Women, Ordination and the Christian Church

by Daphne Hampson
from Speaking of Faith, edited by D.Eck and D.Jain, 1986.

At the time I left the church in 1981, I had for twenty years wanted to be ordained. I had, during the previous three years, given all my strength and energies to trying to get women ordained in the Anglican Churches in Britain. I was the chairperson of the Group for the Ministry of Women in the Scottish Episcopal Church, which I with others had founded. This was the first movement within an Anglican Church in Britain to embrace a broad spectrum of opinion in the church and to be actively engaged in campaigning on every level. We were highly organised. (The English movement for the Ordination of Women was later founded.) I also took a major part in the English campaign. I was the person who wrote the theological statement circulated to all members of the General Synod of the Church of England before the unsuccessful vote on women’s ordination in 1978.

I want to speak, firstly, about what it felt like in the campaign; secondly, to discuss the nature of that campaign and the issues which have been raised; and thirdly, to reflect briefly on the future for women in their thinking about God. In recent years I have been keen that people not confuse “religious” with “Christian”. Leaving the church was, I am sure, made easier in my case by the fact that my allegiance to basic Christian doctrines - Trinity and Incarnation - had always been weak and was fast disappearing. They were a thought structure I had tried to take on board while a member of the church. Where else, after all, was I to express my love of God, my desire to serve, my wish to preach? I think that before I reached the confidence of my late thirties I should not have had the nerve to say that I was not a Christian. Now I have reverted to something in many ways much closer to what my mother taught me. That was religion. Christian doctrine was a relatively superficial layer; religion goes much deeper.

The Campaign for Women’s Ordination

To work for women’s ordination in Britain between 1977 and 1980 was lonely and discouraging. Few women were interested, and those who were, were disorganised. I was immensely frustrated at the simple things that were not done, while the opposition, highly organised, and at times unscrupulous, got away with murder. I took on the campaign on all fronts: writing theological material, keeping a disparate group together, sticking stamps on envelopes, and making long distance telephone calls. I felt worn out by “our side,” quite as much as by anything the opposition did. Indeed it had crossed my mind to muse what bliss, by comparison, it would be to work for the opposition: what use they would have made of one! When the first women were allowed to put on clerical collars in Britain, at the time women in Wales were ordained deacons, I was the only woman to come from the wider movement, although it took me nearly ten hours to travel from central Scotland. There were no coachloads, no photographs taken for The Church Times. There was no organisation. One could multiply the examples.

The movement in the church in Britain pressing for women’s ordination was many years behind that in the United States in getting organised. I was out of step. And desperate to do something. A battle had to be fought, in an organised and quiet manner, and won. It was not only just that I had by this time spent several years in the States; as a child of 12 to 14 in the 1950s, I had been furious, in the church which I compulsorily attended while at boarding school, that all the people “upfront doing things” were male. As a doctoral student in Oxford in the 1960s, confused and hurt, I refused to ask for confirmation, for I did not think that a church which discriminated against women could be counted as fully Christian. I was working at that time on the subject of the Confessing Church in the Third Reich, and thought that Bonhoeffer’s stand was right: that the refusal of the national church in Germany to ordain Jews made it less than Christian. So it was not that the issue of the ordination of women suddenly dawned on me in the 1970s.

Thus it is not actually appropriate in my case when people say, “You should have stayed inside the church and fought.” I did. I left in the end because I was sick. It was on the way back from the hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with Britain at a distance, having been told that I must have an operation on my throat, that I decided that there had to be some basic changes in my life. First of all, and I knew this with great clarity, I had to leave the church. It was not insignificant, I have since thought, that it was my throat that was wrong. Everything was bottled up there. I had never openly expressed rage or anger. I had argued with sweet reasonableness, persuasion, and academic know-how. Alone, I had cried at lot. Since I have left the church, my body has largely healed. There has been no operation. The real pain is the undoing which happens internally. I had let other people get at me. The grounds on which I had been forced to argue, as I shall later show, were themselves destructive of me. I had, at the worst, lain awake at night, feeling my body and crying out what was wrong with it, such that because of it I could not be ordained. I was a theologian by profession, an able preacher I must admit, and no one had suggested, pastorally unsuitable. Yet every young student of mine who was a man could offer to be ordained, and I not. I think many people have not understood what a priori discrimination - discrimination because of one’s body, or how God has made one - does to one in terms of self-destruction. Black people perhaps have. It was Bishop Desmond Tutu who, alone of all the Bishops who spoke at the debate on the ordination of women at the Lambeth Conference of Anglican Bishops in 1978, struck a chord with the women waiting to get news that evening. He said, comparing the situation of women in the church with that of Blacks in South Africa, “a child of God subjected to that kind of treatment, actually gets to doubt that he is, or she is, a child of God”. One of the good things that has happened since I left the church is that I have come to feel good again about my body, and about having been born a woman. I have healed both spiritually and physically.

The fact that I could not offer for ordination, while my friends and even younger people could, came as all the more of a shock because I had never known discrimination before. Growing up in Britain after the war, I had acquired an education, and no one had ever said, “No, because you are a woman.” It was not an issue. It was the church, and the church alone, the place where I most wanted to be accepted, that drew attention to my sex. It is, then, a different situation from the past, when women could not be ordained, but neither could they be lawyers, members of parliament, or university lecturers. The church is completely out of step with British society. We can, apparently without difficulty, have a woman in the highest office of state as Prime Minister. Yet women in England and Scotland are not admitted to the lowest order of the church, that of deacon.

Some of the things I experienced profoundly affected me. I had to learn that one is not only affected by ideas in books, but by what one experiences - a revelation for me. I had been a student throughout the 1960s, but I had never demonstrated. I was not the sort. The church drove me to that. It was because of the church that I was shoved behind a police barrier, so that the 400 Bishops of the Lambeth Conference might be protected from me and a few others who had assembled wearing T-shirts proclaiming, “Ordain Women Now”. It had been forbidden to carry banners. It was shattering that afternoon in Westminster Abbey to watch the procession into choral evensong of four hundred Bishops and their advisors, all men, among them my friends, and to know that I was divided from them, irrevocably, by the fact that I was a woman. I felt entirely left on the sidelines - automatically, by definition. It is out of experiences such as these that one finally gets up and leaves - to preserve one’s human dignity.

Women’s Ordination: The Issues and Arguments

I want now to turn to the nature of the arguments about “women’s ordination,” as it is always misnamed. The issue is the ordination of persons without respect to sex. I wrote a pamhlet while involved in the campaign. It is called, “Let Us Think About Women,” and it shows on the front cover a puzzled bishop confronted with the idea of women. That is what one was up against: it symbolizes the situation exactly. We had to convince a male world. The issue of power relations here is important. Once, while in the thick of the campaign, I was, at a meeting, asked to express myself on paper, a task with which I always have the utmost difficulty in complying! But on that occasion I drew, with verve, a picture of a lot of people, almost all men, walking through two lobbies to vote, while women watched from the gallery. That was what it felt like. While I was inside the Church, I thought that logic and emotion lay with the movement to ordain women. Now I am not so sure. I see the ways in which the opposition’s arguments are consistent with Christian doctrine. But therefore I have left Christianity, not simply the church.

In the Anglican Church, a “symbolic” church in which the priest in the eucharist is held to be by many in some sense a “representative” of Christ, the argument has in the first place centred around the issue of Christ’s maleness. Now to say that a woman cannot be a priest because Christ was male is a distortion of Christology. For classical Christology did not say that a single human being, Jesus of Nazareth, was “God,” but that, in Christ, God took on “humanity,” in which we are all included. We are all “in Christ”. A man baptised into Christ bears no special relation to Christ through his maleness, though he bears a greater resemblance to Jesus. Now, the priest in the eucharist represents Christ. The eucharist is not a play about Jesus of Nazareth, in which case the actor would have to be Jewish, male, etc. If God is not in God’s self male (and that no one has suggested), and the second person of the Trinity is like the first in all respects save in their mutual relation, then it cannot be said that Jesus “as the Christ,” as the second person of the Trinity, is male, although the incarnation may have been in male form. Baptism is into Christ, not into Jesus of Nazareth. And if baptism overcomes the differences of race, class and sex, for all are one in Christ, it is inconsistent to introduce these divisions again at the level of ordination.

However those opposed to women’s ordination may say that symbols are profound. It is not insignificant that God became incarnate as a man, or that “he” has revealed that we should call him “Father.” For the male represents the active, out-going force, and the female the passive, receptive pole. Thus God’s relation to the Church is like that of male to female. The church is “female” in relation to Christ. It is the “bride” of Christ, and is represented by a human person who is female, Mary. One must not confuse symbols, for they operate at the deepest level. Thus it was first C.S. Lewis, to my knowledge, arguing against the ordination of women, who commented that a Mother-daughter religion would be wholly different from the Father-son religion which is Christianity. I am inclined now to agree that a male view of God is intrinsic to Christianity and cannot be separated from it.

This leads to the second main area of discussion: Biblical “revelation”. The issue is both the terms used for God in the Bible, and the respective roles given to men and women. It is clear that the Biblical language for God is overwhelmingly male. He is Father, King, Lord, Judge. Women have unearthed a few passages, notably in the Old Testament, where God is described using female metaphors. (And duly elevated them to a canon within the canon!) But women are quite clearly, in the Biblical world, subordinate to men, from the creation story forwards. In the New Testament there is talk of male “headship”. The question then arises as to whether this should be for all time, or whether there can be a legitimate “development”. Women can also argue, in particular from Galatians 3.28, which states that “there is no more male and female,” for all are one in Christ, that a new principle of equality in Christ has been annunciated.

But women who argue in this way put themselves in a trap. For they tend to reinforce the idea that the criterion as to what should happen in the church now is what happened in the early church. They are implicitly agreeing that that is what counts. Thus women may argue, as they frequently have, that the Bible also has female metaphors for God, that Jesus’s attitude toward women was exemplary, and that St. Paul intended that there should be equality in the order of salvation. But the terms of the debate have been granted. An opponent of the ordination of women may then point out that Biblical imagery for God is overwhelmingly male, that the disciples were male, and that the New Testament teaches a subordination of wife to husband. One needs first to debate the relevance of the Bible.

It is, however, very difficult for women to make a radical move here, and to argue from an a priori equality of women. For Christianity, like Islam and Judaism, is an historically based religion. It is based on certain texts from the past, which are held to be normative, and the events of which they tell. It is not an a-historical religion which simply starts from human experienceof God, giving as much validity to each and every experience in different times and places. Nor does it start from reason. There is always an historical referent. Thus people arguing for the ordination of women seem to have implicitly agreed that it has got to be supported by arguments from the Bible. The most that one can do is to extrapolate from likely texts, or to argue that this is the “meaning” of the texts given in a different age. That the Bible might actually be sexist, and therefore dismissed at least when it comes to speak of the relations of women and men, seems to be too radical a move to make.

Thus, I have myself spent hours arguing, when writing a paper with others justifying the ordination of women at least to the diaconate, that Phoebe of Romans 16 was indeed a deacon. We conducted historical research (and we had some very fine scholars in our group in Scotland) as to the difference or equality between men deacons and women deacons (or were they deaconnesses?) in the second century. The question has thus become: can one argue for what one wants, within the terms in which the debate has been set? Maybe one can. I am not saying it is impossible. However I found it extremely undermining to have to argue in these terms. It was astonishing to a woman like me, who had a good job, and a house loan, to be faced with the issue of it mattering what women did or did not do in the second century. It seems that in this debate there has often been a failure to understand that a woman like me simply feels nothing in common with women of the second century.

I have found that this credibility gap opens up in particular in relation to the Virgin Mary. She is frequently exalted by opponents of women’s ordination as being the true model for women; she is the highest to which humanity has attained. And not a few feminists seem to want to make common cause with her as a counterweight to the male Christ. I find myself incredulous. In the first place anyone who knows anything about Biblical scholarship is going to find this quite bizarre: we know almost nothing about the mother of Jesus. But, quite apart from this, what is her place in the story? She only enters it because she is humble and obedient, and produces a male child. I have far more in common with the men in the Biblical story: in terms of initiative, independence and ability to have control over my life. I feel little if anything in common with women of earlier generations. This struck me when looking at paintings in Italy with a mixed group of people. The men in our party had “ancestors” in the men depicted in a 15th century frescoe. I felt no association with the women.

Moreover the fact that texts from the past are normative tends to undermine any fragile equality gained in the present. If I hear the parable of the prodigal son, on one level I hear that the Father, to whom God is compared, welcomes back his prodigal son who has squandered his wealth, and I compare myself to the elder son who fails to rejoice at his brother’s return. On another level, which operates all the more powerfully through being subconscious, I hear that God is to be compared to a good Father, not a Mother, who divides his property between two sons, not daughters. Thus the long arm of the past stretches forward into the present, influencing people’s expectations. This is not trivial. The medium is the message. And the Bible is read not just as any book, but as one which conveys what is normative for human relations and for how we should think about God.

I have come to conclude that a real equality for women cannot be gained within the Christian framework. I do not think that the revolution which women want to accomplish is possible simply as a revision, for which Christianity itself allows. For Christianity is an historical religion and draws on past events, seeing them as normative. In particular a man, Jesus, by definition is central to the religion. When I was teaching in North Carolina in 1970, I went to a meeting in a Black church hall, where they had a very striking picture of a Black man on the cross. It was simply called “Black Christ.” I realised that I had never before really thought about the problems which Black people face, and I saw in a new way their need to have God identified with them. I have often since wondered what it means that it is not possible to put a woman on the cross. For I think you cannot. She would not be recognised in the same way as “the Christ”. It would just be a woman on a cross. This may mean that there is no place, ultimately, for women within the Christian tradition. For I agree with those opposed to women’s ordination: symbols go deep.

The Christian tradition may, then, in feminism, have come up against something which it cannot handle. It has no way of taking on board a real equality for women without crumbling in the process. It comes out of a world which was patriarchal and is tied to that world. It has no neutral framework which can absorb human equality. Feminism, in this respect, is different from other liberation movements which Christianity has espoused or been persuaded to espouse. One could, in their case, appeal to Christianity itself in their defence. Feminism challenges the maleness of the whole tradition. But this is to say something of the utmost importance for human affairs. For in the past Christianity has always been not too far out of step with new human ethical insights. Perhaps Christianity cannot, by definition, really let this one challenge it to the core, and can only imperfectly absorb it. There may be a deep incompatibility.

The ordination of women may, then, tend to mask what is at stake. I suppose that had I stayed in the United States I should have become a deacon, and then a priest. I should not have seen the issues so clearly as I now do, having been in a situation where this has not been possible. The very fact that women can be ordained in the United States muddles the issue. It seems that all is possible. The wider confrontation is surely yet to come. The fact of women’s ordination does not necessarily help women. It may mean that, through a longing to be ordained, they are prepared to play second fiddle in a male tradition. Certainly the grounds on which one was forced to argue for women’s ordination were, through their presuppositions, deeply painful. What did it mean to have to argue for equality within one’s own church, within one’s own home, to which one found one did not fully belong on account of one’s sex?

The Future for Women?

The transition from being Christian to post-Christian is a huge one to make. As going to the eucharist, then reading one’s Bible, fall away, one wonders what will remain. Will prayer remain? To stop conceiving of God as “Father” and to move to other conceptions is very difficult indeed. For in the case of God, it is not as though we have “God” there for inspection, so that we can draw a symbol for God in the way in which we might symbolise other things. In the case of God, the symbol, or the word we use, or the image which comes to our mind is our God. The symbol reaches into the very nature of the thing. To lose the symbol, if one is not careful, is to lose the reality. And to change the symbol is deeply to change the reality.

I think women are then at a very creative point. We have the possibility of creating something new and, one would hope, much more relevant to our present society than the old image. I think that many women are indeed beginning to conceive God very differently. Increasingly God comes to be seen as spirit: as one who moves among us, between us, and is within us. It is a much less authoritarian notion of God. God is no longer a “thing,” “out there,” a sort of “super-person”. I think this can only be for the good.

Women are beginning to think of God as one who is supportive of us, through whom we come into being, rather than as dominant and over-against us. I find women working with all kinds of fascinating imagery, which sees God as encompassing us, surrounding us. I am reminded of the woman who came up to Ronald Higgins who, in British society, has spoken powerfully of the catastrophes about to overtake humankind. She said to him, “You have given us the cross, but where is the encompassing circle?” The women at Greenham Common speak likewise of “embracing” the base - a deeply religious concept, inviting change to take place. I think then that we are in a position to think out essentially new imagery for God, imagery which may be very helpful for our world. We need to dare to develop our gifts as women.

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