Book Review

The Persistence of Mummery

Without Precedent: Scripture, Tradition, and the Ordination of Women
by Geoffrey Kirk

Wipf & Stock, 2016
(176 pages, $21.00, paperback)

reviewed by S. M. Hutchens

The author, a Catholic convert from the Anglican priesthood and former Secretary of Forward in Faith, founded to resist the ordination of women in the Church of England, writes here less about ordination itself than about the frustrated desire of church feminists to find and cultivate a supporting egalitarian root in the Christian faith—a frantic grasping at slippery handholds that keep giving way in the face of Christianity as a historical religion.

Prominent in Kirk's analysis is M. Daphne Hampson, a feminist theologian who understands this irreformability, agrees with orthodox Christians on the fact of it, and has done the honest thing for a feminist: renounced Christianity. She wonders (in Kirk's words):

[H]ow could a religion centered upon a God who became a man (worse still, a "Father" who sent his "Son")
—and one whose every sacred text and whose whole history was mired in perennial patriarchy—ever concede real equality to women? Hampson [for whom the denial of such equality is simply immoral] had come to see that her most deeply held convictions were a reason, not to embrace women's ordination (she was at one stage an ordinand herself), but to reject Christianity. (p. 7)

Kirk points out, chapter by chapter, the repulse of mythopoetic egalitarians by the Scriptures and the perennial understanding of the Church that the female is included in the male, and by a Jesus who treated women as fully human, but did not seek to emancipate them from a patriarchal Jewish system. He also recounts the attempts to find woman apostles and evidence for an egalitarian early Church that was suppressed by a cabal of male reactionaries who replaced the original dominical constitution with a patriarchy.

He pokes a bit of fun at distinguished religious scholars who should know better, but have found ways to join the gynepiscopal cheering section. Thomas Torrance, for example (whom Patrick Henry Reardon gently laid to rest in the Winter 1993 issue of Touchstone), is sure he sees women bishops in the title "episcopa," and female Eucharistic presidency in the Catacomb of St. Priscilla; and Bishop Tom Wright "believes, on the precedent of the apostola apostolorum"—Mark's account of Mary Magdalene's commission to tell the disciples and Peter of the empty tomb—"that women should be bishops. The appearance in the garden to Mary, he thinks, requires a 'radical re-evaluation of the role of women'" (79). All of these remarkable discoveries demonstrate a penetration of mysteries not heretofore understood, or even known to exist.

Different at the Root

What seems to interest the author most is something that defies analysis—the libido of the egalitarian Sisyphus and his kin. This question, at bottom, defies analysis because it involves insight into souls known to God alone. What drives church egalitarians, despite the resistance of logic, history, Scripture, and tradition, to keep throwing themselves against a faith that resists at every turn their attempts to improve it to their specifications? What drives them to keep producing arguments—but no good ones, as Bishop Graham Leonard observed—for women's ordination?

One can hardly go further than Kirk's suggestion that it is whatever impulse is behind the preference for Enlightenment philosophy over the faith of the Church. The book's final paragraph quotes Bishop David Lunn, who (echoing C. S. Lewis's "Priestesses in the Church?") declares that legislation permitting women bishops, which "its supporters may decorate . . . with quotations from scripture, has its roots in a very different system of belief." The language of such legislation, observes Kirk, "is very far from the unvarying vocabulary of the scriptures. . . . It is the language of Jean-Jacques of Geneva, not of Jesus of Nazareth" (135).