The Woman at the Well as Ecclesiological Type: Fornication and Idol Worship as Hyperbole of Protestantism

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What if the Woman at the Well images a Mystery of Christian Division? Read below for suggestion.

In Part I, we looked at how the Old Testament North, which separated from God’s true Kingdom of Old, can be seen as a type of all Christian division, and not just heresy or just schism. Now we will probe further type of division in the Woman at the Well in the New Testament.

Toward that end, we can ask, what if there were another image of New Covenant ecclesiology? There is: the Samaritan woman at the well! This makes sense firstly because the Samaritans were the epitome of the unorthodox to the Jews of Jesus’ time. Too, the Samaritans were not only unorthodox but descendants of the original North. Hence, the Samaritans are in a perfect position as the Old Testament unorthodox to bear, within themselves, the totality of phases and types of NT unorthodoxy, or division.

Human Sexuality as Image of Holy Orders

Now, to begin, we note the woman, per the words of the Savior, has five husbands, and then a live-in fornicator. This suggests a mystical tie between sexuality and Christian division. Indeed, this is precisely the case, as follows.

Firstly, we know that human sexuality between man and woman is an image of the spiritual spousal relationship between the God and His People, between the Creator and the creature. How? Well, the mystery is this: physically, the act of love between man and woman images the spiritual relationship between God, the Creator, and the creature. More specifically, simply consider the blatant similarities: man has a proceeding sexuality, and woman has a receptive sexuality. Man holds the seed of life that is originally infused. Woman, effectively, receives it. This is the precise nature of the seed of “truth and grace” in the spiritual life: God, the Creator, is the ultimate source of all truth and grace, not the creature. The creature, effectively, is in a receptive position with regard to truth and grace. We creatures do not determine the truth; God does. God is the truth! “I am the way, the truth, and the life!” Moreover, all grace is a finite created participation in the Divine life and love of the Trinity. It must come from God; it must be given by God. The creature does not create grace. The creature receives it.

Similarly, just as man overshadows woman from above [“The Holy Spirit shall come upon you, and the power of the Most High shall overshadow you.”] and enters her inner being, lovingly infusing the total gift of life, the seed of life, so God overshadows the creature, enters its inmost being, the soul, and lovingly infuses grace for the will and truth for the intellect. The grace is conceived and brought forth in new life, a new life that proceeds from the creature to the outer world, meaning, the creature renewed at Mass with God’s Words and strength in the Eucharist goes forth to “love and serve the Lord”, to bring the life and truth it received to others through acts of charity and evangelization.

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The Catholic Balance of Male and Female and Why only Men can be Priests

We now come to essential theology of the Incarnation and Holy Orders. We have just seen that God created male to female to image, at least in one layer, Creator to creature. For this very reason, if God makes Himself flesh, He absolutely must take on the sex which images of the Creator. Hence, the Son must become male. This also indicates why the Sacred Scripture and Tradition effectively use male pronouns for God: Father, Son, Lord. This, incidentally, also vindicates the Church’s tradition that only men may be ordained. How? Well, priests are in persona Christi. They mediate truth and grace of the Creator, as though they were the source, and therefore they must bear the image of the Creator in the sexual analogy, hence, the male. That is, priests and bishops are “spouses” of their respective Christian communities. This gives us a gateway to view the “husbands” and “live-in lover” of the Samaritan woman in light of the sexual mystery of Holy Orders.

The First of Five Husbands, Peter

To move now into the essence of analyzing the woman’s “husbands,” we see that for the first thousand years of the Gospel, the woman, the Christians that would later divorce Christ, had one spouse, one earthly spouse, Peter, for, as every priest is a Christological Bridegroom to his parish, Peter’s Spouse is the whole Church.

The Next Four Husbands: the Remnant Four Apostolic Sees of Schism

Then, in the Great Schism, the first epic rupture of Christian unity, the woman divorced Peter and was left with four “lesser husbands,” the other four Apostolic Sees, and no one could claim her exclusively. These are the other four great brothers of Peter, who had left Him.

Protestantism: the Religion of Pseudo-Husbands

Still later, if the North images all Christian division, then, in Protestantism, all Apostolic spousal relations were abandoned in favor “live-in” husbands. What do we mean? We mean that no man is truly a spouse of a parish or of the Church, or of a diocese, and so forth, unless he has validly received Holy Orders. The only true men of God, are deacons, priests, and bishops of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches.

Protestantism, the most epic and catastrophic division, cut itself from the lifeblood of Apostolic Succession. Luther was merely a monk, and so could not ordain any priest. Ditto, Calvin was just priest, not a bishop. Admittedly, for a while, the bishops of Anglicanism retained Apostolic Succession and were merely in schism and not heresy. But eventually, their theology betrayed the Apostolic Gospel, and subsequent rites of Holy Orders were invalid and no longer efficacious. Hence, Apostolic Succession died out, so that, today, the English communities are heretics like Lutherans, Calvinists, and so forth.
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