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www.thegospeltruthministry.com
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| A Member's Bulletin Board. In most cases items posted here originated as email, except as noted. As a Member you are free to submit items to post here. Send to webmaster) |
| Why Not Women's Ordination?
Charles Erlandson+ It has become clear in recent posts that supporters of women's ordination support it, not merely because it is a permissible option but because they believe it is so clearly taught by Scripture that the entire Tradition must be overturned because it has very clearly contradicted the plain teaching of Scripture. It is not enough for supporters of WO to say that a case could conceivably me made for WO. No, a much stronger claim must be made that the Scripture is so clear that we are compelled to ordain women. If there is anything even close to a tie between innovators and such a nearly universal Tradition (more nearly unanimous in the history of the Church than virtually any other teaching or practice), then surely we must side with the Tradition, and not the innovators. To support such a clear and important innovation, supporters of women's ordination must be able to make a slam-dunk case for it from the Scriptures. Of course, one might ask "Who gets to interpret and decide," but I'll have to leave that for another post!) I want all Anglicans to ponder this momentous claim of supporters of women's ordination very carefully. What supporters of women's ordination are saying, therefore, is that the entire Church has wildly misinterpreted Scripture for 2000 years and cruelly excluded women from a ministry that God has ordained for them. If the Church should have been ordaining women priests for 2000 and hasn't, then we all have a lot of repenting to do, starting with me. However, again, consider the stupendous character of this claim, that somehow ECUSA (for example) in the 1970s got it right regarding the correct interpretation of the Bible concerning women's ordination, while the entire church of the past and the vast majority of the Church today has got it wrong. This is the same ECUSA that allowed Pike, Spong, and others to go undisciplined, and the same 1970s that brought us the sexual revolution and feminism. Before anyone assembles a lynch mob or Inquisition, I am not saying that supporters of WO and supporters of homosexuality (for example) are in identical positions. But I am saying that the American culture of the 1960s and 70s, including ECUSA, that produced clear violations of Scripture and Tradition is the same culture and church we are being told to got it right regarding women's ordination. Furthermore, the first ordinations of both women deacons and priest in ECUSA were clearly illegal and suggest and American willingness to go it alone and proceed without a true conciliar spirit. Another astounding claim that supporters of women's ordination must make in order to overthrow point #2 (about Tradition being authoritative unless in contradiction to Scripture) is that they must make the dramatic claim that the Bible is so crystal clear about women's ordination that the entire Tradition must be wrong. So we trust the united early Church to be able to tell us which books belong in the Bible; to produce the Creeds we live by; to define the nature of Christ and the nature of the Trinity; but on a point where they had greater unanimity than on almost any other point, they all got it wrong, and somehow we enlightened late 20th/early 21st century Christians have got it right. What I am suggesting is that such a hermeneutic is desperately off track, and ultimately it comes down not to whether or not we accept the Bible but who gets to interpret or what controls do we have on interpretation. Especially, when the plain sense of the Old and New Testament teachings appears to be that women should not be ordained, the claims of supporters of women's ordination that Scripture overthrows the entire Tradition on the point is astounding. Even if supporters of women's ordination cannot accept this stronger claim that I would wish to make, they must in essence say that Scripture is not only open to a range of interpretations on the matter but speaks with a clarity virtually unknown on any but a handful of teachings and practices that as faithful Christians we are compelled to overthrow Tradition. I believe that this a completely unsupportable claim. Consider the following points that certainly seem on the surface to support an all-male priesthood: 1. From the beginning, God intended male headship. A. God has chosen to reveal Himself as a male in both the Old and New Testaments. The relationship between the Father and the Son is also presented in terms of exclusively male imagery. B. He sovereignly chose to create Adam first and to create Eve as his helpmeet. It is through Adam, as the head of the covenant, that we fell, and not Eve. C. All of the priests of the Old Testament were males. D. When God chose to become human, He chose to become a man, specifically. E. When Christ chose His 12 apostles, He chose all men, in spite of the fact that there were women who were close to them and whom He treated with dignity. F. When Judas was replace by Matthias, the apostles chose a man. G. When the first deacons were elected and ordained, all 7 were men. It
is important that they were Gentiles because the ordained ministry was now
open to Gentiles, and yet the Church did not ordain women. A. Man is to be the head of the woman, and the woman is the glory of the man, because the woman was made from the man (I Corinthians 11:3-9; Ephesians 5:23) B. Women are not allowed to teach or have authority over a man because Adam was formed first (I Timothy 2:12-13.) Paul ties his reason for men leading the church back to creation: this is not a merely cultural thing. Teaching, consecrating the Eucharist, ruling, and discipling are all inseparably connected, and so it will not do to say that women priests can do some of these but not others, and are therefore still submitted to men. C. The qualifications for overseer (presbyter, bishop) is that a man
must be the husband of one wife and he must rule his own household well (I
Timothy 3:1-4.) |
