The Divide That Is There
S. M. Hutchens on Egalitarian Christianity
Reduced to essentials, my critique (see Symposium, Touchstone 12.3, May/June 1999) of the Christian Women’s Declaration was that its call for cooperation in evangelism and church renewal was futile, or nearly so. This is because the theological and practical divide between its signatories who believe women can be ordained to the pastoral or presbyterial offices and those who don’t is too wide to accommodate cooperation in efforts requiring close agreement on what the gospel is, and what therefore success in its promulgation would look like.
I knew this assertion would sound radical and indigestible, so I summoned C. S. Lewis to my help, for this is just what he says, in so many gentle words, in his little essay “Priestesses in the Church?” There he makes it clear that a church with female presbyters does not have the appearance of being Christian at all. (His duplicity with the tiresome and unreasonable Hutchens seems to have been overlooked by my critics.) The institution, in other words, is foreign to Christianity, analogous to the substitution of a circle for the cross as its principal symbol. Those who advance it have misunderstood the gospel at a fundamental level.
In the critique I am at pains to say that cooperation is possible in many areas between people who disagree on many issues—but not here, not between those who believe in ordained women and those who don’t, not on evangelization and church renewal, not much anyway. The reason is that those who ordain women have put themselves in the anomalous position of no longer looking like the Church, so that the objections of other Christians to working with them on distinctively Christian projects is based not simply on a diverging emphasis or interpretation of a common history and canon, but on the identity of the Christian faith itself. It is not analogous to the difference between Calvinist and Arminian, Catholic and Protestant, or the Roman and Eastern Catholic. It is more like that between the orthodox Christian and the Arian or Docetist.
The Reverend Joy Moore would not agree. She holds that the line between the Christian and the non-Christian is to be drawn between radical feminist thought and that which is essentially Evangelical, and is dismayed that “Christians would be silent with the gospel message in order to invalidate the testimony of women called clergy speaking in this coalition against the menaces of society.” This is a particularly wicked way of putting it—as if those who cannot accept clergywomen are willing to see people be damned just to make their point. Her principal contention, however, is common among Evangelicals, the stock-in-trade of many of its most influential journals and institutions: It is “radical” feminism that is essentially unchristian while the friendlier, egalitarian kind, the kind that doesn’t hate men but welcomes them as different but equal partners in the reception of the grace of the Spirit, is resplendently Christian.
No, it is not Christian at all. The point we have been trying to make ad nauseam in Touchstone, and make once again here, is that this nicer brand of feminism, so attractive to enculturated Evangelicals, negates the maleness of men and the femaleness of women by making them interchangeable in offices that are inherently male in character, and is therefore just as foreign to Christianity as the more obviously unchristian kind. In the long run it will prove even more destructive, since it decorates the neutering instruments so nicely that large numbers of Evangelical men, following their intelligentsia, are lining up for the “equalization” procedure. Radical feminism, which brandishes the shears in full view, holds no such temptations.
Of course Moore is right in identifying the loss of unity as a terrible problem, but who created it? Those who, confronted with the radical novelty of female clergy, cannot validate them as true Christian pastors? Or those who press the innovation on them with an insistence that in many places has verged upon violence, especially to clergy who will not submit? We see clear evidence of the belief behind this insistence in Moore’s charge that those who will not cooperate are so desperately immoral as to be careless of the souls of the lost. Given this level of conviction, is it any wonder that even in places where “moderate” feminism is regnant, traditional opinions on the ministries of men and women are treated as something of which the Church must purify itself, and those who hold such opinions may be accused of withholding the gospel message in order to invalidate the testimony of ordained women?
The opinion on the subject found among the Touchstone senior editors, Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox, is based upon belief that the man, not by any merit of his own, but by virtue of his maleness, is an icon of Christ (that is, a distinctly male participation in him) that the woman, not by any demerit of her own, cannot be by virtue of her femaleness, and that this unique participation has been understood from the beginning of the Christian age, by dominical and apostolic teaching and appointment, to entail the responsibilities of “headship” in family and Church. To assert otherwise (and this is always done—most dangerously, I might add—in the name of the Holy Spirit) is to propose something alien to the faith, something that does not grow out of Christian teaching and practice, but rather is dissonant with it, requiring a secular notion of doctrinal evolution entirely foreign to the Church.
Mrs. Knippers simply does not agree that the difference is that profound. She treats it as no more or less serious than the disagreements that stand, in her example, between Calvinists and Arminians. Consequently, she is able to write off these emphatic concerns with condescending good humor. One receives the impression from her comments that when we reach her level of development we will calm down, treat the disagreement with no more alarm than it deserves, and give the revisionists appropriate credit for being honest Christian folk. The possibility of this reaction was one of the reasons I summoned C. S. Lewis to my side—he is less easy to patronize than I am. And with him I repeat the charge: female presbyters are not, and cannot reasonably be construed as, a Christian institution. Wherever they appear, the appearance of the Church is brought into radical doubt.
Which brings me to the Reverend Donna Hailson, of whose divine call to her office I am clearly skeptical, and who is the most visibly upset with me of any of the respondents. Against my notions of the pastorate or presbyterate she invokes Baptist beliefs about the priesthood of all believers. In these matters, however, we go beyond what Baptists have believed on the nature of the universal priesthood to something more elemental. If the Baptist understanding clears the way for women ministers, then why have Baptist pastors traditionally been male? Inattentiveness to the implications of their beliefs? If you asked the Baptists who raised me why they didn’t—and still don’t—have female pastors, the firm and considered answer would be that it is unbiblical. Whether or not their interpretation of the Bible, including the passages to which Hailson refers to confound me, would satisfy Baptists who ordain women is less to the point here than the beliefs about the ministry they share with those who regard their pastors as part of a male-only sacramental priesthood. (In my own writing I have always taken care not to speak of priestly, but presbyterial or pastoral ordination, signifying the common historical ground between the churches.) Each would have a different understanding of the Christian presbyterate, but would agree that only men should be pastors or presbyters—Baptists customarily call men who function as ruling elders deacons—that the Bible teaches this, the churches have always concurred, and those who see it otherwise err.
One readily grants, and is thankful for, our shared confession, but in the eyes of such as we, egalitarian Christianity is based on an error in doctrine, therefore contains a virus we would be unwilling to spread by the actions and processes that accompany united efforts in evangelization and church renewal. Those who share my convictions do not think it a small problem—a matter upon which disagreement may be placed to the side—but a mortally dangerous one that reaches quickly to the very heart of the doctrine of God, and is in high likelihood the principal heresy against which the Western Church of our own age is called to struggle. We are not assured that egalitarians mean what we do when they as evangelists preach “Christ,” for we see their defective anthropology as entailing a defective Christology as well. As for renewing the churches, we are quite certain we do not agree with them on what success in the venture would look like.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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