The Bible, the Nature of the Church and the Ordination of Women

by Harvey H. Guthrie, Jr

from To be a priest, pp. 155-162,
edited by Robert E. Terwilliger and Urban T. Holmes, Seabury Press, New York, 1975.
Republished on our website with the necessary permissions.

Harvey H. Guthrie, Jr. is an Old Testament scholar and is presently the Dean of the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

It is my conviction that the biblical understanding of the nature of the Church not only presents no obstacle to the ordination of women to the priesthood and the episcopate, but that the very nature of God’s ekklesia (“Church”), as it is understood in the Scriptures of both the old Israel and the new, requires the opening of ordination to women, once the question has been raised. That conviction is based on my understanding of what “Israel” really means in the Old Testament and of what ekklesia really means in the New Testament.

Israel in the Old Testament

There runs through the Bible a basic contrast, the contrast between Israel as the people of God and the goyim. To understand that contrast, as it has so often been understood, as between an “in group” over against unworthy outsiders—Gentiles or pagans—is to misread it. The contrast between “Israel” and goyim is much deeper, much more radical, much better news than that to finite human beings.

Goy is what any human being is in terms of where and when and into what race and nation and class and sex one was born. What goy one is, is justified in terms of a cosmic myth. That was true in the ancient Middle Eastern world of Israel, in the Mediterranean world of the Roman Empire and the early Church, and even in the modern world of secularism and bicentennial national celebrations. The cosmic myth always indicates how the divine order ordains and validates the status, the goyness, human beings live in, in terms of their place and race and nation and class and sex.

There are two recurring difficulties with that world view. The first is that there are numerous varieties of goyness: Babylonian versus Assyrian, Roman versus Barbarian, American versus Russian, white versus black, and so on. When two such varieties of goyness encounter one another—each justified as normative by a cosmic myth—logic requires the conquest of one or the other by one or the other. How, after all could the divine order ordain more than one goy? That question is the reason for the conquest and war by which goy history has always been characterized. Ancient “wise men,” like the writer of the Tower of Babel story in Genesis, and the author of Ecclesiastes; and modern “wise men,” like Mark Twain, have been more perceptive about that than have goy folk living inside cosmic myths. The second difficulty with this classically pervasive world view is that it always underwrites the “outsideness” and the oppression of people like slaves and Gypsies and Indians and immigrants. It cannot be affirmative about the differentness of peoples who push in from the desert, who are captured and imported as slaves, or who immigrate into the established social order. The only alternative for such peoples in relation to a goy order, if they wish to “make it,” is to infiltrate the order or to take it over by force, and then find justification for themselves in terms of the cosmic myth. That is why, and cynical “wise men” have seen this too, history is so largely the record of those who have conquered goy orders at the price of losing their own distinctive identity as human beings.

Israel originated in the ancient Middle Eastern world as a people called away from the goy world by a God whose vitality defied the recurrent repetition of the cosmic myth, and required the recital of a series of unique events in which that God demonstrated that the ultimate power of the universe did not justify any one goy order over against any other, and did not validate the exclusion or oppression of any class or people. Israel was, by definition, no goy. Israel was a league of different tribes. Israel was a confederation of different goyim, the qahal or “congregation” of that God. Membership in Israel was open in theory to whoever “feared” that God and entered into covenant with that God.

Israel’s normative self-understanding is expressed in the account of Abraham’s origins in Genesis 11 and 12. There it is stated that the history of salvation began precisely when Abraham turned his back on the genealogy that connected him with the great goy enterprise described in the Tower of Babel story. Israel came into being in response to a call from God which, if responded to, led to a new kind of identity and raison d’etre in which there was blessing for every different human family of goyim. In line with that, the continual theme of Israel’s prophets, in successively unique historical situations, was a calling of Israel from goy self-preservation to that inclusive “peopleness” which was Israel’s essential nature under God. Israel was not a goy, an ethnic or national religious community in which some one brand of humanness was underwritten by a cosmic myth. Israel was a people called into being across goy lines by a good God whose goodness saw every last different brand of humanness as good, and whose purpose would be fully accomplished only when Exodus freedom was enjoyed by every last human tribe in free covenant with that God.

Israel was, however, certainly culturally and socially and politically and psychologically a part of the human world in which Israel lived. That world took kingship and patriarchy and slavery for granted. Yet the logic of what Israel essentially was worked itself out in remarkable ways, given Israel’s environment. No Israelite king was ever able to be a king in the absolute goy sense. The regulations regarding slaves in Israel’s law incorporate a humane attitude that was ultimately to undermine slavery as an institution. The patriarchal assumptions that women are property do prevail in specific regulations and with regard to the role of women in the “congregation.” The logic of what Israel essentially was, however, works itself out in such a way that monogamy comes to be taken for granted, in spite of what the ancient laws say.

Finally, for our purposes, the carefully worked out theological prelude to Israel’s Scriptures in Genesis 1 sums all that up with regard to the status of women by denying what is implicit in Genesis 2 and 3, the section so often quoted in support of the subservience of women. Genesis 1 includes female as well as male in the category ‘adam, or “humanity.” The logic of the nature of Israel was working itself out in the perception of the priestly writer of Genesis 1 in a way that was directly contrary to a lot of culturally conditioned, traditional material preserved on succeeding pages. Something was being said that demanded finally being witnessed to in an Israel that was really transcending goyness and living as the people of God.

“Church” in the New Testament

When we turn from the Old Testament to the New, we find that that body of people in the Roman Empire, which found itself existing as a result of the life and death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, understood itself in the same way as had ancient Israel, They believed that precisely the same God was at work in a new and unique way to form an inclusive people out of the variety of goynesses to be found in the Roman Empire. When they tried to understand what was happening in them and among them, they found the clue in the recorded experience of the ancient people from which some of them had come—in the Hebrew Scriptures. They could describe themselves only as a new Israel, as the ekklesia (the Greek for qahal) or Church of God, as a people gathered from many ethnai (the Greek for goy and the origin of “ethnic”).

There are, of course, many places in the New Testament which, like many places in the Old Testament, mirror the cultural and sociological and political attitudes of the time. When, however, New Testament writers are driven directly to face the implications, for a given situation of the essential nature of the Church, as ekklesia of God over against human ethnicity, the biblical logic comes through. When, for example, St. Paul, or someone writing in his name, is more concerned about the Church’s public relations than its essential nature, he exhorts people to abstain from buying meat offered symbolically to idols, even though it does not mean a thing; or exhorts slaves to be submissive to their masters, even though God’s sovereignty takes precedence over all other; or exhorts women to cover their heads in public, to remain quiet in public, and to conform to the accepted marital mores. When, however, St. Paul is addressing himself to the essential nature of the Church as that nature relates to some specific issue, the basic logic comes out: “All baptized in Christ, you have all clothed yourselves in Christ, and there are no more distinctions between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female, but all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:27-28).

The Nature of the Church and the “Judaizing” Controversy

In the course of its history the Church has had to deal with three crucial confrontations about the logic of its nature. Interestingly, the content of those three confrontations follows successively the three areas of unity mentioned by St. Paul in the verses quoted just above.

The first confrontation occurred in the New Testament period, and is the one to which St. Paul is really addressing himself in those verses. It was the so-called Judaizing controversy. Because the earliest Christians were Jews, and because the Church’s understanding of itself was so firmly based on ancient Israel’s self-understanding, it came to be asserted that to be a Christian one had first to be a Jew, and then to continue in the practice of all the precepts of Judaism in order to continue being a Christian. Apparently that position was held by Gentile converts in some cases as enthusiastically as by Jews.

St. Paul perceived that to be a direct challenge to the essential nature of the Church. He saw it, in the situation obtaining in his time, to be a reduction of the ekklesia of God to ethnicism, just as the ancient prophets had seen Israel’s reactions to certain ancient situations as a reduction of Israel to goyness. St. Paul perceived the position of the Judaizers to be a human betrayal of the purpose God had in mind when God began that biblical, incarnational initiative in the call to Abraham. That is why those lines about there being no distinction between Jew and Greek (that is what St. Paul was emphasizing), slave and free, male and female, are followed by, “Merely by belonging to Christ you are already the posterity of Abraham, the heirs he was promised” (Galatians 3:29).

To those who were quoting the Scriptures and invoking the divine law in support of the Judaizing position, St. Paul’s words were absurdly and blasphemously radical. St. Paul, however, perceived that the essential nature of the Church, precisely as the new Israel, required such words, and required as well not only the baptism of Gentiles, but the inclusion of Gentiles in his own apostolic ministry. Only so could that ministry embody what was true of the essential nature of the Church. We now take the Pauline position on Judaizing for granted, but its logic leads the Church further.

The Nature of the Church and the Institution of Slavery

The second crucial confrontation about the logic of the nature of the Church took place centuries after the New Testament period. It had to do with the institution of slavery, and, we have only now begun to see, with the racism involved—given the race of those who were slaves in Western society. The issue was raised by some within the Church, but it was raised by those outside the Church as well. The latter should be remembered, given what is being said about the advocacy of the ordination of women being interference in the Church’s affairs by a feminist movement that is secular and humanist.

Arguments justifying slavery were advanced from Scripture and tradition and divine law, just as they had been advanced for the Judaizing position. Here is a description of the position of an eminent American Anglican bishop, Dr. Samuel Seabury of New York, written just before the Civil War under the title, American Slavery Distinguished from the Slavery of English Theorists and Justified by the Law of Nature:

In his Preface he deplores the fact that the question of slavery should “be complicated with questions of morality, religion, and social reputation.” He makes a determined effort to distinguish true slavery as condemned in England and elsewhere from the beneficent institution found in the South. Its supporters in America, he maintains, stand for order, conservatism, and Christianity; whereas its opponents are too often identified with anarchy and infidelity. The slaves must be presumed to have consented to their status, and their relation to their masters is now established by the decree of divine Providence. Not only is slavery not forbidden by the New Testament, but “the precepts of love and equity enjoined on us by our Blessed Lord have no such tendency as is supposed to impair and ultimately subvert the relation of master and slave.” (J. T. Addison, The Episcopal Church in the U.S. 1789-1931, p. 194)

A probably apocryphal story about Abraham Lincoln, however, indicates a different view of Scripture and tradition and divine law. On the eve of the 1860 election, Lincoln was checking the estimate of how his home town would vote. When he expressed particular interest in the clergy, and was shown the results, Lincoln is reported to have said: “Here are twenty-three ministers of different denominations, and all of them are against me but three; and here are a great many prominent members of churches, a very large majority of whom are against me.” Then, with tears in his eyes, he continued, “I know there is a God, and that He hates injustice and slavery. I see the storm coming, and I know that His hand is in it. If He has a place and work for me I believe I am ready. I am nothing but truth is everything.” He then went into a “lengthy and dark meditation” on God and Christ, slavery and the teachings of the New Testament, and concluded, “I may not see the end, but it will come, and I shall be vindicated; and these men will find they have not read their Bibles aright.” (Carl Sandburg, The Prairie Years, II, 372-373)

The issue before the Church in connection with slavery in the nineteenth century, like the issue in the Judaizing controversy of the first century, had to do with the nature of the Church as ekklesia of God, as new Israel. Lincoln perceived the biblical logic correctly. We now recognize what the real issue was, even though we have not followed through on all the consequences of it—not even in the Boston area where I am writing this! We now know that, well-intentioned as he was, Bishop Seabury, in his concern for order and his invocation of Providence and the law of nature, was missing the real issue. We recognize too that the ordained ministry which is representative of the Church must embody those races excluded from it by Seabury’s logic if God’s logic for his trans-goy people is to be expressed. We have done that by including a celebration of the ministry of Absalom Jones in the calendar of the Episcopal Church.

What was at stake for the Church in the 1860s in connection with the question of slavery was the very nature of the Church as Church. We now take Lincoln’s position on slavery for granted, just as we take St.Paul’s on Judaizing for granted, but its logic leads the Church still further.

The Nature of the Church and the Ordination of Women

The third crucial confrontation over the logic of the nature of the Church is taking place at the present time. It has to do with the equality of women in the human community and in the Church. It began in the movement for women’s suffrage earlier in this century. For the Church, and particularly for the Episcopal Church, it focuses on the issue of the opening of the ministries of presbyter and bishop to women. That the question has never seriously been faced before in the Church’s history is, I believe, due to cultural and sociological assumptions—sheer goy assumptions. Those assumptions, as in the first and the nineteenth centuries, can still be clothed in scriptural and traditional arguments, and in arguments from divine and natural law. They are, however, goy assumptions, and the Bible’s view of the nature of the Church makes that clear.

So did the section on Renewal in Ministry of the 1968 Lambeth Conference, which found no conclusive reasons for withholding ordination to the priesthood from women, and then went on to state:

The appeal to scripture and tradition deserves to be taken with the utmost seriousness. To disregard what we have received from the apostles, and the inheritance of Catholic Christendom, would be most inappropriate for a Church for which the authority of scripture and tradition stands high ... It appears that the tradition flowing from the early Fathers and the medieval Church that a woman is incapable of receiving Holy Orders reflects biological assumptions about the nature of woman and her relation to man which are considered unacceptable in the light of modern knowledge and biblical study and have been generally discarded today. If the ancient and medieval assumptions about the social role and inferior status of women are no longer accepted, the appeal to tradition is virtually reduced to the observation that there happens to be no precedent for ordaining women to be priests. The New Testament does not encourage Christians to think that nothing should be done for the first time." (Lambeth Conference 1968, p. 106)

That, though, is basically an argument against the arguments against the ordination of women. My contention is that the logic of what Israel and the Church are by nature requires the opening of the possibility of ordination to every order within the Church to every one of its members, once the issue is raised. If that is not possible for non-Jewish Christians, then goy clothing, to use St. Paul’s figure, is taking precedence over our being clothed in baptism in Jesus Christ. If that is not possible for Christians of races whose fitness only for slavery, by the standards of this world, came to be justified by invocation of divine Providence and natural law, then goy clothing is taking precedence over our being clothed in baptism in Jesus Christ. If that is not possible for a sex whose fitness only for submissiveness and childbearing, by the standards of this world, came also to be justified by invocation of divine Providence and natural law, then goy clothing is taking precedence over our being clothed in baptism in Jesus Christ.

Every order of ministry in the Church must be expressive of the nature of the Church as the non-goy, non-ethnic ekklesia of God. If they are not, then the Church’s witness is lacking in integrity and credibility precisely because of the Church’s own essential nature. Arguments that Christian priesthood is by nature masculine, or exclusively goy in one kind of way, are reflective of the kind of goy-justifying religion challenged by the God of Israel and of Jesus Christ. They are blasphemously subversive of the intrinsic nature of what Israel and the Church are by virtue of the call of God.

Therein lies the issue before the Episcopal Church. As we face it, both in terms of the Philadelphia ordinations and the 1976 General Convention, I suggest that we see it and live with it in the perspective of the Bible’s view of what is essential about us as God’s people.

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