from
Edited by Monica Furlong
Published by SPCK, London, 1984. pp 1-10
These essays are part of a lively debate in the Church of England – a debate of which the narrow end, as it were, is the ordination of women to the priesthood, and the broad end is the full evaluation of women within the Christian community, and maybe within society as a whole. It is a large subject and we are not rash enough to imagine we can cover it adequately or comprehensively. A few aspects of it are well-worn and have more to do with attempts to counter misogynistic arguments than with genuine attempts at new thinking. But we have tried, both here and elsewhere, not to cramp ourselves into defensive postures, but to work freshly with new ideas. Obviously in an institution with deep historic roots like the Christian Church this means a constant and grateful awareness of the nourishment of the past, although for women, as for some others within the Church, it cannot mean an uncritical or blind acceptance of attitudes which have been wounding and deforming. For both women and men the debate takes courage, wisdom, hope that things can be different, charity towards opponents and, above all, a readiness to recognize our fear of change.
Two attitudes to women emerge very clearly from a study of the history of the Church. One is that woman is Eve, the temptress, the one who disturbs man, leads him away from his spiritual preoccupations and is for him the incarnation of sensuality; the Church Fathers repeatedly discussed women in these sort of terms. The other attitude, which revolved around the cult of the Virgin Mary, was one which put woman on a pedestal, as a ‘pure’ being, far above man’s sensual state; woman as mother, and therefore a being who was sexually taboo. Nowadays it is difficult not to see the first attitude as an example of ‘projection’ on the part of men; uncomfortable with the disturbing aspects of sexual desire, and not knowing how to integrate spiritual and sensual aspects of himself, man puts the blame on woman. “The woman tempted me and I did eat.’ In a sense this gives woman too much power, a power which must be countered by dominating and exploiting her. It also makes sexuality a continuing, unhappy embarrassment within the Christian religion. The second attitude, that of putting woman on a pedestal, is a harder one for women to resist or see through, until they perceive that this gross romanticization of them, the flight from recognition of their sexuality, often conceals a profound hostility towards them on the part of men. What it does not permit is any recognition of woman as she really is, a human being with both sensual and spiritual needs.
That both of these attitudes have served to keep women out of the priesthood is naively and rather amusingly evident in the report of the Archbishops’ Commission on Women and the Ministry of 1936:
We maintain that the ministration of women will tend to produce a lowering of the spiritual tone of Christian worship, such as is not produced by the ministrations of men before congregations largely or exclusively female. It is a tribute to the quality of Christian womanhood that it is possible to make this statement; but it would appear to be a simple matter of fact that in the thoughts and desires of that sex the natural is more easily made subordinate to the supernatural, the carnal to the spiritual, than is the case with men; and that the ministrations of a male priesthood do not normally arouse that side of female nature which should be quiescent during the times of the adoration of almighty God. We believe, on the other hand, that it would be impossible for the male members of the average Anglican congregation to be present at a service at which a woman ministered without becoming unduly conscious of her sex .
The blend of flattery, archness and rejection is one which many women will recognize and flinch at; any minute, it seems, the writer will propose a toast to ‘the Ladies: God bless ’em’.
This coy approach to the subject was to be blasted away within a decade. In 1944 Bishop R.O. Hall ordained Deaconess Li Tim Oi priest at Xing-Xing in the Hong Kong diocese. Florence Li Tim Oi served a mixed Chinese and European congregation on the Japanese-occupied island of Macao. Because no priest was available and the congregation was in dire need, Bishop Hall summoned Li Tim Oi through the Japanese lines into free Hong Kong and ordained her. At some considerable personal risk she made the journey there and back, an act which came to symbolize the courage with which women have since sought ordination in the face of formidable opposition. The news leaked slowly back to Britain and the ordination was condemned as ‘a mistake’ by the Church Times. Li Tim Oi was soon forced to relinquish her orders because of the enormous pressure on Bishop Hall, and the Lambeth Conference of 1948 declared that women’s orders were against Anglican tradition and ‘would gravely affect the internal and external relations of the Anglican Communion’.
Ten years later Lambeth was obviously beginning to feel uneasy about its intransigence. It commented on how well trained women church workers were, exhorted churches to make better use of them, and suggested, with unconscious irony, that they might come in useful where ‘pioneer work has to be done’.
In 1968 the Conference began to make a new sound. ‘The Conference affirms its opinion that the theological arguments as at present presented for and against the ordination of women are inconclusive.’ This was reluctant enough; short of outright refusal to ordain women diffidence could scarcely be more marked, but it was the first stone tumbling down the mountainside. The mountain had begun to move.
Events happened quickly. The Anglican Consultative Council, meeting at Limuru Kenya, in 1971, passed the controversial Resolution 28. This encouraged debate of women’s ordination throughout Anglican churches, and permitted bishops to ordain women with the approval of their Provinces.
The new Bishop of Hong Kong, Bishop Baker, at once ordained two women, and Li Tim Oi resumed her orders.
The ordination of women had previously been a subject which aroused limited interest in the Church; suddenly debate and action intensified. In the United States women moved forward quickly seeking ordination. The Episcopal Church of the USAhad shown itself split, with the House of Bishops voting in favour and the House of Deputies of the General Convention voting against. Confronted with this position of deadlock, eleven women sought the co-operation of sympathetic bishops and were irregularly ordained at Philadelphia in 1974.
In 1975 the General Synod of the Anglican Church of Canada voted substantially for the ordination of women and in the same year the General Synod of the Church of England voted in favour of the motion ‘That this Synod considers that there are no fundamental objections to the ordination of women to the priesthood’. However, they rejected a motion to ‘remove the legal and other barriers’.
Within the next few years women were legally ordained in the Churches of New Zealand, the United States and Canada, and in Britain the hopes of many women who wished to be ordained were raised; it seemed more than likely that the Church of England would follow the example of other churches. The shock on 8 November 1978, therefore, when the Synod voted against removal of legal barriers, was very severe. ‘We asked you for bread and you gave us a stone’, Una Kroll shouted from the gallery when the result was announced; like many who had worked for women’s ordination she felt a sense of betrayal. The pain of this rejection of women was to have extensive repercussions.
A number of small organizations had already been working for many years trying to raise Christian consciousness on ordination, and other related issues. The ecumenical body, the Society for the Ministry of Women in the Church (founded in 1929), the Anglican Group for the Ordination of Women and the Christian Parity Group (the most radical, concerned with relations between women and men) had all played their part; Mollie Batten, Margaret Roxburgh, Rachel Moss, Christian Howard, Diana McClatchey, Edith Fyleman, Pauline Webb (a Methodist), Una Kroll and Elsie Baker had significantly shaped their policies.
As a result of the disappointment of 1978 members of these groups and others met to form the Movement for the Ordination of Women (MOW). A working party – Canon Trevor Beeson, Diana Collins, Margaret Webster, Kathleen Burn and Christian Howard – prepared a constitution and, at a big meeting in July 1979 held during Synod week so that bishops and Synod members could more easily attend, MOW was launched. Soon it had its own office, at Napier Hall in Westminster, and an executive secretary, Margaret Webster.
Right from the beginning it represented a wide range of views and varieties of churchmanship from the most radical to the most conservative and orthodox. There were some quite severe disagreements on policy which were faithfully and honestly argued out. Members of MOW frequently reminded themselves and each other that they were working on a new model of what a Christian community might be, a model dedicated to openness, listening, expression of anger where it seemed necessary, consultation, informality, and consideration of the needs and wishes of women. Active both nationally and in local groups, MOW found itself, somewhat to its own surprise, slowly and steadily becoming an influence in the Church, as its numbers soared beyond the usual membership of Church organizations. It was clear that it was tapping a new source of energy, that it had a dynamism not often seen in the Church of England.
From the first it had eschewed fanaticism and extremism. Its task, as it saw it, was to bring about change in the Church, by dialogue, discussion, theological argument, education in all its forms, as well as by working for canonical change. Both in MOW and in some of the overlapping Christian feminist groups there was an upsurge of interest in liturgical language, in theology, in the relation of feminist insights to Christian history, and of Christian history to feminist insights. Groups, conferences, papers, dialogues, experimental liturgies, house meetings, abounded. There were exhibitions and entertainments, articles and television appearances, acts of witness at ordinations. Suddenly there was a ferment of ideas.
Inevitably such an organization encountered formidable opposition, hostility and even harassment. Some of it came from Anglo-Catholics using the argument ‘from tradition’; two thousand years of not ordaining women made it impossible to begin now, they claimed. Another whole area of debate concerned the idea of the priest at the altar as the ‘icon’ of Christ; since women differ genitally from men (so runs this argument), they cannot ‘represent’ him. Some Evangelical! base their opposition on St Paul’s strictures about women ‘keeping silence’ in the churches, and on his words about man being ‘the head’ of the woman. Upon such teaching a whole edifice about the ‘subordination’ of women and the ‘domination of men was constructed.
Rather less serious opposition figured in the Church Times, whose correspondence columns are a rich, and seemingly inexhaustible, mine of misogyny. One cleric had the exciting fantasy that if women were ordained we should have a race of lascivious ‘priestesses’ similar to those in first-century cults. Another thought it was no good ordaining women ‘because they still gaze pathetically towards the male when the car won’t go’. The daddy of them all was Francis Bown of Ecclesia uttering his resounding crow of victory after the Synod vote in 1978: ‘The cause of women priests is defeated for the foreseeable future, and the pressure to resurrect the issue which can be expected from a few militant and hysterical feminists must be firmly resisted.’
As time went on the arguments underwent a sea-change. We began to hear not so much that the idea was wrong as that it was not ‘expedient’. The time was ‘not ripe’. We were ‘divisive’ even to bring the painful subject up at all, and fathers in God used to ask us, more in sorrow than in anger, how we could be so tactless, so thoughtless, so selfish, as to disturb everyone so unnecessarily. The ordination of women would ‘come one day’, provided we took no action to hasten it. Any action on our part would be ‘counter-productive’. In the words of Ogden Nash: ‘People who have what they want are very fond of telling people who haven’t what they want that they really don’t want it.’
It was also pointed out that the rise of ecumenism had made the goal of the ordination of women more remote. Neither the Roman Catholic Church nor the Orthodox Church was noted for an enlightened attitude to women, but ‘unity’ with them was seen as a more desirable and urgent goal than revising our own theory and practice about the ministry of women.
Underlying many ‘intellectual’ arguments against women’s ordination there often seemed to be fearful and primitive attitudes peeping out. Although no one argued any more as ingenuously as the Archbishops’ Commission of 1936 had done, sophistication often hid doubts about women which retained their ancient power but which were hard either to articulate or to respond to in rational ways. Thus, women were a source of temptation and disturbance and must be kept out of the ‘holy places’. Women were ‘aggressive’, and given half a chance, would start dominating men. Women, particularly pregnant or menstruating women, were in some way ‘unclean’, a taboo found in Judaism and echoed to this day in some Greek Orthodox practices. Such arguments are in some sense unanswerable since, like racial prejudice, they are based on primitive emotion not easily accessible to the rational mind.
No amount of fear, however, could stem the rapid change that was occurring throughout the Anglican Communion. Between 1974 and 1983, six provinces out of sixteen began to ordain women; there are now approaching 700 women priests. Many British women and men visiting the United States and Canada began to experience the ministry of women as celebrants and preachers, and they found that they were moved and delighted by the experience, that it seemed entirely natural and congenial once you had seen it happen. Women in churches here began to take an active part in liturgy – reading, preaching, serving, administering, interceding. Visiting women priests became friendly with groups in this country, ministering to those who specially wished to be served by a woman priest. A strong friendship began to be forged between women all over the Anglican Communion, an international network of help and encouragement between women who had achieved ordination and others in churches which still denied it. Some British women, unwilling to wait for the snail-like canonical processes of change in this country, went overseas to train for and seek ordination, and several have now taken up ministry in the United States and Canada.
It is against this background that we are publishing this book. Soon the Synod will again be debating the ordination of women and since we believe that the issue has implications for Church and society which go beyond itself, we are concerned that the matter should be thought about deeply by Synod members and others. We wish to encourage an atmosphere of sensitive, loving, and thoughtful debate, debate which recognizes that we are talking of offering new life, energy and hope to the Church,
The essays cover a wide spectrum of argument. George Carey addresses himself to those still concerned about biblical injunctions about women, Richard Norris to those to whom the ‘maleness’ of Christ is still a major issue, and John Austin Baker to those worried about the ‘rightness’ of the time. Fr Eric Doyle gives us a wise and most helpful summary of the Roman Catholic position.
It may be significant that women writers have tended to occupy themselves with quite different areas of the debate from those mentioned above, Janet Morley writes about the language of the Alternative Service Book with its unconscious revelation of attitudes which need to be recognized and changed. Mary Tanner writes of the many women today painfully testing their vocations. Jill Robson, another Roman Catholic, writes about Mariolatry, and Jane Williams compares Jewish attitudes to women at the time of Jesus with the very different demands he appeared to make of them in terms of life and growth. Anne Hoad writes of a new understanding of priesthood: ‘Today’s concept of priesthood has arisen from an historical process evolving within greatly varying cultures, many of which held a very limited and sometimes hostile view of women.’ Henriette Santer, writing as a clinical psychologist, indicates how stereotypes of men and women have blinded and restricted us all, but shows how such stereotypes are themselves breaking down as a result of new insights.
Rowan Williams, in a movingly argued essay about ministry, suggests that the life of Jesus was a kind of judgement upon all who wished to dominate and who would not share power. ‘Man as wielder-of-power is judged by the God whose embodiment among us refuses that sort of authority, and in some sense may be said to have spoken for the cause of women, as he speaks for all victims.’
Peter Clark, writing on behalf of the MOW Theology Group, which worked collectively on the material for their essay, struggles with the problem of hierarchy and suggests that the task is to see
all our hierarchies not as God-given . . . but as provisional. Furthermore we must learn to see them as the place in which we are to strive towards the possibility of a non-hierarchical under-standing of our world . . . Openness, adaptability, might be said to be the key-notes of the shift away from a hierarchical under-standing of the nature of society. The ability to listen, to hold a silence, to meet people where they are, to admit that one might be mistaken, to receive forgiveness where it is offered as well as to offer it where it is needed – these would be the characteristics of a life redeemed from hierarchy
The issue of the ordination of women does, clearly, raise many related issues about ministry. It raises, too, questions about the way women have, until recently, been excluded from all positions of status and decision-making in the Church. (My impression as a young convert in the nineteen-fifties was that there was little for them to do apart from ironing surplices, making tea and arranging flowers; at my parish church they were not even allowed to sing in the choir.) ‘Woman’ was extravagantly admired and idealized in the person of Mary, yet ignored and snubbed in the persons of living women.
Which brings me, more logically than you might imagine, to the title of this book. Feminine in the Church is a title which, even among Christian friends, caused raised eyebrows and anxious ruminations when we first suggested it. ‘Feminine’ it was felt, suggested something frilly, frivolous, and less than serious. It was uncomfortably close to ‘effeminate’, in our society an adjective invariably used as an insult. ‘Feminine’ had a soft, dependent, helpless connotation, and this seemed a dangerous implication when we are claiming that women have gifts, powers, strengths, which the Church is seriously neglecting.
Two things finally drove us to decide on the title in spite of its drawbacks. One was that it was extraordinarily piquant; the juxtaposition of the words ‘feminine’ and ‘Church’ gave the reader a start, a kind of frisson, which was in itself a revealing reaction. The words seemed to lie uneasily alongside one another, even, in combination, to be faintly shocking. The shock, it seemed to us, might be salutary, since it made a point for us – that something deeply embedded in human nature represented by half the human race and more than half of most Church congregations, had hitherto been felt, in some deep puzzling sense, to be inimical to, or excluded from, the Church
The other reason was that some of us wanted to ‘own’ the word ‘feminine’, to redeem it from any imputation of mindless frivolity, or need of special protection, and to claim it as the word that best described our particular strengths, wisdom and attitudes. Although we were sometimes accused of ‘aping men’, what actually interested us was trying to lift the weight of restrictions that prevented us from being as fully ourselves, as fully ‘feminine’, as possible. In this respect the heaviest weight and the worst restriction, in or out of the Church, was the implication that being a woman was somehow an inferior or unsatisfactory state over against the more desirable possibility of being a man. Much in Church structure, government and language contributes to this implication, quite apart from the issue of ordination, and women are requesting the Church to examine its thinking in this respect and to make its rejection of the implication entirely clear.
That this might have profound repercussions for Christian thinking about the relations between men and women, about sexuality, about power, and about much else upon which at present its mind is muddled and indecisive, would seem very likely. Perhaps if it can find its way to a happier, more honest, more just, and less sentimental, exchange between the sexes, it may find that it has more to say than it can yet imagine to a violent and frightened world in which women are often grossly abused and exploited. It will not succeed, however, without becoming conscious of the ancient and destructive fear which remains at the heart of its practice.