[Frederica-l] Beliefnet: Women's Ordination

[Frederica at aol.com]

This appears as part of a package on Beliefnet, debating whether women can be 
preachers. Other articles are "Will women who preach lose God's blessing?" 
and "Let women speak out." Mine is called "Women preachers yes, women priests 
no" -- although on the piece itself it reads "Sex in the City of God." I know 
from experience that any web magazine article with "sex" in the title attracts 
lots of readers--as if this one was going to be uncontroversial, as is! 

http://www.frederica.com/writings/womens-ordination.html

***

Controversy over the ordination of woman has plagued many denominations, but 
it hasn't raised similar furor in the Orthodox Church. This is thanks to our 
way of approaching such issues: if the early church kept unbroken consensus on 
a matter, we will continue it. Consensus is not obvious in every issue, but it 
is here. For 20 centuries stretching backward, there have been no women 
priests. 
 
There were plenty of women *preachers*, however. I've preached at worship 
services in Orthodox churches, myself.
 
We have some semantic confusion here, because many things Protestants 
consider restricted to clergy are done by Orthodox laity. We have women saints who 
were missionary evangelists, church-planters, teachers, healers, preachers, 
apologists, spiritual mothers, counselors, miracle-workers, martyrs, 
iconographers, hymnographers, and theologians. Holy women do virtually everything men do, 
except stand at the altar. That leaves them rest of the world, which is where 
most of God's work gets done. 
 
St. Theodora the Empress exercised authority over both men and women, and 
brought a triumphant end to the destruction of icons. St. Nina, a 14-year-old 
slave, evangelized the entire nation of Georgia. St. Mary Magdalene, St. Helen, 
and others are called "Equal to the Apostles." St. Catherine and St. Perpetua 
were brilliant debaters. So I don't mind if Protestant denominations want to 
ordain women. Many times, this just means allowing them to do things Orthodox 
women have always done. 
 
But even if we know our Church's destination on this question, we still don't 
know how they got there. Strangely enough, in the writings of the early 
church the question never comes up. It seems it just was never controversial. 
Throughout the ages, Orthodox women and men found the all-male priesthood a 
satisfactory, maybe even a positive, thing. How can we see what they saw? 
 
I don't think we'll get much help from the usual arguments. Opponents of 
women's ordination often start by citing St. Paul's requirement that women be 
submissive and silent in church (I Tim 2:11-15 and I Cor 14:34-35). Yet this can't 
mean utter silence, because Paul honors many women in active ministry, like 
the deaconess Phoebe (Romans 16:1), and he hails Euodia, Synteche (I Cor 4:2-3) 
and Prisca (Rom 16:3) as synergoi (fellow-workers) in the gospel. Vocal 
prophetesses span the bible, from Moses' sister Miriam (Ex 15:20) to the four 
daughters of St. Philip (Acts 21:9). The prophetess Anna spoke out in the temple, 
telling everyone about the child Christ (Lk 2:36-38). 
 
When read in context, it sounds like St. Paul is concerned about disorder in 
worship. In I Timothy, he admonishes men to pray "without anger or 
quarrelling" and tells women to be "in hesychia," a state of prayerful stillness. In I 
Corinthians, Paul says it is "disgraceful" when women talk in church, and 
equally "disgraceful" when they pray without wearing a veil. Yet few who stand on 
the former text insist that women wear veils in church. 
 
Here's another argument: a priest must be male because he represents Christ. 
When I was attending a mainline seminary and aiming toward ordination myself, 
I would say, sure, Christ was male, and he was also Jewish, and a certain 
height and hair color. Why is only his maleness indispensable? Surely the fact 
that he was Jewish is even more significant, but we don't exclude from ordination 
people who don't have Jewish genes. 
 
We don't find this argument used in the early church; in fact, early 
Christians reflected very little on why Christ was male. Instead, they emphasized the 
fact that he was human. As Bp. Kallistos Ware points out, Christ's maleness 
isn't even mentioned in the hymns appointed for the Feast of the Circumcision, 
which would seem the likeliest spot. There might be good practical and 
theological reasons why Jesus was born male, but the early church did not explore them.
 
Another familiar line goes, "But we're not putting women down. Women and men 
are equal. They just have different roles." Okay, but this still doesn't 
answer the question. Sure, every person has a unique calling, and every role is 
"different" from every other. What is it about the priesthood that requires 
maleness?
 
In 1988 an Orthodox consultation met in Rhodes and considered some aspects of 
women's ministries. They recommended resuming the lapsed practice of 
ordaining women deacons, and they suggested that in the all-male priesthood there was 
a correspondence between the priest and Christ, and between the Virgin Mary 
Theotokos and the Church. 
 
But they were reluctant to explain too much: "We are in a sphere of profound, 
almost indescribable experience of the inner ethos of the world-saving and 
cosmic dimensions of Christian truth." 
 
Not everyone is satisfied with ineffability. When you wonder why there's this 
pattern of all-male ordination, some people have a ready answer: it's because 
the early Christians were dumb. We know better now. Somehow the concept of 
evolution leaks over from biology to theology, and it's presumed that our 
generation is what the Holy Spirit was aiming at when he came out with flawed 
prototypes like St. Macrina and St. John Chrysostom. 
 
I suspect the reverse is true, and that we're blind to some spiritual 
realities that were obvious to earlier Christians. Take the value of male and female 
virginity, for example. I once spent a year reading intensively about saints, 
and at the end I was convinced that earlier generations knew something we 
don't. They knew that virginity is a source of great spiritual power. 
 
(Christianity isn't alone in valuing virginity; other great world religions 
also consecrate male and female monastics. I like the line in the film "Keeping 
the Faith" where, after a series of nosy questions about celibacy, a Catholic 
priest mutters, "They sure don't ask the Dalai Lama those questions.") 
 
When it comes to understanding the power of virginity or gender differences 
or anything else related to sex, there's a good chance we just won't get it. We 
live under the bombardment of continual targeted, intoxicating messages about 
sex, which present it in a radically anti-wholistic way, as if it's something 
that happens to an empty body. Consumer-culture sex is an isolated mechanical 
act with no relation to a person's past, future, emotions, relationships, or 
health. But in reality, sex always occurs in a complete embodied life, one 
humming with ceaseless spiritual and emotional activity. In this windstorm of 
messages, two significant truths are being suppressed: that the underlying urge 
is still to reproduce; and that sex requires a lot of vulnerability, so the 
most desired quality in a partner is trust.
 
Since we can't understand sex in the instinctive, body-deep ways our 
ancestors did, it's natural that we won't understand sex differences. We don't see any 
more how savory and good these differences are. While you could sort humans 
in many ways-by height or shoe size or age-the all-time favorite is by sex. We 
just get a kick out of gender differences, even though most of the human body 
plan is shared by men and women alike. It's the distinctives that we 
highlight: women's clothes suggest an hourglass figure no matter what shape the lady 
inside, while men's jackets are enhanced by brawny padded shoulders. After a 
birth the first thing we want to know is "Boy or girl?," and lumpy, 
indistinguishable newborns are stuffed into baseball costumes or palest pink. We pass along 
gender-based jokes, because clumsy stereotypes point toward something that 
fascinates and delights us. The difference between the sexes is the most 
cheerful and exhilarating thing we know: it's where babies come from. The difference 
between the sexes is how we partner with God in the creation of life. 
 
If we can't understand the difference between male and female, we sure can't 
understand what previous generations knew about the value of an all-male 
priesthood. I can only hope that some future generation will regain the peace and 
clarity we've lost, and be able once again recognize and enunciate this 
mystery. 


********
Frederica Mathewes-Green
www.frederica.com
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