forth, God,” He is bringing that whole ministry together in an agony of prophetic travail at this point. He suffered violence and could therefore inflict it. In Chapter 7, Jeremiah says to the temple priests and Levites,

You say ‘This is the temple of the Lord.’ Only if you reform your ways and deal justly with your neighbor, if you no longer oppress the orphan and the widow . . . Put no trust in deceitful words like ‘temple of the Lord.’ Are you to continue to steal and murder and commit adultery, perjury, bribery and then look up and say that nothing can happen to our Jerusalem? Jerusalem will be destroyed like Shiloh. (Jeremiah 7:1-14 passim)

He was put in stocks and prison for saying that, but Jerusalem was destroyed.

Let me try to bring some conclusions from this. First of all: violence cannot be avoided in Biblical religion. Some may be called to pacifism, but that is a unique charism. Violence has its roots in a secular world of oppression and liberation. What we celebrate liturgically is oppression from slavery. And whenever that liturgy oppresses we need prophets to bring religion back to its roots in the secular. We cannot avoid violence for the additional reason that we have hopes beyond the secular, hopes that ought to tell us more keenly how evil is slavery, how evil is oppression. A second conclusion: religion, biblically, is born out of heroic, and underline that word, please, heroic moments of liberation. Religion provides the prophets, then, with the divine imperative to be heroic at certain moments of crisis. And through its prophets, usually to them principally, religion can inspire new moments of heroic liberation. And if religion absorbs and institutionalizes and makes a celebration out of oppression, that celebration has no right to exist unless it continues to inspire always, crisis time or not, sensitivity to the poor. I look then to the Women’s Ordination Conference as a prophetical challenge to institutional priesthood today. The Women’s Ordination Conference suffers within itself the violence it may be releasing upon the institution. My footnote on that statement is this: because a movement releases violence in no way does violence make it evil. It simply makes it biblical. The Women’s Ordination Conference ought to sustain simultaneously concern for the oppressed and the helpless. Let me give a kind of practical byline, footnote on that one. I would hope and pray and I think we ought to monitor something like this: it will be wrong for religious orders of priests to be taking over diocesan parishes, because the diocese can no longer staff them. The diocese can staff them. And if they are taken over they must be taken over only as team ministries. We ought to adopt a policy in this country that a group like Maryknoll has adopted in its foreign missionary work. We will stay only so long and at that point the work will be taken over by the diocese, who will have people who can take the religious leadership. To do it differently is to oppose those who are capable of leadership.

We ought to have a concern in the Women’s Ordination Conference secondly for unity, unity within the priesthood and Eucharist. If I prophetically tear down Jerusalem so that a new Jerusalem emerges, I do not want to build a Bethel or a Shiloh. In the Bible there is a line of continuity that is Jerusalem, all the way through. Therefore, as I prophetically inflict violence on Jerusalem and suffer violence myself, I ought to be able to strip down to a point of liberation where I reach God alone. I think that point is where liberation anoints us for religious leadership.

That brings me to my third concern; the first was the oppressed, the second for unity and the third is for contemplative prayer. A prayer like Jeremiah’s, in which he has thoroughly spent himself and God still calls, “Bring forth the precious without the vile, be still further purified in the process.” I think my point about contemplative prayer is this: that even a movement so righteous as that of the prophets in purifying Jerusalem, in keeping a religion in touch with its secular roots and bringing the oppressed again to the center of the liturgy, even a religion so glorious and so pure as that of the prophets, needs itself to be further purified. Our goals are far beyond the secular and only somehow when the grain of wheat has died, only somehow when the fire has burnt us out, only somehow when we feel abandoned, only then God anoints us to be the messenger.

Track II Responses

In Track II groups which discussed the theological aspects of the ordination issue reveal these broad major categories of concern:

Ecclesiology:

the development of a new church — one with the poor, oppressed and alienated
the development of a church community based in mutual relationships
new ecclesiology calls for new understanding of the sacraments, particularly ordination

Theology of Ministry:

question regarding how the call to ordained ministry is recognized or validated
non-sacramental ministry
the need to emphasize, legitimize and celebrate non-official sacramental ministry and community events as encounters with God.

Theological Process:

theology should and does come out of each one’s own experience in community and world
theology as content/theology as process
who theologizes, about what, and for whom?
language about God — image of God
need to utilize social science concepts in theologizing
need for women to trust their own experience and theologize from it
the need for a Christology focused on radical uniqueness and giftedness of persons

Power:

mutuality versus power
explore new models of power/mutuality and the posture of Jesus
decision-making and leadership roles coming from sources other than ordination to priesthood.

Sexuality:

need for a new theology of sexuality
exclusion of women from ordained mimistry has been based on longstanding misunderstanding of women's sexuality

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