Posted on 11/23/2005 9:18:36 AM PST by sionnsar
“I should like balls infinitely better,” said Caroline Bingley, “if they were carried on in a different manner … It would surely be much more rational if conversation instead of dancing made the order of the day.”
“Much more rational, I dare say,” replied her brother, “but it would not be near so much like a Ball.” We are told that the lady was silenced: yet it could be maintained that Jane Austen has not allowed Bingley to put forward the full strength of his position. He ought to have replied with a distinguo. In one sense, conversation is more rational, for conversation may exercise the reason alone, dancing does not. But there is nothing irrational in exercising other powers than our reason. On certain occasions and for certain purposes the real irrationality is with those who will not do so. The man who would try to break a horse or write a poem or beget a child by pure syllogizing would be an irrational man; though at the same time syllogizing is in itself a more rational activity than the activities demanded by these achievements. It is rational not to reason, or not to limit oneself to reason, in the wrong place; and the more rational a man is the better he knows this.
These remarks are not intended as a contribution to the criticism of Pride and Prejudice. They came into my head when I heard that the Church of England was being advised to declare women capable of Priests’ Orders. I am, indeed, informed that such a proposal is very unlikely to be seriously considered by the authorities. To take such a revolutionary step at the present moment, to cut ourselves off from the Christian past and to widen the divisions between ourselves and other Churches by establishing an order of priestesses in our midst, would be an almost wanton degree of imprudence. And the Church of England herself would be torn in shreds by the operation. My concern with the proposal is of a more theoretical kind. The question involves something even deeper than a revolution in order.
I have every respect for those who wish women to be priestesses. I think they are sincere and pious and sensible people. Indeed, in a way they are too sensible. That is where my dissent from them resembles Bingley’s dissent from his sister. I am tempted to say that the proposed arrangement would make us much more rational “but not near so much like a Church”.
For at first sight all the rationality (in Caroline Bingley’s sense) is on the side of the innovators. We are short of priests. We have discovered in one profession after another that women can do very well all sorts of things which were once supposed to be in the power of men alone. No one among those who dislike the proposal is maintaining that women are less capable than men of piety, zeal, learning and whatever else seems necessary for the pastoral office. What, then, except prejudice begotten by tradition, forbids us to draw on the huge reserves which could pour into the priesthood if women were here, as in so many other professions, put on the same footing as men? And against this flood of common sense, the opposers (many of them women) can produce at first nothing but an inarticulate distaste, a sense of discomfort which they themselves find it hard to analyse.
That this reaction does not spring from any contempt for women is, I think, plain from history. The Middle Ages carried their reverence for one Woman to a point at which the charge could be plausibly made that the Blessed Virgin became in their eyes almost “a fourth Person of the Trinity”. But never, so far as I know, in all those ages was anything remotely resembling a sacerdotal office attributed to her. All salvation depends on the decision which she made in the words Ecce ancilla; she is united in nine months’ inconceivable intimacy with the eternal Word; she stands at the foot of the cross. But she is absent both from the Last Supper and from the descent of the Spirit at Pentecost. Such is the record of Scripture. Nor can you daff it aside by saying that local and temporary conditions condemned women to silence and private life. There were female preachers. One man had four daughters who all “prophesied”, i.e. preached. There were prophetesses even in Old Testament times. Prophetesses, not priestesses.
At this point the common sensible reformer is apt to ask why, if women can preach, they cannot do all the rest of a priest’s work. This question deepens the discomfort of my side. We begin to feel that what really divides us from our opponents is a difference between the meaning which they and we give to the word “priest”. The more they speak (and speak truly) about the competence of women in administration, their tact and sympathy as advisers, their national talent for “visiting”, the more we feel that the central thing is being forgotten. To us a priest is primarily a representative, a double representative, who represents us to God and God to us. Our very eyes teach us this in church. Sometimes the priest turns his back on us and faces the East - he speaks to God for us: sometimes he faces us and speaks to us for God. We have no objection to a woman doing the first: the whole difficulty is about the second. But why? Why should a woman not in this sense represent God? Certainly not because she is necessarily, or even probably, less holy or less charitable or stupider than a man. In that sense she may be as “God-like” as a man; and a given women much more so than a given man. The sense in which she cannot represent God will perhaps be plainer if we look at the thing the other way round.
Suppose the reformer stops saying that a good woman may be like God and begins saying that God is like a good woman. Suppose he says that we might just as well pray to “Our Mother which art in heaven” as to “Our Father”. Suppose he suggests that the Incarnation might just as well have taken a female as a male form, and the Second Person of the Trinity be as well called the Daughter as the Son. Suppose, finally, that the mystical marriage were reversed, that the Church were the Bridegroom and Christ the Bride. All this, as it seems to me, is involved in the claim that a woman can represent God as a priest does.
Now it is surely the case that if all these supposals were ever carried into effect we should be embarked on a different religion. Goddesses have, of course, been worshipped: many religions have had priestesses. But they are religions quite different in character from Christianity. Common sense, disregarding the discomfort, or even the horror, which the idea of turning all our theological language into the feminine gender arouses in most Christians, will ask “Why not? Since God is in fact not a biological being and has no sex, what can it matter whether we say He or She, Father or Mother, Son or Daughter?”
But Christians think that God Himself has taught us how to speak of Him. To say that it does not matter is to say either that all the masculine imagery is not inspired, is merely human in origin, or else that, though inspired, it is quite arbitrary and unessential. And this is surely intolerable: or, if tolerable, it is an argument not in favour of Christian priestesses but against Christianity. It is also surely based on a shallow view of imagery. Without drawing upon religion, we know from our poetical experience that image and apprehension cleave closer together than common sense is here prepared to admit; that a child who has been taught to pray to a Mother in Heaven would have a religious life radically different from that of a Christian child. And as image and apprehension are in an organic unity, so, for a Christian, are human body and human soul.
The innovators are really implying that sex is something superficial, irrelevant to the spiritual life. To say that men and women are equally eligible for a certain profession is to say that for the purposes of that profession their sex is irrelevant. We are, within that context, treating both as neuters.
As the State grows more like a hive or an ant-hill, it needs an increasing number of workers who can be treated as neuters. This may be inevitable for our secular life. But in our Christian life we must return to reality. There we are not homogeneous units, but different and complementary organs of a mystical body. Lady Nunburnholme has claimed that the equality of men and women is a Christian principle. I do not remember the text in Scripture nor the Fathers, nor Hooker, nor the Prayer Book which asserts it; but that is not here my point. The point is that unless “equal” means “interchangeable”, equality makes nothing for the priesthood of women. And the kind of equality which implies that the equals are interchangeable (like counters or identical machines) is, among humans, a legal fiction. It may be a useful legal fiction. But in church we turn our back on fictions. One of the ends for which sex was created was to symbolize to us the hidden things of God. One of the functions of human marriage is to express the nature of the union between Christ and the Church. We have no authority to take the living and semitive figures which God has painted on the canvas of our nature and shift them about as if they were mere geometrical figures.
This is what common sense will call “mystical”. Exactly. The Church claims to be the bearer of a revelation. If that claim is false then we want not to make priestesses but to abolish priests. If it is true, then we should expect to find in the Church an element which unbelievers will call irrational and which believers will call supra-rational. There ought to be something in it opaque to our reason though not contrary to it - as the facts of sex and sense on the natural level are opaque. And that is the real issue. The Church of England can remain a church only if she retains this opaque element. If we abandon that, if we retain only what can be justified by standards of prudence and convenience at the bar of enlightened common sense, then we exchange revelation for that old wraith Natural Religion.
It is painful, being a man, to have to assert the privilege, or the burden, which Christianity lays upon my own sex. I am crushingly aware how inadequate most of us are, in our actual and historical individualities, to fill the place prepared for us. But it is an old saying in the army that you salute the uniform not the wearer. Only one wearing the masculine uniform can (provisionally, and till the Parousia) represent the Lord to the Church: for we are all, corporately and individually, feminine to Him. We men may often make very bad priests. That is because we are insufficiently masculine. It is no cure to call in those who are not masculine at all. A given man may make a very bad husband; you cannot mend matters by trying to reverse the roles. He may make a bad male partner in a dance. The cure for that is that men should more diligently attend dancing classes; not that the ballroom should henceforward ignore distinctions of sex and treat all dancers as neuter. That would, of course, be eminently sensible, civilized, and enlightened, but, once more, “not near so much like a Ball”.
And this parallel between the Church and the Ball is not so fanciful as some would think. The Church ought to be more like a Ball than it is like a factory or a political party. Or, to speak more strictly, they are at the circumference and the Church at the Centre and the Ball comes in between. The factory and the political party are artificial creations - “a breath can make them as a breath has made”. In them we are not dealing with human beings in their concrete entirety only with “hands” or voters. I am not of course using “artificial” in any derogatory sense. Such artifices are necessary: but because they are our artifices we are free to shuffle, scrap and experiment as we please. But the Ball exists to stylize something which is natural and which concerns human beings in their entirety - namely, courtship. We cannot shuffle or tamper so much. With the Church, we are farther in: for there we are dealing with male and female not merely as facts of nature but as the live and awful shadows of realities utterly beyond our control and largely beyond our direct knowledge. Or rather, we are not dealing with them but (as we shall soon learn if we meddle) they are dealing with us.
C.S. Lewis
Traditional Anglican ping, continued in memory of its founder Arlin Adams.
FReepmail Huber or sionnsar if you want on or off this moderately high-volume ping list (sometimes 3-9 pings/day).
This list is pinged by Huber and sionnsar.
Resource for Traditional Anglicans: http://trad-anglican.faithweb.com
Humor: The Anglican Blue
Speak the truth in love. Eph 4:15
Better grease your body now because you will be tarred and feathered very shortly.
There is no middle ground on this conservative thread, and by middle ground, I do not mean via media (which I call via leftia).
I am conservative. I don’t like TEC, but I have stuck with my Episcopal Church and I love my woman priest. She’s the best all-round priest we’ve had in 20 years.
No one likes me here when I say that!!!
My gosh, this is from 2005. Just noticed. Was wondering about the comments about Thanksgiving.
I know Christmas is almost here, but Thanksgiving???
I guess Kate has gone to a better place by now.
"If that claim is false then we want not to make priestesses but to abolish priests."
Thanks for resurfacing this! I had seen references to it, but had never read it before now.
One of those folks who throws out the parts of the Bible that they don’t agree with? The United Church of Christ would welcome you (and your ‘partner’).
Her account has been banned, possibly quite some time ago.
Yes, I didn’t notice it was a 2 year old comment until after I replied.
Yeah, she sounds exactly like the kind of person Lewis envisioned, wanting a world of all neuters. Not to mention no chivalry!
Instead of dealing with Lewis’s arguments, I don’t think she even understood them, let alone tried to refute them. This is typical of the academy today, just assume your position, and try to tar anyone with innuendo who disagrees.
Sexual differences, unlike those of race, are real—and thank God they are! Viva la difference! No one would consider having women in the NFL, and for good reason—only a total freak of nature could ever handle it. Why they assume such a reality doesn’t carry into other areas—and that our physical nature does reflect and give us hints as to are essential and spiritual nature, I just don’t understand.
Keep in mind not only was this posted in 2005, but it was written in ‘48, a very different ecclesiastical world.
Today, we have bigger fish to fry and yes, a biblically faithful woman, seems better, than an biblically wishy-washy man. I’m sure Lewis didn’t dream of sodomists arguing that their perversions are morally good. So compared to the homosexual issue, the issue of women as priests seems to be small potatoes....but they are related, even if not of the same level.
The current crises is one of authority. Who or what determines what our ethics should be? Pop psychology? The ethics of the university, or Hollywood? Some “authority” telling us how to live in the Church? 450 years ago after a muddled time of great corruption in the church, scripture itself was seen as the final arbiter of truth, the final authority.
This is not to say Tradition, that is the sum of interpretation, practice and belief which came before in the Church, or Reason—probably best termed “common sense” are to be ignored, they are authoritative too...just not the final word.
Your experience of a good woman priest, is your experience—anecdotal evidence. When we as a church want to determine corporately what is right, we look at these 3 in order: 1. Scripture, 2. Tradition, 3. Common sense or Reason. When those 3 all seem to agree, it’s something to pay attention to.
Your personal experience falls under the Reason category, or, perhaps something like personal tradition (or experience). It has some weight, but not final weight. One can easily find homosexuals for example, who will tell you how much their ‘partner’ helped them learn to love the Lord.... That’s their “experience.” So what though, it’s biased, and that by sin—how can someone living in a way the bible calls an abomination tell us anything about loving the Lord? Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying a woman priest is equal in wrong-ness to a homosexual one...but the issue is, do we weigh our experience by scripture (corporate Tradition and Reason) or do we just say, “if it works it must be right.”??? For a while the Germans were winning WWII and murdering Jews too—the final solution appeared to “work” for them....but of course that didn’t prove it right. I know I know, extreme examples, but, I’m just trying to drive a point home.
I don’t doubt that a godly woman was able to help you. However, IN THE LONG TERM, FOR EVERYONE, is having women specifically in the office of priesthood good for the Church?
Scripture doesn’t ever show us women ministers. The 12 disciples were men, not women—even though the gospels make clear Jesus had plenty of godly women following Him. The apostle Paul makes pointed remarks about women teaching and being in authority over men...saying it’s not the practice of the churches, and not something he recommends. Are we smarter now than St. Paul? Specific requirements given for Church leadership in the New Testament ALWAYS show them to be men. Are women to minister at all? Of course, but in different ways than leadership over the whole of the Church, men and women.
The Church for 2000 years in belief practice and interpretation, Tradition, has not had women leading men. Why does this generation think they are smarter than ALL those past? Does scripture compel them? No. It’s simply modernist secular philosophy, infecting the church, even among “conservatives.”
As for an argument from Reason, C. S. Lewis gives the best one above. It can only be dismissed, not refuted...see our ex-Freeper neuter-feminist above.
My only point is, we cannot let our personal experience guide us contrary to Scripture, Tradition and Reason. God is not a pragmatist, and He expects us to trust Him, not our own experience or notions on how to best live.
I’m curious, where will you draw the line?
We did have one female priest in the ECUSA parish I used to belong to that was a very good preacher, decent counselor, pretty straight up person. But when push came to shove she sided with the homosexual lobby in ECUSA - there turned out to be a not-so-secret agreement between the feminists and Integrity, "we'll support women's ordination if you'll support homosexual ordination", and she went right along. So much for integrity (the virtue, not the lobbying group).
But her competence turned out to be the exception that proves the rule. Our former parish was the diocesan training parish - so that for the 28 years we were in that parish every woman ordained in the Diocese of Atlanta went through a training rotation of 6 months to a year in our parish. So I had the opportunity to see a wide ranging sample of female priests.
With that ONE exception, they were unfit to serve. Couldn't do the work, couldn't lead, couldn't build a team, couldn't reach a decision. Why were they all so unfit? Lots of different reasons -- but perhaps the major one was that most of them got into the ministry business for all the wrong reasons. Doctrinaire feminism, trying to escape neurosis and other mental problems, trying to make a political point. And then there were the ones that had set out to "shock civilization into common sense" (a crib from Kipling) and MAKE the church accept female priests. And THEN there was the mean short-haired lesbian who brought her "partner" to church socials . . . they DID let her go, that was over the top back in the late 90s.
I began as a well-intentioned young person with the idea that women ought to be able to do whatever they want. But my very negative experience with all these female priests led me to rethink the idea.
In the sand, as Jesus did, and if you are without sin, you can cross.
Well, thanks for a kind and reasoned argument, one I can disagree with without rancor.
There is no comparison between being a woman and being a homosexual.
I wasn’t using my exerience with a good woman priest as a justification for women priests. I don’t believe there needs to be a justification. I believe it is acceptable to God and won’t even be an issue in 30 or so more years.
Remember we are neither free nor slave, male nor female under Christ.
I believe you have been scarred by the ‘first tier’ of women priests, who were mainly angry feminists more interested in advancing women’s issues than in serving God.
I have experienced those kind of women priests as well. We had one in our church, but she was not our rector. She was a man-hater.
As a previous poster said, the suitability of women to be priests should not be judged by the performance of one woman or many women. It’s either right or it isn’t.
I think it is.
These aren't the "first tier" - that was folks like the Episcopal bishop of Boston (who was a totally unqualified affirmative action appointment). We're talking about 28 years' worth -- the older ones are still serving, and now they are rectors and candidates for bishoprics. The last female priest I saw before we converted was a young 20-something. It's not fair to say she was no better than the rest - but she was only marginally better. Still not IMHO qualified to lead a parish.
That parade of female priests simply started me rethinking my opinion.
The real sticking points for me are the sacramental and ontological problems with female priests. I don't think that's as big a problem in, say, a Methodist or Baptist or Presbyterian church - or a "low church" Episcopal parish - where the sermon not the Eucharist is the center of the worship service. But where the priest's central role is to stand in the place of Christ as the High Priest, with the Church as his Bride, and to transmit the Sacraments as alter Christus, there is a serious problem with having a woman in that position. It doesn't work from a theological, representational or traditional standpoint. Or from a practical standpoint either.
Can you advance a theological (as opposed to political or social justice) basis for the ordination of women to the priesthood?
Thank you. I was trying to gingerly ask that question w/o sounding judgemental. I truly wanted to know what your personal threshold is. And I’m certainly not comparing it to mine. But I must tell you, I left the Diocese of El Camino Real under then Bp. Shimfky in 1994.
bfl
“I don’t believe there needs to be a justification. I believe it is acceptable to God ....”
On what basis? How do we know what’s acceptable to God? That’s the issue. I provided sound arguments from scripture, tradition and finally reason. You’ve given none except:
“and won’t even be an issue in 30 or so more years.”
When a people want to change what has been done for 2,000 years they better have good reasons to do so....and social trends just don’t cut it.
I do believe you are right as to the trends though, but it will still be an issue, for all who take scripture, the combined experience of the Church (tradition) and reason seriously. I can tell you that in the evangelical circles I run in MOST young men and women are clear on what I’m arguing scripture teaches.... and these are all part of the fastest growing churches. I also believe that in less that 30 years such people will face legal sanction, and even jail for following their convictions. Will “conservatives” like you defend us?
Unfortunately for many, their own notions of what should be an issue or not, are the final authority for them...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.