Review of “No Women in Holy Orders? The Women Deacons of the
Early Church”
No Women in Holy Orders? The
Women Deacons of the Early Church
by John Wijngaards , Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2002
Reviewed by Lawrence S. Cunningham in Commonweal,
Religion Booknotes, March 2007 .
Originally published in Great Britain in 2002, this
American edition of John Wijngaards's study of women deacons is a work of
polemical scholarship. Its basic thesis is that for nearly a millennium women
in the Eastern Church were ordained to the deaconate, but that shortly before
the end of the first millennium the practice ceased. The fact that women were
called "deaconesses" in the early church is not in dispute: Pliny the Younger
referred to them as such in a letter to the Emperor Trajan at the beginning of
the second century. The argument concerns whether or not deaconesses were
ordained in the sacramental sense of the term.
The first part of this volume mounts a strong argument,
supported by a cadre of liturgical scholars and historians, that women were
ordained in the strict sense of the term. Wijngaards analyzes the surviving
sacramentaries of the early Byzantine Church and compares the ordination rites
for men ordained to the same office. He uses parallel columns to display the
liturgical texts from both rites. His conclusions are similar to those of many
other major scholars who have examined the same texts.
There is one leading antagonist to this line of argument,
the late French scholar Aime Georges Martimort. His Deaconesses : An
Historical Study(English translation, 1986) argues vigorously against such
an interpretation. Using the same evidence, he concludes that such ceremonies
were rites of commission, not true ordinations, for nuns, among others nuns who
served the church but not in the traditional ways male deacons did. Martimort's
work has been the primary source for those who vigorously oppose women's
ordination to the deaconate as an authentically sacramental rite. Wijngaards
examines Martimort's thesis but finds it, to put it mildly, wanting.
The discussion might seem as if it is merely part of a
scholarly dustup, except for one very telling conclusion. If Wijngaards is
right (and he has a lot of scholarly company), then the following question has
to be addressed: If women, at least in the Christian East before the fateful
schism of 1054, were sacramentally ordained to the deaconate, and if the
deaconate is part of the sacrament of orders, on what basis can it be argued
that women cannot more fully share in sacramental orders by being ordained to
the priesthood? Some authors, like Phyllis Zagano, have argued that ordination
to the deaconate is detachable from the larger question, as does the notable
Orthodox prelate and theologian, Kallistos Ware (who believes that women may be
ordained as deacons). But Wijngaards will have none of it.
It is beyond my competence to adjudicate the final
resolution of this debate, but it is abundantly clear that the discussion of
women's ordination cannot be bracketed from the scholarly exploration underway
in examining the precise character of the ordination of women to the office of
deacon. Wijngaards not only sets out the parameters for this debate but also
supplies a good collection of translated primary texts, a rather full
bibliography, and copious footnotes for those who wish to track the discussion
further. One thing is clear: the scholarly debate was not closed by Mortimort's
monograph; instead, his paper has served as one of the fundamental elements in
the discussion.
