But with women’s ordination you seem to use your own value system and the changing tides of modernity to guide you.
It seems that no matter how often I say that my position is based on orthodox Christian theological premises, no one will believe me. No matter how often I make a Christological argument, I will be told that I’m just making a sociological argument based on modern fashion.
You know full well that the Fathers condemned WO. It was one of the main irritations they had with Gnosticism (amongst all the other insanity they taught) that they allowed women “ministers.”
Yes, indeed. And that’s a very instructive case. The Gnostics allowed women to lead because the Gnostics thought the body didn’t matter. That supports my interpretation of the situation, which is that *everyone *in the ancient world thought women were inferior on the physical, biological level, while on the level of the soul they were not only equal but indistinguishable from men. Hence the Gnostic language about “making the female male.” It was the body that made some people inferior to others.
In the context of those cultural assumptions, the Fathers were absolutely right to reject women’s ordination.
Nobody has taught that women are imperfect instances of nature, inferior, or lacking in any dignity that men enjoy.
That’s just plain false, historically. St. Thomas Aquinas taught this, and he differed from other patristic medieval theologians only in the depth and rigor with which he expressed himself.
I don’t understand how people can read any patristic or medieval theologian at any length and not recognize that they were extremely “misogynistic” by our standards. Not just by my standards–not just by the standards of the Episcopal Church–but by the standards of Pope Benedict or JPII or Peter Kreeft or even C. S. Lewis, though Lewis came a lot closer to the traditional view than the others mentioned.
The repeated claim to the contrary by conservatives is a case of willful blindness to reality.
Now either we should return to the traditional view whole hog, affirming that women lack the “ruling faculty” and should have no position of authority in society, but should be treated as less rational and more passionate beings who cannot be expected to be intellectually or (usually) morally equal to men–or we should accept the fact that we don’t believe that any more and look at the consequences
in the light of the unchanging truth of the Christian Faith.
They are simply different. Different is not inferior.
You think that. It’s a peculiarly modern idea. Show me one theologian before the Reformation who thought this way. (Not that the Reformation changed things in itself, but after that point you start to see some expressions of a more egalitarian approach.)
I’m specifically talking about gender, but the idea of difference in equality would have seemed nonsensical to Aquinas at least (and I think to premodern theologians generally) no matter how it was applied. Sure, two different beings may be roughly equal in dignity, but only because one of them is superior in some ways and others in others. The idea that difference in itself could be complementary rather than hierarchical is, it seems to me, alien to premodern European thought.
If you were to ask Ignatius of Antioch, Clement, Augustine of Hippo, Anselm, Ambrose, Cyprian, Leo the Great, Aquinas, and heck even Thomas Cranmer, Luther, and Calvin if women should be ministers, I don’t think they’d acquiesce to the same sense of urgency to ordain women that you express.
I don’t see where I have expressed any urgency. I belong to a church where women are already being ordained. That is not an aspect of this church to which I have any objection in itself. However, the reasons many Episcopalians believe in women’s ordination are clearly flawed in many cases, and I think that the decision to go ahead with women’s ordination was a tragic mistake.
I’m concerned by the fact that the world sees the Church as the last outpost of sexism, so sure, I’d like to see this resolved sooner rather than later. But that is not a justification for Episcopalians charging ahead as we have done–if the “slippery slope” argument indicates nothing else, it indicates that we ordained women for the wrong reasons and as part of a broader agenda that was unorthodox.
You’re doing a lot of rationalizing
That’s a pejorative way of saying that I’m arguing on the basis of orthodox Christian theology for a position that you have simply decided a priori can’t be defended on that basis. So you don’t bother actually to engage what I’m saying.
Edwin
