A Christian Women’s Declaration
On Coalitions & Biblical Orthodoxy
A Critique by S. M. Hutchens
Comments by James M. Kushiner and Mary Podles
Responses by Mary Ellen Bork, Donna F. G. Hailson, Diane Knippers, Frederica Mathewes-Green, and Joy Moore
In the fall of 1997, the Washington-based Ecumenical Coalition on Women and Society issued a “Christian Women’s Declaration,” which was published in First Things in 1998. Touchstone Senior Editor S. M. Hutchens later that year wrote a critique of the declaration. After additional comments on the declaration were written by James M. Kushiner and Mary Podles, we invited several of the original signers of the declaration to write responses to the critique and comments.
Papering Over a Rift
Critique by S. M. Hutchens
Many years before we peevish and inscrutable fundamentalists began to fuss about it, in the days when it could still be written about whimsically, when the ordination of women was still only a gleam in the eye of a few dotty radicals, C. S. Lewis wrote his little essay “Priestesses in the Church?” With Jane Austen’s Bingley he observed that just as a ball would not really seem a ball without dancing, so a church with priestesses would not really seem a church. The point of the piece was that women presbyters and the sexual egalitarianism from which they arise are not Christian institutions. In our own day his words are grimly prescient:
Suppose the reformer stops saying that a good woman may be like God and begins saying that God is like a good woman. Suppose he says that we might just as well pray to “Our Mother which art in heaven” as to “Our Father.” Suppose he suggests that the Incarnation might just as well have taken a female as a male form, and the Second Person of the Trinity be as well called the Daughter as the Son. Suppose, finally, that the mystical marriage were reversed, that the Church were the Bridegroom and Christ the Bride. All this, as it seems to me, is involved in the claim that a woman can represent God as a priest does.
Now, a church whose pastor is not thought a priest might say that this does not apply, but Lewis is using the Anglican situation merely to illustrate his main point, that the ministries of men and women in the Christian Church cannot be “equal” because the male, simply because he is male, represents the Lord of the Church in a way a woman cannot. “It is painful,” he says, “being a man, to have to assert the privilege, or the burden, which Christianity lays on my own sex. I am crushingly aware of how inadequate most of us are. . . . But it is an old saying in the army that you salute the uniform not the wearer.”
Lewis writes here so offhandedly and with such good humor—a luxury, I think, of a day when lady ministers were still confined to the sectarian fringe—that the dreadfulness of what he is saying is easy to pass over: When women are ordained, it will open a fundamental rift between those who accept the practice and those who do not.
If Lewis is right, then egalitarians for whom the ordination of women is no problem, of whom there are many among professedly orthodox Christians, have set themselves up against not, as they typically think, a weak and obsolescent tradition, a cultural incarnation of the ministry appropriate to the first century that is an impediment in our own, but against no less than the Christian doctrine of God, man, and the Church.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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