Are female Holy Orders valid and is Sacramental assurance maintained?

Aidan pretty much just summed up everything I was trying to put into words here.

 

No I'm talking about the instance with saint peter and the " feed my sheep " verses. I'm referring to Matthew 25:31-46.

 

what I'm saying is that the church has the power to end so much suffering and yet we don't how can our eyes be open to Christ but closed to the needs of our suffering neighbor. Spiritual growth and acts of love , justice and mercy go hand in hand.

 

The church will never be able to end suffering. There will never be an end to suffering, until Christ comes again.

Christ teaches that it is impossible to stop or 'cure' poverty. It is NOT POSSIBLE. When the scribes and pharisees asked why he doesn't just magically create bread to feed the poor, he said it is impossible to fix poverty. We should fix people's spiritual poverty.

You might say, oh we've done so much, fixed misery. Well yes and no. Right now the Episcopal church is trying to abolish gender and destroy many of the old Episcopal Church beliefs and doctrines, to 'heal suffering'. They want to embrace transgenderism, and make trans people feel 'included'.

Well, by doing that they are telling ME that I have no gender. So they are hurting ME, when they're healing the trans people. That is always how it works. There is no end to suffering.

The only choice is who will get to suffer. The Episcopal church wants to make normal people, those who are in God's image, suffer. But the Church Universal has said that the trans people have to suffer, because they are unnatural and have a mental disease called gender dysphoria. They should be shunned by the Church, and always have been. It's just a matter of whom you pick for the suffering, for there will be no end to it, by your human hands.

 

Anglicanism is now just so diverse. You get the participants on this site, who are, in the main, staunchly anti WO, then you get the Anglican folk in the Anglican forum of Christian Forums and they are petty much pro WO - and yet all consider themselves Anglicans. Both sides are passionate about their beliefs and the reasons why they hold them.

Personally, I am not convinced that women should be ordained and I attend a Forward in Faith Church. I am a professional woman in a senior management role in my organisation's executive team at my place of work. I am all for women in leadership roles in secular life, for women in leadership roles in jobs. But, the role of a Priest is not, in my mind, a job - it is service. Equal opportunities is simply not a concept that should be applied to the role of priest as it should to jobs/employment. That's not to say that I think that all women who look to become priests are wanting to do this because of reasons related to equal opportunities. I am sure that many/most feel a calling to serve God. The Church needs to ensure that the opportunities for meaningful service by women are available and valued.

I have posted this link before. It is not an Anglican source, but it does represent in the most part, my thoughts on the topic of WO. They are different from those who feel that women shouldn't preach, being more aligned with those traditions that believe the sacraments should be administered by male priests.

http://antiochian.org/node/17953

With regards to whether the sacraments given by female priests are valid - I don't know - but I do believe that if God wants to make them valid for the people receiving them in good faith, then even if WO is a heterodox teaching, He could do it. However, personally I would not receive from a female priest. I guess that for some Anglicans the issue of the validity of the sacraments would not be of a great concern, given that they hold to a memorial understanding of the sacraments - but that's a whole other area of concern!

 

Started to have a look at Anglican reasons for and against WO.

This article is over 2 years old, but an interesting summary of the C of E journey
http://theconversation.com/female-bishops-in-the-c-of-e-how-theology-has-changed-the-church-36708

This article gives some of the arguments for and against the ordination of women but it's at quite a basic level.
https://www.carlislediocese.org.uk/...tion_of_women_as_priests_and_Bishops.pdf.html

 

So, are we about to fight now? Jk.

 

Suffering is s state of mind . Living in the joy of the resurrection is also a choice. Transgendered people are also created in the image of God and Christ came to redeem them as much as he came to redeem you and me. Modern physiology has said that being transgendered is not a disorder do to studies on the matter if you think living a transgendered life is a sin or not that's a completely different discussion. Oh yes boo hoo poor cis gendered you, how are you suffering from someone else being welcomed into the family of God. What physical or mental trouble is a transgendered person sitting in the pew behind you minding their business actually doing to you ?

 

The damage/harm they do to me is, they destroy the certainty of my gender. If we make human gender uncertain, to accomodate/'include' THEM, then we make it uncertain FOR ME.

They make me less of myself, of my core innermost self (which I associate with my gender).

Another harm/danger they do is by destroying Christian doctrine, forcing us to throw out the gender in the Holy Scriptures and Divine Revelation.

It's just harm for everyone involved, including themselves. For we allow and coddle them in their sins and wickedness. Gender dysphoria is a real mental illness, look it up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_identity_disorder

 

So your saying the church should hate transgendered people?

 

" The main psychiatric approaches to treatment for persons diagnosed with gender dysphoria are psychotherapy or supporting the individual's preferred gender through hormone therapy, gender expression and role, or surgery." This is from the same article you just posted.

 

The issue seems to be acceptance of sin or repentance. Yes, we are to "love everyone but to hate sin"(St. Doretheus of Gaza) The spirit of this age tells us to accept sexual immorality, Jesus tells repent and flee from sin. He states,"depart from me,you who practice iniquity", and"to find our life,we must lose our life(of sin). To embrace sin and justify it is to live in delusion. He "is the same, yesterday,today and always." Either Christ and His Word are right or either this new LGBT movement and their proponents are right when it comes to Biblical truths. I will side with the Lord.(Joshua 24:15).

 

So? The main approaches to treatment of certain diseases used to be feeding people cocaine. Right now the main approaches to medical treatment involve heavily over-chemical medications instead of a holistic approach. Medicine is morally agnostic. The church is not. The church can, should, and has forbidden certain medical actions/activities, such as abortion.

 

I

Also why is your primary identity your gender when your primary identity as a Christian should be to identify with Christ and his mission.

 

Because I'm an incarnated soul. A physically embodied soul. To claim that my identity is purely spiritual is a gnostic heresy.

 

This is always the default claim of liberal positions- claim prejudice and victimization when someone disagrees with your position. It's intellectually lazy and morally repugnant.

No one on this thread has expressed sexism or hatred of women. Quite the opposite. They have provided reasoned and historical arguments for their positions- just because one may disagree with those arguments on the role of women on the church gives no right to impugn their moral character.

 

Whenever I hear the women deserve equal opportunity to be in leadership or service roles, therefore the priesthood, I just hear "women can be husbands too" and realize how very sad our culture has become.

A man told a story once about how he was encouraging his son to "dare to be a Daniel" and his son looked up and asked in all seriousness "but what if I'm the lion in the story?" It's the same case of identity disaster.

 

In this age of androgenous, Christians need to celebrate femininity and masculinity with parity of esteem. After all a man and a woman are two halves of one whole as in marriage and in the future of our race

 

I think what people who are proponents of WO often miss is that their position can be derogatory and even misogynistic towards women as they tend to down play the work that lay women do in the church as "not the real thing". That women's contributions are only fulfilled once they are ordained smacks of true dismissiveness towards the accomplishments of Christian women down through the centuries. There are profound a deep teachings of the Christian church that were revealed to women (the Resurrection for example) and lessons which often went right over the Apostles heads, but were taught to women. It's not true that women must be ordained to have a full life in the church.

I know it sounds counter intuitive, but really the insistence that women and men must share every single role in society indicates that there is nothing unique and special about being a woman (or a man); that the roles appointed for her in the church are less than or even worthless if she can't ordain because she is missing something-that her role just as a lay woman is incomplete. No ones role in the church is incomplete! Instead of women serving as faithful laity in support of the church in teaching, evangelization, organizational or administrative the insistence that full equality actually means women must be ordained undermines all the positive roles and influences women have in non-ordained roles.

I agree that the influence of radical feminism and this gender identity panic has contributed to this phenomenon. Women, actual women, are tremendously devalued on the left- they must endure drag queens mocking their femininity, men impersonating them as "Trans" women & then using their physical spaces, and being told that their natural biological states (the desire to have children, to be less aggressive then men, less overly sexual, that they must compete on the same physical level as men i.e. combat in the military) are a negative and they must rise above it to be successful. In short, they must act like men in all facets of life. The entire notion of filling roles based on God's created order has taken a back seat to post-modern 3rd wave feminism and the insistence that it is simple matter of being"natural" and "right" and "justice".

These churches bowing to the winds are not growing or flourishing, but declining. It's truly sad how people fail to see that once the culture has run over the church and made it conform to the world, the world no longer has need of the church.

 

Lord have mercy.

It's like the post on Twitter I saw that said, "Men also menstruate" and "Not all women have vaginas". How much more deluded and twisted statements can people make and not wonder about their mental state? It's real life Doublethink.