Women and the Priesthood of the Church

by E. L. Mascall

from Why Not?
Priesthood and the Ministry of Women

edited by Michael Bruce & G. E.Duffield
Published by The Marcham Manor Press, 1972, pp. 95-120

From the earliest days of the Christian Church down to almost the present time the incapacity of women to be admitted to the historic Holy Orders of the Catholic Church has been not so much argued as taken for granted. This is presumably the reason for the brief and, it must be admitted, inadequate consideration of the question which is found in the Supplement to the Summa Theologica (1); the author has clearly more pressing and controversial matters which demand his attention. That the deaconesses who finally became extinct round about the eleventh century did not constitute a "Holy" or major Order was convincingly shown by the late Dr. N. P. Williams in a speech which he made in the Convocation of Canterbury in June 1938 and which is reprinted at the end of Dean Kemp's memoir (2); as he remarked, the diaconissate cannot even be shown to have existed as an "order" of any sort before the fourth century. In recent years, however, the question has been raised more than once, and the claim has been made that the unbroken practice of the Church in refraining from conferring Holy Orders upon women rests upon no theological basis but merely upon social convention or sheer male self-assertiveness; and it is sometimes suggested, in spite of the absence of evidence, that throughout the Christian centuries there have been thousands of Christian women who were thirsting to exercise the priesthood but were sternly and unfeelingly frustrated by the domineering male authorities. Discussion has been made the more difficult by the fact that the various Christian bodies and their theologians differ widely among themselves as to what the nature and functions of the Christian ministry are; it is roughly true that, if a Catholic is asked "Do you think that women ought to be ordained?" he will immediately think of a woman standing at the altar celebrating the Eucharist, while a Protestant, if asked the same question, will think of a woman standing in the pulpit preaching a sermon. It must therefore be made plain from the start that the question with which we are concerned is whether women are capable of admission to the "Holy" or major orders of the Catholic Church, and in particular to the priesthood and episcopate, whether they are capable of receiving that indelible "character" of Holy Orders to which Archbishops Frederick Temple and Maclagan more than once referred in their reply to Pope Leo XIII (3)

It is of the greatest importance that a matter such as this, in which emotional and irrational reactions are only too easily aroused on either side, should be discussed upon a strictly theological plane. This must not, however, be taken to mean that it is to be conducted upon purely deductive lines, and that the conclusions, in order to be valid, must be shown to follow with apodictic logical cogency by a series of syllogistic steps from certain basic and undeniable premises of the Christian religion. Only the most arid kinds of scholastic theology have been content to take that course, and even then one is often tempted to suspect that the syllogistic form of the argument is in fact an artificial and ex post facto construction; certainly Anglican theology has never adopted that as its ideal. The threefold appeal to Scripture, tradition and reason which is characteristic of Anglican theology is far richer and deeper in its scope. Theological investigation of the legitimacy of any actual or proposed course of action will be concerned far more with its general coherence with the whole body of Christian life and thought than with a priori deductions. Thus, for example, it would be extremely difficult to prove beyond all manner of doubt on purely a priori grounds that the children of Christian parents ought normally to be baptised in infancy, but it is perfectly easy to show that the practice is thoroughly consistent with the nature of the Body of Christ and of sacramental grace as Catholic tradition understands them. So, with our present question, what we want to know is whether the unbroken tradition of the Church for the first nineteen centuries of its existence in restricting Holy Orders to persons of the male sex, can be seen to be organically articulated with the whole corpus of Catholic theology or whether it has no such connection and is therefore to be looked on as nothing more than a rather strange accident of history. Such an enquiry can rightly claim to be theological in the true sense of the word.

Non-theological considerations

This does not mean that there may not be arguments of very great weight which are not theological but rather practical in their bearing. Thus, for example, the fact that admission of women to Holy Orders would put an additional and extremely serious obstacle in the way of future reunion with the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches and would destroy our already achieved unity with the Old Catholic Churches should be a quite sufficient deterrent to anyone who does not identify Christianity to all intents and purposes with Protestantism. Furthermore, the virtue of Christian humility itself would seem to demand from the Christian theologian the admission that an unbroken and universal practice of Catholic Christendom is almost certain to have some profound theological basis, even if he himself has not yet discovered what it is. Indeed, the main method by which Christian theology advances is by trying to penetrate more fully than before into the theological meaning of the Church's life and practice, rather than by discarding as trivial those elements of them which it has not so far thought out. Only so is theology kept in vital touch with the life of the Body of Christ and saved from becoming the most abstract of all academic pursuits. Thus N. P. Williams, in the paper to which I have already referred, having put the question "Is it possible for persons of the female sex to become members of the historic ministry instituted by Christ (as distinct from other ministries instituted by the Church, or by 'man's authority' alone)?", points out that, "until a few years ago, it would have been universally assumed throughout Christendom, that the example of our Lord in choosing only men to be his Apostles (not conferring any sort of ministerial authority or jurisdiction even upon his blessed Mother), the emphatic language used by St Paul in condemning female ministrations, the universal custom of the Church of Christ, constituted an overwhelming weight of authority against any such idea." Referring to lie modern suggestions that this limitation was due only to the contingent conditions of time and place and that the Church's custom is nothing but "a manifestation of unreasoning conservatism", he went on to say:

The assumption that our Lord was so much a slave of contemporary ideas that he "could not" have broken through them, is not calculated to encourage great confidence in him, merely considered as a human Teacher; the onus probandi lies with those who make it, not on those who, trusting him as the incarnate Truth, desire in this matter to do what he did and nothing else. So also with the implied repudiation of the authority of the New Testament and of the Church; for Churchmen at any rate, the onus probandi must be deemed to rest upon those who would defy these august authorities, not on those who would maintain them.

Williams was at pains to observe that his contention amounted

... not so much to the thesis that it is dogmatically certain that women cannot receive "Holy Orders", but ... to the thesis that there is an overwhelming probability, based upon the example of our Lord, the teaching of the New Testament, and the universal practice of the Church, that they cannot, and that no serious reason has been adduced for supposing that they can,

and he summed up this part of his argument by saying:

Those who venerate the example of Christ, the commands of St Paul, and the practice of the Church, will feel that no power short of an Oecumenical Council— perhaps only an Oecumenical Council enlightened by a special revelation of the will of God — could dare to assume the responsibility of modifying or altering what comes to us upon authority so mysterious and august. (4)

For Williams clearly this argument was conclusive, but he was well aware that arguments from pure authority have little force with twentieth-century Englishmen; nor would he himself have tolerated the notion that Christ, the Bible and the Church would combine in imposing upon Christians so drastic a discipline as the disqualification of half the Church's members from the reception of Holy Orders unless there was some reason for this. And he went on in fact to build up a very imposing argument to which it is difficult to do justice without quoting it in full in his own sonorous prose. It is based upon the "well-known, though mysterious, affinity between religious emotion and sex-emotion", in virtue of which "the stimulation of the religious instinct may, by a kind of subconscious reverberation, under certain circumstances, simultaneously stimulate that per se less supernatural instinct which is so closely allied to it". He insists, therefore, on "the utmost importance, indeed ... the most stringent necessity, that the personality of the officiant in any form of divine worship, as of any others who in any degree participate in the leadership in worship . . . should not be such as to convey, even accidentally, the very slightest avoidable suggestion, of the kind which we have indicated, to the imaginations of any present". "The natural conclusion," he maintains, "is that only those ought to be admitted to Holy Orders whose personalities are not likely in a liturgical or sacramental atmosphere to exercise any distracting effect upon worshippers of the opposite sex to their own," and he claims

men as such are much less likely to be an involuntary cause of distraction to women, under the circumstances of public worship, than women are to men; that this is a permanent fact of human nature, which can no more be abolished by modern progress than the law of gravitation can be abolished by modern progress,

while he hastens to add:

Although this fact may seem to result in a privilege for men, it does, not imply any moral superiority on their part over women, but, if anything, the opposite; it is based, paradoxically enough, upon their greater weakness (in this regard) and susceptibility. (5)

This argument of Williams's may have a good deal of force in it, but it must be noticed that it is an argument of expediency based upon considerations of psychology and is not in the strict sense theological. It would, as he remarks, exclude women from any visible official participation in worship, as choristers or acolytes for example; and, unless the senses of sight and hearing are (as perhaps they are) to be considered as altogether different from each other in the relevant respect, it would appear to exclude them from almost any participation in an invisible choir also; this last restriction would go beyond the limitations imposed even by the Roman or Eastern Orthodox Churches. At its best, Williams's argument is mainly an argument from expediency — an argument that women ought not to be given a prominent part in public worship, rather than an argument that they cannot receive Holy Orders and, unless it is reinforced by more strictly theological considerations, I think many people will, not altogether unreasonably, feel that the very real dangers to which he points might be kept within bounds by suitable safeguards if, on other grounds, the ordination of women was desirable. In any case, I think a good many people will feel that it is an argument stated rather too much from the male standpoint, and from the standpoint of a very normal male at that. Without exaggerating the dangers involved or underrating the power of grace to neutralise them, it would be unrealistic to ignore the sexual element in the impression which the personality of a male officiant may have upon either females or homosexually inclined males in his congregation, and it is not overwhelmingly obvious that this effect is necessarily weaker than that which a female officiant would be likely to have upon a normal male. Furthermore, Williams's argument becomes a little incoherent at the end. He rightly makes it plain that his contentions apply only to the strictly religious context. "Where the atmosphere is entirely secular, or unemotional, none of the foregoing considerations have the slightest application. There is no reason whatever why a woman should not deliver a university lecture before a mixed audience, preside at a meeting of a board of directors, sit on the Bench as a magistrate, deliver a speech in the House of Commons, act as a cabinet minister or even as the sovereign." And he insists that there is a "diversity of functions which the difference of the sexes involves, and always (so long as human nature is constituted as it is) must involve. Probably," he adds, "few of those who have been the most zealous champions of the equality of the sexes would wish to see women holding commissions in the fighting services, or deprived of their customary right to be yielded seats in trains and omnibuses by gentlemen." (6) However, to a generation which has seen women holding commissions in the fighting services (and to a future generation in which the customary right of women to seats in public vehicles may have vanished altogether) this illustration may seem a little dated, and one may wonder whether, if he had lived in 1850, Williams would not have been as horrified at the idea of a woman being a don or a chairman of directors as being an officer in the A.T.S. Furthermore, even in public worship the Church has not been quite as restrictive as Williams's argument would seem to suggest. In the Orthodox Church a woman can frequently be seen performing very prominent functions as a reader, the bride at a wedding is (according to the Western view) the minister of a public sacrament; the godmother at a baptism, the superior at a profession, while they cannot be described as leading public worship, are taking a very prominent and essential part in it; and the part that a female sovereign plays at her coronation is still fresh in the minds of English people. While Williams may very well be right in emphasising the wisdom with which the Church has severely limited the part played by women in the ministerial functions of public worship, it cannot be argued that that limitation is absolute, and it hardly seems possible to build upon psychological considerations an argument for the incapacity of women to receive Holy Orders. If such an argument were to be made cogent it might be necessary to enquire whether, from this psychological standpoint, the celebration of the Eucharist was in a radically different category from the conducting of other services and the preaching of sermons; but, however suggestive arguments derived from psychology may be, I cannot avoid the conviction that the fundamental considerations must be not psychological but theological.

A theological approach

Those who advocate the ordination of women usually start from the undeniable fact that, whereas in Judaism women occupied an essentially inferior position, if for no other reason than that they were physically unable to be admitted into the Covenant by the rite of circumcision (7), in Christianity the water of baptism and the unction of the Spirit are available indifferently to men and women alike. "As many of you as were baptised into Christ did put on Christ. There can be neither Jew nor Greek, there can be neither bond nor free, there can be no male and female; for ye all are one man in Christ Jesus." (8) The bearing of the argument is, however all the other way. For it is this same primitive Church, which is appealed to as witnessing to the absolute equality of all Christians, both male and female, in their status as members of the Body of Christ through baptism, which restricted the Church's ministerial functions to men. And behind the action of the Church in this matter there lies the example of her Founder, who (as we see for example in his condemnation of the Jewish attitude to divorce) was full of sympathy for women but who nevertheless founded the Church's ministry by giving it a purely male Apostolate. It would be absurd to suppose that in doing this Christ was depriving women of their legitimate rights, and misleading his Church as to their true status, as a concession to the conventions and prejudices of the time; even his enemies never accused him of conventionality or cowardice, and it would ill become his disciples in the twentieth century to do so. When we find our Lord and the primitive Church restricting the ministry to males in spite of the emphasis laid by both alike upon the absolute equality of women with men as members of the New Israel which is the Body of Christ, is it not natural to assume that there must be some very deep and significant reason in the nature of things for this restriction?

Mrs. F. Cruttwell Blomfield has made this point very tellingly in her little book Wonderful Order in the following words:

Not only is the Sacred Ministry something possessing its own sacramental method of generation; it is also, from the first, composed of men. Our Lord cannot be supposed insensitive to the gifts and powers of women; he had many of them amongst his disciples. The Church has relied on the ministerial order as Christ designed it: the order he instituted when he chose a band of men to be his apostles. Holy Order is not something invented by man, but is created (or invented) by Christ himself. He did not ordain any of the women disciples, though they were surely just as capable of making good clergy as any of those who now aspire to the priesthood.

It may be said that this was because the Jewish Church knew nothing of priestesses; and that it would have been therefore too revolutionary an action to begin to make them in the early Church. But the absence of priestesses in Israel has itself to be explained, before this can be used as an argument for changing the plan. Was Israel wrong? It is absurd to suppose (as some do) that the idea of the "priesthood of women" emerges as a sign of progress and evolution in our own day. It is of immemorial antiquity; it is found in the very dawn of history. The ancient world and all its great civilisations had religions with goddesses as well as gods, and priestesses as well as priests. But Israel knew them not. There, we find an occasional prophetess; but only men were priests. Our Lord was never afraid to break with the religion of Israel when he deemed it right to do so — as he did in the matter of the Sabbath. The change of the weekly holy-day seemed then shockingly revolutionary. Yet for all his independence our Lord confirmed the Old Testament rule of a priesthood of men. There is not the least suspicion possible that this was because he regarded women as inferior; for it is his influence which has raised them. If, then, he deliberately concentrated upon the training of twelve men to be the ministers of his Catholic Church, it would be, to say the least, the height of presumption to alter his design.(9)

Of equal relevance are the following comments made by Miss Thrall on Canon R. W. Howard's assertion that the male priesthood of Judaism was due to a one-sided reaction, in a patriarchal society, from an equally one-sided institution of a female priesthood in an earlier matriarchal period when the deity was conceived as a fertility goddess:

This argument is ingenious, but it is open to criticism. In the first place, what have these nature deities, the fertility goddesses of whom Canon Howard speaks, to do with the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the Creator of heaven and earth?To conceive of these deities as female and to worship them only by means of a female priesthood may be taking a one-sided view, but it is hardly a one-sided view of God. It is not a view of God at all, but the result of the human tendency to idolatry. And what Canon Howard is pleased to term the reaction, that is, the Biblical worship of the Lord Jehovah by means of a male priesthood, is not merely reaction or the swing of the pendulum in the opposite direction, but the recall of man from the worship of idols to the worship of the living God, and the beginning of redemptive history. The extra-biblical existence of female priesthoods appears more as a warning than as an inducement towards ordaining women, and the male priesthood of Israel is not to be viewed theologically as an example of

"Jewish inhibitions" which must be outgrown.(10)

The point as issue was lucidly stated by a writer in the Graham Street Quarterly of Autumn 1956, in which stress was laid on the fact that women are able in principle to perform in church all the functions which laymen as such can perform.

The true "liturgy" of the layman is to "offer" the oblations at Mass and to assist at the consummation of the sacrifice by communicating. Women share these privileges on completely equal terms with men. They are admitted to the sacraments — baptism, confirmation, penance, marriage, unction in exactly the same way that men are. They can be churchwardens, "sidesmen", parish councillors, and members of the Church Assembly. We take all this for granted, but Christianity is the only world-religion which treats women as God's children in exactly the same sense that men are. There is no sex-bar in the Christian Church. St Paul taught that in Jesus Christ, in his Body, there is no distinction between male and female. They are equally members of the family of the one Heavenly Father.

In consequence women can, and do, perform all the duties in church which laymen are allowed to do. For example, all the breviary offices, from the earliest times, have been recited by nuns in their chapels, without any intervention or help from any priest. They worship in exactly the same way as congregations of monks do. Those communities of women who recite Morning and Evening Prayer do so among themselves with no more restrictions than are imposed on laymen. Superiors of women's communities and sisters whom they appoint, give addresses in their chapels. Deaconesses and other laywomen are licensed by bishops to do the same in parish churches. There is no objection at all to these ministrations for congregations of women and children, although some may doubt the wisdom of allowing women to officiate for mixed congregations. (11)

We may note in passing that this writer, while recognising in the last sentence by implication the force of Williams's argument, keeps it quite distinct from the question of Holy Orders. As he says, "there is no difficulty at all until we come to proposals that Holy Orders should be conferred upon women." And he has an extremely illuminating observation to make upon the fact that the Protestant bodies feel no difficulties about ordaining women. It is, he says, because

the functions of their ministers are to all intents and purposes those of laymen, and we have seen that laywomen can do in church all that laymen can do. Protestant ministers instruct their congregations, conduct services, prayer meetings and bible classes. They baptise, marry and bury. In the Catholic Church all these functions, under the direction of the bishop, can be performed by any layman. (12)

In case this statement is felt to be unjust to the doctrine of the ministry held by Protestants it may be well to reinforce it from an unimpeachably Protestant source, from no less an authority than Dr Paul Tillich, who has written as follows:

Protestantism demands a radical laicism. There are in Protestantism only laymen; the minister is a layman with a special function within the congregation; and, in addition to possessing certain personal qualities, he is qualified for the fulfilment of this function by a carefully regulated professional training. He is a non-layman solely by virtue of this training. (13)

It is important to emphasise that this agreement of Protestants upon the essential identity of the clerical and the lay status is not affected by their wide disagreement as to the way in which a man can be authorised to exercise it. Three main views seem to be held about this; one is that the authorisation conies straight from God and that all that the Church has to do (if anything) is to recognise it, one is that the authorisation comes from those who have already received it, and the third is that it comes from the local congregation as a whole. But in each case the fact remains that the functions involved, even when they include the celebration of the Eucharist, are looked upon as, in their essence, functions that any layman can exercise; it might be considered to be improper for him, except under very exceptional conditions, to celebrate the Eucharist, but it would not be considered to be impossible. Apart from his training, all that the minister has which a layman has not is authorisation, whether this last is conferred directly by God, by the existing ministers or by the congregation. There is no trace of the notion of character, as distinct from authority, upon which the Anglican Archbishops laid such stress in their reply to Leo XIII.(14) We can thus wholeheartedly agree with our Protestant brethren that, as members of Christ incorporated into his Body by baptism, there is no difference whatever in the status of a layman and that of a laywoman, and that in principle (for the question of what is expedient in any given circumstances is a different, though not an unimportant, matter) there is no difference in the functions which they can exercise or that, at most, if there is any difference it is based not upon strictly theological considerations but upon psychological and sociological considerations such as those expounded by Dr. Williams. The two essential quest-tions are, first, whether a priest has any essentially different status in the Body of Christ from that possessed by a lay man or woman, and, secondly, whether, if he has, it is one which is inherently restricted to members of the male sex. If we answer both these questions in the affirmative, as the whole trend of the Church's tradition would appear to authorise us to do, it is not with any intention of disparaging either the lay person in comparison with the priest or the female in comparison with the male. Two points need to be kept in mind. The first is that, although in the Christian Church considered as an organisation there is bound to be, as in any other human association, a certain subordination of one member to another, this involves no suggestion whatever of moral or social inferiority; its nature is well described in St Paul's famous passage about the body and its members, (15) though no analogy can be perfectly adequate. Secondly, although this differentiation has certain repercussions in the organisational aspect of the Church, it is primarily not organisational but sacramental; the priest or bishop is not in the first place a ruler but a liturgical celebrant, and, although it would no doubt be inconvenient, it would not be altogether inconsistent with the Church's nature if its government was entirely exercised by the laity. To return to our point, the Catholic doctrine of the Church gives to the laity not a diminished but a vastly enhanced status, for it holds the character of the Christian lay man or woman to consist not in an external imputation of the merits of Christ, nor in a moral choice made by the individual — though both those may be and should be involved — but in his or her actual incorporation into the human nature which the Son of God united to himself in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Thus, in no merely figurative sense, the baptised Christian shares in the priesthood of Christ and he shares in it through his membership of Christ's body. Hence, to speak strictly, it is not the individual Christian but rather the Church, as Christ's body and bride made one flesh with him, which enjoys the priestly character. "The priesthood of the laity" is a somewhat misleading phrase, even when it is not used, as it so often is, not so much to mean that the layman is a priest as that the clergyman is not; "the priesthood of the Church" or "the priesthood of the Body" would be more accurate, and it is notable that the New Testament stresses this corporate aspect rather than the individual.(16) "He made us to be a kingdom, to be priests unto his God and Father" (17), it is true; but "ye are an elect race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for possession" (18), "ye also, as living stones, are built up a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood" (19)— it is to the Church in its corporate aspect as Christ's body that his priesthood is communicated, and this communicated and corporate priesthood is seen in its fullest exercise when the Church is assembled together, with all its members playing their several and interrelated parts in one organic and coherent activity of praise and offering, for the celebration of the Eucharist, the rite which day by day recreates the Church and maintains its life. In this great priestly activity, centered in and flowing from the Eucharist but penetrating every aspect of human life, as Christ's members take him with them into their homes and into their daily work, men and women are united without differentiation of status. This priestly character is committed primarily to the Church as Christ's Body and only secondarily to its members as individuals, for it arises directly out of their incorporation into the Body at their baptism; in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, bond nor free, male nor female, for they are all one man in Christ Jesus.

The priestly ministry

Together with this corporate participation in Christ's priesthood, which is communicated to the Church as a whole as his body, there is an individual participation in his priesthood, which is communicated to the Church's ministers. So far from the ministry being something contrived by the Church for its own convenience, it was instituted by Christ himself when he called twelve men to him and commissioned them to be his apostles. Indeed it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that it is clearer from the Gospels that he instituted a ministry than that he instituted a church; it is at least true that his way of founding a church was by founding a ministry and giving it an apostolic commission. "Upon this rock I will build my church"— not "independently of it"; and the Acts of the Apostles bears witness to the fact that the extension and establishment of the Church was a peculiarly apostolic function. I do not think that the argument which I am developing here is in any relevant respect affected by the variety of the views that are canvassed at the present day about the way in which the threefold ministry of the middle of the second century emerged from the "tunnel" which connects it with the New Testament. I think that Charles Gore was right in maintaining that "the New Testament appears definitely to exclude the possibility that the functions exclusively discharged by the general or apostolic order in the first days . . . lapsed altogether, so that the Church of the second century would, as it were, have re-developed an apostolic order of bishops from below"(20), but this is not central to my argument. The essential theological facts as I see them are these. Jesus is, as the Epistle to the Hebrews makes plain, both the Apostle and the High Priest of our confession (21), and both these offices are combined in his person in virtue of the fact that he is the incarnate Son of God. To the Church as his Body these offices are communicated. By participation in him the Church is both Apostle and High Priest; because the Whole Christ is Head and members together, Apostleship and Priesthood are uagain is made plain by the Epistle to the Hebrews: "It is evident that our Lord hath sprung out of Judah; as to which tribe Moses spake nothing concerning priests."(22) Nor does the sacrifice which he offers continue the line of the sacrifices of the Jewish law. He instituted his ritual sacrifice not by doing something to the sacrificial rites of the Old Dispensation but by giving a sacrificial character to a rite of thanksgiving for food and drink which previously was not in the strict sense sacrificial at all, by declaring that the cup at the Last Supper was the cup of the New Covenant in his blood. But this, so far from opposing his apostleship to his priesthood, makes his priesthood a consequence of his apostleship. It is because he is the Apostle, the one sent by the Father, that he is also the High Priest and the Victim. "A body didst thou prepare me ... Then said I, Lo, I am come to do thy will, O God." (23) It is of the very essence of the New Covenant that in it apostleship and priesthood are united: in him as the Head, in the Church as his Body, in the ministry of the Church as his agent and as the Church's vital organ. But why, we may wonder, is there any need for a ministry at all?nited in the Body as they are united in the Head. It is indeed true, and it is central to our theme, that Christ's priesthood is not the levitical priesthood of the Old Dispensation. This

If we may venture to speculate on the reason for this and to enquire why it was not sufficient for the welfare of Christ's members that they should simply be incorporated into his body by baptism and enjoy thereby their corporate participation in his apostleship and priesthood, we must presumably reply that Christ intended that future generations of his followers, no less than those who saw him in the days of his flesh, should come to God and live as children of God through the ministration of a person or persons. Dr. A. L. Peck has well emphasised the essentially personal nature of God's dealings with us in the Church; we are not baptised or absolved by "the ministry" but by a minister, not confirmed by "the episcopate" but by a bishop.

We shall never see clearly what "the episcopate" is until we think of it in personal terms, until we realise that we are concerned not with an institution but with persons, until we realise that the bishop is the personal representative of the personal Christ, the vicarious father of the heavenly Father (24)

The corporate priesthood of the whole Church is of course itself intensely personal, in the sense that the Church consists of persons, and nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the Eucharist. But the exercise of the priesthood by the Christian minister acting as such is personal, and indeed individual, in a quite different way; in his sacerdotal acts Christ's priesthood is, as it were, channelled or focused to a point and made operative through the words and gestures of one particular man, who blesses, absolves or presides at the Eucharist. It is this manifestation of Christ's priesthood with its inherent personal and individual character, and not that which is shared in by the Church as a whole, which the Church has limited to members of the male sex. What we have now to enquire is whether this limitation is — not deducible from (for we have seen that Christian theology does not proceed in a purely syllogistic way), but congruous with — the basic truths of the Christian religion.

Now when we consider the Christian priest as his essential status is manifested in his highest office as the celebrant of the Eucharist, it seems clear that he acts in the person of both God the Father and of the Lord Jesus Christ. St Ignatius of Antioch, writing at the beginning of the second century and interpreting the relation of the bishop to the Church in the light of his function as the normal celebrant of the Eucharist surrounded by his presbyters, wrote as follows to the Magnesians:

Be ye zealous to do all things in godly concord, the presbyters after the likeness of the council of the Apostles, with the deacons also who are most dear to me, having been entrusted with the diaconate of Jesus Christ.(25) And again:

As the Lord did nothing without the Father (being united with him), either by himself or by the Apostles, so neither do ye anything without the bishop and presbyters (26)

And to the Trallians:

When ye are obedient to the bishop as to Jesus Christ, it is evident to me that ye are living not after men but after Jesus Christ ... Be ye obedient also to the presbytery, as to the Apostles. (27)

And again, to the Smyrnaeans:

Do ye all follow your bishop, as Jesus Christ followed the Father, and the presbytery as the Apostles . .. Wheresoever the bishop shall appear there let the people be, even as where Jesus Christ may be there is the universal Church. (28)

We need not be puzzled by the alternation between the Father and Christ as archetypes of the bishop's office. "He who hath seen me hath seen the Father," (29) our Lord declared to Philip. "No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him."(30) And behind St Ignatius's language there is almost certainly the vision of the heavenly worship in the Apocalypse, seen as the inner reality of the Church's eucharistic rite, in which the central position is occupied both by the Father upon the throne and the Lamb "as it has been slain" in the midst of the throne, and in which the flanking figures of the four and twenty elders stand for the twelve Patriarchs of the Old Israel and those twelve Patriarchs of the New Israel who are the twelve Apostles called and commissioned by Christ, the supreme Apostle of the Father. And now that the presbyteral order has come to exercise the chief liturgical functions which in St Ignatius's letters belong to the bishop, it is the priest as the normal liturgical minister who is to be envisaged ad instar Patris and ad instar Christi. Now it is not, I think, a matter of chance that both the Father and the Son are denoted, both in Scripture and in Christian theology, by words of the masculine gender and never of the feminine. I do not suggest, of course, that there is in the triune Godhead anything crudely corresponding to the biological characteristic of sex, nor am I forgetful that in the book Genesis God is described as creating both man and woman in his own image: "God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them."(31) Nevertheless he created them in his own image, not in hers; and if it is suggested that the use of masculine terms is a mere accident of language or that the analogical application of terms to God is so remote that their gender is of no significance, it will, I think, be sufficient to remark that our belief in God would be different from what it is if the Trinity was described as consisting of Mother, Daughter and Spirit or if, taking refuge in terms of common gender, we described it as consisting of Parent, Offspring and Spirit simply. It is in no way derogatory to the female sex to point out that the Christian priest is to exercise fatherhood and not motherhood to God's family, because his office is a participation in God's own relationship to his people, and God is our Father in heaven and not our Mother. The female sex has its own peculiar dignity, as we shall see in a moment; but we can hardly imagine it exercising the Fatherhood of God. And that God is the Father of his people is one of the dominant themes of Old and New Testament alike; in the Church, which is the New Israel and the Body of his Son, God's fatherhood is extended to Jew and Gentile indifferently. When we consider the priest ad instar Christi the matter becomes even clearer, for here we are concerned not merely with the application of terms of human provenance to the Deity, but with the fact that the Second Person of the Holy Trinity has assumed a concrete human nature and has assumed it in the male sex. Christ, our High Priest, is a man (aner, vir) and not a woman. Once again, if anyone is inclined to think that this is, theologically speaking, a mere accident, so that Christ might just as well have been born as a female child, it should be enough to suggest the mental exercise of substituting a female figure for the central figure of the Gospels and asking whether our religion would be substantially the same or radically different. Would it really make no difference to the Christian religion if it taught that God was a Trinity of Mother, Daughter and Spirit and that in the fulness of time, for us and for our salvation, the Daughter became a woman of a human father without the agency of a human mother? Is it not plain that the priesthood of Christ is, in no merely biological sense but in some profound and mysterious sense which lies behind and provides the ground of the biological differentiation, a male function, and can we doubt that this is the basis of our Lord's choice of men alone to be his Apostles and of the Church's instinctive sense that the personal exercise of the communicated and participated priestly office of Christ must be restricted to men?

Male and female in Christianity

The fact must be faced that the Church is the perpetuation on earth of the Incarnation, and that in the Incarnation the two sexes are involved in different ways; it is only to be expected that this difference will in some way be reflected in the structure and life of the Church. It was male human nature that the Son of God united to his divine person; it was a female human person who was chosen to be his mother. On the other hand, no male human person was chosen to be the Messiah (to suppose so was the error of the adoptionists), and no female human nature was assumed by a divine person. Thus from one point of view the Incarnation exalts the male sex above the female, while from another point of view it exalts the female sex above the male. In no woman has human nature been raised to the dignity which it possesses in Jesus of Nazareth, but to no male human person has there been given a dignity comparable to that which Mary enjoys as the Mother of God, a dignity which, in the words of the Eastern Orthodox Church, makes her "more honourable than the cherubim and beyond comparison more glorious than the seraphim". It may be worth noting that the discoveries of modern biological science have, if anything, enhanced rather than diminished the importance of Mary's part in the Incarnation, for, in contrast to the purely receptive role which Aristotelian biology ascribed to the mother in procreation, it presumably involves that the whole of our Lord's human genetic inheritance was derived from Mary. The fundamental fact about the two sexes is not that one is superior to the other, but that they are different. This difference is reflected both in the different roles that they play in the work of redemption, and in the different roles that they play in the economy of the Church. It is, I believe, the almost complete neglect of Mariology in the Church of England and in the Protestant Churches that has led to the demand that the functions of the two sexes in the Church shall be simply identical. As Mrs. Blomfield has profoundly remarked:

The order of the laity is represented above all by women, for the simple reason that they cannot be priests. Certain actions are reserved to men in the Church, and we are told that it is because every man (a server, for example) is a potential priest. The reason is sufficient, but it is double-edged. It gives to woman a position among the laity which is all her own; it makes "the priesthood of the laity" pre-eminently hers. To understand how this may be, we must turn our eyes to the Queen of the Laity, Mary the Blessed Virgin. (32)

The question is sometimes raised, as by the Right Revd Glyn Simon in a letter in Theology of March 1955, whether in the Incarnation any difference of the sexes is not transcended. " 'In Christ Jesus is neither male nor female'; not manhood but humanity was taken by the Word of God; human nature is neither male human nature nor female human nature; man and woman, neither alone, make up what we understand by human nature.'(33)And it is often argued from considerations such as this that priesthood cannot be fully and adequately exercised in human nature unless it is exercised by persons of both sexes. The most careful distinctions are necessary here. In his first place, the text quoted from St Paul certainly does not mean that Jesus of Nazareth was not of the male sex, but that, in Christianity as contrasted with Judaism, women no less than men are incorporated into Christ by baptism and made sharers in the New Covenant of his blood. And the rest of the sentence — "Human nature is neither male human nature nor female human nature; man and woman, neither done, make up what we understand by human nature"— seems to make two mutually contradictory statements, implying first that our Lord ought to be asexual and then that he ought to be hermaphrodite. The application to the doctrine of redemption of the assertion that "man and woman, neither alone, make up what we understand by human nature" has in fact been made use of in a very alarming way by some of the more extreme Roman Catholic Mariologists in order to argue that the Blessed Virgin has not merely a secondary but a primary part in the redemption of the human race; for, they hold, our Lord, being in his manhood male and not female, cannot without an equally primary co-operation on the part of a female human being, make a complete offering of human nature to the Father. It is surely necessary to hold that the exercise of priesthood by our Lord in the male sex does not in the least render incomplete the offering of universal human nature in consequence of the hypostatic union; and if this is so, there is no reason to suppose that the participation of that priesthood by the Church's ministers is in any way incomplete if there too it is exercised only in the male sex. Rather, this is what we should expect.

In a letter in Theology of January 1955 Miss M. E. Thrall raised the somewhat similar point that "the distinction between Jew and Gentile was to the Biblical writers of no less fundamental importance than the distinction between male and female" and that "if the selection of priests is to be determined by a consideration of the individual characteristics possessed by the human nature of Christ as a necessary consequence of the particularity of the Incarnation, we might equally well, on the face of it, argue that since the Word became man as a Jewish individual the Christian priesthood should be Jewish by birth."(34) Now this is on the surface a very plausible argument, so plausible indeed that we can hardly suppose that the primitive Church never thought of it. It is perfectly true that both the distinctions to which Miss Thrall refers are transcended in Christ, but it does not follow from this that they are transcended in the same way. If the primitive Church had thought so, it would no doubt have extended the priesthood to women as it did to Gentiles. If we wish to find out the precise ways in which the two distinctions are transcended, all we can do is to look at the practice of the primitive Church and see what light is cast upon it by the body of Christian doctrine as a whole; and this is what I have tried to do in the preceding discussion.

Furthermore, transcendence is not abolition. In spite of the fact that the distinction between Jew and Gentile is transcended in the Church, the Jew and the Gentile have different theological functions in the dispensation of God, as St Paul was at pains to make clear. So have men and women. And the distinction between Jew and Gentile is a different distinction from the distinction between man and woman, even though both distinctions are transcended without being abolished in the Christian Church. And therefore they are transcended in different ways.

Miss Thrall is at least to be complimented on the fact that she has attempted to approach the matter from a theological and not from a sentimental point of view. In an article which appeared in Theology in September 1954 and which was expanded into a short book, published under the title The Ordination of Women to the Priesthood in 1958, she makes a very thorough examination of the Biblical evidence. (In her book she remarks upon the theological inadequacy of the "feminist" arguments of such earlier advocates as Miss Edith Picton-Turbervill Canon C. E. Raven and Canon R. W. Howard.(35). In her article, she argues at length that the notion of priesthood is closely connected with that of "dominion":

Man is a creature, and if he is to exercise dominion he must do so in accordance with the will of the Creator by whom it was given to him. He thus becomes the mediator of God's will and purpose to those over whom he rules, and he must in some sense continually offer his subjects and his realm in sacrifice to God, instead of considering them his own property.(36)

Miss Thrall then maintains, on the basis of a close examination of the early chapters of Genesis, that the dominion of the male over the female is a result of the fallen condition of the human race, and is properly reflected in the law of the Old Dispensation. But this, she contends, is done away in Christ, and therefore in the Christian Church women should be admitted as of right to the priesthood, since dominion is restored to woman equally with man in the New Dispensation. If Miss Thrall is correct, therefore, the Christian Church throughout its existence has had a grossly inadequate understanding of the effects of Christ's redemptive work; it has entirely failed to see one of the most important consequences of the restoration of the human race by Christ. As the Ven. G. F. Hilder remarked, in a comment upon Miss Thrall's article which does not seem to have been in any way rebutted in her book,

Her argument, on its premisses, is both lucid and cogent. But it starts from, and depends upon, the assumption that "dominion" is all of one kind — that represented by man's relationship to chattels in his possession— so that a subordinate state is necessarily servile. The passages of Scripture which have been taken to signify that man has been given by God in creation a certain primacy or headship over women are simply disregarded . . The effect of this omission however is serious, as it goes to the root of the whole matter under discussion. It is clear that in the scriptural view there is a servile element in woman's status which is the consequence of sin, reflecting the servile state into which, from sonship, man himself has fallen. From both servitudes Christ has won redemption, though manifestly the outward effects of bondage are not in this life simply abolished. But just as man's fallen condition of servitude is the perversion of a creaturely state of filial dependence upon God, so it is at least possible that the fallen servitude of woman only exaggerates, perverts and masks the true subordination to man which is her place in creation. In this case the proper meaning of that "headship" of man spoken by St Paul can be seen only in Christ, when the partnership of the sexes is freed from the false pattern of domination and servitude with which sin has overlaid it. (37)

Miss Thrall's omission to discuss the scriptural passages in question was, as the Archdeacon of Taunton recognised, to some extent repaired in an article by Dr. Sherwin Bailey which accompanied hers. But it can hardly be said to take the New Testament evidence seriously.

Dr Bailey . . . frankly recognises that a "theory of subordination" appears in certain Pauline Epistles and in I Peter. But he regards this as merely a rationalisation of the social outlook of contemporary Judaism, supported in St Paul by a rabbinical exposition of the second creation story in Genesis ii. Similarly he argues that Genesis ii and iii are themselves to be regarded as a reflection in mythological form of woman's actual situation in the ancient world.(38)

Miss Thrall, in her book, takes a rather different line from this. She is not prepared to assert that the teaching of the New Testament writers about the status of women is sub-Christian in itself, nor, apparently, that St Paul failed to see the implications of his own doctrine. Attending particularly to the discussion in I Corinthians xi, she suggests that "the solution of the problem is perhaps to be found in the general situation of the Christians at Corinth,"(38) and that St Paul's attitude was governed by the peculiar circumstances of his day. The reason why he refused to tolerate the notion of women exercising the Christian ministry was that in the ancient world Christians were under a constant temptation to fall into idolatry, and that women, under the conditions of the Fall, had a particular leaning towards nature-mysticism and so were more prone to idolatry than men.

The great danger, for the Gentile churches, was the temptation to slip back into the worship of the creature, and the women in particular would be subject to the temptation of idolatry. The worship of the one true God in Israel went hand in hand with the rigid subordination of women. The assertion and expression of monotheism in the Gentile communities of the New Israel required an equally strict subjection of the women to the authority of the men. (39)

However, Miss Thrall assures us, neither of these reasons which were so cogent in the first century is of force today.

Idolatry, in the strict sense of regarding the creation as an object of religious worship, is a thing of the past. The rise of the natural sciences has destroyed, even in the less well-educated sections of the population, any lingering belief that the universe is controlled by daemonic natural powers, and effectively prevents the ordinary man or woman from looking on natural phenomena with a feeling of numinous awe.

And,

as far as the Church is concerned, the education of women ought to mean that Christian women are able to realise to the full their redeemed existence in the Image of God. They are no longer subject to the temptation to indulge in what Brunner describes as "nature-mysticism". Consequently, there is no longer any need for their continued subordination.(40)

Both these views, I must confess, seem to me to be highly improbable. It is, one may suggest, at least as likely that Dr. Bailey has confused the social fashions and prejudices of his own day with the plain implications of the Christian religion as that the New Testament writers did the same thing with theirs. And Miss Thrall's argument seems to me to be a desperate expedient to save St Paul's face without accepting his conclusions. That he should have excluded one half of the Church's members from a status that had been restored to them by Christ, and this for no better reason than that they were somewhat more likely than the other half to succumb to a temptation which was constantly present to all and which, in any case, like other temptations was not irresistible in the power of Christ, is surely incredible, and Miss Thrall's bland assumption that the danger has been virtually abolished by the development of scientific civilisation and female education seems to me to show a sad declension from the theological and realistic level on which her preceding arguments were conducted. It would follow from her interpretation that it is only in the more urbanised sections of the Anglo-Saxon world that women are now qualified for Holy Orders, and presumably that if a situation arose in which men were notably more prone to idolatry than women the Church would be right in excluding them from the priesthood in their turn. It is not really plausible that the very structure of the Church's ministry is meant to depend upon such purely contingent circumstances as these. And it should be noted that if the last part of her argument fails, not only does her conclusion not follow but much of her previous discussion weighs heavily against it. Among modern Anglo-Saxons, with their uncritical sympathy with "democracy" and their impatience with any form of restraint (an impatience which is very understandably accentuated by the unnatural character of many of the restraints which the modern world imposes), the very word "subordination" tends to provoke a violent negative reaction. Nevertheless, in the strict etymological sense, sub-ordination, In the sense of the ordering of human beings under and over one another in accordance with the functions that they are called upon to perform, is a necessity of social life and can no more be dispensed with in the twentieth century than in the first; it rightly carries with it no suggestion of either arbitrariness, tyranny or exploitation. And in the matter with which we are here concerned any such suggestion is altogether excluded by the Pauline writings. In the eleventh chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians we are told that the head of the woman is the man, and the head of every man is Christ, and the head of Christ is God. This does not, of course, mean that in all the three cases headship is exercised in precisely the same way; to use the technical terms, "headship " is an analogical and not a univocal concept. But neither is it purely equivocal, or there would be no force in making the comparison. And if the headship of God over Christ is the archetype of both Christ's headship over the man and the man's headship over the woman, no implication of servile subjection is possible. The fundamental relation of Christ to the Father is not one of inferiority but of filiality and derived equality. The fundamental relation of the Christian man to Christ is not one of inferiority but oside of Adam, in which the fundamental relation is not one of inferiority but of mutual perfection and of derived partnership: " I will make him a help meet for him."(41) The thought is carried even further in the magnificent sixth chapter of the Epistle to the Ephesians, in which husbands are exhorted to love their wives with that same self-giving love with which Christ loved the Church and gave himself for it. Throughout, superordination is manifested not in tyranny but in self-giving; subordination is manifested not is servility but in receptive-ness and response. If women are incapable of receiving Holy Orders, it cannot be just because they are, in the vulgar sense of the word, subordinate to men, but because of the particular way in which masculinity and femininity are involved in the whole dispensation of redemption. Now I have already urged that the masculinity of the Christian priest is organically correlated with the masculinity of the | great High Priest, whose priesthood is communicated to him and operates through him; and this contention is reinforced by the scriptural teaching that Christ's relation to the Church is the archetype — the supreme instance — of the relation of I a husband to his wife. The fatherhood of God towards his | people, the sponsal relation of Christ to his bride the Church — it does not seem fantastic to hold that, if these are the archetypal bases of the Christian priesthood, it is essentially male in its character.f membership and reception of communicated sonship. And behind St Paul's thought about the man and the woman we must surely see the story of the creation of Eve from the

No doubt there are truths about the way in which the male and female sexes are related in the mystery of redemption and in the life of the Church which are only now beginning to be fathomed, and they are bound to have their implications for the Church's ministry. But if we are wise we shall hold on faithfully to the order which the Church has inherited from its first beginnings and attempt in humility to deepen our understanding of it, rather than overturn it on the strength of contemporary fashions and half-thought-out speculations. The Anglican Churches have never failed to pride themselves on their faithfulness to Scripture and primitive practice and to condemn those bodies which have innovated upon the Church's faith and practice. It would be difficult to conceive a more drastic innovation than the extension of Holy Orders to women; for there can hardly be any aspect of the Church's practice which conforms more closely to the Vincentian canon Semper, ubique et ab omnibus, than the restriction of priesthood to the male sex.

1 Supp. xxxix. 1.

2 E. W. Kemp, N. P. Williams, pp. 185f.

3 Responsio . . . , XV, XVIII, XIX.

4 op. cit.. p. 193-5

5 ibid., p. 195-8

6 ibid., p. 199.

7 ch. M. E. Thrall, The Ordination of Women to the Priesthood, p. 44f. for an examination of the Old Testament evidence.

8 Gal. iii. 27-8.

9 op. cit., p. 26-7.

10 The Ordination of Women to the Priesthood, p. 15. Cf. Dr. E. O. James's comments in the appendix to this pamphlet.

11 loc. cit., p. 7.

12 ibid., p. 10.

13 The Protestant Era, ch. xi.

14 Referring to two clauses in the Anglican ordination of a priest, they wrote:
"The former, 'Receive the Holy Ghost', with what follows, together with laying on of hands, confers the general faculties and powers of priesthood (sacerdotii), and as is generally said, imprints the character (characterem imprimit). The second, together with the delivery of the Bible, gives a man the right (auctoritatem) to offer public service to God and to exercise authority (potestatem exerceat) over the Christian people who are to be entrusted to his charge in his own parish or cure" (Resp. XV)

15 I Cor. xii. 12f.

16 "The priesthood of the laity" can be given a legitimate sense if it is used to mean "the priesthood of the Church as exercised by the laity," or "the participation of the laity in the priesthood of the Church"

17 Rev., i. 6; cf. v. 10.

18 I Pet. ii. 9.

19 ibid., ii. 5.

20 The Church and the Ministry, new ed., p. 242.

21 Heb. iii. 1.

22 Heb. vii. 14.

23 Cf. Heb. x. 5f.

24 This Church of Christ, p. 36.

25 Mag. 6. Cf. Trall. 3.

26 Mag. 7.

27 Trall. 2.

28 Smyrn. 8.

29 John xiv. 9

30 John i. 18.

31 Gen. i. 27.

32 op. cit., p. 37.

33 loc. cit., p. 102.

34 loc. cit., p. 26.

35 E Picton-Turbervill Should Women be Priests and Ministers'), 19S3; C. E. Raven, Women and Holy Orders; R. W. Howard, Should Women be Priests? 1950.

36 art. cit., p. 331.

37 "Women and the Ministry", in Theology, December 1954, p. 453.

38 op. cit.,p.74.

39 ibid., p. 109.

40 ibid., p. 109, 111

41 Gen. ii. 18.

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