Thank God

What constitutes “feminization”? Most priests I grew up with were good, charitable men, and they were balanced personalities: strong but compassionate and understanding. When people complain about “feminization”, I’m wondering if they’d prefer a priesthood filled with UFC fighter-type personalities.

In terms of churches “collapsing”, church attendance is declining across the board for both conservative and liberal denominations. Truth isn’t a popularity contest, anyhow. Islam is gaining popularity because folks in many regions seem to need its austerity and rigid orthodoxy. It doesn’t make any of it true, though.

One a church becomes feminized, it invariably becomes homosexualized, and then it collapses.

Very well said – the influx of women priests is what drove me out of the Episcopal Church. I was in high school at the time – like all madness, though, there was no stopping the women ordainers… Bishop Burt of Ohio was my bishop and was indifferent to the concerns I wrote to him and spoke to him about. He was at Church one time and in a one-to-one conversation with me was dismissive as if I didn’t know what I was talking about.

Alice, I’ve read several of your posts and find them also very interesting, but I still wonder how far beyond the priesthood you would carry the binary of male and female. Does it not also support the headship of the man generally? It would appear to do so.

Speaking of binaries, I named and defined the binary relationship between the Father and the Son, as well as between the man and the woman, in my recent article entitled “The Problem with Hierarchy: Ordered Relations in God and Man” (St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly, 54, 2, 2010). You will find in my article some independent confirmation of your view. In the article, I also contrasted that natural relationship with the economical relationship we commonly recognize as hierarchical.

In brief, a hierarchy is an order based on dissimilarity of nature, inequality of powers, subordination of wills, and mediation between persons. In contrast, an archy is an order based on similarity of nature, equality of powers, unity of will, and immediacy of persons — on account of the derivative relationship of the persons, one person being the source, the arche, of the other person.

The Trinity is an archy because the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit share the same nature, are all equal, are of one will, and relate directly with each other without mediation, on account of the Father being the Arche of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Likewise, the man and the woman are naturally an archy, the woman being made from the man, of the same flesh and bone, originally equal and united in will, relating directly to each other and to God (not one through the other to God). This remains the way the man and the woman are supposed to relate, the way they should strive to relate, and the way they will relate in the next life.

The fall, however, requires special measures to keep the man and the woman together, so God decrees a hierarchy, subjecting the woman to the man for the sake of unity, to bind together what has been torn apart until the sinews of love heal enough to hold on their own. This is the first of many subjections and also the slightest. All are necessary to keep many-willed man from contention and estrangement until they can learn to live together only archically.

Female priests, as well as female presidents, are inconsistent with both the natural archy and the economical hierarchy, both of which assign headship to the man. Some people will, of course, say, “You gotta be kidding.” But the patristic argument against female priests was always based on the headship of the man, and my experience is that when you raise children in that tradition, they have no trouble accepting it because it is so plain in scripture and tradition.

Alice, have you studied life expectancy data across the ages?

I remember reading about Mormon history in the USA, migrations west and so on. Then it happened I had to drive across the country several times in each direction through pretty much the same patch of countryside. You head west from the lush plains, the ground gets higher and drier, forage gets harder and harder, seasons more extreme. You get to western Wyoming and its the high plains, passable but not easy living when transport is hard. Then it’s eastern Utah and the Wasach pass, full of water, trees, and its a green oasis coming down to the west. Then… it’s the great Salt lake and plain, hundreds of miles of mud flats with next to nothing and then eastern Nevada where it’s dry scrub.

You can about imagine… a revelation. “We’re stopping here!! This is it!! A sign from on high!” Well it was also good sense.

About the same feeling heading east from Egypt into Israel. Departing folk from the west look a bit further and.. “We’re stopping here!! This is it!! A sign from on high”. Well it was also good sense.

So look at the environment surrounding these theological verities. What do you see? Women dying in childbirth all over, they didn’t even have a common word for great-grandparent. People lost children and went to monasteries to retire and die within a few years because they had no other visible support and banded together. Anthropologically it is very very plain that to be clergy you had to be educated to some degree. At least be able to read, follow directions, basic mobility, vision. Now in those days that already put you way, way ahead of 90% of everyone. Educating women was not a serious anthropological from a energy return standpoint. Women died, took care of the youth in ways the men couldn’t. Books were rare. Female clergy wasn’t anything anyone had time for.

Today? Nearly everyone in a parish is as literate as the priest, and many are more highly educated. Women live longer than men and are equally educated. Women can function everyday of the month with over the counter safe medications. The “Aha, here is were we must plant our flag” — driven by the means folk have of existing where they find themselves changes as the means for existing in the world has changed a great deal.

So the challenge is to understand is the all male clergy the result of merely theologizing a demographic reality, or is there a transcendent requirement there? If there is a transcendent requirement there, somehow I doubt it would have its essential basis in the mundane of somatic plumbing cycles.

P.S. I am not part of any lobby ‘for female clergy’. I do point out if we want to survive the reasons for what we do can’t be based in essential part on the physical limitations those living 2,000 years ago found themselves not in evidence today. Anyone with two eyes will note that it is not presently 100 AD, and if doing as we do depend on living as they did then we are a museum, not a church.

http://jandyongenesis.blogspot.com/2010/01/importance-of-binary-distinctions.html
http://jandyongenesis.blogspot.com/2011/07/binary-worldview-shaped-horite-culture.html
http://jandyongenesis.blogspot.com/2009/03/blood-and-binary-distinctions.html
http://jandyongenesis.blogspot.com/2009/03/circumcision-and-binary-distinctions.html
http://jandyongenesis.blogspot.com/2010/12/sun-and-moon-in-genesis.html

The evisceration of the binary worldview of the Bible renders as meaningless the kenotic event of Jesus Christ.
http://jandyongenesis.blogspot.com/2010/08/binary-worldview-of-bible.html
http://jandyongenesis.blogspot.com/2010/04/god-as-male-priest.html

I assure you this view is far from the Episcopal Church’s politically correct stance on gender. And yes – “Huh? You gotta be kidding.” – is the usual response even from people who say that they believe the Bible.

Alice, thank you for your interesting post, and for your work generally. Yours is a powerful witness against the error of our age.

I’m wondering, though: Is it all about the blood? What do you make of the headship of the man? You seem to accept that manhood and womanhood make no difference for any other role in society or the Church, just the role of priest. That’s a barely less feminist position than the Episcopalian extreme.

Secondly, what would you say to the obvious counter-argument that the sacrifice Christian priests now offer is a “bloodless sacrifice”? That would seem to do away with any concern for blood, especially among the young whom we are trying raise in the faith, yet who are challenged by the world to believe something else. The world tells them there’s no difference between men and women; if we also tell them that, yet make an exception for the priesthood on account of this blood thing, I know a lot of them are going to say, “Huh? You gotta be kidding.”

They came of age in the 1960’s and 70’s and never grew up.

I have read Ms. Lindsey’s articles on Virtue Online. It is nice to see someone come out of Episcopalianism for reasons that aren’t so shallow as, “I don’t like women priests.” or “I don’t like gays.” It’s not about liking, it’s about Tradition.

Once I considered Roman Catholicism. The first parish I visited was fairly modernist in its sensibilities. I was talking with a nun in her office. No habit, street clothes. She told me of the baptism that was going to happen in a week or two. A gay couple was coming to have “their child”, (actually the biological child of one of them) baptized. I’m glad the little fellow got baptized, but . . .

We started talking about her attitudes toward this or that traditional teaching and modern innovation. At some point, having heard more than I ever wanted to know, I asked her, “Wouldn’t you be more happy in the Episcopal Church?”. She laughed and replied that she was going to stick around and work for change from within.

C’est la guerre.

The only reason I’ve ever heard as a reason for women’s ordination is to give women the power/authority/position they rightly deserve (thus the no more bringing a dish for the pot luck). The reason is clothed in a lot of other things but fundamentally, they want the power to do what they want to do.