Women and Holy Orders

Being the Report of a Commission appointed by
the Archbishops of Canterbury and York
Published by the Church Information Office, London. Dec. 1966

CHAPTER II

BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL EVIDENCE

Scripture

18 The question whether women may be ordained to the Christian ministry is not one to which the New Testament gives a clear answer since, with the doubtful exception of 1 Timothy 2. 12-15, there is no evidence that consideration was given to concrete claims that women should be admitted to holy orders. A brief summary of the evidence, which has often been studied in detail, will suffice here.

19 According to Galatians 3. 28 ‘ In Christ there is neither male nor female’. The text, with its close parallels (Rom. 10. 12; 1 Cor. 12. 13; Col. 3. 11), is concerned with baptism.

20 Three texts from the Epistles show St Paul prescribing checks to feminine freedom. 1 Cor. 11. 3-16 argues that it is not proper for women to pray or to prophesy (evidently at the church meeting) with head uncovered. That women may pray and prophesy at church services is not denied. The argument concerns only the covering of the head, for which a number of special reasons are given, the strongest of which is no doubt the last: ‘ We have no such custom neither have the churches of God’. That women should pray unveiled was a cause of scandal to some Christians, especially, it seems, to Jewish Christians, among whom it was a shame on a woman to go outside her house with uncovered head.

21. 1 Cor. 14. 34-35 contains a similar appeal to church custom: ‘ As in all the churches of the saints, let the women keep silence in the churches; for they are not allowed to talk, but should be in subjection, as indeed the law says.(1) If they want to learn anything, let them ask their own husbands at home, for it is a shame for a woman to speak in church.’ The position of these verses varies in the manuscripts, from which phenomenon it is a reasonable, but in no sense a necessary deduction that they were first written in the margin and thence inserted by copyists at different points. Possibly therefore they are an addition, in the spirit of 1 Tim. 2. 12, by an early editor of the Pauline corpus. If the words are part of the original text of the Corinthian letter, they belong to a general discussion of order and edification in common worship, At Corinth the form of worship was extremely free, and the community possessed a vitality so little controlled by considerations of order that church services approximated to anarchy. One would contribute a psalm, another a discourse of instruction, another a revelation, another an ecstatic utterance, and yet another an interpretation of the utterance. The Apostle directs that only one person is to speak at a time, and not several people simultaneously, and that for an ecstatic utterance one interpreter is sufficient. In the general excitement at Corinth women were clearly contributing to the disorder of worship. Therefore the direction to silence is intended to achieve greater order and discipline in common worship, by checking the extent of free lay participation, at least so far as the women are concerned. The discussion is dominated by the question: What is most conducive to edification?

22 Thirdly, there is 1 Timothy 2. 12: ‘ I do not allow a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; she must keep quiet’. The reasons given for this prohibition are (a) that Adam was created first and Eve second, and (b) that Eve was responsible for the Fall, not Adam. Nevertheless (the passage continues) women may attain to salvation provided that the position assigned to them (by Genesis 3. 16) is accepted—that is, if they limit themselves to their prescribed duty of motherhood, and provided that this acceptance is combined with a chaste and holy life. The historical background of this prescription is not certain; but it is a likely conjecture that the passage is directed to a situation where, under the influence of gnostic asceticism, women were understanding the new grace of the Gospel to mean a liberation from the ties of nature, and were therefore abandoning their lawful husbands as well as holding teaching office in the community.

23 Perhaps the one entirely certain deduction from the New Testament evidence is that St Paul believed women to be subordinate to men because this is involved in their role as wives and mothers. This context of a subordination of the woman within the marriage relation is especially emphasised in Ephesians 5. 22-33: ‘ The husband is head of the wife as Christ is head of the church; and as the church is subject to Christ, wives should be subject in everything to their husbands.’ It remains unclear, however, whether this principle of subordination is also applicable quite apart from the marriage relation; whether the principle there stated is one to to be counted as of permanent validity; and whether this principle of male primacy is necessarily and in all circumstances a bar to the conferring of valid orders upon women.

24 There is no evidence to justify the suggestion, sometimes made on the basis of a misreading of 1 Corinthians 7, that St Paul’s stress on the submission of women can be explained by attributing to the Apostle a deep personal antipathy to the female sex. There were many trusted women in his personal circle. 1 Corinthians 7 concedes to a faction at Corinth which regarded marriage as incompatible with the Christian profession, that celibacy is a higher state than matrimony, on the ground that’ the time is short’, and therefore there is a calling for detachment. The argument of that chapter may also be taken to imply that the love of God is at least potentially a rival to the love of mortals, but not that there is any defilement inherent in the sexual impulse since marriage is explicitly declared by St Paul to be no sin. 1 Corinthians 7 (with Matthew 14. 12) constitutes the principal scriptural foundation upon which the ascetic renunciation of marriage came to be based; but it provides no evidence about the impropriety of women being admitted to the ministry of the church.

25 There is, on the other hand, substance in the notion that the Apostle took it for granted that the role of women in the society of the people of God under the new covenant would not be different from the long customary in Judaism. Jewish social tradition excluded women from offices with a public role in society, such as teaching. (The same was in general true of the Gentile world of the first century A.D.) The prime social function of women in antiquity was that of the home-maker, caring for husband and children. By its universal Gospel the church transcended racial and family ties. It encountered much opposition precisely because it tended to split up traditional social patterns and forms and to divide families (e.g. 1 Peter 3. 1-2). Because of the nature of its message the church fostered a more individualistic estimate of human personality. This tendency could have become radically disruptive if there had been any major change then in the accepted understanding of the social role of women.

26 The theological question cannot be simply settled by a mechanical quoting of texts from scripture, the evidence of which has to be seen in its context and in relation to its total background.

TRADITION

27 The only instances in antiquity of women preaching in the synaxis or celebrating the eucharist occur in unorthodox sects. The Church Fathers seldom discuss the subject unless they are expounding the texts from the Pauline epistles in the course of commentaries, or unless censuring some specific sect (such as some gnostics and the Montanists) among whom women are prominent. The role of women in worship is to be passive, they assume. There is considerable disagreement among them whether even baptism administered by a woman is valid or not. It would be exaggerated to say that the estimate of woman in the Church Fathers is invariably gloomy, since a number of them stress the greater spirituality and sanctity that some women have attained, and, even if they sometimes make Eve rather than Adam responsible for the Fall, they also say that this lapse is more than counterbalanced by the work of Mary or by the women to whom the risen Lord appeared. Nevertheless, the common view of a very large number of the fathers is that woman is a frail and emotional creature, placed in subordination to man as a result of the Fall, perhaps even by the original creation. From late in the fifth century onwards there is a succession of prohibitions against women assisting in the sanctuary at the eucharist, on the ground that their presence constitutes a threat to the chastity of the clergy.

28 No patristic writer gives any reasons other than authority in scripture (the Pauline texts in particular) for the exclusion of women from the presbyterate. The reinforcing of the Pauline doctrine of subordination on the basis of Genesis 2-3 by the Aristotelian doctrine that a woman is a defective male provided the possibility of a more developed statement such as appears in Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica III, sppl. q. 39. Aquinas meets three objections to the tradition: (a) in scripture women are sometimes prophets, and, since the office of a prophet is superior to that of a priest, a fortiori a woman may be a priest; (b) authority is entrusted to women both under the new covenant (e.g. abbesses) and under the old (e.g. Deborah); and they can be pre-eminent as martyrs or in the religious life. Therefore it cannot be a valid objection to their admission to the ministry that they may not exercise authority, (c) Ordination is a spiritual act concerning the soul, not the body. Aquinas answers the objections, that since woman is in a state of subjection she cannot receive the sacrament of order.

29 Aquinas gives a slightly longer discussion in S.T. Ila Ilae q. 177 a.2, where he explains that women are not allowed to teach publicly in church because of the subjection imposed by Genesis 3. 16, because men may be tempted to lust, and because normally women are not fitted for public teaching.

30 At the Reformation the acceptance of women as ministers of the Gospel became a characteristic of the radical sects, especially the Anabaptists. The demand for a female ministry was therefore associated with advocacy of social revolution and dissidence. Some Lutheran theologians of the sixteenth century regarded it as legitimate for a woman to preach in case of necessity, and classified this among ‘ things indifferent’, like the custom of men praying with uncovered heads, while women prayed with hats on. In modern times Lutheran churches have accepted women as ministers, though not without controversy. Baptists, Methodists, and Con-gregationalists have also appointed women ministers. But the more traditional bodies in communion with Rome, Constantinople, and Canterbury have not hitherto made an official and recognised move in this direction, while within conservative Lutheran circles a powerful body of opinion has regarded the ordination of women with reserve or even hostility.

1 Probably a reference to Gen. 3. 16: ‘I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children, and thy desire shall be to thy husband and he shall rule over thee.’

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