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Very similar in some respects to Lewis’s discussion is a very remarkable paper by the Calvinist theological Professor JeanJacques von Allmen of Neûchatel.5 In view of my earlier stress upon the fact that we are concerned with the Catholic priesthood and not with various concepts of the Protestant ministry it will be well to make two points. First, von Allmen is a very high-church Protestant indeed, as anyone who has read his great book Worship will have discovered; there is no trace in him of Tillich’s view that a minister differs from a layman only by his training. On the contrary, “the pastoral ministry is that grace, which the Lord has willed for the Church and instituted in the Church, by which one of the faithful, following on the Apostles, is called to act in the name of Christ the prophet, Christ the priest (sacrificateur) and Christ the King .... It is by the power of the Holy Spirit, invoked upon him at his ordination, that he is justified in exercising this ministry in the Church, and that he presumes to exercise it with confidence.” Secondly, Calvinism has, of all forms of Protestantism, when it is true tò its origins and traditions, the strongest sense of the Church as an organic and structured reality.
Von Allmen begins by stressing “the fact that in the Church everything is grace”. “No one,” he writes, “men no more than women, has the right to be a pastor .... You condemn yourself to never solving the problem when you say that it is unjust that women have not, as men have, the right to be a pastor; it is a grace which has not been purposed for them, because it would divert them from their being and their vocation, just as the grace of motherhood, for example, could not be given to a man.” “Every ministry”, he asserts, “is a grace. It does not depend then in the first place on the Church, but on the Lord of the Church; and if he has willed that among the ministries that of the pastor is to be reserved for men, the Church consequently has not the right to oppose this will by disobeying.”
Von Allmen has a refreshingly independent attitude to the contemporary climate of opinion: “It could not be a question of progressive adaptation or reactionary obstinacy, for we are not called upon to comply with the present age, either in respect of what impels it forward or what restrains it; it is simply a question of obedience or disobedience, of faithfulness or unfaithfulness.” It becomes clear later that this does not mean that God acts arbitrarily, without respect for the nature which he has given to mankind.
5. “Is the Ordination of Women to the Pastoral Ministry justifiable?”, VerbumCaro, XV1I (1963), No. 65. The paper was first delivered to the Commission on Pastoral Ministry of the Reformed Church of France on 4th February, 1963. I quote from an English translation by the Rev. Herbert Moore, which exists in duplicated form.
Three major sets of arguments are given against the ordination of women to the pastoral ministry; the first is described as ecclesiological, the second as both anthropological and eschatological, and the third as ecumenical.
The ecclesiological argument replies to the assertion that, since women are admitted to faculties of theology and follow the same courses, offer the same work and pass the same examinations as men, they must be given the chance to practise the same profession. This assertion, von Allmen comments, assumes that “the pastoral ministry is not so much an institution of the Lord as an internal measure of ecclesiastical efficiency .... The ministers are, then, kinds of ecclesiastical officialsministers of the Church rather than ministers of Christ in the Churchresponsible for doing what would be in short the task of the whole body of the faithful, but which cannot be demanded of them all, because it is not possible to disturb them all from their commitments involving family life or social, economic, political or cultural activities .... The Church then trains, enlists and supports ‘theologians’, who are a kind of full-time laity.” (Von Allmen protests in passing against the assumption by Roman Catholics that such a view of the ministry is held by all Protestants.) “In fact,” he adds, “if the pastoral ministry is only a fulltime occupation for specialised laypeople, ordination, in the way that we traditionally practise it, is nonsense, indeed it is a contradiction and an error. For if the pastoral ministry is only that, baptism is sufficient for the valid exercise of it.” The ministry would then be merely of the bene esse of the Church, not of its esse.
Behind this view von Allmen sees the influence of the Enlightenment, the Aufklarung:
With complete disregard for the biblical doctrine of baptism, people go on affirming that from now on there is no longer any difference between the sacred and the profane; and under the shelter of this proposition, they attempt to exclude from the Church anyone who would recall this difference, and thus also the difference between the clergy and the laity.
He penetratingly adds, no doubt with those in mind who will fear the implication that the clergy are “sacred” while the laity are merely “profane”
Theologically this difference has nothing to do with the difference between the sacred and the profane, because it concerns a distinction within the sacred; but historically it can appear to give rise to this difference, since the Enlightenment is a cultural movement manifesting itself in western Christendom which had only too great an inclination to “make sacred” the clergy and secularise the laity.
“It is”, he adds, “a ‘desecration’, a secularisation of the pastoral ministry to cease receiving it as a grace . . . to reduce it to an occupation in the internal organisation.”
Von Allmen detects two other causes for the prevalence of this inadequate view of the ministry. The first is a wrong interpretation of the royal priesthood (sacrificature) of the people of God, an interpretation which arose at the time of the Reformation as a reaction against the extreme sacerdotalism of the Middle Ages; it has, he says, been more common among Lutherans than among Calvinists, and he gets in a sly dig at some modern Roman Catholic theologians for their “Lutheran approach”. The second cause is the view that there is only one essential ministry in the Church, that of the Apostles and that, since the Apostles are no longer with us, it cannot be exercised by persons at all but only by the written testimony of the Apostles which is contained in the New Testament. His judgment on this point deserves to be quoted at length:
I do not see, either in the New Testament, or among those who were the first to read it (the Fathers of the primitive Church), or among those who re-discovered it (the Reformers), the theory which would reduce the apostolic succession to the canonisation of apostolic writings; neither in the New Testament, nor in the Fathers, nor in the Reformers, do I find the assertion that the post-apostolic ministries, the ministries in the apostolic succession, do not belong to the Lord’s institution, but to human invention; neither in the New Testament nor in the early Fathers, nor even in the Reformers, do I find the idea of a fundamental change in the Church just exactly at the death of the apostles, as if what came afterwards had no longer any actual relevance, had no longer any continuity, any genuine history, as if the Church did not have to continue, to last, without interruption, until the Parousia, and as if the pastoral ministry, the ministry in the apostolic succession, willed and instituted by Christ, was not precisely one of the graces by which he accompanies his people from one generation to another until his return .... And it is perhaps in this that the question of the ordination of women to the pastoral ministry is a most beneficial question: it will compel us to take up a position on the doctrine which among all of them makes us most uncomfortable, the doctrine of apostolic succession.
“But,” von Allmen continues, “it will be said . . . can one not maintain in all its truth the doctrine, at once biblical, catholic and reformed, of the pastoral ministry while at the same time ordaining women to it, since henceforth in Christ ‘there is neither male nor female’?” And this, he says, brings us to his second reason, which is both anthropological and eschatological.
Willingly accepting the text just quoted from Galatians iii, 28, he parallels it with three other Pauline texts: Romans x, 12, I Corinthians xii, 13 and Colossians iii, 11, but he remarks that all these are concerned with baptism, and he adduces six reasons why they cannot be extended to include the pastoral ministry. These merit consideration at length but I can only briefly summarise them here
(1) It is untrue that St. Paul and the primitive Church shared the antifeminist prejudices of their time. In many matters they showed themselves far more ready to challenge contemporary prejudices than are the Christians who criticise them today.
(2) The renewal which the Gospel brings to men and women alike does not invent, it restores; it recovers and revives what was “in the beginning”. The New Testament and Pauline doctrine about women is based not on the Fall but on Creation. “The Gospel, in other words, does not save from Creation, it saves Creation; it does not rescue from the world willed by God, it rescues the world willed by God. Redemption does not contradict Creation, it vindicates it.” To deny that there is a radical difference between man and woman in the order of redemption is to fall into Marcionism or Montanism-the precise heresies which had women priests!
(3) The polarisation of human beings into male and female “is not an accident but affects them in their very identity and in their deepest mystery”. This is why sexual sins are seen as not outside but “against” the sinner’s body. People are called to serve the Lord in their masculinity or femininity. Further, Jesus was raised as male (aner), not just as human (anthropos), II Corinthians xi, 2.
(4) St. Paul’s comparison of the nuptial union with the relation between Christ and the Church in Ephesians v is far too deeply theological for it to be possible to interchange Christ and the Church without falsifying and upsetting salvation. If the sexes were interchangeable St. Paul’s argument of the “great mystery” would become artificial and shallow.
(5) Without encouraging odious male pretensions and arrogance, there is a “gradation” in mediation: “The head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is the man, and the head of Christ is God” (I Corinthians xi, 3). “God reaches men by Christ, and Christ reaches women by men. Which undoubtedly implies the converse also; just as men reach God by Christ, so women reach Christ by men.” “It is no departure from this Pauline framework to say therefore that the work of God is transmitted through the mediation of Christ and, now that Christ has ascended into glory, through the derived and ministerial mediation of those whom he has charged to dispense the mysteries of God. Stated without safeguards and without qualifications, this means that between the Ascension and the Parousia, the mediator of grace among men is man rather than woman." Von Allmen expounds this notion at length:
Expressing it in the terminology of Melanchthon, one can say that in the couple man represents the sacramental element, whereas woman represents the sacrificial element. But the sacramental element (he extends grace) is not more than the sacrificial element (she gives back grace), since these two elements are both indispensable for the work of salvation to be achieved.
Von Allmen is emphatic that “this does not in any way disqualify woman, but assigns to her her specific place”. And he makes some very suggestive final remarks
I do not think, however, that what we are unskilfully attempting to unravel here prevents Christian woman from also becoming the mediatrix of grace. But it means that if woman assumes this place, it is either when God temporarily dispenses with man (as in the virginal conception of Jesus), or else when man withdraws from his function of principal mediator of grace, as in the case of mixed marriages in which the husband is an unbeliever and the wife consequently becomes the justifying and sanctifying element (see I Corinthians vii, 14-16) . . . .
Woman could only accept and assume this place in the absence of any man or if men withdrew; then, perhaps and very exceptionally, it could be temporarily a course made tolerable by necessity. But so long as there are men in the Church, it would mean inflicting upon women a usurpation and on men a deprivation, by compelling women to forswear themselves in order to become ministers of the Word, the sacraments and discipline. For, even if they are holders of a Licence in Theology, what is a Licence in Theology in comparison with God’s creation?
(6) “The New Testament, in spite of the chance of total renewal which it provides for women as well as for men, never testifies that a woman could be, in a public and authorised way, representative of Christ.” Although there were many women who could personally fulfil the requisite conditions, Christ gave all his ministerial commissions to men, and the Church never even considered a woman as a possible successor to Judas. “This is certainly not out of disdain, or because of masculine obstinacy, but through obedience.” The events of Easter morning are normative:
It was to women that Jesus appeared first in the record of Matthew, Mark and John. They were women who were the first witnesses of the empty tomb in the record of Luke. This is fresh proof of the importance which women acquired with the Gospel and by it. But to these first witnesses of . . . what is the heart and essence of the Gospel, Jesus does not say: Go and proclaim it to the world. He gives them the command to go and tell it to the Eleven. If Jesus had wished to invest them in the Church with the apostolic ministry of the Word, the sacraments and discipline, he would have charged them to go and proclaim to the world what they had seen and heard.
Lastly, von Allmen turns to ecumenical arguments. Stressing the uniformity of the Church’s tradition against the ordination of women, he points out that the practice appears only in the nineteenth century and in circles in which the ministry itself is seen only as of the bene esse of the Church. “The Churches scandalised by such a measure understand . . . that by adopting the practice of ordaining women to the pastoral ministry, they would be doing much more than taking an internal administrative decision; they would be taking a fundamental and theological decision, which could not but have repercussions at once on the doctrine of the Church and the Ministry and on anthropology.” And, remarking that the ecumenical problem presented by the ministry is already sufficiently complicated, von Allmen concludes that “a Church which refused to allow itself to be influenced by this argument would be lacking in love and in hope and, under the safe pretext of obedience, would be making a display of pride, of insensitiveness and even of sectarian spirit.”
This concludes von Allmen’s minute and comprehensive discussion of the ordination of women to the pastoral ministry. In a much shorter appended section of his paper he discusses, with approval and enthusiasm, the development of the female ministry of the diaconate. I shall not attempt to summarise it here, partly for reasons of space and also because the details of his exposition are more relevant to the conditions of a continental Calvinist Church than to those of the Churches of the Anglican Communion. It does, however, make it plain that he is not motivated by any anti-feminist bias. Looking back on his paper as a whole I find it both refreshing and profound. In contrast with most of the discussions to which we have become accustomed in this country, his argument has several very impressive features. The first is his determination to raise the whole question above the sub-Christian level of rights, privileges and demands, and to see it as primarily concerned with simple obedience to the decisions and commands of God. The second is his conviction that those decisions and commands are not purely arbitrary but are coherent with human nature as God has created it. The third is his recognition that the polarity of human nature as male and female is not a superficial or accidental differentiation, primarily concerned with the propagation of the species, but penetrates human nature to its most profound recesses. The fourth is his insight that this polarity on the level of nature and creation has its analogue, and indeed its fulfilment, on the level of grace and redemption; mankind is bisexual by nature and bisexual too by grace. The fifth is his detailed and exhaustive attention to the texts of the New Testament; unlike the Lambeth sub-committee, he is not content simply to throw together casually a couple of texts and then discard one of them. Finally he provides an impressive example of the fact that opposition to the ordination of women to the priesthood is not the outcome of a crudely sacerdotal clericalism; indeed a secondary, but by no means unimportant result of his discussion, is a suggestion that-a traditionally Calvinistic view of the ministry (as distinct from views characteristic of liberal Protestantism) may be much closer to that of a balanced and renewed Catholicism than one might have expected. In the most vigorous (which does not mean the most anarchistic) Catholic circles today there has appeared a recovery of the pastoral aspect of the priesthood which does not carry with it any derogation from the sacramental and kerygmatic aspects; this is at least similar to von Allmen’s stress upon the minister’s exercise of Christ’s threefold office as prophet, priest and king. Here as in many other matters it has, I think, become clear that the real dividing line today is not between Catholicism and Protestantism in their authentic forms, but between those who believe in the fundamentally revealed and given character of the Christian religion and those who find their norms in the outlooks and assumptions of contemporary secularised culture and are concerned to assimilate the beliefs and institutions of Christianity to it.
It will I hope, be clear from the foregoing discussion that the extension of the ordained priesthood to women is by no means the natural and indeed inevitable development that many people today assume it to be, and that the case against it rests not upon masculine triumphalism and unreflective conservatism but upon serious theological and biblical principles. In bringing the discussion to a close I will make only two final remarks.
(1) The present epoch is one of animated and wide-ranging reconsideration of dogmatic and theological matters, and of these the nature of the Church and its ministry are not the least important. Their resolution will not be achieved overnight. It is conceivable, as a matter of pure logic, that the upshot will be a universal recognition that the priesthood is open to women as to men and that the arguments for the contrary position,- such as those which have been expounded above, will have received satisfactory refutation and will be seen to be baseless. This is in my opinion unlikely and it is not in any case to be assumed in advance. In a period of theological turbulence it is not legitimate, as many appear to think, that practical effect should be given to any revolutionary proposal that may suggest itself. On the contrary such a proposal needs the most searching examination; otherwise the Church may be found to have committed itself to an irreversible course of action that future generations will condemn as reflecting the ephemeral and unsubstantial prejudices of the latter part of the twentieth century. Those who dismiss the Church’s past practice as socially conditioned and obsolete should seriously ask themselves whether their own proposals may not fall under the same condemnation. Sociology is a game at which more than one can play!
(2) Even if we leave theological considerations aside, it may well be questioned whether the contemporary world is capable of providing the Church with those guidelines for aggiornamento which it needs at the present day. Far from presenting the appearance of a social order which has discovered how to control and direct the tremendous forces which science and technology have released, it bears all the marks of a situation which has got thoroughly out of hand. The mere mention of such phrases as nuclear war, population explosion and environmental pollution is sufficient indication that the dominant influences in the world today have not yet discovered how to direct the world’s own affairs, let alone those of the Church. I am not advocating that, in order to escape contamination by the perverse and ephemeral assumptions of the present day, the Church should cling on to the perverse and outmoded assumptions of the past. What I am advocating is that the Church should be loyal, both in ordering her own life and in presenting the Gospel to the contemporary world, to the revelation which she has received from God in Christ. And with regard to the special question with which we have here been concerned, it would be naive in the extreme to suppose that the culture in which we live has been so successful in understanding the nature of sex and applying that understanding in practice as to be capable of providing the Church with principles for deciding such a matter as that of the ordination of women. On the contrary, the sexual chaos of the modern world would seem itself to show the need of such guidance as only the Christian revelation can give. No doubt it is true that in matters of sex the Church has picked up in the course of her history attitudes and assumptions that cannot be justified by Christian principles. It is all the more necessary that, having learnt the lesson, she shall explore those principles more thoroughly and not capitulate to the attitudes and assumptions of her present environment. And of no aspect of the matter is this more true than of the relation of sex to the priesthood.
The Ministry of Women. A Report by a Committee appointed by His Grace the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury. London: S.P.C.K., 1919.
Wonderful Order. By F. C. Blomfield. London: S.P.C.K., 1955.
The Ordination of Women to the Priesthood. By M. E. Thrall. London: S.C.M., 1958.
The Ministry of Women in the Early Church. By Jean Dani6lou. London: Faith Press, 1961.
Concerning the Ordination of Women. (A Symposium.) World Council of Churches, 1964.
The Position of Women in Judaism. By Raphael Loewe. London: S.P.C.K. 1966.
Women and Holy Orders. The Report of a Commission appointed by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York. London: Church Information Office, 1966.
Theological Objections to the Admission of Women to Holy Orders, considered by Leonard Hodgson. London: Anglican Group for the Ordination of Women, 1967.
Women and the Ordained Ministry. Report of an Anglican-Methodist Commission on Women and Holy Orders. London: S.P.C.K., 1968.
“Women and the Priesthood.” By Alan Richardson. In Lambeth Essays on Ministry. London: S.P.C.K., 1969.
The Lambeth Conference 1968: Resolutions and Reports. London: S.P.C.K., 1968.
The Time is Now. Report of Anglican Consultative Council: Limuru. 1971. London: S.P.C.K., 1971.
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