The Argument from Theology

by C.P.Price

from Women Priests? Yes - Now! pp. 51-64, ed. by Canon Harold Wilson, Denham House Press, 1975.
Republished on our website with the necessary permissions.

The Reverend Charles P.Price, Professor of Systematic Theology, The Episcopal Theological Seminary, Alexandria, Virginia, U.S.A.

Concerning the ordination of women, enough people have said “We know no reason against it. What are the reasons for it? Can you make a positive case?” I hope to do just that. Consequently I am not going to deal with the range of practical considerations which bear on this matter pro and con; and I am not going to try to answer in any systematic way the objections which have been raised against the ordination of women on theological grounds, although my response to many of these objections is implicit in the case which I shall try to make for the ordination of women. Furthermore, since women are already being ordained to the diaconate,(1) I shall focus attention on the ordination of women to the priesthood. If the case for ordination to priesthood can be made, the case for ordination to the episcopate presents no further theoretical problems, so far as I can see.

This paper falls into three main parts. In each part, there are a number of subsidiary points, most of which deserve fuller treatment than I have space to give them here. I think of the paper as a programmatic statement, indicative of the scope of the problem and of the work that ought to be done in the future. The three parts are these: (I) women as representative persons; (2) the fulness of a ministry which consists of both women and men; (3) the implications for ordination of women to the priesthood of the understanding of Jesus as the incarnation of Wisdom, a female figure. The bearing of each of these considerations will, I trust, become clear as we go along. I shall conclude (4) with few observations about the ordination of women in the light of ecumenical developments.

I

First, then, women as representative persons. I assume an understanding of the ordained ministry which is well known and widely accepted in Anglicanism: the ordained ministry of the Christian Church is a representative ministry. If we were to elaborate this theory of the ministry, the matter of representation would have two sides. On the one hand ordained persons represent the Church to itself and before God. They both sum up and also facilitate the ministry of the whole Church, which is the continuation of Christ's ministry as servant (deacon), as priest (or mediator), and as “Shepherd and Bishop of our souls”. On the other hand, ordained persons represent God to the Church, or Christ to the Church. I wish to defer consideration of this second half of the representative character of the ordained ministry until a later section of this paper, but for completeness' sake, we shall recognize it now. And we should recognize at the same time that not all of us understand this aspect of representative ministry in the same way; that some of us do not hold it as equally important with the first; some hold it as crucial. For this latter group, more than the former, ordination of women presents an acute theological problem. We shall come to that later. For the time being, I am interested in that first aspect of representation—the summing up and facilitating of the ministry of the whole Church.

What we are talking about in simplest terms is the function of leadership. Every healthy human group produces representative persons, who embody the nature of the community, express its character, implement its will. A group produces its leaders, and the leaders which it produces are characteristic of it. That fact may be uncomfortable at this juncture of our national history, but I take it to be a basic fact of life. One can think of Abraham Lincoln, who focused in his own person, perhaps better than anyone else in our history, the American spirit: with his sadness, his humour, his brooding compassion, his non-ecclesiastical, non-orthodox, but unmistakable Christian faith. He summed us up, and therefore was able to lead our country through its most severe time of testing. You could say similar things, I think, about Winston Churchill for Britain, and Charles de Gaulle for France. De Gaulle remarked at one point, “I am France.”

That remark is illuminating in our consideration of representative persons. It makes us think of the kings of Israel, and of the ancient world in general. They were regarded as representative of their nation, and therefore in some sense they were the nation. The elders of Israel also were such representative persons. In his sociological study, Israel, Pedersen says of the elders, “[they] are identical with the city; they comprise the whole body of citizens helping to support its life.”

One would want to say that the presbyterate in the early church emerged out of the institution of eldership in the synagogue. The elders were the representative persons of the congregation. Bishops were even more so. Ignatius wrote to the Magnesians, “Forasmuch as I was permitted to see you in the person of Damas, your godly bishop,” and to the Trallians, “I saw your whole congregation in his person”. (He spoke of Polybius, bishop of Tralles.) This point is a familiar one, and I don't want to labour it.

What is important for our purpose is the observation that in the Hellenistic world, and in most cultures down to fairly recent times, women were not thought able to bear this representative function. I'm sure there are exceptions to that statement. There were matriarchies, for example; but they are not in the mainstream of our cultural tradition. In our tradition there have been queens. But they were few, and they usually came to power by reason of a failure of male heirs. As a general rule, I think one could say rather flatly that women have not been representative persons.

Today it is obvious that the situation is quite different. Women are widely recognized in this representative role. One has only to think of Mrs. Indira Gandhi or Mrs. Golda Meier. For a hundred years, more or less, women have been moving into leadership roles in all walks of life, in increasing numbers. The trend is obvious enough now for us to recognize it even in the Church. And it is this fact, I submit, that makes a decisive difference in our attitude towards the ordination of women to the priesthood.

If women were not recognized as having this capacity to bear the representative role, the significance of ordaining them would be quite different from the significance of ordaining men. In that case, women priests would not be perceived as performing this first, basic, essential function of priesthood —namely, summing up and facilitating the ministry of the Church. And apart from that recognition, the provision of women priests would suggest priestesses with all the overtones of the unchanged situation—ancient fertility cults and that paganism against which Israel made such a firm stand. This spectre has been raised in present times, as you know, in connection with our problem. There is a certain logic in it unless you are willing to recognize that women are able to bear the representative function today as they were not in time past.

It is sometimes said that the Church should not let the world set the agenda in these matters. Just because leadership roles have fallen to women in other walks of life, the argument runs, there is no reason why leadership should be opened to women in the Church. I should want to acknowledge the force of the basic argument—that the Church doesn't have to follow the world in every respect. But I should want to resist applying that argument to the ordination of women.

Surely it is not the world's agenda for the Church, but rather the Church's agenda for the world, that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female . . .”, as St. Paul wrote in Galatians. You may say that his vision is only an eschatological possibility; or that it represents an ecstatic description of how real worldly differences are overcome by the spirit of Christian love in the fellowship of the Church, although they are not overcome in fact in the world. But is that all that we mean?

Canon Charles Raven preached a memorable sermon some years ago in Trinity Church, Boston. He addressed the question, “What difference has Christianity made in the world during its two thousand years of history?” He used this text from Galatians; and maintained that the power of this eschatological vision, the power of the spiritual reality of Christian love, slowly (and all too slowly) has produced in the places where the Christian faith has flourished, a society of religious toleration (neither Jew nor Greek), a society where slavery is at length abolished (neither slave nor free) and a society where the equal status of women is recognized (neither male nor female). One cannot live seriously with an eschatological vision and not try to actualize it.

Canon Raven did not ponder, though well he might have, that God's providence is inscrutable, and that in each of these three cases, the active force at work to change sociey was not the orthodox Church, but heretical sects and secular organizations. In each case they have learned from the Church—we must not forget the fact either—to believe more than the Church did in the practical application of this vision, and to work for its immediate realization. I do not know what this strange symbiosis means, this love-hate relationship between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. But I do know that just as most of the orthodox Churches have learned to accept and even delight in the fruitfulness of religious toleration and the release from slavery, so we can learn to accept and delight in what the world teaches us now about the representative capacity of women, and we can draw out the implications of this new situation for the structure of our ordained ministry. It is not an alien lesson, after all. The world learned it from us. And now it almost looks as if, like Jonah, we are sulking under our gourd while Nineveh revels in the fruits of repentance.

II

We move on to our second major point. Since contemporary society, under the impetus of Christian agape working in these mysterious ways which God alone understands, has made it possible to institute a representative ministry which includes women, we should observe that such an inclusive ministry will be an ampler and more adequate one. We must emphasize again, however, that this ampler ministry would not have been possible until the capacity of women to be representative persons had been secured. Until that had been established, women could not exercise priesthood and episcopacy in this representative sense, which is the fundamental character of the ordained ministry.

What is involved in asserting that the ordination of women to the priesthood will provide ampler ministry rests on a home truth: that the fulness of human being is male and female together. “In the image of God created he him; male and female created he them,” we read in the first chapter of Genesis. I am not concerned even at this point with the possibility that a woman can stand at the altar to represent God to us, or Christ to us. That discussion I must postpone once more, to the next major part of the paper. Here I am concerned with the much more obvious point that the whole of human being is male plus female. The word sex, as you know, comes from the Latin verb, sectare, which means to cut. Sex is the cutting of humanity, the division. You remember the Platonic myth of the creation of male and female by the cutting apart of the perfect sphere of human being. Of all the divisions which separate human kind, sex is the deepest. I suspect that it is the depth of this section, this cutting, that accounts for the fact that it has taken twenty centuries in the Christian era for women to take representative roles in society.

In any case, when the ordained ministry is solely male, it cuts itself off from the rich potentiality of an ordained ministry which would include women. I am not able to give a convenient list of qualities or capacities which are especially female and another list of those which are especially male. So far as I can make out, all such lists have been demonstrated to be without foundation. The situation is extremely complex, once you get beyond physical characteristics. I regard human being as comprising a large and varied set of qualities. Taken over the whole range of humanity, some of these will doubtless be found with greater intensity among men, and others with greater intensity among women. Not one will be found to be the exclusive property of males, and not one the exclusive property offemales. And we will find some females who possess with equal intensity any of those characteristics we associate with men in general, and vice versa.

The whole thing boggles the mind. I simply want to suggest that you can by-pass the necessity of making these difficult judgments and distinctions with the observation that if the ordained ministry contained both men and women, all capacities, all qualities, all gifts, whatever they are, would be available in proper measure from the proper persons. If women were ordained to the priesthood, the ordained ministry would provide them all.

Another thing. It is clear to anyone who consults his or her feelings that male priests evoke quite different emotional responses from those which would be evoked by female priests. Also the response to a female priest would be different among male members of the congregation from what it would be among female members of the congregation. Here again, I do not think we need to specify what these responses are, if the ordained ministry could provide both possibilities. I do not want to be in the position, for example, of saying that women priests would be better counsellors for women in certain circumstances, or that male priests are more likely to excel in preaching or administration. If both women and men were available as counsellors, as preachers, as administrators, and in all roles performed by bishops, priests and deacons, the Church would be found to provide a more comprehensive ministry more able to respond in various constellations of sexuality than a church with a male priesthood only.

This point seems to me to involve a corollary. As it stands, male priests are required to be all things to all men and to all women. They are put into the position, when you think of the matter in this context, of themselves supplying whatever female priests might supply, if we had them. It is at least worth suggesting that this fact may connect with the confusion of sexual identity from which many clergy seem to be suffering at the present time. It may be that the confusion is at least exacerbated by the fact that our present structure requires a male priest to operate in this androgynous way. A female priesthood might help to alleviate this problem, since it would free male priests to be men. It is said in liberation theology that the liberation of the oppressed entails the redemption of the oppressor. In a somewhat comparable way, we could say that the ordination of women to the priesthood would be the redemption of male priests, for they would be freed from the necessity of providing whatever it is that female priests might contribute to ministry.

Of course, this point of view requires female priests to be unequivocably women. I take a stand against any uni-sex theory of ministry. If admitting women to the priesthood were to have the effect of making women priests more like men, we would have confounded our problem, violated creation, and failed to realize the great potentiality which I believe is offered by a priesthood which includes both women and men.

III

Now I want to explore a third area: the implications for the ordination of women to the priesthood of the understanding of Jesus as the incarnation of Wisdom. The thrust of these remarks is directed against the argument frequently heard that a woman cannot represent Christ when she stands at the altar. These considerations have to do with the second half of the representation which we call upon our priesthood to perform.

Let us try to be precise about the phrase, “representing Christ”. I take it that here Christ is a name for the second person, or persona as I prefer to say, of the Trinity. The heart of Christian faith is the belief that the second persona of the Trinity was incarnate in the human being, Jesus of Nazareth. In a unique way, he represented Christ to us. In fact, he was the Christ.

It is, of course, a plain matter of historical fact that Jesus of Nazareth was a man, a male human being. Since the rise of New Testament criticism, practically every item of the record has been subject to serious question; but I can't recall that this matter has ever been doubted. Critics have even questioned whether or not Jesus lived. But as far as I can make out, none has seriously questioned the fact that if he lived, he was male.

The theological question, then, is whether the maleness of the incarnate one implies the maleness of the Second Persona. I must confess that I've never thought at great length about the sexual character of the three Personae of the Trinity. God of course, the blessed Trinity, is “without body, parts or passions”. God is beyond sexuality, although sexuality must be rooted in God. But what about Father, Son and Spirit— First, Second and Third Personae of the Trinity? Do they have a sexual character? The names of the first two certainly appear to suggest masculinity, and the third, Spirit, is at best neutral. There is nothing about the name Spirit to imply femininity. In fact, some of us, in time past, used to make a rather self-conscious effort to speak of the Spirit as him, to emphasize personality.

There is no space for an extended discussion of the Trinity. It would not be too difficult to show, however, that the masculine names of the three Personae are not ultimately satisfactory clues to their substances. Augustine said that one called them by these names for want of something better. The Tillichians among you will recall that Tillich identifies the first persona with the ground of being, and suggests that perhaps the First Person should be given feminine identification, as the one who bears, produces, supports.

But I want to focus attention on the Second Persona, of which Jesus is the incarnation. Son, we have learned to say. But Son is not the only name. Christ is another. Logos is another. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”, in the familiar opening verse of the Fourth Gospel. And since Word is masculine in Greek, and has been understood to have penetrating, aggressive traits, Word has been thought of conventionally as masculine. What is interesting, however, is that in the patristic period, and I am beginning to learn, in the New Testament itself, even in the synoptic gospels, Jesus is identified with Wisdom. In fact, Word and Wisdom appear in some of this literature as quite interchangeable, despite the fact that from the Book of Proverbs on Words in Hebrew Wisdom literature, Wisdom is personified as unequivocally female.

Lampe's Patristic Greek Dictionary lists a dozen or so references to Wisdom in relation to the Creation, the kind of language which we might expect to be used of the Logos; and well over twenty references to passages where wisdom appears a title of the second Person of the Trinity, or the one who becomes Incarnate, or as an attribute of the Incarnate Son. Origen in First Principles uses the terms Christ, Son and Wisdom interchangeably in his discussion of the eternal generation of the Son, and does not wince at all in citing the verse from the Wisdom of Solomon which begins, “She is the breath of the power of God, and a pure effluence of the glory of the Almighty”, as a parallel to St. Paul's description of Christ as “the brightness of God's glory and the express image of his substance”.

What is more, I have just found a considerable body of recent literature in the New Testament field which aims to establish the identification of Jesus as Wisdom even in the synoptic gospels. Listen to this account from First Enoch of Wisdom's visit to earth and her rejection by men, and bear in mind the Prologue to the Fourth Gospel, where the Logos is the subject:

“Wisdom found no place where she might dwell.
Then a dwelling place was assigned her in the heavens.
Wisdom went forth to make her dwelling among the children of men
And found no dwelling place.
Wisdom returned to her place,
And took her seat among the angels . . ."

Felix Christ, in his monograph Jesus-Sophia, argues persuasively that it is the figure of Wisdom which lies behind one of the few synoptic passages which depicts female characteristics in Jesus.

“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not."

He reaches this conclusion after a lengthy examination of all the wisdom sayings in the synoptics. He concludes that Jesus appears not only as a speaker of wisdom, but also as Wisdom herself. St. Paul, says explicitly, “Christ, the Power of God and the Wisdom of God.”

In the present context, the implication of this conclusion would seem to be this: that the authors of the New Testament, and perhaps even Jesus himself, were not at all disturbed by the thought that Jesus, a male, could represent to humanity the persona of Wisdom, a female, despite the fact that his sex was not right. In fact, the Second Persona of the Trinity could be described as male or as female with almost equal ease. One may rightly raise the question whether the female gender of sophia (chokhma), or even the female personification of Wisdom in Proverbs and apocryphal literature, was intended to impute female character to the Second Person of the Trinity. But then one must also raise the question whether the male gender of logos was intended to impute male character. The occurrence of sexual characteristics in God was a matter of no concern, despite the maleness of the Incarnate One. And that is all we need to show in the present case.

It seems dear enough that Wisdom dropped out of the theological tradition during the gnostic controversies, because some gnostic systems identified Wisdom with the demiurge. And I am not going to propose a resurrection of Wisdom language now as another name for the Logos. But I think it is reasonable and important to recognize that the sexual identity of the representative figure is not decisive. If a man can represent the female aspects of the Second Persona of the Trinity to us, it does not seem to me to inherently contradictory that a female could represent the male representative of the Second Person. In fact, a female priest might conceivably represent to us better than a male priest could do those female aspects of the Second Persona which Jesus incarnated.

IV

At the end, I'd like to deal with the question of women's ordination in the context of ecumenical discussions. It is sometimes said that the decision to ordain women should not be made by one branch of the Church unilaterally, but only by a united church. And since the conversations with Rome have been so fruitful, we should not rock the boat by taking this step at the present time.

The argument needs to be reviewed, I think, in the light of the recent Anglican-Roman Catholic statement on the ministry. According to my reading, confirmed by discussion with several persons closer to the discussion than I am, the statement leaves open the question of women's ordination. Lutheran-Roman Catholic conversation on the ministry has not been precluded by the fact that Lutherans ordain women already; and it is clear that within Rome itself there is more than a little pressure for the ordination of women to the priesthood.

The outcome of all these conversations, of course, is inconclusive; you could not make a case for women's ordination just because of considerations like these. Nor could you strengthen by these considerations an otherwise weak case. If other arguments were inconclusive, it would be logical to delay. But I cannot shake the conviction that the arguments for women's ordination are compelling ones. The conditions of our society make it possible to consider women as representative figures. In such a society, the ordination of women to priesthood makes sense; it provides a fuller ministry; and I think you can even argue that in the very place where the opponents of ordination of women to the priesthood make their strongest theological stand—the alleged inability of a female priest to represent Christ to us—even there, a woman priest will complement rather than destroy the priesthood of the male. If the argument on behalf of women's ordination should in fact be found to be as convincing in its own right as I think it is, then to delay for the sake of better ecumenical relations would seem to me to be tantamount to sacrificing truth for the sake of diplomacy. And in fact, if we do delay, we may turn out to be the ecumenical laggards.

Footnotes

1. Women are already ordained to the full diaconate in the Episcopal Church of the U.S.A.

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