The Head of the Church
S. M. Hutchens on Women’s Ordination
A reply to Reverend Raphael-Nakos (whose letter immediately follows)
One of the unhappiest duties of writing what I do about women’s ordination is the responsibility of replying to devout believers who endorse it, yet wish to identify themselves as orthodox Christians. It gives me no pleasure, but I am convinced this must be done as many times as necessary to convince those who have been influenced by the propaganda of egalitarianism—and yes, I believe it is indeed egalitarianism we are dealing with here—that they are not orthodox, at least on this point.
It must be said once again that the female pastorate is not at the base of our concerns. The appointment of women to the offices Scripture and tradition assign to men is a symptom of a more profound and dangerous evil, expressing itself on deeper levels in sexual perversion and the rejection of other divisions that comprise not only the order of creation, but also the godhead from which it has arisen and to which it is related through the eternal Son. The ordination of women, as its more thoroughgoing theological advocates are perfectly aware, is not simply a matter of fairness, but must find its ultimate root and consequence in the “adjustment” of all things in heaven and earth.
We hold the Christian pastorate, an office of great symbolic importance, as exclusively male not simply because we are offended by lady ministers or find them bad for business, but because they, like other attempts to improve upon divine order, are harbingers of chaos and a denial of God, who must in the end be “re-imagined” to justify such innovations. This is why those who ordain women rarely stop at that, for they find (as C. S. Lewis said they must) that there is an ineluctable logic to this alteration that reaches out from there, passing through all creation into the very life of God.
Only a few on either side of the question seem to understand this. Those who do from what we at Touchstone see as the “other side” have mostly left the Church, understanding that they cannot have Christianity and lady ministers too. What they regard as the moral necessity of the elevation of women beyond Judeo-Christian categories requires the rejection of a faith that is constitutionally patriarchal, hence, in their view, immoral. We on this side who share their understanding of the nature of the faith, but believe it good, appear as radical as they do to people who wish to have God as their Father and female pastors in the bargain. And so we come to the letter from Reverend Raphael-Nakos, which speaks not only for its writer, but also for a great many others who are trying to cleave to the middle of this very tilted path.
Tradition & tradition
Let me first go to what I find its most curious part, the discussion of capital-T Tradition as over against traditions small-t. The first includes the unnegotiables, indispensable to orthodoxy, like the Creed. The second includes those matters, women’s ordination prominent among them, in which we have been granted evangelical freedom, and it is not good for the likes of me to proclaim the existence of a great church divide here: “I fully respect the decision of those churches that do not ordain women and accept it that they, for their own reasons and purposes, choose to maintain a male-only clergy. . . . Likewise I only ask of Hutchens to respect those of us who live and participate in churches with differing traditions concerning this issue.”
Several things strike me here. The first is the connection of tradition to the institution of the female pastorate. I admit to becoming more impatient than I used to be with use of this term to mean “what we do now.” If even the distinctive beliefs or practices of Protestant denominations seem fragile beneath the weight of doctrine and allegiance this word implies in the context of a Church that is two millennia old, what can we say of “traditions” that have only been with us for a generation or two?
Friends who are part of the Wesleyan genealogy are fond of reminding me that their tradition sits looser to female ordination than that of many other churches. Perhaps so, but in the scope of the history of the Church as a whole Wesleyanism is a newcomer and still in the process of presenting its credentials. If it carries the mark of women’s ordination, this does not argue for its catholicity. (I say this with deep respect for the great Wesley and for what the best of Methodism has to tell us.) It is also clear that this sitting loose does not mean what many modern Methodists wish it meant: that the ordination of women as it is being done in the present would have been approved by Methodism in the past. My 1912 Discipline speaks only of men in the offices of preacher, pastor, deacon, elder, and bishop. The deaconess’s office is reserved for women. Methodists, it would appear, have been careful to recognize the gifts of women, but not to regularize their ordination in the offices of pastoral authority.
One senses that the use of “tradition” as a practical synonym for “belief generally held among us” is a signal that it is to be regarded as a tenet of the group and therefore immune from criticism by the ecumenically minded. To this I reply that the tradition of women’s pastoral ordination does not appear to be a tenet of historical Methodism, or that if it is, it is not old enough to count as tradition in a sense cognizable by other Christians, even if it were as old as Methodism itself. One must here contrast the tradition of not ordaining women, which the writer treats as a barely explicable parochial obsession that some churches follow “for their own reasons and purposes”—as if it were not the universal practice of all but the strangest sects from the beginning of the Christian age!
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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