Elsewhere in this magazine you will find a copy of my sermon preached on the Sunday after General Synod turned down, as a result of a vote in the House of Laity, the measure to consecrate women as bishops. That sermon looks in part at the consequences of the vote, but it does not consider the reasons why some Anglicans have voted this way, nor the grounds on which the measure can be supported. It might seem that this is not an appropriate topic for a Christmas issue of the magazine, but in a way it is, because the arguments are partly to do with the implications of the incarnation (the second person of the Trinity being born as a man to save our humanity). What is it that we celebrate at Christmas and in what ways should Christ’s birth as a man in a male dominated society affect the life of the Church today? Is his maleness significant as opposed to his humanity? In what way is he representative of humanity, male and female?
These arguments and many others were set out in the report of a special House of Bishops working party on the subject chaired by the then Bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir-Ali . What follows is a summary of what both sides of the argument have said with some comments of my own.
The arguments against can be divided between those which come from the Conservative Evangelical side and which tend to focus on Scripture and those which come from the Conservative Anglo Catholic side and tend to be more doctrinal and to concern also our understanding of the nature and traditions of the Church. Many of them will be familiar to those of you who have followed this debate for some time; to others the arguments will be new and are described here to show that opponents of women’s ministry are not simply misogynist bigots as parts of the press sometimes portray them. To look again at these views may remind us of some of the crucial issues in contemporary Christianity which affect a wide range of attitudes, not just towards women.
The Conservative Evangelical arguments are these:
In the creation narrative in Genesis, Eve is created out of Adam and is named by Adam indicating a ‘functional subordination’ and the headship of Adam over Eve. Adam’s sin is that he reverses the natural order of creation by submitting to Eve and eating the fruit. After the fall the headship of the male is reasserted as a ‘creation ordinance,’ an indication of something essential about human life.
Paul’s teaching in 1 Corinthians 14:34-36 and 1 Timothy 2:12-15 reassert this view of headship. There is a link to be made between male leadership in the family and male leadership in the household of God. The assertion of seeming equality between male and female in the body of Christ in Galatians 3.28 relates to our equal heritage in the promise to Abraham and does not undercut the understanding of headship within that inheritance.
Paul’s understanding of the relationship between the Father and Son involves both equality, and submission and sacrifice. So though men and women are equal as human beings there is a comparable order of headship and submission in their relationship which is taken up in the New Testaments teaching about marriage in 1Cor. 11:12-16, Col. 3:18 and Eph. 5:21-33
If, as the early church began to believe, Bishops are in some sense icons of God the Father, women cannot exercise that role which is essentially paternal rather than maternal.
There is no consensus as yet on this issue, we are still in a period of reception in which the validity of women’s ministry is still being tested and it would be rash to proceed on the basis of majority voting in synod. Nor is there any consensus with the past on this issue, so it would also be rash to submit to an idea which originates in one particular era of the Church’s life. Bishops are called to be a focus for unity and a woman bishop would only be a focus of disunity.
Since the end of the First World War there has been a growing feminisation of the Church and without men at the heart of its leadership (men who still value and uphold the unique role of women and encourage appropriate Biblical forms of women’s ministry) the Church will not be able to reach out successfully to men.
Without yet commenting on any of these views we pass on now to the arguments from the Catholic wing of Anglicanism, recognising that there is some overlap in the two sets of arguments.
So there is also a view from the Catholic side that the Church should not respond too quickly to the beliefs and practices of contemporary society, or compromise its strongly established traditional practices. The doctrines of the Church enshrine God’s blue print for our humanity and it would be dangerous to tamper with revealed anthropology – the divinely ordained distinctions between male and female and their complementary way of life.
On a more general Biblical view modern concerns for equality between the sexes would not have occurred to Jesus or his followers. Here the argument is perhaps a more negative one; not so much an argument for headship as an argument that neither Scripture nor Tradition provide any precedent or authority for such a development. Jesus chose 12 men to be his apostles, in spite of his association with women, who could play sometimes vital roles in his ministry without being counted as apostles. The equality of men and women in Christ is a consequence of their baptism, not a model for leadership.
All attempts to show that women exercised formal leadership in Scripture and the public life of the early church are conjectural, unconvincing and biased by modern concerns. In fact all known societies and cultures apart from ours have been patriarchal.
The fact that Christ became incarnate as a man is not just historically accidental or conditioned. Jesus had to be known as Son of the Father and Son of David to make clear his historical identity and significance. The Church’s traditional belief about the role and function of the priesthood involves the notion that at the altar the priest acts ‘in persona Christi’, as an icon of Christ, sacramentally re-enacting the saving sacrifice of Calvary, symbolism which is lost if the priest is female. Just as bread and wine have to be used on the altar to represent the particularity of the Last Supper so the priest must be male to represent Jesus. Similarly, the Pauline imagery of Christ as the bride groom and the Church as his bride can only be preserved by a male priesthood. (Here of course we must remember that some of these arguments are the basis for not accepting women as priests or Bishops). These arguments also show how relatively more important symbolism is for the Catholic argument.
The ecumenical argument is also important for Catholics. Anglicans claim to share a threefold ministry with Roman Catholics and the Orthodox, going back to the period of the undivided Church. To act on our own on this matter undermines our claim to be part of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. Ministry is part of the essence of the Church’s being. It is not a secondary matter of only local and practical significance. Such an independent act by the Church of England would prove a major setback in ecumenical relations and would be counter to Jesus injunction to work for unity.
If we take such a step we put in doubt the validity of the priestly ministry and that in turn creates doubt about the validity of the sacraments which priests and Bishops celebrate. For a conservative Evangelical validity of Christian practice is established principally by conformity to Scripture. For an Anglo Catholic conformity to Tradition is equally important. An authoritative, and genuine Christian community must be able to show that its ministry and sacraments are part of the great, universal tradition; if the link with that tradition is broken then the validity of its ministry and sacraments is called in doubt and our salvation is thereby endangered, because baptism and Eucharist are not just optional spiritual practices they are vital to our salvation.
Catholics and Evangelicals both share a concern for the Bishop as a sign of unity. Bishops ought to be able to act on behalf of each other and in that sense their ministry is interchangeable. When Bishops move dioceses they do not have to be re-consecrated. If women are made Bishops that would cease to be the case. It is this issue which makes it so difficult to work out how those who cannot accept women bishops can be accommodated, because the integrity of their belief means that they cannot accept the orders of priests ordained by women, or bishops who have ordained women or joined in the consecration of women, nor can they accept other sacraments celebrated by women.
These then are briefly (!) but I hope fairly represented, the arguments put forward by those who cannot accept women as priests or Bishops, though there is a general acceptance that once women have become priests it is both unjust and doctrinally illogical for the episcopate not to be open to them, provided adequate provision is made for those who cannot accept such a development but who still see themselves as Anglicans.
What then are the arguments in favour of the consecration of women as Bishops, arguments which for the most part also apply to their being priests?
The Biblical argument can work in at least two ways. On the one hand scholars have tried to show that women do exercise leadership in Scripture and in the early church – you just have to look harder for the evidence. On the other hand it can be said that the patriarchal dominance both in Scripture and Tradition is culturally conditioned and should not be taken as seriously when cultures change. In my view the former argument is weaker than the latter. Attempts to show women in the New Testament and the early Church exercising roles comparable to that of priest or bishop can often be accused of special pleading. It seems odd to say that the New Testament and the early Church practiced a form of women’s ministry for which documentary evidence is clearly to be found but which no-one subsequently noticed. It may of course be the case that a male conspiracy subsequently suppressed a lot more of the evidence but providence has enabled us now to rediscover it just when we needed it. I’m not sure that history works like that. It is a lot more complex and fluid. I have no doubt that women did a lot in the early church, and that Jesus’ relationship to women was unusual for his time. At the same time I think the Church continued to be influenced by the patriarchalism of both Jewish and Roman society. Women were able to exercise certain kinds of influence in the home as wives and widows and Christianity seems to have appealed to women because it guaranteed them a new kind of respect both as wives and widows. But at the same time Christianity had to conform at certain levels to the surrounding society if it was to avoid misunderstanding, ridicule and persecution. How much society could be challenged was an evangelistic calculation.
This whole debate uncovers a difficult question about how to use Scripture to establish belief and doctrine. For example it could be said that Genesis 2: 27 establishes an idea of equality between the sexes. ‘Male and female he created them’ and both alike are created in the image and likeness of God. However, this verse, whenever it was written, does not seem to have established the principal of equality in Jewish or Christian society until now. Such equality only began to be talked about after the Enlightenment of the 17th century so that we now look back on the Genesis text, taken out of its historical context, to vindicate a Christian account of gender equality. The argument would then seem to be saying that the original author of those words in Genesis was inspired by a truth which is essential for the well being of men and women in relationship but which we have only recently discovered! A different but perhaps more honest approach would be to say that the Bible is a huge compendium of texts which have been more or less validly used in different ages (the less valid ones were used to justify slavery and the oppression of women) but whenever the church considers a new development it should be able to find substantiating texts without reading too much into scripture or violating a fundamental scriptural principle. The debate in this light therefore emerges as to whether patriarchalism is such a principle or whether it is a culturally conditioned practice which in changed cultural circumstances it would be harmful to uphold whereas in the past it may not have done the same kind of harm. In this context we are then free to note in Scripture some of the remarkable but unusual roles played by women (eg Naomi and Ruth, Deborah, Huldah, Jael, Mary Magdalen etc) without trying to justify a more general theory by their example. In this way also Jesus can be seen as both conforming to his historical culture, which he does not challenge in his teaching, while at the same time upsetting the norm in his actions. A similar pattern is observed in the early churches. Women contribute significantly to the spread of Christianity but at the same time they often conform culturally in order not to bring shame on the church, by behaving in ways which would shock their pagan contemporaries.
A similar set of comments can be made about our use of tradition, which is not static but fluid. It develops according to Newman’s famous analogy, as a river changes when it passes through different terrain. As the famous16th century Anglican Richard Hooker recognises, God does not institute laws which can never be bettered. Change may not have been appropriate in the past, but it may be appropriate now when some ‘new-grown occasion’ makes ‘that which hath been better worse.’ In a culture where the differences between men and women may be narrowing or disappearing women become more suited to religious leadership than they may have been in the past, though there have always been exceptional circumstances which often produced saints like St Catherine of Sienna who lectured the Pope on his duties! Though of course there are biological differences between men and women, it is very hard to establish that obvious differences of character or capacity for leadership follow from this. And finally we cannot say that tradition excludes women from the leadership of the church, simply because that was what was always done. Tradition is established by the Church coming together to consider a question in a decisive fashion as with the creeds and the content of the New Testament. As yet the place of women in the church has not been decided in this way.
The contrary arguments make much of the maleness of Christ and his symbolic representation at the altar. An alternative view would have it that since Christ could not be both male and female he had to be male to gain a hearing in his society and for his ministry to be related to ancient prophecy. Evangelicals put their main emphasis on salvation through his death. Catholics often refer also to his incarnation as being the initiation of the saving process. ‘What is not assumed is not healed,’ as the Alexandrian Bishop Gregory of Nazianzus put it. However, if that is the case what Christ assumed must be the humanity men and women have in common, his maleness is not relevant. At the altar it is therefore appropriate for him to be represented by both men and women.
As to the catholicity of the Church of England and its ability to make changes as yet unacceptable to Roman Catholics and Orthodox, it might be said that we are carrying on the tradition established at the Reformation to adapt the life of the church to a new understanding of the central message of the faith, its ministry and practice. While the church remains divided each separated church has continued to make decisions without consulting its neighbours; some of these decisions have been recognised eventually by others, some have added to division; it is not always obvious which decisions will have which results. Unilateral action was part of the very founding of Anglicanism; while we do our best ecumenically not to antagonise our neighbours and maintain a loving relationship with them, we may not deny ourselves all independent action without denying the validity of our origins.
And finally there is the issue of justice and example. We live in a society which has itself not entirely come to terms with the implications of equal education and opportunity for women. It the eyes of women who still in one way or another experience prejudice, injustice and discrimination a Church which does not allow women full representation in its leadership roles can hardly speak on their behalf or be perceived as being on their side.
This is as you can see a huge topic which raises many issues that are relevant to other debates in the Church at the moment not least the arguments about homosexuality. We can only pray that through the debate, and the emotions it gives rise to we can begin to learn new things and deeper truths and so eventually be strengthened in our commitment to God and to one another.
The Vicar Writes
Stephen Tucker