All that is not eternal,” wrote C. S. Lewis, “is eternally out of date.” The Christian Church throughout its history has struggled with the thrust and counterthrust of adhering firmly to the revealed truth of God while seeking simultaneously to communicate that truth in power to an ever-changing world. Changes made by the Church merely to accommodate changes taking place in the world have resulted in a loss of power. This week’s “relevance” is next week’s irrelevance.
The question of the ordination of women has been raised inevitably because of the women’s liberation movement. The confusion wrought by this question in the Church is one of many symptoms of a general malaise. As Christians we ought always to be testing our assumptions and priorities against the Word of God, for we are daily subjected to undermining by the secular presuppositions of our age. Among the presuppositions of 1975 are (1) that equality is no longer only a political term but implies the interchangeability of all human beings, and (2) that there is something immoral about making distinctions. The concepts of authority, subjection, and obedience have fallen into disrepute in the secular world. There has been an attempt to impute guilt to the Church for denying to women equal status with men: why must the Church be so irrelevant, so obscurantist, so implacable? The Church, in painful self-doubt, is asking whether the time may have come to jettison certain principles and practices that have become highly distasteful to the modern palate.
One of these principles is the subordination of women. Have we outgrown the need for the subordination of women and reached a point where the ordination of women is called for? The answer must rest finally in the command of God. We cannot capitulate to the spirit of the age, or accommodate ourselves to what the public is said to want. “The public” is notoriously fickle; if we could ascertain what it wants this week, it would still be impossible to predict what it might want next week.
The only question that matters is, Has God spoken? If he has not, we are free to make our own pronouncements. If there is no norm, there can be no such thing as heresy, and all opinions are equally valid. Whatever makes us feel most comfortable, most free, most affirmed, most appreciated, most understood, or most fulfilled is to be welcomed. But if we still adhere to the authority of Scripture we must examine what it says and whether it means what the Church has for nearly two millennia understood it to mean. We have, according to the Apostle Paul, “the mind of Christ.” Would it have been different if Christ had been born in twentieth-century America? Are there some improvements in principle that we, in a more enlightened age, are entitled to make for the sake of his Church?
The exclusion of women from ordination is based on the order established in creation. The first chapter of Genesis gives an account of the creation of the world and its creatures. The creation of man and woman in the image of God himself was the culminating act. This act is more specifically described in the second chapter, in which it becomes clear that the man Adam was created first. When God brought to Adam all the beasts of the field and the birds of the air he named them, but among all the creatures “there was not found a helper fit for him.” It was then that God made the woman, fashioning her from Adam’s own flesh and bone. The third chapter of Genesis recounts the Fall, in which both the man and the woman disobeyed the expressed will of God.
Both man and woman were created in the image of God, the sexual difference being complementary and necessary to the full expression of the divine image, bodied forth under the dual modality of masculine and feminine. Both man and woman, created by and for God, bore full responsibility toward him. Both disobeyed the unequivocal command of God, and they were accounted equally guilty. Both, we know from New Testament teaching, are equally the objects of God’s redeeming grace.
The Old Testament reveals Judaism as a patriarchy in which women were held strictly in subjection and had almost no legal rights. They took no part in cultural life and were allowed to listen to but not to practice the Torah. It was the supreme hope of the Jewish woman that she might become the mother of Messiah. Exceptional women were prophetesses and judges, but none was ever admitted to the priesthood.
Jesus’ treatment of women in the New Testament invested them with a radically new dignity. He associated with them in a way unheard of in Judaism prior to his time. There is in his teaching no slightest intimation of women’s inferiority or denial of her rights. Women as well as men received forgiveness, healing, and instruction from the Master, and it was to women that the risen Christ first showed himself.
The principles of obedience, submission, and authority are clearly set forth in both the Old and New Testaments. Every creature of God has his appointed place, from cherubim, seraphim, archangels, and angels down to the lowliest beast. Man himself is “made a little lower than the angels,” and was commanded to have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves.
The modern cult of personality makes submission a degrading thing. We are told that we cannot be “whole persons” if we submit. Obedience is thought of as restrictive and therefore bad. “Freedom” is defined as the absence of restraint, quite the opposite from the scriptural principle embodied in Jesus’ words, “If ye continue in my words, then are ye my disciples, and ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” Freedom in God’s view lies always on the far side of discipline, which means obedience. Wholeness is achieved not by casting off restraint but by obeying the laws of creation. A river must be “harnessed”—limited, channeled, restricted—in order to produce power. It is not by leveling and equalization that the life of a Christian is enriched, but by recognition of and obedience to the order given by the Creator. To attempt to apply democratic ideals to the kingdom of God, which is clearly hierarchical, can result only in a loss of power and ultimately in destruction. Christ himself, the Servant and Son, accepted limitation and restriction. He subjected himself. He learned obedience.
Is there any reason why a woman may not hold the office of highest authority in the Church? Traditionally she has not held it, but may we not believe that God is now calling women into the ordained ministry? Hasn’t the Church an obligation to grow and develop in order to meet the needs of a changing world?
Historically, developments in the life of the Church have always been of that which was implicit from the beginning. We look to the epistles of Paul for guidance concerning church office. Paul, though by his own admission a “Hebrew of the Hebrews,” placed women next to man in a manner that would have astonished the Hebrew patriarchs. We are sometimes told that Paul’s ideas were rabbinical and that the Church must move beyond them, but his letters reveal a new direction for women’s participation in community life, and there is a deep personal appreciation for the individual women who supported him and worked beside him for the Gospel. Far from being religious non-entities, women are singled out for special mention—Phoebe as a deaconess, Priscilla as a teacher and fellow worker, and others as “saints” along with men. There is no question about Paul’s full acceptance of women as called through Christ, reconciled, redeemed, members of the holy “priesthood” of all believers, and full-fledged members of the Church. It was the Apostle Paul himself who wrote, “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” As Calvin said, “In the spiritual kingdom of Christ, in the heart of God, and in conscience, no difference exists between men and women.”
But for the temporal order of the Church and home (as distinct from the baptismal order described in Galatians 3) certain differences remain. Paul called for the subjection of women. He pointed to the order of creation: quite simply, woman was made for man. Man was not made for woman. For those who accept Scripture as authoritative, any attempt to evade or reinterpret this statement is mere tergiversation. A knowledge of what a thing is made for is prerequisite to its proper use. In the vastly harmonious arrangement of the universe, it is not so much a question of whether a creature is higher or better, or lower or worse, but a question of what it’s there for. The stars move perfectly in their courses and the morning stars sing together. The archangel goes on the mission to which he is sent, the clam lives out his clamness without sin. Those creatures alone who took issue with the purpose of the Creator forfeited their wholeness.
It has been no part of the Church’s purpose to suppress the gifts that God has given to its members; rather, it is to ensure their full and proper use within the divinely given framework. This is the will of God, and the working out of that will reveals the deepest meaning of our human existence. Isak Dinesen in Out of Africa wrote:
Pride is faith in the idea that God had when He made us. A proud man is conscious of the idea and aspires to realize it. He does not strive toward a happiness or comfort which may be irrelevant to God’s idea of him.… People who have no pride are not aware of any idea of God in the making of them, and sometimes they make you doubt that there has ever been much of an idea, or else it has been lost, and who shall find it again? They have got to accept as success what others warrant to be so, and to take their happiness, and even their own selves, at the quotation of the day [Modern Library, Random House, 1952, p. 261].
If a woman “feels called” to do a work that on scriptural grounds is outside the “idea of God in the making” of her, it is the duty of the Church theologically rather than sociologically to judge her vocation. Service to God is never a purely private matter. No one, merely because he or she has the Spirit, may disregard the judgment of the congregation.
Let us be very clear that the ordination of women is not proscribed because of women’s lack of spiritual qualification. The ministries of both Jesus and Paul give abundant testimony to their recognition of women’s gifts and devotion. It is a question of appropriateness. The natural order established at creation has not been abrogated either by the Fall or by redemption. Jesus did not choose women for his disciples, nor were women among the Seventy sent out to preach. The Apostle Paul did not allow women to teach or to usurp authority over men—not because women were incompetent, but because the structure of Church and home, as an image of the relationship between the God of the Old Testament and his covenant people, and between Christ and his Bride, requires subordination. The Church has always seen such imagery as highly important, not random, accidental, or trivial, and therefore not to be tampered with. The distinction between the sexes is a permanent one so far as this world is concerned. (Indeed, there is no reason to believe that it will be erased in heaven—we know only what they don’t do up there; we are told nothing of what they do do.) Subjection of wives to husbands as the Church is subject to Christ is an important aspect of the Church’s message. The Church cannot, therefore, negate this truth that it teaches by ordaining women to the office of minister of Word proclaimer.
The relationship between the sexes is most fully understood in the light of monogamous marriage. God’s commands regarding marriage leave no room for speculation as to the special responsibilities of husbands and wives toward each other—self-giving love is required of the former, submission of the latter. To say that submission is synonymous with the stunting of growth, with dullness and colorlessness, spiritlessness, passivity, immaturity, servility, or even the “suicide of personality,” as one feminist who calls herself an evangelical has suggested, is totally to misconstrue the biblical doctrine of authority. Supreme authority in both Church and home has been divinely vested in the male as the representative of Christ, who is the Head of the Church. It is in willing and glad submission rather than grudging capitulation that the woman in the Church (whether married or single) and the wife in the home find their fulfillment.
Equality in the kingdom of Christ, as set forth in Galatians 3:28, does not erase, for the politia ecclesiastica, the distinction established from the beginning, the distinction that Paul sought to preserve when he admonished women to be silent or, when praying or prophesying (clearly exceptions to the rule of silence), to cover their heads as a sign of subjection. The particular ways in which sexual differentiation is signaled in various cultures may differ widely. The use of the headcloth or veil in Paul’s time may perhaps be an example of a custom that might vary in a different time and place; but what it represented, the subjection of women, is a divinely inspired principle and not negotiable. Paul recognized in the desire to dispense with the head covering an attempt to nullify the hierarchical order by equalizing men and women, whose respective positions in church and home had been assigned by God. The ancient heresy of Gnosticism had, by dissolving the relation between redemption and creation, succeeded in making the sexes equal and thereby destroying marriage itself. Montanism, another heresy, by an overemphasis on the imminent return of Christ and on charismatic experience, fostered an indifference to the distinctions established in creation. Paul was certainly acquainted with the havoc wrought by these false teachings, and he sought to direct the attention of Christians to the foundation truths.
In non-liturgical churches the office of Word proclamation is perhaps the most important, but in liturgical churches, where there is a deeper understanding of the meaning of signs and symbols, the priest’s office of dispensing the sacraments is primary, an act in which it is of paramount importance that the ancient imagery be preserved. As C. S. Lewis pointed out, a woman may properly represent the people to God, but she may not represent God to the people. A woman may be godly, but the propriety of speaking of God as womanly would be questionable, inasmuch as the pronouns referring to him in Scripture are without exception masculine. This, too, cannot be a matter of indifference. The few times when God’s treatment of his children is compared to that of a mother can only by the wildest stretch of imagination be taken as authorization for speaking of God as our mother which is in heaven. Not only in biblical imagery but in all of imagery of poetry, mythology, and chivalry, masculinity gives, creates, and rules, while femininity receives, responds, and submits.
The soul has always been seen by the Church as feminine toward God, while God is masculine toward mankind. Man and woman have each a unique function to fulfill in recognizing their proper appointment and accepting its responsibilities. It is the very magnetism of two opposite poles that not only signifies vast eternal verities but also lends interest, fascination, even a certain glamor to our earthly life that those who agitate for equality and/or interchangeability seem to ignore—or what is much worse, to hate. What is more lamentable than the spectacle of one who, through hubris, arrogates to himself a position never assigned, unless it is the spectacle of one who, assigned a position, from false humility refuses it? The commands of God in Scripture clearly delineate the structures of the Church, the relation between its members and leaders, the disciplined use of gifts for its edification. We cannot have it both ways. The Church must choose between the ordination and the subordination of women. Which does God command? If subordination is the command of God, ordination is excluded. It is a contradiction.
The fruit of the Spirit which is called meekness is, I believe, the ability to see one’s proper place in the scheme of things. If I as a woman have been endowed with certain gifts that may be good for the “use of edifying,” let me use them within the boundaries set, recognizing that the Spirit of God does not contradict himself. Any attempt to obfuscate the lines drawn will not only impoverish the one who makes the attempt but also deprive the Body of Christ of depth, of variety, and of that maturity which is described as “the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.”
