Word without Sacrament— A Lop-sided Ministry

by G.W.H.Lampe

from Women Priests? Yes - Now! pp.9-18, ed. by Canon Harold Wilson, Denham House Press, 1975.
Republished on our website with the necessary permissions.

The Reverend Geoffrey W.H.Lampe, Canon of Ely and Regius Professor in the University of Cambridge.

A generation or so ago the question whether women should no longer be excluded from the ordained ministry was generally interpreted as a question about preaching. The idea of a woman priest presented itself to most people in the form of a picture of a woman occupying the pulpit. In those days it was not uncommon for a woman to be invited to give an address in church, and, to reassure the clergy and the congregation that this was not a formal sermon, to be required to deliver it from the lectern or the chancel step, and not from the pulpit, the place of authoritative liturgical preaching, which was reserved for those who had been ordained to the ministry of the word. In the discussion of that question the teaching of the New Testament about women prophesying and speaking in the congregation naturally played a prominent part, and to those who believed that the New Testament conveyed authoritative instruction about a pattern of Church order, valid for all time, the words of 1 Timothy 2:11-12 seemed to foreclose the issue: “A woman must be a learner, listening quietly and with due submission. I do not permit a woman to be a teacher, nor must woman domineer over man; she should be quiet.”

Today the question which the Church of England is being asked to consider is entirely different. It is no longer the old question whether women should be formally entrusted with the ministry of the word and exercise it in the pulpit. That has already been decided. Deaconesses and women who are Readers preach regularly, and in many churches it is no longer a strange sight to see a woman either occupying the pulpit or assisting in the sanctuary at the celebration of the Eucharist and helping to distribute the elements at Communion.

The decision to admit women to the ministry of the word has had three consequences which are relevant to the present discussion. At a trivial level, the problem which used, surprisingly, to vex a great many people, what liturgical garments a woman minister might wear in church, is ceasing to be important now that congregations are growing accustomed to see women officiating at services and preaching. More important, the debate as to whether the New Testament passages that forbid women to teach and speak in the congregation are decisive for our own practice, or whether they were related only to the historical situation in which they were written, is no longer relevant to our present question. On that debate the Church of England has declared its mind in its decisions on the preaching ministry of deaconesses and certain 'lay' women. It has shown that it does not believe the Church everywhere and at all times to be bound by certain injunctions which were appropriate to the social circumstances of the Christian congregations in the Greek cities of the Roman Empire during the first century.

The third consequence is that the issue which has now to be decided is whether there are good reasons for debarring a woman who has been duly commissioned to minister the word, or who, if she wished, could be so commissioned, from also (a) ministering the sacraments (other than Baptism, in respect of which the principle has been conceded); (b) holding a "cure of souls" as a parish priest or dignitary; and (c) being, consequentially, eligible for consecration to the episcopate. This enquiry involves the supplementary question whether those parts of the Church which believe that there are no good reasons why a woman should be debarred, and have proceeded to ordain women to the full ministry of the word and sacraments, have been wrong and, if so, why they were misguided. We are concerned here, however, only with the barrier that now exists, in the case of women, between the ministry of the word and the ministry of the sacraments.

The theology and practice of the liturgical movement in every part of the Church has been centred upon the indissoluble link between the word and the sacraments. In the Church of England the renewed emphasis on this principle during recent decades has transformed the pattern of public worship. The Parish Communion has tended to replace the old division of Sunday morning worship into Holy Communion (said) without a sermon, on the one hand, and, on the other, either Matins with a sermon, in isolation from the eucharistic liturgy, or High Mass with a sermon but without a Communion of the people. The same principle underlies the structure of the Series 2 and Series 3 rites, where the use of scripture in three lections together with opportunity for psalmody and canticles, and the preaching of a sermon, have their proper place in the liturgy of the Eucharist.

“The Word of God” is a term which has often been understood in too narrowly restricted a sense. In its wider significance it stands for God's gracious address to man, in all its countless and diverse forms. God's Word is his own self-communication, the entire expression of his love in creation and redemption, his judgment, his mercy and his calling. This Word of God is spoken to us in many different ways, according to our capacity to hear it in our own particular situations. It is declared uniquely to the whole world in Christ who is God's Word made man; and Christ the Word is communicated to us in two related modes, through the spoken word and through the acted word. The Hebrew prophets such as Jeremiah and Ezekiel communicated the Word of God to Israel both by word of mouth and by the performance of symbolic actions. In a somewhat parallel fashion Jesus Christ, the Word of God, is made contemporary with us and present to us in the spoken and written words of scripture and preaching, and in the action of the “breaking of bread”. These two modes of God' s address to us are theologically inseparable, and as far as possible they should be united liturgically. As Lutherans especially, are fond of expressing it, the word (that is, the presentation of the gospel to us in scripture), is “broken” in the pulpit and the bread is broken at the altar, in both these modes Christ the Word is made present to us as the bread of life.

To drive a wedge between the ministry of the word and the ministry of the Eucharist—two modes of the one reality the Word of God in the broad sense of the term—contradicts the principle which has been so successfully recovered and re-emphasised in modern theology and liturgy. Yet to admit women to the ministry of the one and debar them, at the same time, from the ministry of the other does exactly that. An ordained man may occupy the pulpit and “break the word” of Christ's gospel, holding up Christ for adoration by means of the sermon and communicating his presence to the people through the spoken word, to sustain their life in Christ and build them up into the community which is Christ's body; and he may then go to the altar and do the same thing again in another mode through the sacramental action which Christ himself instituted. A woman, however, can do the first but at present she is not permitted to do the second. Whereas the ministry of a priest effects the unity of word and sacrament, in the ministry of a woman they are divided.

It could rightly be maintained that in fact even the ministry of the word itself is split apart by the Church's present refusal to admit women to priestly ordination. For the ministry of absolution is a particular form of the ministry of the word God's forgiveness of sins is declared, in general terms and universally, in the reading of scripture and the preaching of the gospel. The message of forgiveness may be spoken privately in pastoral counselling and in less formal 'lay' ministries of many kinds. Many women who are engaged in pastoral ministry, however, especially if they approach it from within the 'catholic' tradition, find occasions when the sacrament of penance is required. They feel, sometimes acutely, that it is quite wrong from the standpoint of pastoral need and personal relationship that when they have reached a point in counselling where the person concerned has come to desire sacramental absolution, they must hand over to a man who is a priest but who may probably be a stranger. The private ministry of absolution tends to become misunderstood and even distorted when it is divorced from both counselling and the public modes of ministering the word. Yet, once again, tbe fact that a woman may preach and counsel, but not formally pronounce absolution, drives a wedge between two modes of God's gracious Word which ought to be inseparable, and sets the sacrament of penance in a distorted perspective.

It is true that there are many forms of ministry which are exercised by men and which also fall short of the fullness of tbe priestly ministry of the word and tbe sacraments. Deacons conduct non-sacramental services and preach. They are not ordained to celebrate tbe Eucharist, and their ministry of the word, too, like that of women readers and deaconesses, is oddly and illogically curtailed. Since they have not received ordination to tbe priesthood they are not permitted to pronounce formal absolution either to individuals in the context of tbe sacrament of penance or to the congregation in the general terms of the absolution following the General Confession at Matins and Evensong according to the Book of Common Prayer; nor may they pronounce a blessing in the declaratory form which involves the use of the second person: “The Lord bless you ...”.

With minor modifications, the functions of Readers are similar to those of deacons. The difference between a deacon and a Reader, apart from the all-important fact that in the Church of England a deacon is an apprentice priest rather than a member of a truly distinct third order of ministry, is a matter of "order" and "ordination", and raises the very subtle and difficult theological and legal questions which cluster around such terms as "clergy", "laity", "Holy Orders", "commissioning", "authorization" and so on. These are questions which are being canvassed at present in all parts of the Church and admit of no easy theoretical solutions, but which, for the plain man, are sufficiently answered by the fact that a deacon may wear a clerical collar while a Reader may not, and that by reason of this alone an enormous religious and social gulf divides them.

In practice, however, these two ministries, like those of deaconesses and of Readers who are women, are confined to the word alone, and it might be argued that no one thinks this improper in the case of these men, and therefore no one need complain if women's ministries share the same limitations. Further, the pastoral situation in the Church at the present time, especially in rural districts, is giving rise to new questions about auxiliary ministry. If the ministry of the sacraments is to be preserved in practice and the Eucharist is not, perhaps, in the long term to become almost a peripheral rite, celebrated only on rare occasions, it may become desirable that bishops should ordain or authorize certain men to celebrate the Eucharist in their own localities while not entrusting them with the full ministry of the word and the cure of souls. Here is the possibility of an opposite form of the dichotomy between word and sacrament: a priesthood virtually restricted to the sacramental ministry only. It might also be argued that there are many priests who do not consider themselves to be fitted by their training or experience to act as spiritual directors. It could be said that in their case, too, their ministry, indeed their ministry of the word, is curtailed, and yet no one thinks this improper. It might be claimed that all these limited forms of ministry represent in fact a valuable diversification of the ministry of the whole Church, a parcelling out among its members of functions which used to be concentrated too exclusively in the single persona of the parson.

A prevalent modern tendency in the development of the theory of episcopacy, especially since the Second Vatican Council, has contributed to this view. The fullness of priesthood is held to inhere in the office of a bishop; only in the bishop does the entire ministry of word and sacraments come together. The presbyter is the deputy of the bishop, but not even he can represent the bishop completely in all his episcopal/ priestly functions. So long, then, as the full ministry of word and sacraments finds its unity in the bishop, there need be no objection if some other ministers are occupied with the one to the exclusion of the other.

These arguments, however, besides being questionable in themselves, in no way justify the restriction of women, as such, to the ministry of the word only. They are questionable because they assume that diversification and variety within the Church's corporate ministry (which is a right and proper aim) ought to be attained by multiplying part-priestly forms of ordained or formally commissioned ministries, some concerned with "word" only, some perhaps with "sacraments" only. A better way to achieve diversification, both on theological and on pastoral grounds, is by the development of specialized forms of genuinely lay ministry, on the one hand, and, on the other, by securing a greater variety of functions within the fully priestly ministry that comprises both word and sacraments. The deacon was originally an administrative officer concerned with organization and finance. He had his own liturgical function as an assistant at the Eucharist, but he was not a minister of the preached word (unlike Stephen, whom later centuries believed to have been his prototype). The Anglican Ordinal itself does not regard the deacon as necessarily authorized to preach by virtue of his ordination. He receives authority to do so only on condition that he “be thereto licensed by the bishop himself”. It is because of developments in the modern pastoral situation that the deacon has become a full minister of the word while still remaining unauthorized to celebrate the Eucharist. This is theologically anomalous and pastorally unsatisfactory, and the question is now being seriously raised whether the diaconate as it exists at present ought to be retained. The growing liturgical and theological emphasis on the indivisibility of word and sacrament makes the diaconate in its present form an unsatisfactory kind of ministry, tolerable only as a brief apprenticeship to full priesthood.

The same pastoral developments have also affected the office of Reader. In modern conditions the Reader is not merely an assistant to the priest in conducting the Offices. He is also an independent leader of the congregation's worship, a regular preacher, and a person who exercises a considerable degree of pastoral care. It is increasingly evident, in theological theory and in pastoral practice, that his office, not being, like the diaconate, a step to priesthood, is less than satisfactory. The Reader is likely, before very long, to be largely replaced by the part-time priest, able to unite the sacramental and preaching ministries in his own person. This will happen all the more rapidly if the concept of auxiliary ministry is extended to the authorization of certain men to celebrate the Eucharist in their own localities without being obliged to undertake other priestly duties. On the other hand, it would be very undesirable, and it is in fact improbable, that such men should be ordained if they were quite unable to fulfil the proper liturgical requirement that the word should be “broken” during the eucharistic service. The auxiliary priest ought to have sufficient knowledge and experience to be able to communicate, perhaps in very simple terms, his own understanding of the gospel.

It is true that not every priest can or should be a spiritual director if he lacks knowledge and experience. This does not, however, impair the completeness of the ministry of God's word and sacraments in which, according to the Ordinal, priesthood consists: for every priest has equal authority, by virtue of his ordination, to declare God's absolution of the penitent, whether publicly or privately.

Nor does the fact that the bishop is the sole minister of ordination and confirmation lend support to the exaggerated doctrine that the bishop is the only full priest. The presbyter is ordained, now as always in the past, to the full ministry of word and sacraments. The parcelling out of diverse forms of ministry among the members of the Church should not mean that the distinction between “priestly” and “lay” ministries becomes blurred and “semi-priestly” forms of ministry come to seem acceptable. The distinctive role of a priest is, as the Ordinal expresses it, to be “a faithful dispenser of God's holy word and sacraments”. The Anglican Ordinal nowhere suggests that the priest receives this commission simply as a deputy for the bishop, and even in the ecclesiology of the Second Vatican Council, according to which “the real ministry is embodied in the episcopate”, it is clear that “with and under the bishop the presbyters share all three tasks of the apostolic commission: the proclamation of the gospel, the celebration of the sacraments, and the guidance of the faithful.... The necessary and vital connection between the proclamation of the faith and celebration of the sacraments of the faith is strongly emphasised” (H. Stirnimann, “The Church's Ministry”, W.C.C. Commission on Faith and Order, Sept. 1972).

However this may be, the present restriction of certain male ministers to a non-sacramental ministry offers no real parallel to, and no justification for, the withholding from women of authority to celebrate the Eucharist and declare absolution as well as to conduct the Offices and preach. A deacon can expect to be ordained priest within a year at the most; a man who is a Reader can apply to be considered as a candidate for full-time or part-time priesthood. No man is compelled to content himself with what the Church is increasingly coming to regard as an incomplete, indeed a maimed, ministry. Yet this is precisely what every woman minister is in fact compelled to do, for no other reason than that she is a woman. In her case the dichotomy between the ministry of the word and the ministry of the sacraments is absolute; and this is an intolerable theological, liturgical and pastoral anomaly.

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