Responsible Use of the Scriptures

by Schuyler Brown, S. J. and Richard W. Corney

From Pro and Con on Ordination of Women
Report and Papers from The United States Anglican-Roman Catholic Consultation, Cincinnati, June 1975.

The arguments for or against the ordination of women to the priesthood in the Episcopal Church, in so far as these arguments concern the biblical basis for or prohibition against such ordination, raise the broader and more fundamental question of the part which the Bible can and should play in the life of the Church today. That the Bible is in some sense authoritative is generally agreed, but how it operates as an authority for us in our time is a point much debated.

Some of this debate focuses on the nature of the Bible itself and is concerned with the manner in which the Bible can be said to be the revelation of God. Views range from an extreme fundamentalism, which believes every word of the Bible to have been dictated directly by the Holy Spirit, to an understanding of Scripture as a book of past history, of no more importance than any other past history.

We do not have the space to enter into this debate. We would simply record in general terms our firm conviction that God has chosen to reveal himself in a definitive way in the life of ancient Israel and supremely in our Lord Jesus Christ, and that we believe the Bible to be the present embodiment of that life, the record of the old and new Israel’s experience of God, an experience shaped and guided by the Holy Spirit. If some such view of scripture is maintained, and not all would phrase it in the same way or even agree that it is correct, then it is clear that this definitive witness to God’s self-revelation is crucial to the ongoing life of the Church. What is not clear is the manner in which this witness can be appropriated by us with reference to particular questions raised in and by the times in which we live, questions of which the ordination of women to the priesthood is but one.

The first decision we have to make when we approach the Bible with such a question concerns the scope of our inquiry. What particular aspects of the biblical text should we examine in order to obtain the information and insight applicable to the particular situation which confronts us? As far as the presence or absence of a scriptural mandate concerning the ordination of women is concerned, there are at least three related areas which can be explored. We can simply ask if there is any evidence for the existence of women presbyters in the New Testament; we can broaden the inquiry to include a study of the structure and character of ministry in the New Testament Church; or we can go even further and look at the ideal character of the Christian community as this ideal is set forth in the Bible.

Before we set forth some of the things the Bible does have to say in these three areas, we need to become aware of the fact that our concern with the character and structures of the New Testament Church is, like so many of our present concerns which we bring to scripture, a matter to which the biblical authors have not directly addressed themselves. The New Testament contains no manual of church order to which we can turn to discover the precise form of and qualifications for the ordained ministry. Still less does it contain a treatise on the place of women in that ministry. Even the pastoral epistles, the only books in the New Testament which deal explicitly with the formal ministry of the Church, have as their primary concern the protection of the faith and morals of the Church against corruption by false teaching. These epistles deal with church order for the most part only in so far as it relates to this larger issue (cf. Titus 1:7-11). The incidental character of the New Testament data bearing on the subject in which we are interested means that any reconstruction of church order in the New Testament Christian community inevitably will be incomplete and more or less hypothetical.

When faced with a situation in which the data are incidental and incomplete, we are often tempted to fill in the gaps either by reading into the New Testament structures which developed in later times, or by organizing what information there is in such a way that it will support the conclusion at which we would like to arrive. The stronger our commitment to one side or another of a current debate, the stronger this latter temptation becomes. As Richard Hooker long ago remarked,

Nature worketh in us all a love to our own counsels. The contradiction of others is a fan to inflame that love. Our love set on fire to maintain that which once we have done, sharpeneth with wit to dispute, to argue, and by all means to reason for it. Wherefore a marvel it were if a man…, having such incitements to make him desirous of all kind of futherances unto his cause, could espy in the whole of Scripture of God nothing which might breed at least a probable opinion of likelihood, that divine authority itself was in the same way somewhat inclinable.(1)

In Romans 16:7, for example, we find two individuals mentioned as “persons of note among the apostles.” The first, Andronicus, is clearly a male. The second name, which appears in the accusative case as Iounian, could be either “Junias,” a contraction of the masculine name Junianus, or the common feminine name Junia. If it were the latter, we would have evidence that at least one woman was accounted by St. Paul as an “apostle,” the most important of the ministries in the Pauline Church (1 Cor. 12:28). The arguments for and against either possibility seem fairly evenly balanced. In such a case the tendency is for us to prefer the interpretation which supports the position we already hold. If we are in favor of the ordination of women to the priesthood, we are tempted to find in Romans 16:7 the female Junia; if opposed, the male Junias. What we have in fact is an ambiguity which ought to be left ambiguous.

This temptation to read our personal preferences into Scripture can be held in check, once we are aware that it exists. More difficult to control is the influence of our present cultural environment upon our interpretation of the Bible, for this operates unconsciously. It is relatively easy to point out how in the past commonly held cultural assumptions have influenced scriptural exegesis, for each new age calls into question older assumptions once thought to be self-evident truth. It can be shown, for example, that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century “the historical interpretation of biblical revelation was controlled by an immanentalist, evolutionary world view, by the liberal idea of progress, and by the historical methods modeled after the empirical methodology of the natural sciences.”(3) But today the “liberal idea of progress,” to take one of those assumptions, has become a casualty of two world wars and an uneasy peace. It is highly unlikely that any modern exposition of the vision of “swords into ploughshares” (Mic. 4:1-7) would contain statements like those of George Adam Smith, written in 1895.

There is much in the Vision that is not only nearer to us than to the Hebrew prophets, but achieved and behind us…. History has in part fulfilled the promised influence of religion upon the nations. The Unity of God has been owned, and the civilized peoples bow to the standards of justice and mercy first revealed from Mount Sion . . . . And though to-day our Peace be but a paradox, and the ‘Christian’ nations stand still from war less in love, than in fear of one another, there are in every nation an increasing number of men and women, with growing influence, who…do yet keep themselves from foolish forms of patriotism, and by their recognition of each other across all national differences make sudden and unconsidered war less and less possible.(4)

A similar challenge to our cultural assumptions has been made by the present movement for the equality of women in our society, and this challenge has provided an impetus for the re-examination of scripture, to see if it is in fact as male-oriented as has been assumed in the past. In her article, “Depatriarchalizing in Biblical Interpretation,” Phyllis Tribble(5) points out that, in spite of the undeniable patriarchal character of biblical society and religion, “female imagery for God is more prevalent in the Old Testament than we usually acknowledge.” She cites as one example Hosea 11:3, a verse which many (including one of the authors of this essay) have spoken of in terms of the Fatherhood of God. Yet its description of God as the one who taught Ephraim to walk shows him engaged in a task which in ancient Israel was undertaken not by the father, but by the mother. So accustomed are we to think of God as Father that we read this image even into passages where it is not to be found.

Dr. Tribble has also re-examined the second and third chapters of Genesis, chapters which have often been understood to state that the female, created from the rib of man and seduced by the serpent, was created by God as inferior to the male; such an interpretation can be found in the New Testament itself (1 Tim. 2:13-14). While we would not agree with every detail of Dr. Tribble’s exegesis of the Genesis material, she does seem to be correct in her major contention that the subordination of the female to the male does not appear in the story until Genesis 3:16, as a part of the curse for disobedience. These curses at the end of the narrative of the Fall are the explanation given by the author for why existing conditions are the way they are; the serpent crawls on his belly; the woman has pain in childbirth and is subordinate to her husband; the man must toil hard for his sustenance. All of these conditions are seen to be the result of human sin; they are not part of God’s original plan for his creation. The author of Genesis, chapters 2-3, it would seem, did not identify the way things are with the way God intended them to be. Dr. Tribble has called attention to the comment of Edwin Good,

Is it not surprising that, in a culture where the subordination of woman to man was a virtually unquestioned social principle, the etiology of the subordination should be in the context of man’s primal sin?(6) It should also be noted that whoever was responsible for joining the story of creation in Genesis 2:4b ff. with the account found in Genesis1:1-2:4a apparently saw no contradiction between the creation of the woman from the rib of man and the original equality of the sexes implicit both in the statement “so God created man in his own image…; male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:27) and in the fact that the divine command, “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it…,” is addressed to both the female and the male (Gen. 1:28).

As we turn to the New Testament, then, to see what it has to say about the three questions suggested earlier —the evidence for women presbyters, the structure and character of the ministry, and the ideal character of the Christian community— we need to be aware of our tendency to find in scripture the answers which support the conclusions to which we would prefer to come. We also need to check, so far as we are able, the reading into scripture of the cultural conditions and presuppositions of our age. Here perhaps the greatest danger is that, having become aware of our unconscious imposition of masculine imagery on the Bible where none existed in the text, we may overreact and play down male orientation where it does appear, in order to make the Bible more palatable to our time. Our aim should be to listen to the scriptural text on its own terms, not on ours.

The easiest of the three questions to answer is the first one, for there is no evidence to indicate that women were presbyters. Of course, it is equally true that the direct evidence for the church office of presbyter being held by men is itself meager. The only certain instance is First Peter 5:1, where the author of the epistle describes himself as a “fellow-presbyter.”(7) Nevertheless, since the office of presbyter seems to have been derived from that of the “elder” in the synagogue, a position held only by males, it seems highly unlikely that women were ever appointed to this office in the Christian Church.

When we turn our attention to the question of the structure and character of the ministry as this is found in the New Testament, we find that there is evidence for the co-existence of different forms of church order. In the Pauline churches the three most important ministries seem to have been those of apostle, prophet, and teacher (1 Cor. 12:28). As far as the evidence for women exercising these ministries is concerned, we are told explicitly what they prophesied (1 Cor. 11:5).8 They apparently were still serving as prophets at the time the Book of Revelation was written, for in Revelation 2:20 we read about a “woman who calls herself a prophet;” compare “those who call themselves apostles, but are not.” (2:2) .

The epistles generally attributed by modern scholarship to St. Paul do not contain the names of anyone who held the office of teacher. In Acts 13:1 the names of the five “prophets and teachers” are all masculine, but since we know that women did function in one of the two offices there mentioned, the absence of a feminine name from this list proves nothing. Direct prohibition of women teaching is to be found in the Pastoral Epistles (1 Tim. 2:12). There the prohibition is based on a deduction from scriptural account of the creation and fall that the female is by nature inferior to the male (vv. 13-14) . The very fact that such a prohibition was deemed necessary and that scriptural justification had to be given for it may indicate that up to that time women had indeed been functioning as teachers, at least in some congregatons. As far as the office of apostle is concerned, we have already seen that the evidence for any women among their number is not negative, but ambiguous.(9)

Although the three most important ministries in the Pauline Church seem to have been those we have just been discussing, the introduction to the Epistle to the Philippians shows that, in Philippi at least, there was another form of governance in the local congregation. St. Paul opens this letter by greeting “the saints in Christ Jesus who are in Philippi, together with the episkopoi and diakonoi.” Here we find two distinct orders ministering to the congregation. Since this is the sole reference to an episkopos in the Pauline correspondence, we can tell nothing about his function. The word diakonos is often used by St. Paul, but usually as a general term for one who ministers either to or on behalf of another. Thus St. Paul calls both Apollos and himself the diakonoi through whose ministrations the congregation at Corinth came to believe in the Gospel (1 Cor. 3:5). The only other possible reference to diakonos as a particular office is in Romans 16:1, where the woman Phoebe is called a diakonos of the congregation at Cenchreae.

The title presbyteros appears nowhere in the genuine Pauline correspondence. However, a contemporary presbyteral form of church order, presumably derived from the synagogue, is attested for the church of Jerusalem and, somewhat later, in I Peter. For a reflection of the threefold ministry of the churches in the Catholic tradition we must turn to the Pastoral Epistles. There for the first time we find mentioned episkopos, presbyteros, and diakonos existing side by side in the same congregaton. But while it is true that episkopos and diakonos appear to designate different offices (cf. 1 Tim. 3:1-13), the distinction between episkopos and presbyteros is unclear. Some scholars find in the pastoral epistles a monarchial episcopate, or at least view the episkopos as primus inter pares; others see episkopos as nothing more than another designation for presbyteros.(10)

Women in the congregations with which the pastoral epistles are concerned do not seem to have been eligible for any of these two or three offices. In the series of injunctions addressed to the episkopos and the diakonos there appears the command that they be “husband of one wife” (1 Tim. 3:2, 12), an injunction obviously applicable only to males. This is not surprising in view of the author’s belief in the natural inferiority of women, whose only salvation is to be found in the proper upbringing of their children (1 Tim. 2:15).

It should be noted that the word “priest” (hiereus) is never used in the New Testament as the designation of an office and ministry in the Christian Church. The only times that it is used of Christians is a metaphor describing the redeemed community as a whole (Rev. 1:6; 5:10; 20:6). To be sure, the English word “priest” is derived from presbyteros, but this etymological derivation should not be taken to imply identity of function. In the Episcopal Church, for example, the priest is associated above all with the function of presiding at the Eucharist; no such association can be attested for the presbyteros in the New Testament.

Our discussion of the ministry in the New Testament Church has not considered the Gospels, for although some of the personnel chosen by Jesus appear in leadership roles in the early Church (cf. Gal. 1:18; 2:9), the shape of the ministry is a post-Easter phenomenon and cannot be traced back to the intention of the earthly Jesus. It is sometimes argued, however, that behind the Church’s restriction of Christian priesthood to males “lies the example of her Founder who… was full of sympathy for women but who nevertheless founded the Church’s ministry by giving it a purely male Apostolate. ”(11) There is no way we can tell from the Gospels themselves whether our Lord considered masculinity a necessary requirement for selection as one of the Twelve. Our only list of qualifications for that group is to be found in Acts 1:21-22. In the account of the replacement of the traitor Judas we are told that the disciples said, “Therefore one of the men (andron, ”males”) who have accompanied us all the time our Lord Jesus went in and went out among us, beginning with the baptism of John until the day he was taken up from us —one of these men must become a witness of his resurrection with us.” The primary qualification is the ability to bear personal witness to the earthly life of Jesus and hence to the identity of the risen Lord with that earthly Jesus. This is a qualification which no one has been able to fulfill since the first century of the Christian era. The fact that the disciples are to function as witnesses may also have a direct bearing on the requirement that they be males, for in first century Judaism only males could act as witnesses. (12)

The broadest of the questions we have asked of the Bible in connection with the ordination of women concerns the ideal nature of the Christian community, an ideal which the Church’s structures should express. Of this ideal and its development Oscar Seitz has written:

All the original disciples of the Lord Jesus were brought up…in the age-old traditions of the Hebrew scriptures, nurtured and centered in synagogue and temple. For them, membership in the church came as no new discovery, for it was a long accepted fact. Yet this very basic fact had to be thoroughly rethought in the light of their recognition of the Messiah in the person of the crucified. One of the most ardent apostles of the Gospel of Christ crucified had at first resisted it to the point of violent persecution. The beginning of the new creation in Paul’s life may have been determined by one decisive moment…. Yet Paul’s own letters suggest that the most far-reaching changes in his old ways of thinking about God’s dealing with men were the result of a long and painful process of growth. In fact, his most distinctive Christian convictions were reached… during the course of an intense controversy with his more conservative brethren of Jewish descent. It was this struggle to secure the inclusion of Gentile converts within the Christian fellowship, on terms of complete equality with Jewish believers, that gave to the church – in the providence of God – its truly universal character. The New Testament simply affirms this unity of all believers to be a fact: “There is Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave there is neither male nor female; for all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28) it was this fact which demanded the most drastic revision of men’s habitual ways of thinking and living.(13)

It should be noted that this fundamental unity of all believers in Jesus Christ is not taken in the New Testament to imply or require the obliteration of distinctions in this world. St. Paul says elsewhere, “let everyone walk as the Lord has assigned to him, as God has called him.”(l Cor. 7:17). The Jew is not to seek to remove the marks of his circumcision, nor is the Gentile to become circumcised (v. 18); the slave is to remain a slave, even if the opportunity should arise for him to obtain his freedom (v. 21). (14) The reason for this is that such earthly distinctions are irrelevant in the kingdom, expected soon in its fullness.

A word should be said about the appearance of women in the ministry of the Pauline Church in the light of the above discussion, for it follows from the principle, “let everyone walk as God has called him.” The list of ministers in First Corinthians 12:28 is part of a discussion of “spiritual gifts” (12:1); it is a charismatic ministry. If God, through his Spirit, has called women, whatever their earthly status, to one of the offices in this ministry, then the woman who is called has no choice but to exercise this ministry. However, spiritual gifts are not always exercised wisely and well by those who have received them. Indeed, the twelfth chapter of First Corinthians was written to correct such misuse, which was causing disorder and dissension in the Church. It rapidly came to be realized that judgments had to be made about spiritual gifts, and the principle on which such judgments were based was that the use of spiritual gifts could not contradict what God had already revealed: “no one speaking by the Spirit of God ever says, ‘Jesus be cursed!’” (12:3). In the Pastoral Epistles this principle is applied to the case of women teachers. There, as we have seen, (15) the second and third chapters of Genesis, interpreted to mean that the female was created inferior to the male, was cited as the prior revelation in the light of which any woman’s claim to be called to the teaching office is judged invalid.

So far we have been examining those things which the Bible has to say which might be relevant to our particular contemporary concern. Now we are faced with the problem of how to apply the data which we have collected. This is not a new problem. Even within the Bible itself, as we shall see, there can be discerned various methods by which the biblical writers sought to use earlier scriptural material in their own times. But there is a difference in outlook here between the biblical world and our age, a difference which has its origin in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – the development of “scientific history” as the mode for understanding the past. This introduced into the consciousness of western man a more distinct concept of the past as distant and different from the present, creating a gap which must be bridged if we wish to see the past as authoritative for our present. How ingrained this outlook toward the past has become in our thinking can be seen if we consider what is commonly meant today by the term “anti-historical.” This term is applied to views which ignore the past as irrelevant. Such views do not deny the existence of the gap between the past and present; quite the contrary. They maintain the gap is a chasm too wide ever to be bridged.

As Christians, with our belief that God acts in history, we are committed to the bridging of this gap. Here we shall be presenting four methods which have been used to accomplish this. Each of the four may be useful in certain circumstances as a means by which we can convey to others our understanding of the implications of God’s past activity for our time. But we believe that only one of them — the last one we shall be discussing – is in the last analysis an adequate and effective way for understanding and appropriating this revelatory activity of God for ourselves.

In Nehemiah 8: 1-8 we are told that Ezra the scribe read to the people “the book of the law of Moses which the Lord had given to Israel” (v. 1). What the author of the Book of Ezra understood this event to be was the reinstitution in the post-exilic community of Jerusalem of the laws which God had handed down to Moses at the time of the exodus, many centuries before. This reproduction of the past in the present is one way in which earlier revelation can be made effective in a later time. What this method does is obliterate the gap between “then” and “now.” If we take this method and apply it to the answer given to the first of the three questions we addressed to the Bible, we receive a very clear directive. Women were not found in the presbyterate of the New Testament Church; therefore they should not be ordained to the presbyterate now.

This directive becomes less clear when we concern ourselves with the ideal character of the Church in the New Testament. If we concentrate on our unity in Christ, in which “there is neither male nor female,” then perhaps a case could be made for the ordination of women to the priesthood. It could be argued that to forbid such ordination to women who have felt a call to this office and ministry and whose vocation has been tested is to deny that unity in Christ. But, as we have seen, this is an interpretation which, despite St. Paul, the New Testament Church in the end did not accept.

It is when we consider the actual structures of the ministry in the New Testament Church that the difficulty of reproducing New Testament church order in our time becomes most obvious. The ministry as we have it today is a post-biblical development, both in much of its form and in some of its functions. The presbyterate to which women were not admitted in New Testament times is not identical with the priesthood of the Episcopal Church. The problems involved in any attempt to impose first century church order today are innumerable. Which church order would we choose — that reflected in the genuine letters of St. Paul or that reflected in the Pastoral Epistles? Whose interpretation of the office of episkopos in the Pastorals would we follow? To which order would we assign the celebration of the Eucharist?

Apart from the practical difficulties of reproducing the New Testament church order in our time, there are, it seems to us, at least two important theological considerations which argue against any such attempt. In the first place, such a procedure is hard to justify on biblical grounds, if the Bible does reveal to us a God who acts in history and whose activity in this realm presumably did not cease in the first century of the Christian era. The denial of validity to post-biblical developments in the ministry, which this method implies, represents a confining of God’s activity to one particular historical period and is a denial of the continuing providential guidance of the Church by the Holy Spirit.

A second objection is that the tendency of such an approach to scripture is to turn gospel into law, thereby perverting the basic character of the New Testament message. The structures of the ministry in the New Testament Church, as the incidental nature of the references to them indicates, were secondary to the promulgation of the Good News and the protection of it from distortion. The fact that there was a freedom to alter both the form of and qualifications for this ministry points in the same direction. The New Testament is not a collection of rules and regulations valid for all time, and to use it as such is to misuse it.

To be sure, both historical development and the freedom to change need to be judged in the light of the biblical revelation. This is the truth which those who would reproduce the past in the present have grasped. Biblical revelation is normative for all future development, all future change. The Bible is the touchstone by which we test whether or not any development or change is a distortion of the truth of the gospel.

There is a way of reproducing biblical time in our time which avoids the practical difficulties inherent in the direct imposition of the past on the present and which recognizes the validity of historical development. We shall call this method “translation.” It operates primarily on the basis of analogy. Something in the present is seen to be similar to something in the past, hence what is said about that past can be applied to the similar present. In Amos 1:9-10 there is an oracle which condemns the Phoenician city-state Tyre and threatens it with God’s punishment. Let us assume, as many scholars have argued, that this particular oracle comes from a later hand than the prophet Amos himself. In this oracle Tyre is attacked for its involvement in slave trade. This is the same sin for which Amos in an earlier day had attacked the cities of the Philistine confederacy (Am. 1:6-8). The author of Amos 1:9-10 saw in Tyre’s activity a case similar to that for which Amos had earlier threatened the Philistines with destruction, and so he applied an analagous penalty to the Tyre of his time.

In using this technique of translation in connection with the question of church order one avoids the difficulties caused by the dissimilarities between the New Testament Church and ours. The differences are acknowledged, but it is pointed out that our present priesthood has evolved from the New Testament presbyterate and is in some way analogous to it. Therefore what can be applied to the New Testament presbyterate can be applied to the Episcopal Church’s priesthood. If women are not found in the presbyterate of the New Testament, they should not be ordained to the priesthood today.

The translation method is often helpful in particular attempts to bridge the gap between past and present, and it grasps the truth that God’s past activity is relevant to our time. But for its proper use it requires a clear understanding of both the past and the present historical situation, in order that the analogies between the two times may be properly drawn. This understanding the translation method by itself cannot supply. There is an Italian proverb which states “a translator (traduttore) is a traitor (traditore).” Every translation is to a greater or lesser extent a distortion of the original, for every translation is of necessity selective. The single Hebrew word dabar, for example, is rendered in the King James Version by about seventy-five different English words. Every time dabar appeared in the Hebrew text the English translators had to decide which of its many connotations suited the particular passage in which it occurred and then select an English word which also fit the passage, but which had a different set of connotations. In effect there are two overlapping circles, each of which has areas which do not correspond to the other. We can illustrate this by reference to Deuteronomy 24:5 (KJV), where the English word “business” was chosen to translate dabar. In this case the circles would look something like this:

HEBREW

ENGLISH

business patronage

A similar selectivity operates in the translation from the past into the present. In working with the analogy between presbyter and priest, the other two questions we addressed to the Bible – church order in the New Testament and the ideal character of that Church — are ignored. Yet they are part of the complex in which New Testament presbyter is to be found. The two circles overlap in the area of similarity between these two offices, but the differences between them, as well as the differences between the ancient and the modern church orders in general, lie on one side or the other of this overlap.

modern church order

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An effect of this selectivity is a tendency when using the translation method to read the present into the past. Just as when one reads the Bible in English one’s understanding is influenced by the connotations of the English words, so is one’s understanding of the past influenced by one’s present experience. Whereas the reproduction of the past in the present tends to impose the present on the past. In fact both methods which we have so far discussed operate in different ways more to obliterate the distinction between past and present than to bridge the gap between them. It is this which makes the translation method not too satisfactory a tool for our understanding of the past and its relationship to our time.

The third method we shall examine is one which is aware of the past as an entity distinct from the present. It goes to the past and seeks to abstract from it timeless truth. It tries to discover the substance of the biblical message by removing that message from the accidents of its cultural conditioning. St. Paul did much the same sort of thing in Galatians 4:21-5:1, with his allegorization of the Genesis account of Hagar and Ishmael (Gen. 21:1-21). What St. Paul understood as the historical event of Hagar’s expulsion by Abraham is removed from its historical context and turned into a theological argument for the truth that Christians are not under the necessity of obedience to the Mosaic Law: “for freedom Christ has set us free” (Gal. 5:1).

Using this method one could argue that the fact that women do not seem to have been admitted to the presbyterate in New Testament times is due entirely to the inferior position which women held in that culture. If women were not capable of being witnesses, if women’s salvation depended upon their bringing their children up properly, if the male “is the image and glory of God, but woman is the glory of man” (1 Cor. 11:7), the wonder is not that women were not admitted to the presbyterate, but that women found any place in church order at all. However, times have changed, and our society as a whole no longer thinks of women as inferior to men. Thus we can now see that this older view of women, which prevented their acceptance as presbyters becomes irrelevant to the discussion of the ordination of women in our time.

The same method can be used to answer another question which is sometimes raised(16) and which we have not yet examined. It is pointed out that in the world of both the Old and the New Testaments it was quite common, outside the cultus of the old and the new Israel, to find women functioning as priests. And it is argued, quite correctly, that their absence in the Israelite and Christian cultus must have been the result of a conscious choice. The reasons for this choice are different for the Old Testament and the New. In ancient Israel it is related to the character of those religions which had both male and female cultic functionaries. These religions were polytheistic and often took the form of a fertility cult, complete with sacred prostitution. Against them the religion of the God of Israel had a long and difficult struggle, and it was probably as a safeguard against the introduction of such pagan practices into the religion of Israel that women were not admitted as priests. In the New Testament, as we have seen,(17) the term “priest” nowhere appears as the designation of an order of ministry in the Church. The avoidance of this term is to be related to the sufficiency of Christ’s sacrifice. To have used the term “priest” in a world where priests were offering sacrifice to their gods on a regular basis would have raised questions about that sufficiency. But these cults no longer exist, cultural conditions have changed, and so the presence or absence of women in the priesthood of the Old Testament or of the use of the term “priest” for an office and ministry of the Church in the New Testament is no longer determinative for our time, with its different cultural conditions.

What is determinative for our time is the truth about the Church that is revealed in the New Testament. It is to the ideal Church that we must turn our attention. Our task is to move as best we can toward the realization of this ideal and to see that our present church structures reflect it as much as possible. The ministry of the early Church, in so far as it was culturally conditioned, is not relevant to this task, for ours is a new age with new conditions. If all who are Christ’s are “Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise” (Gal. 3:29), inheritors of a kingdom in which racial, social and sexual distinctions are no bar to full participation in its life, then such distinctions should not be a bar to full participation in all aspects of the life of the Church, the anticipation of that kingdom. To deny women who feel a call to the priesthood and whose vocation has been tested by the Church ordination to that office and ministry is to fall short of the ideal which the New Testament sets forth.

Attractive as this argument is to those who, like the authors of this paper, are in favor of the ordination of women to the Catholic priesthood, it seems to ignore a basic fact about the character of revelation as Christians understand it. In discussing the significance of the dates given to oracles and visions in the Book of Ezekiel, Walther Zimmerli remarks, “the dating unmistakably gives expression to the fact that the word of Yahweh, spoken to the prophet and preached by him, is not timeless truth….”(18) The prophetic word is addressed to a particular situation existing at a particular time, and it is this very particularity which gives it its power. What is true of the prophetic word would seem to be true of biblical revelation as a whole. The Bible is the record of God’s encounter with a particular people who lived in a particular place at a particular time. It is, in two words, culturally conditioned. Surely this is one of the implications of the Incarnation. To attempt to discern timeless truth behind the culturally conditioned revelation is to make abstract that which was originally concrete. Moreover, while it is true that this third approach does not involve a distortion of the present or the past as do the first and second methods we discussed, it still does not take the past seriously on its own terms. By abstracting from the cultural conditions of the past, it ignores the very thing which gives the past its particular identity. In its own way this method too obliterates the past.

The fourth method, the one which we prefer, we shall call, borrowing the term from Krister Stendahl, the bi-lingual approach. A person who is bi-lingual is a person who does not have to translate from one language to another, since he or she is equally at home in both. Both languages are an integral part of such a person’s experience. The bi-lingual method for bridging the gap between the past and the present operates in a similar way. We immerse ourselves to the greatest degree possible in a particular past in order to make that past as much a part of our own experience as possible. When we speak what we believe to be God’s word to the present or when we seek to discern God’s activity today, we speak or seek as one whose understanding has been shaped by our experience of God’s activity in times past. In our own person we become the bridge between then and now. When Second Isaiah talks of God’s bringing the exiles back from Babylon to Jerusalem in terms which recall the exodus from Egypt, or when the author of the Gospel According to St. Matthew structures his account in such a way as to recall the ministry of Moses, neither writer seems to be thinking in terms of analogy. The return from Babylon is not “like” anything which God has done before; it is a “new thing” (Isa. 43:19). Nor is Jesus “like” Moses, and to make such an analogy would indeed be putting new wine in old bottles (Mt. 9:17). In both cases, it would seem, the writers perceived God’s new activity in their present time as consonant with His activity in the past of their people and sought to convey this by the imagery and structure which they used. It was their perception of God’s activity in the past that enabled them to discern and proclaim what he was now doing. In a somewhat different vein the statement made by Henri Nouwen concerning the modes of Christian activity today seems to be based on a similar understanding. He writes, “when the imitation of Christ does not mean to live a life like Christ, but to live your life as authentically as Christ lived his, then there are many ways and forms in which a man can be a Christian.”(19)

Of all the methods discussed, this is the most difficult to use. It is never easy to become bi-lingual. There is always the danger that one or another language will predominate, that one or another will deteriorate. We can become so immersed in the past that we ignore the present. Nevertheless, we prefer this method because it seems to us to take into account the strengths of the other three, while avoiding their weaknesses. Since it guards the integrity of the present, it can accept the historical developments which led to the present and at the same time exercise the freedom to change. It also recognizes that such developments and such freedom need to be judged in the light of the biblical revelation and that God’s past activity is relevant to our time. It does this by making that revelation and activity an integral part of our own experience, so that we cannot avoid “thinking biblically” in our time. Yet by not looking for any one-to-one correspondence, either direct or analogical, between the Bible and our time, it refrains from turning the New Testament into a code of behaviour, refrains from turning Gospel into Law. There is neither imposition of the past upon the present nor of the present upon the past, for the bi-lingual interpreter lives and is at home in both worlds. Far from seeking to remove God’s truth from its cultural conditioning, we immerse ourselves in that ancient culture, seeking to discern God there not in spite of it, but in and through it.

Is it God’s will that women be ordained to the priesthood of the Episcopal Church at this time? This is a question each of us must face and answer for ourselves. Many factors will and should enter into our answer. But one factor for a Christian must be his or her experience of God’s dealing with his people as this has been preserved for us in the definitive document of our faith. The Bible contains no direct answer to that question, and the tossing of individual texts back and forth from one side of this issue to the other is no substitute for the immersion of ourselves in Scripture. Only if this is done with honesty and integrity will the answer which is given be in any sense truly biblical.

Footnotes

1. Richard Hooker, “ A preface to them that seek (as they see it) the reformation of the laws and orders ecclesiastical in the Church of England, II, (The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (London: J. M. Dent, 1907), Vol. I, pp. 89f.)

2. Compare, e.g., William Sanday and Arthur C. Headlam, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (The International Critical Commentary) (New York: Scribner’s, 1896), pp. 422-423, who maintain the name is masculine, and C. H. Dodd, The Epistle of Paul to the Romans (The Moffatt New Testament Commentary) (New York: Harper, n. d.), p. 239, who remarks, “Chrysostom, preaching on this passage, saw no difficulty in a woman-apostle; nor need we.”

3. Carl E. Braaten, History and Hermeneutics (New Directions in Theology Today, II Philadelphia: Westminster, 1966), p . 20.

4. George Adam Smith, The Book of the Twelve Prophets, revised edition. (New York: Harper ,n.d.), p. 435.

5. Phyllis Tribble, “Depatriarchalizing in Biblical Interpretation,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, XLI ( 1973) , 30-48.

6. Edwin M. Good, Irony in the Old Testament (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1965), p. 84, n.4.

7. The use of “presbyter” in the Johannine correspondence (2 Jn. 1:1; 3 Jn. 1: 1) does not seem to refer to an ecclesiastical office, but to one of “a group of teachers who formed a link between the apostles and the next generation,” a usage of the term confined to a short time in the Province of Asia (C. H. Dodd, The Johannine Epistles (The Moffatt New Testament Commentary) (New York: Harper, 1946, p. 155). Barsabbas and Silas, identified as “leading men among the brethren,” who were selected by “the apostles and the presbyters, with the whole church” to accompany Paul and Barnabas to Antioch ( Acts 15: 22), may well have been presbyters, but this is not certain.

8. This appears to be in direct contradiction to St. Paul’s injunction, later in the same Epistle (1. Cor. 14: 33b-36), that “the women should keep silence in the churches.” Some have therefore argued that 14: 33b-36 is an interpolation into the text , and they cite the fact that in some Western texts (D, G) vv. 34-35 are found in a different location as an indication of their secondary character. Others think that St. Paul here is only forbidding women to join in a discussion of the prophecy (see C. K. Barrett, A Commentary on the First Epistle to the Corinthians (Black’s New Testament Commentaries) (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1968), pp. 330-333 . The second view seems more likely to us to be correct, in view of St. Paul’s instruction to the women that, if they have any questions, they should wait until they get home, and then ask their husbands (v. 35).

9 . See above, p. 4.

10. See the discussion in Paul Feine, Johannes Behm and Werner Georg Kummel, Introduction to the New Testament Nashville: Abingdon, 1965), pp. 268-269.

11. Eric Mascall, “Women and the Priesthood of the Church,” American Church News, XXXVII, 3 (March, 1971) , 6.

12. See Haye van der Meer, Women Priests in the Catholic Church? A Theological-Historical Investigation (Philadelphia: Temple University, 1973), pp. 11-14.

13. Oscar J. F. Seitz, One Body and One Spirit. A Study of the Church in the New Testament (Greenwich: Seabury, 1960), pp. 170-171.

14. The Greek of 1 Cor. 7: 21 is ambiguous. It could mean, “if you have the opportunity to gain your freedom, make use of it” (cf. RSV), and a substantial minority of commentators have so understood it. But the context seems to favor the slave remaining a slave ( cf. 1 Tim. 6: 1-2).

15. See above, p. 9.

16. Cf. George William Rutler, Priest and Priestess ( Ambler, Pa, Trinity Press, 1973), pp. 57-58.

17. See above, pp. 10-11.

18. Walther Zimmerli, Ezechiel (Biblischer Kommentar, Altes Testament XIII/1) (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1969) , p. 42.

19. Henri J. M. Nouwen, The Wounded Healer (Garden City: Doubleday, 1972), p. 103.