The Argument from Creation

by Edward Patey, Dean of Liverpool

from Women Priests? Yes - Now! pp. 27-36, ed. by Canon Harold Wilson, Denham House Press, 1975.
Republished on our website with the necessary permissions.

When theological and Biblical arguments are launched in favour of the Ordination of women to the Priesthood, they generally seem to be couched in negative or half-hearted language. The suggestion is that, in spite of apparent evidence to the contrary in Scripture, a case might be made out for the admission of women to Holy Orders. For instance, although there were no women amongst the chosen Twelve, there do appear to have been a number of women who played a prominent part in the earthly ministry of Jesus, albeit, for the most part, behind the scenes. Although no woman was called to be an Apostle, women were the first witnesses of the Resurrection, and the risen Christ sent them to the waiting apostles to tell the Good News. Although women were, by Jewish tradition, not allowed near the Sanctuary, yet it was they who stood nearest to the crucified Lord at the moment of his sacrifice on the Cross, and Golgotha was surely the greatest Holy of Holies of all time. Although St. Paul had some strong views on women keeping silent in church, there is evidence that in the churches with which he was closely connected, women such as Priscilla played a leading role in the ministry of the congregation. And even St. Paul's elaborate doctrine about man being “the head of the woman” just as Christ is “the head of the Church”, may possibly be attributed to an attempt to make theological sense out of the accepted social custom of the time.

These are the sorts of arguments which are usually marshalled against those who oppose the Ordination of women on the grounds of Scripture and tradition. And the arguments have some power. Yet they often fail to convince even those who are not totally blinded by prejudice based on the assumption that man is a superior being (perhaps, because God is a male or that woman is inferior, because that is the way God intended her to be. It would seem that the ordination of women must be backed up by arguments more substantial than those which are frequently advanced. We need to go back to fundamentals and ask a basic question. “Why did God create two sexes? Is this simply a matter of biology; the creation of male and female species and the best way of ensuring reproduction and the continuation of the human race? Or has sexuality a deeper significance? It is here that we must look for an answer if we are to find better reasons for the admittance of women to the priesthood than those which are based on uncertain New Testament precedents, or on the changing social scene. But can we find such an argument?

When the Bible deals with the beginning of time (Creation) and the end of time (Apocalypse) it has to use the language of myth. For when we speak of the end and the beginning of things we are dealing with matters outside history and beyond human experience. The language of the rational sciences can be of little help to us here. We have to rely on poetry and story-telling. Yet are the stories which tell of the Creation in any sense reliable enough to provide material for an answer to the question which we are posing in this chapter ? Does the purpose of God in Creation, as described in the book of Genesis, help us towards a solution of the problem whether or not women should be ordained into the priesthood of the Church? To find an answer in these sources might seem to be a hopeless quest. Yet on closer examination the early chapters of Genesis may provide precisely the material we need. This is not because we turn to the first book of the Bible to find a literal account of how the physical universe came into being, but because a careful examination of these wonderful pages may open up insights which we immediately recognize as corresponding to the deepest instincts about the truth which lie within each of us. This is why the Bible account of Creation cannot be ignored in our consideration of Christian ministry, and the role of men and women within it.

The book of Genesis sees the creation of men and women as the crown of God's plan for making a world which is called “very good”. Men and women are created by him in order to belong both to himself and to one another. There are two stories about the making of man and woman in Genesis, and they emphasize different aspects of the relationship between the sexes, and between men, women and God, which form the basic elements of the Bible view of life.

In the first story man and woman are formed together as the final act of Creation. “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. God blessed them and said, 'Be fruitful and increase, fill the earth and subdue it'." (Genesis 1 :27-28.)

Here man and woman are made together at the same moment in time, they are accorded equal importance, and they are given the double task of bringing children into the world, and of working together so that the world may be a good and fruitful place in which they and their offspring can live.

The second story is quite different. God created the earth with its rivers and plants and trees, and made man “from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” to be the first of his creatures. Man is put into the Garden to care for it, but it quickly becomes apparent that he cannot do the job alone. He needs a partner to help him to look after the good world which has been put into his charge.

“The Lord God said, 'It is not good for the man to be alone. I will provide a partner for him'. So God formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds of Heaven. He brought them to the man to see what he would call them" (Genesis 2:18-19).

The man conveniently finds names for the animals and the birds. But he does not find in any of them the kind of partner he needs if he is to do the work that God has entrusted to him. He does not find an answer to his loneliness until, while he is asleep, God takes one of his ribs and from this forms woman. Adam immediately recognizes that Eve and himself belong together. Here is the answer to his need for a partner to share with him the business of stewarding God's world.

“The man said:
'Now this, at last—
Bone from my bones,
Flesh from my flesh' ” (Genesis 2:23).

We no longer take these Genesis stories as a literal account of the beginning of the world and of human life. But we would be foolish to ignore the tender truths contained in them. The clear affirmation is that men and women are created by God to complement one another, to share in the running of the world and in the bringing to birth of children, and to discover what it means for each to contribute his own sexuality to an enriching and creative partnership.

In primitive societies (such as the book of Genesis reflects) man and women within their homes and within the small community of tribe or village, shared together both in daily work and in the creation and upbringing of children. There was not the clear division of labour between the sexes to which industrial and suburban society has accustomed us, with the man going many miles to his place of work, and the wife staying at home to look after the house and children. We have now become used to the idea that men and women must live a great part (and often a very important part) of their lives in separation, and that the relationship between the sexes is confined to the bedroom, to meals, to the week-end, and to holiday time. So the phrase “sexual intercourse” has been narrowed down to refer to a specific physical activity. And the Christian Church, often eager to pontificate on matters of sex, has itself been guilty of presenting a tragically restricted picture of what the relationship between the sexes is intended by God to be. Sexual relationship has been confined to marriage and family life. Sexual intercourse is taken to be the means by which children are conceived, though it has to be reluctantly admitted that coitus can give, as a bonus, relief from frustration, and even pleasure! But the Church has always appeared to have a hang-up about the relationship of the sexes outside the marriage bond. Here sex is treated with anxiety and surrounded by prohibitions. Not only are men kept away from women in the Sanctuary. Until recently men and women often sat on different sides of the church, and many parishes still run single sex organizations whose raison d'étre seems difficult to justify in the present day.

The younger generation finds this fear of sex amongst their elders hard to understand. And they deplore many of the artificial stereotypes which keep male and female in separate boxes with distinct labels. Unisex clothes are part of the protest. More seriously, they are discovering new patterns of symmetrical marriage in which husband and wife can equally share and enjoy doing a job of work in the world and caring for their family in the home. In the symmetrical marriage there open up new possibilities of partnership between men and women which augur well for the future of married life. And although the pundits are fond of saying that all young people think about nowadays is sex, it is probably nearer the mark to say that the younger generation is beginning to rescue the phrase “sexual intercourse” from the restricted meaning given to it by their parents and grandparents, as they discover a far wider range of creative partnership, and men and women enter into an intimate relationship with one another, not only in what is narrowly described as “sex”, but also in all areas of life, including work, family life, and leisure.

Is not this precisely the picture of sex given in the Genesis stories ? In answer to the question why God created two sexes male and female, Genesis is not content with the biological answer. Men and women are made to be partners. In their partnership they discover within themselves the image of God who is the Creator. For in their partnership they approach creatively the work which God gives them as stewards in caring for his world, as well as in the creating of new life to carry on the good work. We have come to think of sex as that which separates people from one another, and the familiar stereotypes of what is appropriately male and appropriately female, as well as single sex schools, the restriction of some jobs to men and others to women, and much of the way in which the Church is organized, encourages this view. But the book of Genesis sees sex in terms of relationship and partnership. It is not good for man (or woman) to be alone. Their most effective work is done when they are in partnership, and the basic form of partnership is that between the sexes who are “made for each other”. Marriage is one form of that partnership, but the man-woman relationship is much wider than marriage. Coitus and parenthood are one means by which that relationship can be fruitful. But sexual intercourse, and the creative life which springs from it, is much wider than the physical relationship which is one particular expression of it. It is here that Genesis has an even deeper insight to bring.

“On the day God created man, he made him in the likeness of God. He created them male and female, and on the day when he created them, he blessed them and called them man." (Genesis 5:2.)

The extraordinary conclusion that must be drawn from this passage is that the male only becomes man in partnership with the female. And only in their partnership can they be said to be made “in the image of God”. So both our true humanity and our “God image” are intimately bound up with our sexuality. In the sex relationship we find what it means to be human, and what it means to be made after the likeness of the divine Creator.

It is not easy for us to guess what the writer of this great passage had in mind when he wrote these remarkable words. Was he hinting (without, perhaps, realizing what he was saying) that the human desire for partnership is a reflection of the God who created us in this way, male and female? If he was dimly perceiving this strange truth, then he was foreshadowing that picture of God which the Christian Church centuries later was to formulate in the doctrine of the Trinity. This is an area of Christian teaching that many people find bewildering. Yet, taken at its simplest, the doctrine of the Trinity reflects the Christian conviction that as we try to think about God, we have to think of him as Divine Community as well as Individuality. Somehow we must imagine God not simply as “One is one and all alone, and ever more shall be so”, but as Being in Relationship. It is easier to understand this when it is seen in the light of human experience.

When a husband and wife give themselves to one another in marriage, they discover what it is to be two persons and yet one person. They become “one flesh”, and yet do not (or should not) violate one another's individuality in the process. So they can claim that their marriage is in the image of God, for their “two-in-one relationship” is after the pattern of the “three-in-one” relationship which is the Blessed Trinity. But, as we have seen, Genesis insists that the sexual partnership has a wider context than that of marriage. We can therefore dare to affirm that it is when men and women are working creatively together in partnership that not only do they discover themselves as human beings, more wonderfully still, they discover what it means to be made in God's image. “On the day that he created them, he blessed them and called them man.”

God is Creator. The most obvious way in which man and woman in partnership reflect the image of his creativity is when they use their partnership to conceive and give birth to children. But here again we must not confine the creative relationship of men and women simply to what we narrowly (and wrongly) call sexual intercourse. The wider intercourse of the sexes has a marvellously creative potential over the whole range of life. This creativity is frustrated when men and women act alone and in isolation.

The stereotyping of the sexes into their specific roles from the infant nonsense of “blue for a boy and pink for a girl” to male dominance in many walks of life, and the man-despising protagonists of Womens Lib in its extreme form, have frustrated the full potential of creative life more than we can know. And there are many vested interests hard at work (some of them in the Christian Church) to ensure that these stereotypes are maintained. But wherever the old sex role-playing begins to be broken down, life is enriched. In order to discover their full humanity, men and women need one another. And this requires that they find themselves in the kind of partnership where the creative relationship of the sexes can be given its fullest scope. Political life would be much richer if men and women were able to take a more equal share in it. Experience shows that unquestionably schools (and particularly staff rooms) are healthier and more balanced places when men and women, boys and girls, teach and learn together. Clubs and organizations restricted to one sex lose much of their pomposity or their silliness when they become mixed. Youth organizations have discovered this a long time ago. Yet many of the Churches remain masculine dominated even though the great majority of churchgoers are women. The Church of England sometimes looks like an organization for women run by men!

The plea for men and women to take an equal share in the life and ministry of the Church, including the priesthood, is not an ecclesiastical version of the old suffragette movement or the new Women's Lib. Indeed, the cause has sometimes been harmed by those enthusiasts whose concern to see women admitted to the priesthood has been presented in the form of “women's rights”. It is not a question of women saying, in the words of the song, “Anything you can do, I can do better”, even though in some aspects of the priestly and pastoral ministry this may prove to be true. The issue here is not rights, but partnership. If it is true that God created man as male and female in order to reflect his image of Being in Relationship, and in order that in this relationship they might find their true humanity, then at every level of ministry, this relationship must be reflected. If God calls man to exercise priesthood, then that priestly vocation must be open to man in the sense in which Genesis declares he was created. “He created them male and female, and on the day when he created them, he blessed them and called them man”. This is “the man” who is called to the priestly task of representing God (who is Being in Relationship) before the people, and representing the people (who are male and female) before God.

Already in team ministries where women, whether deaconesses or lay workers, minister alongside men, there is ample experience of the creative enrichment which is given to the ministry. In those parts of the Christian Church where women have already been admitted to Holy Orders, the same experience has been found. This is precisely what we would expect when we examine the penetrating insights of the Genesis creation stories. It is curious that a Church which has been so concerned that people should treat sex responsibly has been so blind to the answer which Genesis gives to the fundamental question “What did God create sex for?” It is because Genesis sees the relationship of men and women in creative partnership as a sign both of the image of God in man, and of the meaning of true humanity, that the ordination of women to the priesthood makes sense, and the continuation of sexual discrimination and stereotyping makes nonsense. All the evidence suggests that when the time comes (and it cannot be long delayed) when men and women will share the priesthood together, just as they share many other creative experiences of life together, including marriage, the whole life and mission of the Church will be marvellously enriched. Then we shall wonder that it took the Church so long to see the truths about sex which are so clearly and beautifully expounded in the first few pages of Holy Scripture.

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