God, Gender, and the Pastoral Office
by S. M. Hutchens
In the brave new world of the public elementary school my daughters are confronted daily with graphic assurances that boys and girls, men and women, are mere variations on the theme "human." This means that as a Christian father I am obliged to supplement their education by explaining that while I have no direct objections to women doctors or truck drivers, the differences between men and women are less superficial than their schoolbooks imply. The deeper problem involved is that in omitting something about us they are also omitting some things about the God in whose image and likeness we are made. There are connections between what God is and what we are that define our existence, that tell us what we are as human beings who are men and women, connections which the egalitarian gospel of modern culture and the secularizing churches must because of its very nature deny or overlook.
The time will no doubt come when they will ask me why if a woman can direct a ship or a school she can't be a pastor. It is a reasonable question. Anyone can see that women can teach, address the congregation, and handle the elements of the Lord's Supper as well as men can. Why should they be forbidden to do these things? What denies them but an absurd old prejudice, akin to the sort that regarded women as incapable of education because of their intellectual inferiority? Perhaps Daddy, as nice an old fellow as he might otherwise be, has a bit of a problem, and as soon as his consciousness is raised to where it can accept women's equality, the difficulty with their pastoral ordination will likewise disappear.
But perhaps not. Those who favor the pastoral ordination of women are frequently willing to attribute little more than reactionary motives to those opposed--who for their own part justify the attribution all too often. It must be understood, however, that the theology which excludes women from the pastorate is not shallow, desultory, or (necessarily) the product of mere conservatism. Nor does it depend on a few verses in the Pauline writings of the New Testament. Rather, the well-known statements of St. Paul on the place of women in the church simply represent, explicate, and apply, a massive and logically connected body of doctrine common to both the Jewish and Christian scriptures and the indelibly patriarchal faith they describe so that no argument for women’s ordination based upon egalitarian premises can persist in Christian theology. It might have been otherwise: a strong rationale for women’s ordination may be developed along ancillary--Marian, in its purest form--lines, which I will identify below, with apostolic direction, on grounds other than those upon which it has been denied. But it was not, and the church has no authority to alter the dominical constitution in which its practice of pastoral ordination is defined. Whatever theoretical arguments, even in the context of orthodox theology, might be adduced for women’s ordination to pastoral offices, they fail because the offices are defined within scripture and tradition as patriarchal.
Those who, therefore, wish to reject the traditional practice on egalitarian grounds--and that is where the vast majority of the debate has taken place--should know, as the more radical feminists have repeatedly attempted to tell them, that they cannot pluck this piece from the whole without causing a collapse far more extensive than they have shown themselves willing to anticipate. The pastorate as an exclusively male office has from the church’s beginning been placed in the ground not merely in religious and social convention, but in the very life of the Holy Trinity they profess to worship. Because God the Creator is the depth and origin of all meaning, no created distinction, especially any distinction found in the creature made in his image, can be insignificant. The office of the man as pastor is part of this structure of meaning that has its deepest root in the person of God himself. It cannot be overthrown without denying his character and bringing confusion to the churches that presume to do it.
One needn't look far for the evidence of this. The institution of women's ordination is farthest progressed, as might be expected, in the part of Christendom already most deeply ravaged by modernism, whose faith is the weakest and most deeply compromised, and whose spiritual life is the most secularized and chaotic. In mainline Protestantism, and increasingly among Evangelicals, the presumption that women are as ordainable as men is so strong it is generally believed there is no basis upon which fair-minded people can oppose it. If one is tempted to wonder whether there are good reasons to move against this flow, given that for the last two millennia it has gone in another direction, he is assured by august legions of bishops and professors that there is not. No less an authority than the archbishop of Canterbury has said that the heretofore universal practice of ordaining men only is based on a “serious theological error.” With this he joins a chorus of church leaders who affirm (usually “joyfully") that our generation (guided by them) has advanced so far in faith and knowledge that it can unblushingly declare the Church's belief and practice to have been wrong up until now. This being the case, they have felt it their duty to correct a state of affairs into which even our gentle Lord feared to tread because he was, they typically say, unwilling to offend or confuse his contemporaries. Making himself equal to God, he was simply unable to take the more radical step of making women equal to men.
Some Concessions, Some Hard Words
Let us first acknowledge that apparent novelty is no conclusive argument against women's ordination, or for that matter, against any alleged innovation in the Church. The Lord did not scruple to offend tradition, even that of pious and reasonable traditionalists, when it was being used to diminish some more fundamental truth--truth that was heard by his frequently bewildered disciples as nothing less than new revelation. Christ and his apostles scandalized a great many biblically informed conservatives. There is nothing, for example, more disturbing to mere conservatism than St. John's record of his teaching that "He who believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these, because I go to the Father." When this is added to the possibility that there are certain things the churches have been unable to receive because they are not ready for what St. Paul called "solid food” the argument that refusal to ordain women is based upon an expiring indulgence cannot be dismissed out of hand.
It would be easier to reject the institution as eccentric if it could be treated as the exclusive domain of the feminist ideologue. But in fact it cannot be, for many who believe in it firmly, or at least do not find themselves opposed, do not call themselves feminists, and their allegiance to the creeds appears otherwise firm. Among these are no small number of theologians who appear able to pull up all the strongest counter-arguments by the roots, yet without seeming to attack the main lines of Christian authority. Even if at the end of the day one is still not quite convinced of the rightness of it all, if there are, for example, certain parts of the Epistles that persist in giving trouble, it still may appear that the sum of the arguments put forward against appointment of women pastors is not conclusive enough to defeat the sum of those opposing. Placing the burden of proof on the innovator does no good, because he can in fact produce proofs, and whatever weaknesses they may have are more than adequately compensated by the receptivity of the forums to which they are taken. In the Protestant world not even the strongest presumptions and demonstrations are decisive enough to take into battle against ideas and practices that have already become "tradition" under the sponsorship of some of the brightest and most powerful people in the churches. Where women's ordination is fait accompli, the only real choice that has been given is to accept it with good grace or leave.
Although I hope what I am going to say in this essay is said courteously and with no unnecessary cause for offense, I am not going to mince words. This is a tu quoque, addressed particularly to church leaders who believe that those opposed to ordaining women are guilty of a serious theological error, or who are willing to allow all this to slip by as though it were a mere adjustment to a mere convention that conservatives will oppose because they are naturally inimical to change. No, friends, you are the ones who are guilty of error, a calamitous error that lays violent hands on the very heart of the Christian doctrine of God. You must stop evading the clear meaning and intent of apostolic doctrine by clever and specious arguments, and bring yourselves under authority once again. You must cease making women pastors and repent of the offense of doing so. At stake is nothing less than the integrity of your witness to God in Christ and your accreditation as witnesses to the gospel.
Why I Changed My Mind
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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