The Plan To Smuggle in Women Pastors

It would be a work in progress, but I’m in.

I read a critique somewhere, a long time ago, that said his work wasn’t systematic or dogmatic theology at all, but something were akin to loose poetry, masquerading as something profound. I have read all of Part I of CD, and some sections of Part IV. He comes out swinging on the Trinity and the Incarnation, and he’s rather unequivocal on the Church being visible, and salvation being impossible outside it. You also know a tree by its fruits, and his brave response to and defiance of the Third Reich when a lot of theologians of similar stature capitulated, says a lot about his character and indicates that he genuinely understood the core of the Gospel message. I don’t think he can be simply dismissed.

 

Women Pastors and any other form of the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of women is a Heresy against a Deeper Dogma of Liturgical and Ecclesiological Morals (Genesis 3:16, 1 Corinthians 11:3, 7-10, 14:34/35, 1 Timothy 2:11/12, etc.)! But my studies on Church Music and Women's proper sphere within it are a question of the days ever before there was such a thing as Women's Ordination or Feminism!

 

A "heresy", you say? That's a rather serious charge. I've not heard of this "dogma"...when was it defined, by whom, and at what council?

 

If one wants to be a herr doktorprofessor, one must have a dogmatik. /arrogant Teutonic sniff

Seriously, though: unless you're a specialist in Barth (or some poor graduate student foolish enough to choose the theology of Barth as a doctoral topic) there's no real reason to plow through the entire Church Dogmatics.

Cornelius Van Til had Barth's number long ago. I've got problems with Van Til's presuppositional theology, but in general I agree with his critique of Barth. Barth is not "neo-orthodox"; in fact, he was more a relativist than Schleiermacher ever was in important ways.

Barth says much that is good and true, and he is definitely worth reading (in carefully-curated excerpts, anyway). But his theology should be read as a relic of a former age, not as a living work to be built upon (Calvinists would do better to just go back to the source and read Calvin's Institutes again).

An example: Barth always denied that he was a universalist, but in reading Church Dogmatics, that is the obvious endpoint of his position on soteriology. But Barth's trick was to redefine "universalism" to mean something other than its commonly-understood theological meaning, and then use his new definition in contexts that make his assertions appear orthodox when they clearly are not (at least not in the way Barth means them). When called on this sleight of hand, he simply avoided the question...mainly, I suspect, because he had no answer for it. Barth ended up doing this sort of thing quite a lot, as students of his work quickly discover. His work always seemed to be worded in such a way that a Calvinist could read it at first glance and nod approvingly, yet a second reading would provoke a "Hey, wait a minute!" response.

What I mainly take away from an admittedly-fairly-shallow study of Barth is that he started out as a fairly standard-issue orthodox Reformed pastor, but imbibed too deeply of Kant and Hegel. He painted himself into a corner, theology-wise. My position has always been that one should read Barth as a tonic for Schleiermacher, and Van Til as a tonic for Barth. (And maybe Sproul as a tonic for Van Til!)

 

I would read the church fathers to get out of the reformed mind set and back to the fathers. That is my tonic.

 

Yeah I pretty much agree with all of this. As fascinating as Barth is to read in many ways, his presentation often seems to be revisionist in much the same way that a lot of recent Eastern Orthodox writing is revisionist toward pre-XXth century Eastern theology.

 

The problem with that is someone like e.g. Origen - he's far more heterodox than Barth is, particularly later in his life. (And he was a universalist as well, now that I think about it.)

Using "Back to the church fathers!" as a rallying cry is a recipe for more error, not less. They have wisdom to impart, but you have to read their works with discernment. I find much of value in the deuterocanonical books, but I don't consider them Scripture; much less so do I view the books of the Fathers, even such a one as Augustine of Hippo. They are writings by fallible men, many of whom were working at a time when access to good scholarship was rare. Many were theological innovators in ways both good and bad; we read their works as negative examples as often as for positive ones (Anselm, Duns, and Thomas Aquinas fall into this category, in my opinion -- but then I am not of the Roman church).

I am strongly opposed to elevating patristic writing to any level even approaching scripture. Some of it is good, some of it is bad. It takes study to know which is which.

There was never a "golden age" in Christianity when we had a perfect statement of systematic theological thought (outside the 66 books of the Bible). This is why I don't much care for "systematic theologies" as a class of literature in general. They are all works of fallen men, and even the best of them creak under the weight of time. Always read this stuff with this in mind. Take wisdom when it is on offer, but be aware that error and cant lurk alongside.

Systematic theologies are trying to sell you something -- if you decide to buy, be sure you know what you're getting.

 

That is a very unanglican statement. The Fathers help us to interpret the Bible. Origen has his faults but much of what he taught was distorted later. He might have been a universalist but has the councils teach and say we can teach universalism as a hope but we can't proclaim it dogmatically. I certainly hope it is true but don't say it is so and don't think it is so but hope it is so.

 

I agree with every word of this and couldn't have said it better myself. There was a time when I would have disagreed with it vehemently, but time has had a way of tempering that earlier enthusiasm. There were some great things written in the patristic era and they should be studied, but there were a lot of really weird things written in those days as well, and it takes time and discernment to figure out which is which. A lot of the exegesis one finds in the Fathers is also just really poor at times, in part because almost none of them had access to the original languages for both testaments. Anyone interested in the patristic era should read the Anglican bishop R.P.C. Hanson's The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God. He gives example after example of how the pro-Nicene theologians could have blown many Arian arguments from the Bible sky-high if only they'd had access to the original languages rather than translations (often bad ones), but instead were forced to rely on really stretched readings that later exegesis also blew sky-high.

They also brought a lot of assumptions to the table that no one looking to interpret the text according to its plain sense would assume. Proverbs 8:22, for example, played a role throughout the Arian controversy that it would have never attained absent premodern hermeneutical assumptions. To read through those endless, tortuous arguments now is a task for the historian, not the theologian. The same goes for Eastern Orthodoxy and the filioque. The only reason that was ever a controversy - aside from bad logic on the part of the Orthodox - is that the statement in the Creed is a direct quotation from John 15:26, which in turn was assumed to be referring to an eternal reality, an assumption which, again, modern exegesis has disposed of. John ch. 14 and 15 are parallels, and it is clear from the context that the Spirit's proceeding (in that passage) is temporal, not eternal, and the same passage says that the Son will send the Spirit, as well as the Father. If John 15:26 doesn't refer to an eternal procession, neither does the Creed. Fast forward to the Book of Revelation, and we have the same Greek word used thus:

Given that this is referring to the reality in heaven, this could be patient of reading the same word in a timeless/eternal sense, in which the source of the "river of the water of life" - arguably a reference to the Holy Spirit - is referred to both the Father and the Son - "God and the Lamb". This is just an example of how a little exegesis could have replaced thousands upon thousands of pages of quotations from the Fathers marshaled by either side in support of their respective partisan positions.

There's also the assumption that when referring to "the Fathers" that one is referring to a unified body of thought in which ambiguities in one Father's writings can be addressed by clearer statements from a different Father on the same subject (a sort of patristic repurposing of the analogia fidei), but there is no objective basis for that assumption: those writings aren't inspired, after all. The writings of the Fathers can be mined for statements supporting just about any theological position one can imagine; studying the Fathers is no substitute for actually doing theology - the process of carefully exegeting (and applying) the revelation of God in the Scriptures. There is no substitute for that.

 

There are two differences though.

For one, Origen while being accepted as an early Christian, is not really considered a church father. The latter is a qualitative category, and not just a historical category.

And two, Origen is not enjoying a mass following or is a leader teaching countless thousands. So whatever errors he has made, are far less relevant, in practice, than Barth’s errors. Now there was a time back in the 500s, when Origen did enjoy having a following of thousands (the “Origenists”), and lo and behold, the Church took care of it. They were officially condemned by the church councils.

So far as I know, Barth hasn’t been condemned by a church council yet. So he remains a danger, while Origen does not.

It’s not that some of may want to do so, and some of may not want, so it’s just up to anyone. In fact you can’t interpret the scripture without them, just like you can’t interpret the Scripture without Josephus, without Philo, without the Book of Enoch and the Intertestsmental Books. Without archeology and the material artifacts that shed light. Without paleography and the study of manuscripts which teaches us (eg.), what is in the Canon, which Verses are authentic, etc.

Scripture does not testify to itself, it needs outside interpretation, through archeology, patristics, and non-Christian writers.

We are not saying that the Church Fathers had some mysterious knowledge that they impart to us about Scripture’s meanings. That’s the error of Rome. Even non-Christian writers can lend us authoritative insight into what Scripture meant; for example just who exactly was Ahasuerus in the Book of Esther? Scholarship pinned him down to Emperor Xerxes or Artaxerxes whom we know of from ancient Greek historians and Persian archeology. Do the Greek historians have special secret knowledge? No. But do they authoritatively help us interpret the Book of Esther? Yes.

Similarly with the Church Fathers.

Don’t be so quick to reject a valid principle which Rome has corrupted. Without the Church Fathers, ancient non-Christian writers, without ancient paleography or archeology, all you’re left with is the“self-attesting Scripture”. That ideology had nothing in common with the Reformation, and produced gruesome schisms, errors, and heresies.

It was actually Philip Melanchthon who authored the principle of verifying Scripture through the church fathers; the Anglicans took up after him. It was the Baptists, Quakers, Shakers, and others much later who rebelled against all history and scholarship (to preserve their beliefs). I am not afraid of scholarship. My Church is the Church of the Apostles. And if it isn’t, I need to fix that.

None of which were church fathers.

“One gospel, two testaments, three creeds, four councils, first five centuries, form the boundaries of our faith.”
-Lancelot Andrews

 

I don't think the case rests solely on Origen. The question is not whether the Fathers can be a guide in matter of doctrine or discipline; the question is whether they can reliably be so. That's the first point. The second point is that their behavior matters as much as their writings do. St. John Chrysostom may have been a powerful and talented orator, but he was not what I would call an outstanding exegete, and many of his interpretations should be taken with a grain of salt (and indeed, some of these have been addressed in other threads on this site). He had some very nasty things to say about the Jews and Jewish Christians (which proves that Jewish Christianity continued to be vibrant and widespread in Syria all the way into the 4th century), which no one should want to emulate today. St. Cyril of Alexandria turned a blind eye to atrocities against Jews and Pagans (e.g., the brutal murder of Hypatia, retold in great detail in Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve). And Hanson (mentioned in another post above) covers in great detail the (at times) "thuggish" behavior of St. Athanasius in his treatment of Arians in Egypt during his episcopate at Alexandria. These are just a few examples. Each of these Fathers mentioned also performed great services for the Church in many ways, but in other ways they sometimes appear like the antihero in a Clint Eastwood western: not particularly morally exemplary characters who just happened to be on what was later deemed to be the "right" side.

In light of the original subject of this thread, the main thing one learns about the Fathers' attitude toward women is that they believed women were inferior by nature (see the attached paper), a view which is simply unacceptable especially in today's world, is wholly lacking in any empirical or scientific basis, and which has rightfully been discarded by pretty much everyone in the Western world. All of the Fathers' arguments on the subject were reducible to an outdated anthropology; none were properly theological in any robust sense. In other words, if God's nature is such that it cannot be represented, then defining the priesthood as such a representation funs afoul of the 2nd Commandment; and if the priesthood is somehow an exception to this, then there is nothing about being specifically male that should make that quality more capable of representing the wholly spiritual nature of God than being specifically female. The possible retort that the priesthood represented Christ in his humanity carries with it an implied Nestorianism, making Christian ministers "priests of Christ" rather than "priests of God", and overlooks the fact that the only essential difference between Christ and every other human being is that Christ is also God. It would of course be tantamount to idolatry for a priesthood to represent a mere mortal, so the union of Christ's humanity with the Divine Nature in his one person is indeed the unique factor to be considered here. Either both sexes may represent the Divine Nature, or neither can. Anything other than those two alternatives is arbitrary and unwarranted.

 

I actually quite like Origen and feel he got treated badly later when he was anathematized. He is certainly and early Christian scholar who pave the way for much of what we accept as orthodox Christian theology. To rely on him in this area, is a bit like, he is a Church Father when he says what we want him to say and an heretic when we don't agree with him.

There is a question of what is an acceptable theological anthropology. The two most canvassed are a Patriarchal Model and an Egalitarian Model, both of which can be found in scripture.

When you say 'who for us men and for our salvation ...' do you see this as half the population or the whole population?

 

I absolutely agree with this. The Church Fathers are extremely useful scholars to read, but you should read them in their context, aware of their biases, and respectful of their fallibility. Augustine, for example, is one of the Church Fathers I find most useful, but his opinions on sex and sin were clearly flavoured by his personal experiences earlier on in his life that provoked an undue amount of emphasis on them, and at times an improper focus on literal interpretations in Genesis that almost all patristic scholars before him, and many Western scholars after the Reformation (and even in some cases in the Catholic Church in modern times) agree are parables or metaphors and unlikely to be literal historical events that were perfectly preserved.

Treating a Church Fathers' writings like a canonized letter from Paul is a recipe for misdirection and misunderstanding - they sometimes made small errors that we can revise and correct whilst still appreciating the outstanding formidable intellect of a group of people whose thoughts still hold mostly true and mostly relevant almost 2000 years into the future.

Some Church Fathers lived before the Canon was closed. If all they wrote was the word of the Spirit we would have discovered them in the same way, and their works would be included in the Bible today. The Canon remained closed after certain Church Fathers wrote their most important works by God's Will, let's respect it as such by drawing a clear and obvious distinction between the scripture and the tools we use to support our interpretation of it.

 

One of the big draws of Anglican churches is the sense of tradition and of holding fast to the practice of faith as it was handed down from the early church. Since female priests and bishops did not exist in the early church, and since the first female priests to be ordained in the Anglican communion were ordained a mere 50 years ago (in Japan), we can see that the practice does not fit the pattern handed down to us from of old. Allowing women to be priests is a break with tradition and it tends to somewhat nullify the claim of adherence to the "faith of our fathers." The practice may alienate some parishioners who find the situation uncomfortable, unacceptable, or un-Anglican. Since neither God nor the true faith change with the winds of societal fancy, it can be difficult to appreciate the solidity of a church's commitment to our unchanging God and unchanging faith when that church institutes changes that appear as shiny-new as a freshly minted penny.

What are the Biblical precedents? God made Eve as a helper to Adam, after first making Adam. God called upon males to act as the priests to the Israelites. Even before that, God made Melchizedek a high priest before Him. Jesus incarnated as a male and acted as our high priest. Jesus called 12 males as His Apostles. The early church from the Apostles onward, being mindful of all these things, ordained males as priests. Whether men in those days were chauvinistic or whether they considered women to be second-class citizens is all beside the point. The point is, God established and taught the precedents, and we should be mindful of them.

Women as teachers, prophetesses, evangelists, helps ministries (a deacon is a helper to the priest), etc., are all fine, as the Holy Spirit enables them and calls them to these loving works of service. But I think that God does not and will not call women to the priesthood; He didn't do it then (a track record of thousands of years), so why would we assume that He is doing it now (just in the last 50 years)? Therefore, I think all those women who are being ordained as priests are doing so outside of the will of God, and all who so ordain them are also in disobedience.

As long as the priesthood is to retain its specialness and its traditional aspect, the priesthood needs to be comprised exclusively of males.

 

Minor correction - The first woman to be ordained in the Anglican Communion was Florence Li Tim-Oi, in Hong Kong during World War II (some 76-78 years ago, I can't remember the specific year).

 

Ok, thanks. I mistakenly trusted the first web page I googled, which listed this:
1971: Anglican communion, Hong Kong. Joyce Bennett and Jane Hwang were the first regularly ordained female priests.
And on top of everything else I forgot it said Hong Kong and I typed Japan by mistake!

Still, less than a century.....

 

I’m going to keep saying it: the only reason this is even an issue is because Roman Catholic ideas about the Church’s ordained ministry were imported back into Anglicanism. The Reformation understanding of the Christian ministry involves the exercise of no capacities that aren’t held in common by men and women alike. The NT also knows of no priesthood in the true and proper sense other than Christ’s, and the Greek word for “priest” (hieros) is never used of an ordained minister in the NT.

The argument from tradition doesn’t hold water, either. For one thing, it’s an argument from silence at best. For another, it proves too much, for, if true, it would invalidate not only the ordination of women but also the homoousios of the Creed. On top of being widely thought to being theologically wrong (by having a ‘materialistic’ connotation to many ordinary Greek speakers), the word had never been used before by the Church to describe the relationship between God the Father and God the Son, and that was precisely the argument made by many of the bishops who opposed Nicaea. The tradition didn’t have the last word. All of the heresies that have afflicted the Church throughout history did so because the Church up to that point had not fully worked out the implications of the teaching in question. The Reformation itself could be understood as the Church finally becoming aware of what it really meant for God the Father to be ‘Almighty’ in the context of salvation. Women’s Ordination could then be seen as potentially the final flowering of the Reformation understanding of the Church’s Ministry, rooted as it is in the Scriptural teaching of the “priesthood of all believers.” Tradition thus isn’t the Church’s version of ‘common law’, a storehouse of precedents not to be deviated from; in the normative sense, tradition is the servant, not the master. The Church may be around for another 10,000 years before Christ returns. A development that only took two millennia, from that vantage point, would be seen as “early”. Again, the tradition argument proves too much.

Lastly, the rite of ordination - in keeping with the aforementioned tradition - recognizes that the Christian ministry is the exercise of certain gifts of the Holy Spirit: the same Holy Spirit whom all Christians have already received in baptism, and whose gifts the Father may bestow on whomever He pleases (and, let’s not forget, the supreme Example of which was a woman). If Christian women have the Holy Spirit just as Christian men do, then they are potential recipients of the same charisms of that same Spirit as men in the Church have always been assumed to be. To deny this in concrete circumstances may very well be an instance of ‘blasphemy against the Holy Spirit’, which we have discussed on another thread on this site. That raises the stakes quite a bit. Even if I weren’t convinced of the rightness and propriety of women’s ordination (and I am), I would still want to err on the side of not potentially denying the Spirit’s work where He was truly present, wouldn’t you?

 

This was the thinking that allowed me - in my gradual decade long progression from fundamentalism to a more moderate, healthy and honest/genuine belief - to accept WO. I'm not at the point where I would say I am unequivocally convinced of the rightness, but on the balance of probabilities I think it does more harm to reject it than accept it.

 

It will surprise very few posters in this forum that I have reached a point in this issue where I consider the only justifiable reason for the church not encouraging Women's Ordination is the possibility that men are so proud and resistant to the gospel that female priests would be yet one more barrier to men becoming regenerate through the ministrations of the Holy Spirit when that encounter may be mediated through conversation with a woman.

I think, when considering the evidence in the Gospels, that Jesus had little bother with the women not understanding his teaching, but had a frustrating time trying to get men to understand his message to them. (do a search and see how many times Jesus was annoyed that men did not understand [about 20] and then compare that with the number of times Jesus was actually talking only to a woman or women [about none] ). Women caught on quicker. I think men are still slower off the starting blocks when it comes to spiritually catching on to the teaching of Jesus Christ, and misguided macho manliness and all it's demonic social programming is the main disability for mankind. We even tried to blame Eve for our own stupidity in being decieived by a woman and pretending we had not transgressed, when actually we had, and that's even the opinion of someone who wrote it down in scripture. 1 Tim.2:13-14.

With women priests there might be the danger that men will be even less inclined to come to church than they were when there was a guarantee that they would be seeing another man up front.

Unsurprisingly though one rarely sees this argumant put forward against the ordination of women but in my opinion it is probably the only really convincing one left.


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Oh dear Tiffy, the way that is written it looks like you're saying the scripture is wrong and your opinion is more correct than Paul's...