How to defend the belief only men should be ordained?

So what you’re saying is… Christ did not have authority,?

 

No. I'm saying that Christ said authority in the church must be excercised by those most fit to do so no matter whether male or female.
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If Pharisees were willing to attack Christ and his disciples for healing the sick, not washing their hands, and feeding themselves on the Sabbath, I am 100% sure that they would have verbally eviscerated Jesus for appointing Sodomites and Women as apostles/deacons/presbyters if he had done so.

I prefer the argument that Paul and Christ were just culturally "backward" which would be more honest.

 

Which, coming to think of it, is a perfectly good reason for the fact that Jesus Christ did not do so. What it is not a good argument for would be that the fact that Jesus Christ did not do so, is evidence that he would not allow it or wish to do so were it not for the inevitable consequences of bringing down the wrath of Pharisaical, bigoted misogyny upon himself and his disciples unnecessarily.

I don't because I don't believe either of them were. That's probably why they both had misogynistic enemies, within and outside the church.
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Why is that? Neither Jesus nor Paul made any substantive statement on the subject. If they had, we would expect it to be within the spectrum of what we know to have been cultural norms in the first century from other sources. What does speculation about what the Pharisees might have objected to in a hypothetical scenario prove? (The account of the Pharisees also isn’t what happened, but that’s a conversation for another thread.)

 

I would argue that Jesus appointing sodomities and women as apostles would have been less offensive to the Pharisees than when he claimed divinity and condemned the Pharisees in some of the harshest words in the entire Bible. If the Pharisees were happy to pick the Lord apart on some of the minutest details and obviously the big ones as well, it is surprising that the Bible wouldn't record the Pharisee's reaction to Jesus appointing women and sodomities as apostles.

Maybe Jesus was too scared of what the Pharisees might think if he did so? Well, he obviously wasn't scared of doing things that could get him accused of being satanic/blasphemous, he also doesn't appear to have been scared of saying things that could lead to his death, but appointing women or sodomities as apostles would have just gone too far I guess (when women/sodomite religious leaders/priests weren't rare in the middle east)?

The time bomb theory is also very interesting. Jesus was too scared of making the Jewish authorities mad, so he decided to plant a "time bomb" of female and sodomite ordination that was set to go off exactly 1,944 years after his death.

Rather than holding biblical views of sodomites and women, it is far more likely that Jesus Christ and the Apostles shared the views of 21st-century radical feminists and gay-rights activists. So much so, that Christ and St. Paul are never attacked for being sodomite and trans-affirming. Furthermore, in no contemporaneous Jewish source do they ever attack Christians for ordaining sodomites or women. Maybe not a single Jewish writer from the death of Christ till the 1970s ever found out that Christians were ordaining sodomites and women. Undoubtedly, if that had known, they would have written tons of anti-christian polemics against us on that issue. Or maybe the Jews never wrote any anti-christian polemics from the death of Christ till the 1970s?

 

The Bible didn't record anything at all. The Evangelists and Epistle writers recorded everything we have in the scripture those writings were then compiled into the Bible 350 odd years later.

I can't understand how 'sodomites' came into this discussion. I nor anyone else mentioned them until your replies were posted. I can't see the relevance or why you should be connecting 'sodomites' with 'women' and 'ministry. Anyhow Jesus Christ didn't appoint either. In fact Jesus Christ didn't even appoint Gentiles in any position of leadership, male female or homosexual ones. That does not in itself imply in the least that Gentiles were never intended by Jesus Christ to hold positions of authority within His Church. In fact we know that He chose St Paul to arrange that Gentiles should be included in the benefits of the Gospel and to fulfil all their obligations in service to mankind as priests to Himself and God. There is nothing there that indicates women or even eunuchs are excluded.

Jesus didn't go out of his way to deliberately annoy or scandalise the religious people of his time. They got upset with him because of their religious rule keeping, rule dodging, cheeseparing, bigotry, not because Jesus Christ was an annoying person. Jesus was a faithul Jew but had not time for pettyfogging rule keepers devoid of LOVE for their neighbour. He may even have included women and sodomites in His chosen category of NEIGHBOUR.

This subject and that word seems to be particularly distubing you. You keep bringing it up for some reason even though you were entirely resonsible for its inclusion in the first place. I fail to see the relevance of it in this thread.

You seem to have a real problem with this issue, don't you? Why did you decide to bring it up? We were talking about "Cases of aberrant devotions to Mary in the Roman Church" and how women's role models in the Roman Church seem to be cast in the images of exclusively either Virgin Queens of Heaven or Prostitutes like Mary of Magdala wasn't as far as scripture tells us; but never Priests.

Sodomy was never the subject until you, for reasons of your own, brought it up.
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I love the suggestion that somehow Jesus appointing sodomities and women as apostles (something that wouldn't have struck many if not most of the people living in the middle east as controversial) would have been more controversial and provocative than literally claiming divinity (something that was controversial and provocative to everyone in the middle east).

 

None of the rest of us are talking about culture war issues here. We’re talking about the role and limits of tradition as a source of normative propositions regarding roles in the Church. I don’t know where you’re getting any of this.

 

No, what you said was that “authority” was of Aaron and the Old Testament while the New was characterized by something altogether different namely “service,” as if the priesthood established by Christ had a lesser claim to authority…..

 

Christ established no priesthood but that which is common to all believers and is thus received in baptism. And as Christ’s own priesthood is eternal as well as unique, owing to his status as the God-Man, there is neither warrant nor room for any succession to it. If that isn’t confessionally basic for contemporary Anglicanism, then there’s no such (one) thing as “Anglicanism”.

 

Not surprisingly, it was entirely your own line of 'reasoning' since it was you who made the statement, not anyone else.
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I actually wrote nothing of the sort. No wonder what I wrote has been misinterpreted by those who seem to have misunderstood the statements. The statement I put the link in for readers, regarding 'Authority' in Christ's church on earth, seems to have been similarly misunderstood, ignored or dismissed.

But indeed you are right, according to Jesus Christ, it SHOULD have a lesser claim to authority.
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I don’t know where you get your theology but it’s clearly from revisionist liberal sources… Christ established the Apostles and the Bishops, who ordained the Presbyters.. which word (via presbuteros = presbyter = prester) is translated into the word priest in the English language… priest literally means nothing more than presbyter, one of the orders of clergy established in the Apostolic era

 

You re-characterized what it was that was opinion. Not valid. My statement stands: it is your opinion that "there is no cogent theological or anthropological reason to conclude that women are excluded in any way from the gifts which men have always assumed were (at least) available to themselves." As I stated, cogent theological reasons have been brought out in the past on this forum.

 

I guess it is "merely my opinion" to assume that Jesus (our high priest and our example of the perfect priest) being born male was just happenstance; perhaps the lot of you are inclined to thing that a "Josephine, only begotten daughter of God" could have served just as well as our Redeemer?

To be a priest like Christ is to be male, because Jesus was both the ultimate authority and the greatest servant ever. Why do you want to separate the two? Is your concept of Jesus only one-half of what He is?

Every properly ordained priest is both authority figure and servant. Modeled after Christ.

 

Very simply, it boils down to this: show us in the Bible where God appointed a woman to be a leader and authority figure over God's people as a mixed group of men and women. Show us the precedent.

Those of us who say only men should be ordained priests are standing atop the hill that the entire Church has occupied for 1900 years. You want to take over as 'king of the hill' and advance your position of women's ordination? There is only one proper way to do it. On something this important, God would make His will known. Give us chapter and verse that proves your position. Otherwise, y'all have nothing to stand on; you're further into conjecture than the conjecture you're claiming against us.

 

Now, right there you are sounding very much like a run-of-the-mill Protestant who rejects episcopacy. Honestly, when it comes to the typical Protestant pastorate, I will agree with you: let the women pastor. Because the way I see it, a priest is also a pastor but he is more than a pastor, because pastors don't claim to make a pronouncement of general absolution, nor do they hand out the Body and Blood of Christ. There are things that a priest does in his office, things about the office of a priest, that set him and the office apart from what is seen in the Baptist, Assemblies, Wesleyan, (etc) churches.

The thought of a woman pronouncing the words of consecration and handing out the Body of Christ is an offensive notion to me. A woman saying a few words about the Last Supper and then letting ushers pass around a trayful of crackers and juice... no big issue (with the woman, I mean).

So you have, I think, landed upon the crux of the issue (in a sideways manner, but there it is). If your view is that the Anglican or Episcopal priest is no different than a common Protestant pastor, and indeed is no different than a layperson, then you (or I) should be able to give the rector a weekend off, go up there to the table, pronounce general absolution, consecrate the elements, and pass out the Eucharist. Can we do that? Is that what you're saying?

Or do you see that the priest is something different?

 

I think you limit god if you think He couldn't have incarnated as a Josephine. He chose to incarnate as a male for that time and place but God is not limited by gender or race. To think so is to make him less than God.

That being said, He DID incarnate as Jesus, so no arguing with that. But it was a specious argument you made. Your opinion about female ordination is a good one, in your theology, but it isn't valid. And that is why there are so many women ordained today.

 

To be sure, it was yourself that started bandying the word 'opinion' about in this thread. Clearly you also have an opinion but cannot claim endorsement of it by Jesus Christ simply by just implying you have it from him, neither can anyone else.

You well must know that had Jesus of Nazareth been "Josephine, only begotten daughter of God", she would not have fitted any of the Old Testament descriptions of The Messiah. Therefore she could never have convinced ANYONE that she WAS the messiah. But that in itself would not have invalidated her incarnation as the only daughter of God, if God had decided to redeem mankind in that manner. (But God didn't. God had an only begotten SON). Nothing is impossible to God though, even the provision of a female Saviour is logically not impossible for an omnipotent God. But since no OT prediction of the gender of the promised Messiah was, to my knowledge, female, it is useless, fruitless speculation to proceed from that fact to making the unwarranted assumption that God had to have a Son and not a daughter because Sons are obviously much more preferable to God than daughters, (as was humanly held in the whole of Jewish society at the time, and probably still held in the Bible Belt Southern States of America by ultra fundamentalists ), and Sons are so obviously 'better' in supposedly definable ways, (from a human point of view), according to whatever prejudices one might have against women and their dismissable God like characteristics.

Jesus Christ was a HUMAN being. The fact that he was a male human being was probably merely because he happened to be a male human being of the species, not because male human beings are any more like God than female human being are. To suggest such a thing would be idolatrous, anthropomorphism, a damnable worshipping of human masculinity. (A very Greek and pagan form of religious aberation. A sin they went in for big time and got condemnation for it by St Paul).

Jesus the Christ had to be male because had he been female no one in Jewish society at that time would have even NOTICED him, let alone owned him as their Messiah. No one ever listened to anything a woman might think or say in those days. Their testimony wasn't even accepted in courts of law and they couldn't be called as witnesses unless their evidence was supported by a man. If Christ had been a woman, we would all still be in our sins and damned eternally, because she would never have been ALLOWED by the MALE human race to BE its saviour. God was therefore limited by human sinfulness to only being able to provide an exclusively male sacrificial victim, for the human race to take out its macho, murderous, arrogant, violent sinfulness on.
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