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Can Women Represent Christ at the Eucharist?Rome says that women cannot be ordained priests because the priest acts ‘in the person of Christ’. Christ, who was a male, can only be adequately represented by a male priest. Read the full argument in Inter Insigniores, § 24-28. The argumentation is wrong for the following reasons
It should be noted also that Rome's ‘iconic’ argument is not ‘traditional’. We do not find it until the Middle Ages.“As for the argument of a male priest needing to represent Christ, it may be noted that the NT does not seem to have any theological interest whatever in the maleness of Christ. I have found only three texts in which the word aner is used of Christ (Lk 24:19; Jn 1:30; Acts 2:22), and none of them exploits Christ’s “maleness.” It is interesting that in Rom 5, where Christ is presented as the “one man” through whose obedience the disobedience of the “one man,” Adam, was undone, the word for both figures is anthropos, not aner. The point, obviously, is not to question Christ’s maleness nor to suggest that one’s relationship to him is not affected by it, but simply to show that theological emphasis on the maleness of Christ’s humanity is foreign to the NT.”
“The argument based on the need of male representation is virtually unprecedented in Tradition. It does not in fact state any of the traditional grounds on which ordination to presbyterate or episcopate has been denied to women. To accept the argument and its practical consequence, therefore, is not to maintain tradition, but to alter it by altering its meaning. It is to accord a quite new sense to the Church’s long-standing refusal to ordain women. This is not only, or even principally, because the idea that a presbyter or bishop somehow ‘images’ Jesus in a special way is one which arrived rather late on the scene in Christian history. What is genuinely novel in it is the idea that Jesus’ maleness is at least one of the crucial things about him which ecclesial priesthoods must image. This novelty, furthermore, does not fall into the category of minor and peripheral products of pious musing. It touches ultimately upon questions having to do with Christology and with the economy of salvation; and for that reason it demands the most careful and sceptical scrutiny.” “. . . Thus [after studying the sources] we may say quite firmly in summary that the maleness of Jesus is of no christological interest in patristic tradition. Furthermore, it is possible to detect in the development of patristic ideas on the subject a logic which suggests why it never occurred to the Fathers to make any more play with Jesus’sex than they did with his race. What the Fathers learned to understand by ‘incarnation’ was the likeness of the Word of God in his humanity to all those who are included within the scope of his redemption. It is this likeness, expressed in the word anthropos, which for them explains the logic of the Word’s becoming flesh. ‘For he became human that we might become divine,’ said one of them (Athanasius, De Incarnatione § 54). And presumably this ‘we’ (and therefore this humanity) includes women. To make of the maleness of Christ a christological principle is to qualify or deny the universality of his redemption.” “ . . . . In the light of these considerations, it must be said that as from a strictly christological, so from a theological, perspective the fact of Jesus’ maleness is not, for the classical tradition, a constitutive factor in the meaning of ‘God-with-us’. It is definitive neither of what is meant by ‘us’ in that expression, nor of what is meant by ‘God’. So we are left roughly where we were at the end of the last section. Maleness is not constitutive of Jesus as the Christ. On the contrary, Christology envisages him as the representative human being - a category which presumably includes female human beings. The question then arises: Why would maleness be significant among the conditions which qualify a person to ‘represent’ the Christ in the ministry of Word and Sacrament?”
John Wijngaards |
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