The Re-ordering of the Ministry

by Michael Marshall

from To be a priest, pp. 163-172,
edited by Robert E. Terwilliger and Urban T. Holmes, Seabury Press, New York, 1975.
Republished on our website with the necessary permissions.

Michael Marshall was a well-known preacher at All Saints, Margaret Street in London before his selection as Bishop of Woolwich. He has lectured widely in the United States and is well known as a radio preacher.

The place of women in the Church is not simply an ecclesiastical squabble; it is a vital question of our day, and an essential part of the witness and challenge of the Christian Church to our civilization. We must get it right, not simply for the sake of Church order, but as part of our witness to, and care for, the world. Clearly, in our recent past we have got it very wrong indeed, and this will not make the debate any easier. No one would wish to defend the unjust and inadequate role of women in the Church in recent history. It is the purpose of this essay, however, to show that there are very considerable theological reasons for continuing the practice of the Church in ordaining only men to the office and order of a bishop in the Church of God.

Clearing the Ground — What is the Question?

We are NOT talking about “women in the ministry.” For far too long the Church has produced a strange species called “clergymen” and they have played the role of a “one man band”—Mr. Minister. The real injustice and distortion of the past is that this particular species, which is unscriptural and untraditional, has kept many men as well as women out of the ministry. At last—largely through the economic crisis, and also through the inspiration of the charismatic revival in the Church— we are beginning to see that all baptized men and women are “ministers.” It is as though the Church should put a notice over its Noah’s Ark: “No passengers aboard this ship: crew only.” For Baptism was our ordination and every baptized man, woman and child is baptized to serve in the ministry of the Church. The charismatic renewal has awakened many men and women to a new and deeper understanding of their baptismal responsibilities. This is the true priesthood of all believers, because through our baptism we are made members of the Body of Christ, and partake in his essential nature, which is that of a priest in his relation to his Father and to the world. The Church is that priestly body, and all its members partake of Christ’s own unique and total priesthood.

So we may ask: What is the distinctive nature of the ordained priesthood—more correctly called the presbyterate? “An essential element in the ordained ministry is its responsibility for ”oversight" (episcope).... Presbyters are joined with the bishop in his oversight of the Church...." (The Canterbury Statement). So the essential nature of the role of the bishop / apostle is that of oversight: “Take heed to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to feed the church of the Lord which he purchased with his own blood” (Acts 20 verse 28). But this is not a role which excludes all other ministries: rather, it enables them and gives cohesion to them. In the early Church this left plenty of room for the prophets and healers, and all the other charismatic ministries—in fact, wherever the charismatic was most in evidence there was needed the structure and order of the sacrament in the person of the bishop or his delegate—the presbyter.

Can we rediscover the nature of that oversight and its relationship to all the other ministries? Clearly, there was an essential interdependence in this basic model which both the priest of the Middle Ages and the preacher-minister of the Reformation lost in their domination over the whole body. Cranmer, in insisting on a congregation present both at Mass and at the daily office, is hinting at a different model for the total life of the Church. There must be this essential interdependence between the bishop (or the presbyter) and all the other ministers of which the deacon is the type. So Jesus, in St. Luke’s Gospel, included in his apostolic band women who “ministered to him” and the word used is diakoneo (St. Luke 8:3). Sadly, this interdependence has been lost: the interdependence between the sacramental and the charismatic: between the oversight of the Church and all other ministries.

There are healthy signs that the true model of the Church could be re-established in our day. The question before the Church, therefore, is not primarily whether women should be admitted to the office of bishop and overseer of the Church of God. The question is rather how all baptized men and women can rediscover their ministry within the life of the whole community, in which the Holy Spirit has set men as overseers. Such a reordering of ministry would then clear the ground for the secondary question: should we reverse the Judaistic-Christian tradition of four thousand years and initiate a feminine oversight— (episcope)—of the people of God?

There are three main fundamental reasons why we simply cannot and must not do this.

1: The Claim of Theology — The Methodology of Theology

Anglicans are committed to a particular discipline in the way they do their theology. They do not isolate the Bible from tradition and they do not set up tradition over the Bible. The Lambeth Quadrilateral—as it is sometimes called—compels the Anglicans to do their theology in a particular way. The Bible, tradition, the spirit of the age, and the place of conscience, are four reference points in this work of theology.

a. The teaching of the Bible and the mind of Christ

It is rather surprising that the early Israelites were unique in their rejection of a female priesthood in the Old Testament and stood out so strongly against the cultural conditions of the age in which the female priesthood was the norm. They had prophetesses and, indeed, women judges, and women held a strong place in the life of Judaism. Nevertheless, after some struggles, the Israelites were distinctive in rejecting the practice of all the other religions around them in maintaining only a male priestly line and in speaking of God as male. (This was not of course the only way in which they stuck out like a sore thumb against the cultural conditions of the contemporary religious climate—they were also unique in their rejection of polytheism.)

So Jesus, in the New Testament, initiated only a male apostolate. We cannot initiate any other apostolate since all priesthood is derived from him by faith and the Church must not “by works” initiate any other priesthood—indeed it cannot. One could contend that Jesus was culturally conditioned in this matter and yet it is hard to think of the Christ of the New Testament as culturally conditioned to this extent in a matter which is so at the heart of the life of the Church. Indeed, it is hard to think of him as culturally conditioned at all in essential matters of principle, for he is the one who could stand before men with stones in their hands and say: “It is written . . . but I say to you.” Among his closest disciples he had many women “collaborators,” and his first recorded resurrection appearance was to a woman and not to a man. Paul continues the tradition in this matter, both as a Jew and as a Christian and, while holding the Church in the house of Lydia, nevertheless sees the oversight of the Church as only male. The teaching of the Bible and the mind of Christ is that the oversight of the people of God must be male and not female: “Women did not receive the call to the apostolate of the Twelve and therefore to the ordained ministry” (Speech on April 12th, 1975, by Pope Paul).

The protagonist for women bishops, however, would contend that on this matter we cannot follow the biblical tradition because Jesus and Paul were culturally conditioned against women. This shows a total ignorance of the Greek and Roman world of the first and second centuries, with a Diana of the Ephesians and goddesses galore, in a society which in its sexual imagination was in many ways exactly like our own; moreover, behind the argument there lies a strange view of history and an even stranger view of theology.

The Christian believes that God’s chosen people were rather carefully groomed to have unique and distinctive views, often in opposition to their surrounding culture. They were in this sense very strongly “culturally conditioned”: this conditioning is sometimes called “revelation”! It is hard to believe that Jesus, for example, was so blinkered by the culture of his day in this profound issue of the nature of sexuality and of his own distinctive vocation as the priest, that he had to leave the Church for two thousand years to get it right.

But the question is even more urgent than this. It is a matter of how we do our theology. If, when we come into controversy with the prevailing spirit of the age, we write off the Bible as culturally conditioned and the Church as culturally blinkered in the past, what does this imply? It implies that the Christian must conform to the contemporary culture: “Be ye conformed”!

It would seem that, while we can speak of a biblical view of patriotism in healthy contrast to our own contemporary jaded and distorted view of patriotism, when it comes to the question of sexuality we are strangely reluctant to discover and re-assess a biblical view of sexuality and the relation of the sexes because it is different from that of the contemporary climate. While we can combat a contemporary mistaken view of economics by re-asserting a more biblical outlook on this matter without being branded a biblical fundamentalist, it would seem that in the crisis of sexuality in our contemporary culture we can only tamely assert that the age has got it right and the Bible has got it wrong.

b. The tradition of the Church and the mind of Christians

The second great cornerstone of theology is the tradition of the Church. Here again, in spite of a frequently changing cultural view, the Church has for two thousand years taught only a male oversight of the people of God. To the protagonist of female oversight this counts for nothing. Here again, the Church has been blinkered and culturally conditioned by the blindness and darkness of the past in matters of sexuality, awaiting the awakening and enlightening of the 20th century where, apparently, all the evidence would show that for the first time there is now a happy understanding of sexuality and a more wonderful relation between the sexes than before. At last we have emerged from a male dominated society to an enlightenment which is free from the oppression of the Church in this matter so that men and women can be regarded as the same and interchangeable in every respect (except of course in the process of childbirth). This outlook is as untrue to history as it is ignorant of history. It is hard to think that in Dante or the society of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, in Elizabethan England or in the time of St. Teresa of Avila there was a male chauvinist domination! However, a total ignorance of history is the best qualification to rewrite it and we are encouraged in this argument to write off two thousand years of Christian tradition in this matter because it belongs to the unenlightened ignorance of the Church, blinkered by surrounding culture and a false obedience to its foundation and its founder.

A wrong parallel is sometimes drawn here with the rejection of slavery or the admission of Gentiles to the Church. However, in the case of the former, the protagonists fail to point out that it was precisely because Christians refused to follow the cultural conditioning of the day that they were opposed to a particular and distorted form of commercial slavery. In the case of the latter, ignorant alike of Romans 15 and Acts 11, they fail to realize the process by which the Church arrived at its decision to open its gates to Gentiles. It was precisely because they looked back to their traditions and found substantial quotations and theological insights from the prophets of the past, that they felt able (against their own cultural prejudices) to admit Gentiles to the Church. It was their tradition which gave them that uncomfortable dialogue with their own contemporary prejudices. So, in Acts 15, we see the Church doing its theology by taking tradition and the Bible seriously.

So the question is an important one: how do you do your theology if you write off the Bible and tradition when they stand in contrast to the prevailing spirit of the age?

c. The counsel of the Churches

It is sometimes maintained that the ecumenical argument (against proceeding simply as the Church of England without waiting for other Christian Churches to make up their minds) is only an argument based upon expediency and should at best only delay action on this matter. But here again it is a strange view of the work of theology. Where have all the ecumenists gone? On this vital issue we are in danger of turning our backs on years of ecumenical growth and trust. That would be bad enough, for it will undoubtedly sever us for the foreseeable future from any communion with the Roman Catholic Church of the West or the Orthodox Church of the East—five-eighths of the whole Christian world. But there is a theological consideration at the heart of this. Apparently the protagonists are happy to do their theology, having written off not only the Bible and the tradition of the Church, but two-thirds of their fellow Christians in the process. At this moment in history above all others, we proceed with an isolationist’s view of the Church in this, the most important theological debate of the day. In other words, the counsel of the Church is ignored and again the question is: how do we do our theology? The reply is clear: on all thorny issues we follow the spirit of the age and the motivation of our own conscience. It must be said, however, that this is a new way of doing theology—no, more than that, it is not Christian theology in any recognizable form and we should realize that this is so.

2: The Place of Symbol in Christian Spirituality

For those who are familiar with the medieval debate concerning nominalism and realism, it is not necessary to say very much more than to point out that this same debate is still with us in a different key. The debate of the Middle Ages concerned the Corpus Christi in its sacramental form—the Eucharist. The debate today is centered around the nature of the mystical Corpus Christi—the Church, the people of God. It must be even more powerfully expressed. The study of the Church is not simply the study of an organization. It is a sacrament and its form expresses that total reconciliation which is the good news of the Gospel: the reconciliation of flesh and spirit, of heaven and earth. For the Christian, the body and the form are a sacrament: an outward and visible sign of an inward reality. If we sever the relationship between outward form and inward reality, or if we interchange symbols as though they did not matter, we enter into a schizoid existence and create insanity in the very deepest recesses of our experience.

We live in a world, of course, which has separated outward form from interior meaning. That is part of the sickness and sadness of our schizoid world. We live in a world in which the outward and visible form gives no clue to the interior meaning, and that is part of the bewilderment and pain of living in our society. So, in any study of sexuality, the Christian is committed to exploring that relationship between opposites and seeking a complementary union because of the physical difference signified by the outward and visible form of the difference between a man and a woman. To put it bluntly: men and women are not the same things with different fittings! The different fittings indicate an interior difference at the level of the spirit. It would be fatal to be too certain that we can readily and easily define, through a study of recent history and the Victorian outlook, the precise nature of that difference. That is not the substance of the argument. Rather the very nature of sacramental theology compels us to explore the difference between the sexes and their mutual interdependence by starting in the realm of the physical.

“Love cannot and must not dispense with matter, any more than can the soul... Just as Spirit is never so enfranchised from matter as to be able to reject it, so every union of love must begin on the material basis of sensible confrontation and knowledge. It is a fundamental law of creative union that the fusion of spiritual apexes presupposes a coincidence of their bases.” The Eternal Feminine, by Henri de Lubac, SJ.

If our discussion is not rooted in this kind of sacramental symbolism it fails to be rooted at all. We live in an age of the new gnostic who deliberately wishes to bypass the image and the symbol, the earth and the flesh, the body and material. Little wonder, since we have made such a mess of these. But the Christian is committed not to bypassing them but to transcending them, and taking them to where they belong, so that in the end there will be “neither Jew nor Greek, bond nor free, male nor female.” But that does not point to a future which has bypassed the differences between cultures and nations, classes and sexes, living in a dull and grey asexual society. All these have to be picked up and taken to a richer and fuller dimension, where sexuality will mean more, not less. Of course we know that contemplation moves beyond images, but it does not bypass them so much as surpass them. It transcends them and picks them up to a higher reality and to a realm of greater significance, of which that much neglected feast of the Transfiguration is the type in our Lord’s self-revelation. Of course, at a time like this, we are strongly tempted to bypass those very areas of our life in which we have seen so many pitfalls. We live in a materialistic age: would to God we could bypass the image, the symbol, the flesh, matter, mother, mater, and materialism. But that is not the good news of the Gospel. The Gospel consists of going on beyond what is natural and taking it into the supernatural. Paul says: “First those things that are natural, and then those things that are supernatural.” Sadly, there are many gurus and disciples today who would flee the natural and the symbol and split it off from the supernatural, leaving it to fester unredeemed.

Perhaps this schizoid gnosticism is nowhere more apparent than in the alienation between head and body in every sense of that phrase. Our body politic is alienated between those who are insane because they only use their head and those who are bored because they only use their hands. “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason but the man who has lost everything except his reason” (G. K. Chesterton). The body politic is divided between head and body: our personalities are divided between head and body. The spirit of the age has brought into this alienation only a spirit of competition. In contrast, the spirit of the Gospel, in the name of reconciliation, speaks only of interdependence: “The head cannot say to the body, I have no need of you, neither can the body say to the head, I have no need of you.” Whatever the difference between the sexes may be, it is through emphasizing their difference in the name of interdependence, and not through seeking their similarities in the spirit of competition, that our common life will once again be healed. This will go right across the board, and only Christianity has the model and the theology of the body politic, ecclesiastical and physical, which is sufficiently large and diverse to rescue the present unhappy and divisive debate which is at the very heart of our common life, not only in the matter of sexuality but at every level.

I cannot believe that the people of God would be the same with a matriarchal oversight (episcope) as with a patriarchal. These two are not interchangeable, and perhaps if we spoke a language which endowed all impersonal nouns with a gender, we would know that no language in the world speaks of “father earth”—it is “mother earth”; there is no bypassing the earth, however “spiritual” the discussion may become. The challenge is a profound one. I believe that the place of “mother” is crucial to this generation. She has become either a music hall joke or a problem as a tyrant in psychology. It is not incidental that often behind a saint in the Church there is a remarkable mother, and perhaps we shall not have any saints in this age until the place of “mother” in our society is rediscovered. The Middle Ages were perhaps in danger of placing woman above man, and above God in the strong emphasis on mariolatry. Nevertheless, the madonnas in every village church across Europe must have been an effective sign to a society, speaking as they did of a reconciliation which our age has distorted by denying women their true place in society, in the Church, and in our psychology. Both male and female have become distorted: mother earth and everything that is of “mater” is judged only in relation to a distorted male image. How right the A Rule for a New Brother is when it says: “Mary, the mother of the Lord, must have a place in your life.” When iconoclasts tore down madonnas they did more to our consciousness than we perhaps realize. Mother is not immaterial: matter matters for the Christian. I am not here advocating anything less than a strenuous struggle to understand again something of the place of the feminine in our life and, above all, in the concept of the city. In the end it will be the new Jerusalem which is the “mother of us all” and the interdependence between male and female is the way by which our cities will be redeemed from being sick, soulless, masculine, heady centers of loneliness and alienation.

3: The Contemporary Challenge

Following from what I have said earlier, if this is really the heart of the matter—if it is not simply an ecclesiastical squabble but if the debate touches on our whole understanding of the creation and our part within it—then the debate about a feminine oversight of the Church and women bishops is a far-flung and vitally important topic. The debate has not yet really begun. Could it be that there is a relation between the present crisis about sexuality and the crisis of materialism? The Protestant work ethic which has pervaded the outlook of Western society for the past four hundred years has come to the end of the road. Tawney’s thesis, Religion and the rise of capitalism, is all too true. If our only criterion for handling the earth and our environment is a masculine one which, in the name of productivity, invites competition, then little wonder that our environment is in the sad and weary condition that it is.

The feminine must tame this masculine domination which shows in every aspect of our common life. It will tame it, not by competing with it; it will tame it, not by copying it; it will tame it, not by being interchangeable with it. It will tame it only by that union at the heart of which is love. For in the act of procreation, as in the dance, there cannot be superiority or inferiority; there cannot be envy or competition—only a complementary union. There will be much humor and irony, subtleties and many surprises. At some point that union will reach out for a total form which can express this ultimate reconciliation. There is a Body waiting. It is the Resurrection Body of Christ of which we are members, and in the end that Body will be the new creation, in which, on the other side of differentiation, there is that true and full reconciliation in which there is “neither Greek nor Jew, bond nor free, male nor female.”

Summary

The Church must not simply follow the cultural conditioning of this age in this sector of Western society and in this little island. It must rather seek to communicate with the spirit of the age, to confront it and challenge it both by yea and by nay. In the common life of the Body of Christ on earth there must be a sacramental sign of the interdependence of the sexes; between the head and the body; between oversight and ministry. Neither can dispense with the other. Both are interdependent. The shape and model of the Church needs this reorientation. The liturgy of the Church will be a demonstration of this interdependence between episcope and deaconing: a dialogue and a dance.

We may have to go back into our tradition like “wise scribes,” bringing out both the old as well as the new, if we are to discover the rich diversity of the world of Chaucer or the humor of the Shakespearean comedies which so often are based on the exchange of role, but never on its identity. There have been chapters in the history of our Western culture when women were not hindered; it is hard to see St. Hilda or St. Theresa as oppressed by male chauvinism!

All this will be part of our debate as we seek to recover such a harmony at the heart of the life of the Church. Such a discussion might bring us to a better understanding both of the nature of the episcopate of the Church, and also the nature of sexuality. There have been few periods in history less able to make a far reaching decision which springs from a deep understanding of ministry and the nature of sexuality. The real debate has scarcely begun, and ought not to be foreclosed by an arbitrary schismatic decision by one minute section of the Church.

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