Alternative Histories?

One of the key differences between the Protestant complementarian argument against women’s ordination and the Catholic argument concerns the significance of history. Specifically because the Catholic understanding of ordination presumes that clergy are “priests” and not merely “ministers of the gospel,” the Catholic argument assumes a continuity from the priesthood of the Old Testament to Jesus’ twelve apostles, from Jesus’ twelve apostles to the threefold office of bishop, presbyter (understood as “priest”) and deacon, and, through apostolic succession, a continuity from church office in the New Testament to contemporary clergy.

In addition, the new Catholic position in opposition to the ordination of women centers on a symbolic understanding of priesthood. Specifically, while speaking the Words of Institution (“This is my body,” “This is my blood”) in presiding at the Eucharist, the priest acts in persona Christi, not merely as a representative, but in some sense a representation, of Jesus Christ. Because Jesus Christ is male, it is claimed, the priest must be male. Moreover, this representational function also explains why not only Old Testament priests, but also Jesus’ twelve apostles, all NT office holders, and all clergy in the subsequent history of the church, must necessarily be male.

The connection between this history and the symbolic function of masculinity means that “tradition” is central to the Catholic argument in a way that it is not for the Protestant one. At the same time, the Catholic argument is encumbered with a problem that complementarian Protestants do not have. The Protestant argument is not based on male symbolism, but on male authority. Indeed, Protestants reject the Catholic in persona Christi position as “sacerdotal.”¹ Nonetheless, Protestant complementarians can appeal to passages in both the Old Testament and the New Testament and in church history in which they claim that male leadership is connected to male authority. To the contrary, the Catholic position is not able to point either to Scripture or to history for the symbolic argument for the simple reason that it is a modern argument lacking in significant historical warrant.

In terms of history, there is no real evidence for such a theological understanding of ordination based on symbolic male sexuality before the mid-twentieth century. The OT nowhere suggests that Levitical priests represent a male YHWH and this is why they must be male. Jesus himself nowhere makes a connection between his own masculinity and the masculinity of the Twelve, or suggests that the Twelve are male because they play a symbolic role of representing a male Jesus. The New Testament discussions of the offices of bishop, presbyter, and deacon in the pastoral epistles and elsewhere nowhere suggest that bishops or presbyters must be male because they are successors of the twelve male apostles, or that presbyters or bishops represent a male Jesus in presiding at the Eucharist. Indeed, the NT writers make no references whatsoever to who presides at the Eucharist. There is also no discussion in the history of the church of clergy acting in persona Christi before the medieval period. Even then, the notion that the priest acting in persona Christi means that the priest represents Christ as male is not a medieval, but a modern notion.

Apart from the exception of a single passage in Bonaventure which seems immediately to have been forgotten,² there do not seem to be any historic arguments against women’s ordination based on a male priest’s resemblance to a male Christ. Thomas Aquinas is the historic originator of the in persona Christi theory of eucharistiic celebration, but Aquinas makes no connection between the priest acting in persona Christi and the male sexuality of the priest. Aquinas’s own objections to the ordination of women is based on the traditional ontological inferiority I mention in chapter 3 “The Argument from Tradition is Not the Traditional Argument” of my book, Icons of Christ: A Biblical and Systematic Theology of Women’s Ordination (Baylor University Press, 2020): Women are less intelligent than men.

This second part of my response to Mark Perkins’ review of my book, Icons of Christ, looks specifically at Perkins’ critique of sections in my book that address this issue of historical continuity: (1) my discussion of the significance of a move from an agricultural to a post-industrial culture for the role of women in ancient and modern society; (2) my discussion of priesthood in the Old Testament, and specifically my suggestions as to why there were no women priests in Israel; (3) my discussion of the masculinity of Jesus; (4) my discussion of the reasons for the masculinity of Jesus’ twelve apostles; (5) my discussion of the history of opposition to women’s ordination in the church.

In order to make a positive argument, Perkins would need to make the case for an alternative history. He would need to trace a line of symbolic representation beginning with the Old Testament priesthood, continuing through Jesus’ twelve apostles, and going on from there through apostolic succession. It is not clear whether Perkins understands OT priests to have represented a male YHWH, but he certainly believes that in presiding at the Eucharist, contemporary clergy represent a male Jesus. And in order to play this representative role, only male priests will do.

Perkins thus has a straightforward but genuinely difficult task to accomplish. He needs to argue that a modern understanding of priesthood lacking evidence in the historical record was actually the real reason for male-only ordination all along. He also needs to challenge any alternative history that would provide a better explanation because actually based on historical evidence. Perkins as much as admits that the historical record is lacking evidence to buttress the Catholic position against women’s ordination by citing Anglican theologian E. L. Mascall, whom I quote here from the original: “It is not surprising that in the past, when the masculinity of the Christian priesthood has been accepted by a kind of general intuitional consensus, discussion of the reasons for this limitation has tended to be sketchy and superficial.”³

Mascall makes a crucial acknowledgment, but also misrepresents the evidence. The adjective “intuitional” makes clear that Mascall cannot point to what he considers satisfactory historical arguments against women’s ordination. The statement that reasons were “superficial” is certainly correct. It is not the case, however, that the reasons “tended to be sketchy.” As I document in my book, there is a single argument that appears consistently in the tradition: Women cannot be ordained because of an ontological defect: (1) they are lacking in intelligence; (2) they are emotionally unstable; (3) they are subject to temptation, particularly sexual temptation. In addition, the position was not that women were excluded from ordination per se, but rather from any public position in which they might have exercised authority over men. (The Protestant complementarians are correct here.)

Mascall was not deliberately sexist. He writes that insofar as “human societies have been dominated by an explicit or implicit assumption of male superiority . . . it is urgently necessary that the structures should be modifiied” (Mascall, 135). However, the “implicit assumption of male superiority” that actually lies behind the history of the tradition means that Mascall’s adjectives “sketchy” and “superficial” cover over the actual “general intuitional consensus” of which Mascall would certainly not have approved.

Before responding to Perkins’ critique, I add two additional observations. In my previous essay, I focused on Perkins’s substitution of negative rhetoric for argument, but the rhetoric rises to new levels here. Perkins challenges my presentation not so much by denying the historical facts as by descending into tendentious rhetoric.

Second, in proceeding in the manner in which he does, Perkins engages in the fallacy of the false dilemma. Even if either my interpretation of the historical evidence or of its implications were mistaken, this would not mean that Perkins’ alternative interpretation of the history is therefore correct. Perkins needs to be able to account for the same historical evidence I present without simply claiming without evidence that the real reason for exclusively male-only priesthood is based on masculine symbolism. An appeal to “intuitional consensus” is not an argument. If there are reasons in the historical record for opposition to women’s ordination other than the ones I point to, these would have to be established from the historical record itself, not from after-the-fact assertion based on “intuitional consensus.” Even then, this would justify exclusively male ordination only if the actual reasons for the opposition to women’s ordination were valid in themselves.

 

Patriarchy and Economy

In chapter 5 of Icons of Christ, I follow both Tikva Frymer-Kensky’s book In the Wake of the Goddesses: Women, Culture and the Biblical Transformation of Pagan Myth (Macmillan, 1992) and Carrie Miles’s book The Redemption of Love: Rescuing Marriage and Sexuality from the Economics of a Fallen World (Brazos, 2006) to point out that Israel’s culture was agricultural and preindustrial. In preindustrial cultures, there is a necessary division of labor grounded in the basic biology of childbirth and child-nurturing. Women’s work is necessarily tied to the domestic sphere because women must be near children to breast-feed and care for them, allowing only men to work in the public sphere. This alone explains the basic difference between the roles of men and women not only in the Old Testament, but in all traditional cultures. In the words of Frymer-Kensky: “The social system reflected in the Bible did not originate in Israel, nor is it substantially different in the Bible than elsewhere in the ancient Near East” (Frymer Kensky, 120; cited in Icons, 66).

In its complementarian criticism of my argument, The Anglican Diocese of the Living Word did not find observations about family structure in preindustrial cultures to be in the least interesting or relevant. However, Perkins (as well as earlier reviewer Matthew Colvin) is morally offended by my observation, views post-industrial culture largely negatively, and dismisses my summary of the significance of the shift as a “naive” endorsement of post-modernity.

Perkins cites a single passage in my book in which I point to the significance of post-industrial culture in lowering the birth rate: “In the United States and in Western Europe, the number of children produced by the average family has dropped from over seven to less than two.” The passage goes on to mention the shift from living in rural areas to living in cities, to household tasks being done outside the home, to replacement of physical labor by automation, to the kinds of work done outside the home as work able to be done by both sexes, and that children are no longer an “economic asset,” but become an “economic cost” (Icons, 69).

The passage is descriptive, not evaluative, but Perkins characterizes it as “Romantic sentimentality,” referring to “Witt’s own rather idyllic picture of modernity.” In contrast, he writes of the “modern West . . . on the precipice of demographic collapse – a hopeless society slowly fading into oblivion . . . a culture that has utterly rejected the divine blessing of Genesis 1:28.” Perkins summarizes what he claims is my position: “In Witt’s own telling, however, it is precisely the distance that modern society places between the privileged and the earth – between the privileged and their own bodies – that has enabled us finally to see what God always intended for us in Eden, in Jesus Christ, and in the eschaton.”

The rhetoric is extreme and ascribes to me a position that I do not hold, misrepresenting my position as “glorifying modernity.” Far from from “glorifying modernity,” I summarize the following problems arising from these economic changes: (1) a large number of single people in that marriage is viewed as no longer an economic necessity; (2) higher divorce rates; (3) sexual liberation; (4) devaluing of virginity as freedom of sexual expression becomes almost a cultural requirement.

If I were writing a different book, I might have mentioned additional problems I cover in the courses I teach on Christian Apologetics and Christian Ethics: (1) loss of transcendence leading to secularism and what I call “normal nihilism”⁴; (2) capitalist consumerism as a substitute religion⁵; (3) politics dominated by autonomous individualism rather than the common good and appreciation of subsidiary communities – for both political “conservatives” and “progressives”⁶; (4) a prison system that focuses on punishment rather than restorative justice⁷; (5) an alienation from nature leading to environmental crises.⁸

Perkins dismisses my phrase “some negative consequences” as a “rather understated description of our civilization’s impending demographic and ecological collapse.” This is to complain about an adjective (“some”). The four characteristics I mention are more than one (“some”), but they are nonetheless serious and significant. Crucially, Perkins omits my summary of the new “liberalism” on the following page: “This, however, is simply to capitulate to the new social situation with all of its attending problems, including the breakdown of marriage, high divorce rates, new kinds of inequality between men and women, sexual promiscuity, and superficial social and sexual relationships.” I also state (following Miles) that it is not the “collapse of family values” that has created the new sexual morality, but the disappearance of the economic structures of the preindustrial family. Traditional families were not “more moral” than modern families. That I prefer a “third alternative” to both “traditionalism” and “liberalism,” an “equality and companionship of men and women who genuinely need and are partners of one another, motivated not by fear but by love” should make it obvious that I am not “glorifying modernity” (Icons, 70-71).

Perkins’ criticism of modernity focuses primarily on modern sexual libertinism and smaller families, echoing the “conservative” moral criticism of post-industrial culture to which I had referred, but he ignores the actual reasons behind the economic necessity for women in preindustrial cultures to have large numbers of children, and to be tied to the home in order to do so. Again, preindustrial families were not more “moral” than modern families. They had larger families because they had no alternative. Larger families were an economic necessity.

On page 68 of Icons of Christ, I refer to the following characteristics of preindustrial economies, all of which led to the economic necessity of large families:

1) Preindustrial societies are agriculturally-based. Most people made their living as farmers.

2) Preindustrial societies depend on the labor of many slaves or servants. Because many manual laborers are necessary to grow and harbor crops, a power-structure develops in which some men rule over everyone else: other men, women, and slaves.

3) In light of the above, preindustrial societies are patriarchal in a specific sense. Patriarchy is not the unqualified rule of all men over all women, but of a few powerful men over everyone else. There are no democracies.

4) In such cultures, large families are necessary because:

4a) Without the advantages of modern medicine, there is a high infant mortality rate.

4b) Children are more reliable sources of labor than slaves or servants, who have no inherent loyalty to their masters or employers.

5) In preindustrial cultures, men are valued for their physical strength; women for their physical beauty and ability to produce children.

6) Women’s work is confined to the home because of the biological necessary of being near children. Public, physical, and dangerous work is done by men.

It is the economic shift from a preindustrial to a postindustrial culture that has led not only to the disappearance of the above six characteristics of premodern cultures, but also to people having smaller families. It is neither “Romantic sentimentality” nor “idyllic,” nor “glorifying modernity” to point out that despite the very real problems accompanying modernity, living in a postindustrial culture has certain advantages.

I cannot bring myself to believe that Perkins really desires a return to high infant mortality rates and the use of child labor, a culture in which a small handful of property-owners rule over everyone else, or a society that depends on large numbers of slaves and/or servants. But these are necessarily corollaries of preindustrial cultures.⁹

At least one of the consequences of postindustrial culture has been a significant decrease in infant mortality rates, accompanied by lengthened life-expectancy. Certainly modern people have fewer children, but those children are less likely to die of childhood diseases, thus far more likely to grow to adulthood, and, as adults, lead longer and healthier lives. In consequence, there really is no danger of “demographic collapse” (Perkins’ expression). Contrary to Perkins’ lament, people keep being “fruitful” and “multiplying.” The world’s population has grown from 2.6 billion in 1950 to 7 billion today, and is expected to grow to 11 billion by 2100. Despite smaller families and the higher rate of death associated with the COVID virus, US population growth has slowed, but not reversed. The US population was 150 million in 1950, 340 million in 2022, and forecast to be almost 400 million by 2100.

Perkins himself takes advantage of modern technology. He wrote his review on a word processor, and uploaded it to the internet. A photograph of Perkins’ church on his blog indicates that it has electricity and probably central heat. Perkins’ parishioners almost certainly commute by automobile. Perkins also speaks approvingly of a former woman teacher. But women teachers who teach male students do not generally exist in preindustrial cultures.

One of the reasons that I referred not to modern femininists, but to Anglican apologist Dorothy L. Sayers, in the conclusion of my book, and to Sayers’ essays “Are Women Human?” and “Why Work?” is that Sayers addresses the crucial issue of the connection between “good work” and “vocation” (Icons, 335-338) Certainly only women bear children, but that is not all that women are capable of doing. In postindustrial cultures, women are no longer tied by economic necessity to merely domestic tasks. Moreover, many of those domestic tasks have been “outsourced.” As Sayers states: “It is perfectly idiotic to take away women’s traditional occupations and then complain because they look for new ones.”¹⁰

This raises a final question: Is Perkins unhappy that in postindustrial cultures, some women are pursuing a vocation to ordained ministry? Or is he complaining rather that in postindustrial cultures, some women are following vocations to do anything at all besides giving birth to and raising children? Does Perkins really believe that women should be permanently tied to the home and almost exclusively reduced to the role of mother and child-care provider? Unless his claim is the latter, his complaints about my observations concerning the economic consequences of postindustrial culture are beside the point.

 

Old Testament Priesthood

As mentioned above, for the Catholic argument against women’s ordination, there is a necessary historical continuity between OT priesthood, NT office, and ordination today. The claim is that women cannot be ordained today because OT priests were male.

In chapter 10 of Icons of Christ, I discuss the history of priesthood both in the Old Testament, and also in the history of the early church. I challenge the biased use of the word “priestess” in reference to ordained women, and trace its historical origins. I address the most plausible reasons that women were not ordained priests in ancient Israel: (1) In Israel, priesthood was hereditary and restricted to the Levites – passed down from father to son. (2) Preindustrial distinctions between the biological roles of men and women meant that public work (like priesthood) would normally have been done by men. A woman priest could not have attended to her public duties while simultaneously breast-feeding and nurturing the large number of children to which a woman at that time would have given birth; (3) women did not have the physical strength to do things like butcher cattle to be used in temple animal sacrifices; (4) most important, OT ritual purity requirements would have meant that a woman would have been ceremonially unclean on a regular basis and so could not have predictably been depended on to do the job.

(1) In preindustrial cultures, hereditary property and leadership roles are passed down through the male line. The Aaronic priesthood was not an exception. Male inheritance is a regular theme in the OT, and periodically leads to problems: Isaac and Esau’s birthright (Gen. 25), the resentment of Joseph’s brothers (Gen. 37), the problem of female inheritance (Num. 27), the problem of the succession to David’s throne (1 Kings 1).

Perkins questions the connection between masculinity and hereditary priesthood by pointing out that there are priests in the Old Testament who are not Levites: Melchizedek, David, and Solomon (who exercised Melchizek’s priesthood): “As it turns out, though, the Bible gives us a priesthood that is male without exceptions but not universally Levitical or even Jewish.” What Perkins misses is what Melchizedek, David, and Solomon all held in common besides exercising the role of priesthood. All were kings as well, and in traditional Mediterranean cultures, monarchy is always a male institution for obvious reasons: Monarchs are political leaders, and lead men (not women) into battle. The story of Melchizedek appears in a chapter designating Melchizedek as a king and describing such a battle including numerous (male) kings (Gen. 14).

(2) and (3) Perkins does not address the insurmountable problems that a woman would have performing the functions of Levitical priesthood. Most Israelite women would have been married, likely would have had numerous children, and, at any given time, might well have been either pregnant or breast-feeding. In order to exercise Levitical priesthood, such a mother would either have needed to leave her children at home (not at all likely), or bring them with her to the temple. Could a woman have performed the role of a Levitical priest with her children in tow?

Again, the primary task of a Levitical priest was offering sacrifice. The temple was a place in which large stock animals, not only sheep, but also oxen, were regularly butchered, and this work was done by the priests. This was not women’s work – because it required physical strength. Manfred Hauke, who argues against women’s ordination for symbolic reasons, recognizes that these physical limitations would have provided plausible reason to exclude women from Levitical priesthood.¹¹

(4) I argue in my book that the most likely reason that Israel did not have women priests had to do with ritual purity laws, which Perkins dismisses as “Witt’s rather lame gesture towards purity laws.” Perkins writes that my explanation is “unconvincing. For one thing, the predictable rhythm of ritual impurity would hardly form an insurmountable barrier to female priestly service . . .” In addition, ritual purity “does not solve the problem . . . given that God is the source and author of both the male Levitical priesthood and the ritual purity laws.”

This dismissal does not take seriously either the strictness or the symbolism of OT purity laws. As I cite Tikva Frymer-Kensky, one of the main purposes of the purity laws was to keep both death and sexuality separate from the sacred realm (Icons, 180). Not only women, but lepers, and even houses, garments, and eating-utensils could be declared ritually unclean. Priests were not allowed to go near dead bodies, except for close relatives. The priest could not marry a widow or divorced woman. A priest could have no physical blemishes or bodily deformities such as blindness or injured hands or feet. Bodily discharges (whether one was male or female) also made one ritually impure.

As I point out in my book, “many Old Testament temple functions were periodically scheduled (feasts, periodic prayers), and women could not be depended on to be ritually pure on each occasion the function needed to be performed” (Icons,180). The problem is not whether women’s ritual impurity was “predictable” (Perkins) – seriously? – but that the temple requirements were inflexible. Again, I wrote: “women could not be depended on to be ritually pure on each occasion the function needed to be performed” (emphasis added). Moreover, a plausible explanation is required for the prohibition of women not only from offering sacrifice, but from the temple grounds themselves (the Court of the Women) where non-priestly men were allowed (the Court of Israel). Possible ritual impurity would be the most plausible explanation. (If “predictability” would have enabled women to be priests, then it should have obviated any need for a separate Court of the Women.)

(5) Perkins concludes by offering a counter-example: “Israel had ample models of female priesthood in surrounding cultures,” and “Israel and the Church always had the female priesthood as a cultural possibility. Women priests were never unthinkable for Israel’s neighbors, even though they were preindustrial agrarian societies, just like Israel.”

To the contrary, unless “priesthood” among Israel’s neighbors was “just like [priesthood in] Israel,” Perkins is comparing apples and oranges. Perkins does not describe the nature of “female priesthood” among Israel’s neighbors, but the counter-example works only if the parallels are across the board. Did these pagan female priests receive their priesthood through hereditary male descent, as Israel’s priesthood was hereditary through Aaron? Were these pagan women priests married, and if so, did they have children? Did they bring the children with them, or did they leave them at home when they performed their priestly duties? Did the duties of these pagan women priests include butchering and sacrificing large animals, such as sheep and oxen? Did these pagan cultures have ritual purity laws that would have prevented these women priests from performing priestly functions on a regular basis? Unless Perkins’ answer to each of the above questions is “yes,” his counter-example is beside the point.

Addendum: What about the term “priestess”? Both Perkins and Colvin express surprise at my suggestion that use of the term “priestess” by those opposed to women’s ordination “implicitly links ordained women to the discredited legend of pagan temple prostitution.” Perkins claims that he has “never heard anyone connect the term to sexual impropriety.” If so, he is either sheltered or fortunate. Perkins states: “Witt’s only explicit evidence for this usage by anyone at any time is a Forward in Faith document from 2004.” I had stated that it is “not an objection that is encountered in the theological literature, as most theologians realize that the term ‘priestess’ is offensive” (Icons, 173), and that it appears primarily on the internet or in private conversation where it is used disparagingly to refer to women clergy. However, Forward in Faith is the largest and most representative Anglo-Catholic group opposed to women’s ordination. That they use the term in a public organizationally-produced document in the manner I mention, confirms my point.

 

Why Was Jesus Male?

In Icons of Christ, I mention two reasons that the Son of God become incarnate as Jesus of Nazareth, a Jewish male. The first is connected to a central theme throughout my book, what I call “Christological subversion,” an ironic pattern of reversal of values in which Jesus challenged traditional understandings of power, specifically power as expressed in the “honor system” of ancient Mediterranean culture. In the Gospels, the key passage is Mark 9:35: “If anyone would be first, he must be last of all and servant of all.” In Paul’s epistles, the theme continues as “cruciformity,” and the key passage is Philippians 2:1-11: “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men” (verses 5-7). On page 262, I state: “Only a male Savior could challenge and defeat Mediterranean honor culture by voluntarily undergoing the humiliation of death by crucifixion and then conquering death through resurrection. Only a male Savior could meaningfully teach that salvation comes not through domination, but through voluntarily becoming a servant.”

The second reason has to do with the fulfillment of OT typology. Jesus as male typologically fulfills the OT roles of prophet (Moses/Melchizedek), priest (Aaron) and king (David). Even here, however, Jesus fulfills these roles through Christological subversion. As prophet, Jesus fulfills Jewish law, but also calls sinners not the righteous; he heals on the sabbath and associates with sinners and Gentiles. As priest, Jesus is simultaneously priest, victim, and temple. As king, Jesus reigns from a cross.

Perkins acknowledges but does not really address this first point of “Christological subversion,” focusing instead on the second: “[W]e must ask why these Old Testament types are so unrelentingly male in the first place – and we must do so without pitting an egalitarian Jesus against the misogynistic God of the Old Testament.”

Some points should be so obvious that they do not need mentioning, and they have nothing to do with the God of the Old Testament being “misogynistic.” My earlier discussion of the differences between the public roles of men and the domestic roles of women in ancient preindustrial cultures should have made evident why the original three OT types were males. Moses, Aaron, and David all had in common that they exercised public leadership roles that would not have been available or possible for women in ancient cultures. Moses was not only a prophet, but a political leader, and no woman in ancient culture who had to attend to one or more children could have exercised the kind of leadership role Moses played. Moses was married and had a son (Exodus 4:24-26), but we know more about Moses’ father-in-law Jethro than we do about either his wife Zipporah or his unnamed son. Similarly, David was a king, and, as mentioned above, monarchs in ancient Middle Eastern cultures would have been exclusively male. Women like Bathsheba, Esther, and Jezebel(!) are portrayed in the OT as playing significant roles in the life of the court, but they always do so through influencing males – a point made by Frymer-Kensky (Frymer-Kinsky, 118-127).

I have already addressed reasons why OT priests were male above, but Aaron was also not only a priest, but engaged in a public leadership role as Moses’ spokesperson before Pharaoh. Again, no woman would have played such a public role in a traditional patriarchal culture. If Moses was concerned that he was not sufficiently eloquent to appear before Pharaoh (Exodus 4), his sister Miriam would not have provided an impressive alternative in the eyes of the king of Egypt.

Perkins’ use of the adjective “misogynist” is another example of rhetorical misrepresentation, as well as a careless misreading of my book. I have an extensive discussion of the significance of God’s portrayal as masculine in the OT (following Frymer-Kensky). I argue that the key reasons had to do with monotheism, and that monotheism actually led to advantages for women in Israel (Icons, 253-257). Nowhere do I suggest that the God of the OT is “misogynist.” Quite the contrary!

 

Jesus and the Twelve

In a chapter 13, I discuss the symbolic significance of the relationship between Jesus and the Twelve, pointing out that Jesus chose male apostles for the same reason that he chose twelve Jewish apostles. The apostles symbolically represent both the twelve sons of Jacob and the twelve tribes of Israel. The twelve could no more have been women than they could have been Chinese or more or less than twelve in number. This does not require that successors of the apostles be male any more than it requires that they be Jewish or twelve in number because successors of the twelve cannot play this symbolic role exclusive to the original twelve. I write: “the reason the apostles had to be male is evident from the text itself. Jesus chose male apostles for the same reason that he chose twelve apostles and Jewish apostles. Insofar as Jesus’ followers represent the new Israel, Jesus’ twelve apostles typologically represent the twelve tribes of Israel, and, specifically, the twelve patriarchs (sons of Israel/Jacob) from whom the nation of Israel was descended” (Icons, 265).

Perkins responds in three ways.

First, in a manner similar to his comment about women priests in the Old Testament, Perkins insists that Jesus could have chosen women apostles if he had wanted to: “[I]f Jesus intended to inaugurate a total egalitarianism in his Church, he surely would not have balked at reorienting the patriarchal symbolism he received from the Old Testament to include women.”

In Icons of Christ, I responded to a statement similar to that of Perkins raised by Roman Catholic Sarah Butler – that Jesus “could have entrusted the apostolic church to women if he had wished to, but chose to do otherwise.” To the contrary, even though Jesus was free from the prejudices of his time, this did not mean that Jesus could have exercised some absolute freedom without regard to the cultural context of Jewish faith. I refer to a Roman Catholic(!) reviewer of Butler’s book who points out that “the demand of communication places limits on what one can say. If the twelve apostles were to play the symbolic role that Jesus assigned to them – as representatives of the New Israel and the twelve patriarchs – they had to be twelve free Jewish males” (Icons, 265). If Jesus had chosen female apostles or Gentile apostles, or more or less than twelve apostles, the symbolism would not have worked. My reference to possible Chinese apostles was deliberate – as the church later included Gentiles, but Jesus had no Gentile apostles. If Jesus had the kind of freedom from tradition that Perkins insists, he could have chosen Gentile apostles as easily as women. To rephrase Perkins, if Jesus intended to inaugurate a church composed of both Jews and Gentiles, “he surely would not have balked at reorienting the Jewish symbolism he had received from the Old Testament to include Gentiles.”

Responding to my pointing out the necessary parallel between the Twelve apostles and Jacob’s twelve sons, Perkins states: “If the Old Testament is God-breathed, and if the God of Israel is indeed the Triune God of Christian faith, then we must ask why God chose twelve male patriarchs in the first place. Unless I missed it, Witt not once considers that question.”

Again, writers do not consider some questions because they assume that readers are capable of making obvious connections. If we ask why God’s promise to Abraham continued through Jacob’s twelve sons rather than his daughter Dinah (Gen. 34), the obvious reason is again found in ancient Middle-Eastern socioeconomic practices: property inheritance passed through males. The concern about descendants is a central theme throughout the book of Genesis, and the descendants are always male because lineage always passed through male sons – usually the first-born male. Would God’s promise to provide Abraham with (male) heirs be fulfilled? The promise is threatened repeatedly, as evidenced in the numerous stories concerning Abraham and Sarah (Gen. 20), Hagar and Ishmael (Gen. 16, 21), Abraham and Isaac (Gen. 22), Isaac and Rebekah (Gen. 24, 26), Isaac and Esau (Gen. 27-28, 32), Isaac and his twelve sons (Gen. 29, 30, 35), Joseph and his brothers (Gen. 37-50). There are occasional surprises and numerous plot twists. Ishmael is Abraham’s oldest son, but his mother Hagar is a slave, and Isaac is Abraham’s son through Sarah. Esau is the oldest son, but the younger son Jacob receives the promise. Joseph is a younger son who is sold into his slavery by his brothers, but later rescues his older brothers from famine, thus preserving Jacob’s line of descent! Jacob blesses Joseph’s youngest son rather than his oldest, contrary not only to the usual practice, but to Joseph’s wishes (Gen. 48).

A theme I mention repeatedly in my book is that biblical symbols must be interpreted through their narrative contexts. It is these narratives of Genesis that provide the context for the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham that eventuates in the twelve sons of Jacob leading to the twelve tribes of Israel, and fulfilled by Jesus’ twelve apostles. Given this narrative context, the symbolism of Jesus’ followers as the New Israel would have been disrupted if Jesus had chosen either women apostles or Gentile apostles or any number other than twelve apostles. If we ask why God chose “twelve male patriarchs in the first place” (as Perkins does), the answer is that twelve is the number of sons Jacob had. If we ask why “male,” the answer is that patriarchs are male specifically because they are patriarchs, not matriarchs. Again, inheritance in the ancient Middle East was traced through male offspring. Jacob had at least one daughter, Dinah, but unlike her brothers, Dinah received no inheritance. If we ask why God chose to reveal himself within a patriarchal culture, this is directly tied to the particularities of a revelation in history. One might as well ask why God decided to reveal himself within the history of a Mediterranean culture in which slave-holding was a common practice, in which several of the patriarchs were polygamists, or in an ancient culture at all. God deals with humanity as he finds it, not as later cultures might wish it to have been.¹²

Second, Perkins insists that the Twelve are the archetype rather than the fulfillment of the type.

Witt, in other words, has the symbolic order backwards. Though in chronological history the twelve patriarchs come first, the twelve apostles are in fact the archetype. Viewed theologically and eschatologically, the apostles come first, for it is they and not the Old Testament patriarchs who will sit on thrones in the eschaton. The patriarchs, it turns out, anticipated the apostles, rather than the apostles reflecting the patriarchs — the number and attributes of the patriarchs typologically foreshadow the apostolic Church, and not the other way around. Even if one were to grant Witt’s argument, his gesture towards the Old Testament model resolves nothing. It simply pushes the problem back in time.

To the contrary, I would say that the archetype is neither the twelve sons of Jacob nor Jesus’ twelve apostles, but the people of God – Israel in the OT, and the church in the NT – composed of men and women, Gentiles and Jews. Perkins reverses here the relationship between type, archetype, and typological fulfillment in Scripture. Typology always works from Hebrew Scripture/OT to its fulfillment in the NT. Jesus is the archetype of Prophet, Priest, and King, but it is the OT prototypes that provide the prefiguring, not the reverse.

Finally, in the midst of Perkins making so much of the masculinity of the apostles, he fails to address another issue certainly as significant as the masculinity of the twelve. Why did Jesus choose twelve? Because Jacob had twelve sons, and there were twelve tribes of Israel. If there is symbolic significance in the masculinity, is there also some special symbolic significance to the number twelve? Is Perkins saying that Jacob necessarily had to have had twelve sons (no more nor less) because later Jesus would have twelve apostles? Would biblical typology have been defeated if Jacob had only ten sons and Jesus had only ten apostles?

Third, Perkins blurs the distinct role of the Twelve with later successors of the apostles. Perkins summarizes my position as “Witt’s assumption that the apostolic office of the Twelve ceased with their deaths (267) is not borne out by the record of Scripture or the witness of the Church.”

What I actually wrote was: “[T]he twelve apostles had a distinctive role that cannot be repeated. The apostles were companions of and witnesses to the mission of Jesus (Matt. 28:20, Luke 24:44-49; Acts 1:8, 21-22). The apostles were witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection (Acts 1:22, 1 Cor. 9:1). After his death, the role of Judas was replaced by Matthias, but after that, there were no more replacements. Bishops and presbyters may be successors to the apostles, but they are not themselves apostles” (Icons, 267).

To this Perkins replies first that there were other apostles in the NT besides the Twelve, pointing to Paul as well as Timothy and Titus, who received authority from Paul through the laying on of hands. This is a red herring, as I myself made the same point in a later chapter discussing women’s office in the early church. In that discussion, I acknowledge that the word “apostle” had a wider meaning beyond the Twelve, and that Paul refers to himself as an “apostle” in this wider sense. At the same time, the point of that discussion was to make clear that Paul refers to Junia (a woman) as an apostle (Icons, 304-312). That Junia was an apostle in this wider sense actually counts against Perkins’ point here.

Perkins then makes a point standard among Anglicans, including, for example, Richard Hooker (whom he does not mention), that there is a correspondence between the office of apostle and the office of bishop, and that bishops exercise the specific role of oversight (“apostolic office of shepherding”) and “faithful witness” that had earlier belonged to apostles. As an Anglican, not only do I have no quarrel with this argument, I would support it. Where I would differ from Perkins is in his statement (following Mascall) that the bishop’s “historic duty” to preserve and transmit the Church’s tradition without distortion “corresponds directly” to the apostles’ role as “eyewitnesses to the earthly life of Jesus.” Certainly bishops as successors to the apostles have a duty to transmit the church’s tradition “without distortion,” but this role does not “correspond directly” to that of the Twelve because it takes place through faithful transmission of and careful interpretation of the canonical Scriptures which receive their inherent authority over the later church because of their prophetic and apostolic origins. The second-century church marked its continuity to the first-century apostolic church through the four channels of (1) Two-Testament canon of Scripture; (2) Rule of Faith; (3) episcopal succession; (4) worship in Word and Sacrament. The appeal to the canon is definitive specifically because bishops are not themselves eyewitnesses, and so must necessarily appeal to those who were. Again, bishops are successors to the apostles, but they are not themselves apostles in the specific way that the Twelve were apostles as eyewitnesses who actually accompanied Jesus in his mission.¹³ Apart from this important qualification, I have no quarrel with Perkins here. See my essays on the significance of episcopacy, apostolic succession, and on the distinctive characteristics of Anglican theology. All of this discussion of bishops is really beside the point.

The real concern of Perkins’ argument here occurs in a single paragraph: “And if we accept the Church’s witness on this subject in the New Testament and beyond, then they [the twelve] were the first of many who would serve in the apostolic office down the ages. Thus, our Lord’s failure to include women suggests either that he did not anticipate the apostolic office of bishops or that he did not mind leaving his Church with misleading data about the office – or that he intended it to be male.”

This is a non sequitur. Again, Jesus chose not only male apostles, but twelve apostles and Jewish apostles. If Jesus’ failure to include women among the twelve meant that he necessarily intended that bishops be male, then it would follow just as much that he intended bishops to be Jewish and exactly twelve in number. What Perkins fails to address is why the masculinity of the Twelve is significant for later church office, but their Jewish identity and the symbolic number twelve are not. That bishops as successors to the apostles exercised both authority and pastoral leadership says nothing about why those bishops necessarily need to be male, since women are capable of both exercising authority and pastoral leadership. Moreover, as I argue in my book, there is good evidence that women exercised various offices in the early church (including that of apostle), and that the requirements for bishop and presbyter in the pastoral epistles would not exclude women (chapter 15). Since Perkins is appealing to subsequent historical practice (the episcopate as “apostolic office down the ages”), he needs to address the question: What was the Church’s historic tradition concerning the ordination of women, and what were the reasons behind it?

 

Women’s Ordination and Church Tradition

In addressing the history of “priesthood” in the early church, I point out that the church fathers repeated the key themes of New Testament priesthood and sacrifice: Jesus Christ is high priest and sacrifice; the Eucharist is a sacrifice in the sense that Christ’s once-for-all sacrifice is “remembered” (anamnesis) in such a way as to be made “present”; the fathers spoke of the priesthood of all Christians (Icons, chapter 11).

I also point out (following Roman Catholic writers Robert J. Daly, S.J, Gerald O’Collins, S.J., and Michael Keenan Jones) that in the church’s first millennium, there is no detailed discussion of the relationship between Christ’s priesthood and the priesthood of ordained clergy. There is no warrant in the writers of the first millennium of the church’s history to suggest that a priest represents Christ or acts in the person of Christ (in persona Christi). This is the theology of a later medieval period arising in the West and opposed continuously by the Eastern church.¹⁴

In the second chapter of Icons of Christ, I trace the history of opposition to women’s ordination in the church and show repeated examples of a common theme: women cannot be ordained because they are less intelligent than men, overly emotional, and subject to temptation. I point out that this is the single reason given for opposition to the ordination of women in the tradition, and it appears over and over again. Starkly put, this just is the church’s “tradition” against the ordination of women. I also point out (and this is just as important) that the church’s historic tradition was not exclusively against the ordination of women, but against the exercise of women in any public position of authority over men.

If one honestly wants to embrace the church’s “tradition,” then this is the position that one necessarily must embrace. To claim that one is following the tradition while simultaneously affirming the intellectual and moral equality of women and men or allowing women to exercise public leadership roles, but not allowing ordination, is not following the tradition, but doing something entirely new while claiming that this new thing is the tradition. It isn’t.

In light of what the historic tradition actually is, it is also important to acknowledge that in the mid-twentieth century all mainline churches – Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, and Protestant – came out with what can only be called a new position: the affirmation of the intellectual and spiritual equality of men and women. Thus, those opposed to the ordination of women necessarily had to adopt positions that were contrary to the church’s historic position. Protestant opponents to the ordination of women embraced the position of “complementarianism”: that while intellectually, morally, and spiritually equal to men, women necessarily occupy a position of subordination to male authority based on differently created “roles.” While endorsing the historic hierarchy based on authority, complementarians rejected the church’s historical tradition concerning women’s ontological inferiority. Catholic opposition took the different path of basing opposition not on the exercise of male authority, but on sexual symbolism: the male priest in presiding at the Eucharist acts in persona Christi, symbolically representing a male Christ.

Both positions are equally departures from the church’s historic tradition insofar as they affirm the intellectual, moral, and spiritual equality of men and women. Ironically, by focusing on male authority, the Protestant complementarian position is actually more in continuity with the church’s historic tradition. For example, the complementarian Anglican Diocese of the Living Word commented how significant it was that opponents of women’s ordination in the tradition regularly appealed to Paul’s prohibition of women teaching men in 1 Timothy 2:12. Ironically, Perkins claims to be following the tradition, but he mentions 1 Timothy 2:12 only once in his Review, and passes over its significance for historic opposition to women’s ordination. Regardless of differences between Protestant complementarians and Catholic sacramentalists, historic figures such as John Chrysostom, Epiphanius, Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin or John Knox, would have been as opposed to the new Protestant and Catholic positions concerning the equality of women as contemporary Protestant complementarians and Catholic sacramentalists are to those who advocate women’s ordination.

Before addressing Perkins’ argument here, I need to acknowledge first that he rightly corrects a misstatement that had appeared on my blog, summarizing voices from the tradition: “They do not quite add up to ‘exhaustive citations from primary sources in the history of the church,’ as Witt characterizes them, but neither are they meaningless.” The reference to “exhaustive citations” was careless writing on my part. What I should have put on the blog, I had already written in my book: “[I]t is not difficult to trace a consistent pattern in the history of the church that explains why the church has not ordained women. Some selective examples that are typical but not exhaustive, follow” (Icons, 21). Note the words “typical but not exhaustive.” What I wrote on my blog was not exactly what I meant, and I should have been more careful. Why Perkins chose to cite a sentence from my blog rather than the actual statement from my book, I am not sure, but I stand by the passage in my book. In Chapter Three, I provide citations from key figures in the tradition from the patristic era through the Reformation: Eastern and Western, Catholic and Protestant: Origen, Tertullian, John Chrysostom, Epiphanius, Augustine (Patristic era), Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas (medieval Catholic), Martin Luther, John Calvin, Heinrich Bullinger, James Boswell, Richard Hooker, John Knox (Protestant Reformation).

Perkins dismisses these as “a smattering of quotations.” He points our that “only two” of the early figures were canonized (Chrysostom, Epiphanius; what about Augustine and later Aquinas?), that Origen and Tertullian are “highly controversial.” He claims that “as a sufficient and complete explanation . . . Witt’s evidence does not measure up.” They are “undeveloped ‘asides.’” Almost none of them are “fully developed arguments about the sexual exclusivity of ordination.” Six of the citations “amount to one quote from every two-hundred years of history!” At the same time that Perkins acknowledges “the rather paucity of relevant material available to the historian,” he also insists that “we should not make the mistake of assuming that all the evidence we happen to have is all the evidence we need.” Perkins concludes: “That Witt finds his methods and evidence sufficient to fully explain the practices of the Spirit-bearing Body of Jesus Christ is downright bizarre.”

Beyond acknowledging that the citations contain a “number of misogynistic quotations,” Perkins ignores their content altogether. The chapter is “selective,” as I acknowledge, because in a single chapter, it had to be. I was not writing an entire book on the complete history of opposition to women’s ordination. Nonetheless, I cover a significant stretch of church history – from the second century through the Reformation, representative figures from both the East and the West – and the figures I discuss are significant figures in the history of the church: Chrysostom, Augustine, Aquinas, the Reformers and others.

More important, I trace a consistent pattern, beginning with several key passages from Chrysostom. There is a hierarchy of male-female relationships based in an ontological inequality (reflecting traditional preindustrial agricultural divisions between public and private spheres of work). Women’s work is confined to the private sphere of home and family. Men’s work is in the public sphere. The justifications for this division of labor are (1) that women are less intelligent than men; (2) that women are emotionally unstable and are more subject to temptation than men. (3) In light of this, women cannot teach or exercise authority over men, but are rather under the subjection of men; (4) Also crucial to this discussion is that the restriction is not a restriction against women’s ordination as such, but a restriction against women exercising any position of authority over men whatsoever. This restriction is not confined to ordination, but certainly includes it.

However, and this cannot be emphasized strongly enough, although the rationale for what was really a subordination of women to men in all spheres of life (not simply ordination) was that of ontological inferiority — women were less intelligent, emotionally unstable, and subject to temptation — the rationale was an attempt to provide justification for what was simply the historic division between men and women in preindustrial cultures. Because of socioeconomic necessities tied to biology (childbirth and breast-feeding), women’s work was tied to the domestic sphere because they had to be near children. Work in the public sphere was necessarily restricted to men not only because men were stronger, but because men did not by biological necessity need to spend their time in the company of children. Although most people would have been illiterate, women in particular would have been less likely to be educated. That women lacked education would have provided sufficient reason for those who were literate (such as the church fathers) to conclude that they were less intelligent than men.

To confirm that variations on these four points appear repeatedly over a span of history and geography, I include citations from 2^nd century Origen through sixteenth century Knox. When there are partial exceptions, I discuss them, e.g. Thomas Aquinas and Luther. In the end, however, it is clear that a pattern appears repeatedly in the history of the church across centuries, in both East and West, among Orthodox, Catholics, and Protestants. Historically the church had a tradition, it was not against women’s ordination as such, but against women exercising any public authority, and it presumed an ontological inferiority grounded in concerns about women’s intelligence, emotional instability, and susceptibility to temptation. This consistent pattern itself needs to be explained, not ignored, and it is not adequate to complain that the historical record is not complete – “the evidence we happen to have” – or to dismiss citations as a “smattering of quotations.”

Perkins ignores both the evidence as well as the four key affirmations and their logical connection. He does not so much as acknowledge what the traditional position actually is – that women were restricted not only from women’s ordination, but from any position of public authority over men. Although he complains that my citations are a “smattering,” and that I do not present “fully developed arguments” concerning women’s ordination, he provides no alternative voices from the tradition, and he certainly does not discuss “fully developed arguments.”¹⁵

Instead Perkins descends once more to rhetoric. Perkins claims that my summary of what the church’s tradition actually was “represents the complete and total rejection of tradition as tradition,” that “Witt’s premises militate not against dead traditionalism, but against tradition as such.” He writes: “Reducing tradition to naked intellectual propositions devastates any cultural practice and any human institution, but the Church is not any institution. She is the Spirit-filled Mystical Body of Christ. Witt’s attitude toward tradition excludes even a bare minimum respect for Christian tradition . . . . Witt has found himself with a view of tradition too low even for many Baptists.”

While rhetorically fierce, Perkins’ language is an evasion of the actual issue. Given that Perkins affirms the ontological, intellectual, and spiritual equality of women with men, his own position is as much a departure from the tradition as is mine. He also finds himself in company with “many Baptists.” Perkins is able to claim that (unlike myself), he is following the tradition only because he will not acknowledge what the tradition actually is. To the extent that Perkins offers an alternative, he suggests that “an argument from tradition cannot be the reason why a tradition was started in the first place.” Perkins claims instead that traditions arise over time, and that arguments already presume long-held practices. This misses that no tradition arises without some intentionality that provides its rationale in the first place, and the tradition continues only because subsequent followers agree with and maintain the tradition for the historic reasons. If the reasons are forgotten, or if subsequent adherents come to disagree with the reasons, the tradition dies out.

To provide obvious comparisons: In the United States, we have traditions of setting off fireworks on the Fourth of July, of gathering with family and eating Turkey on the third Thursday of November, of exchanging presents on December 25. None of these three traditions simply arose as a “long-held practice” for which arguments for the practice arose afterwards. Exactly the opposite is the case. Each of the traditions occurs for specific reasons: celebration of Independence Day, gratitude for religious freedom and God’s good gifts in creation (Thanksgiving), celebration of the Christian feast commemorating Jesus’ birth. And the practices arose as ways of commemorating original events by symbolic acts with rational justification: fireworks and independence (“the rockets red glare . . . . our flag was still there”), turkey dinners (Pilgrim settlers giving thanks for survival by sharing a meal), Christmas gift-giving (gifts of the Magi commemorating the gift of the incarnation). Without the initial reasons, there would have been no corresponding tradition. If different rationales arise over time – as Christmas has become more and more of a secular winter celebration in post-Christian cultures – the tradition evolves into a new tradition. Thus, greetings of “Merry Christmas” are more and more replaced by “Happy Holidays” or even “Seasons Greetings!”

It is precisely this collapse of the traditional rationales that has led to the questioning of the traditional practice concerning women’s ordination. As long as Western cultures were preindustrial, women were excluded from public settings by default. As cultural changes took place, not only women but other historically subordinate groups began experiencing more social freedom. I document the way in which voices in the early modern world challenged slavery, racism, and supported the rights of working people as well as women (Icons, 13-14).

Within both the broader culture and the church, women experienced numerous restrictions until the last century. For example, women (and non-property holders) were not allowed to vote until the early twentieth century. Butler documents the restrictions historically placed on women in the Roman Catholic Church and the gradual shift to an egalitarian position (Butler, 18-38). Within Anglican and Episcopal churches, women were not only restricted from ordination, but even from serving on vestries.

This all changed with the recognition by all mainline churches in the mid-twentieth century of the intellectual, moral, and spiritual equality of women. And it is this genuinely new recognition that has led first to the rejection of the traditional rationale for not ordaining women, but by logical extension of the restriction itself. Because Protestants and Catholic opponents of women’s ordination can no longer affirm the traditional rationale against women’s leadership (ontological inferiority), they have necessarily had to adopt new but contrary reasons to continue to close the doors of church office to women.

As I put it in my book, there is no logical way to get from an intellectual and moral incapacity that demonstrates an inability to teach or exercise leadership to an intellectual and ontological equality that now allows teaching and leadership, but nonetheless does not allow celebration of the sacraments – which was not the original concern. If the two versions of the “tradition” are so radically different as that, the latter is in no way the same tradition as the former! (Icons, 33).

Perkins cannot appeal to any historical argument for sacramental male symbolism because it is a recent argument. Again, in their opposition to women’s ordination, the voices of the tradition complain about women teaching and exercising leadership over men, not about sacramental representation.¹⁶ Perkins dismisses the statements of the writers I cite as “misogynist,” but these are the only arguments that writers actually put forward – and these are significant figures in the church’s tradition! Certainly if the “Spirit-filled Mystical Body of Christ” were following an authentic tradition, its best advocates could have come up with a better rationale than the ontological inferiority of women.

If Perkins’ understanding of tradition is correct, the historic tradition of the church against women’s ordination must be based on a symbolic understanding of masculine sacramental symbolism for which there is no evidence in the historical record. The position collapses over the choice between three equally undesirable understandings of tradition:

(1) One could embrace some version of the two-source theory of the relationship between Scripture and tradition that prevailed among Roman Catholics at the time of the Council of Trent. Besides Scripture, there exists some unwritten oral tradition that justified such practices as papal primacy even though there is no actual evidence for this unwritten tradition in the surviving historical record. Accordingly, though there is no actual historical evidence for it, such an unwritten tradition about male sacramental symbolism must have existed. Given his complaints about the historical gaps in the sources I cite, perhaps Perkins believes that such an unwritten oral tradition existed, or at least if it existed, it does not seem to have left written records.

(2) To the contrary, following something like Mascall’s argument, one could acknowledge that there was no such unwritten oral tradition based on sacramental symbolism. Rather, the church did not ordain women based on an unspecified “intuitional consensus” that only men should be ordained. Only twenty centuries later, the church finally sorted out the real reasons based on sacramental symbolism. Until that happened, the church rightly ordained only men, but unfortunately rationalized the practice for faulty reasons that the church now correctly rejects as misogynist. At the same time, the church must insist that despite the evidence to the contrary, the stated reasons found in the historical record (intellectual, moral, and spiritual inferiority) cannot have been the “real” reasons.

(3) Alternatively, one could acknowledge that for most of its history, the church had a tradition that women could not teach or exercise authority over men in the public sphere, and this was based on assumptions concerning female inferiority. In accord with this, women were not allowed to be ordained either. It was only in the mid-twentieth century that the church came to realize that women were not intellectually inferior to men after all, and that women could after all perform tasks in the public sphere from which they had historically been excluded, e.g., teaching or exercising authority. At the same time, the church came to realize that one exclusion still obtained, that women could not be ordained. This was not, however, for the traditional reasons, which are now recognized as problematic, but because of a new understanding of male sacramental symbolism that had not been understood to be the church’s historic position, but actually was.

Each of the positions collapses because of incoherence.

(1) collapses for the same reason the Tridentine two-source theory collapsed. An unwritten tradition for which there is no historical evidence is akin to the infamous “Invisible Gardener.” A tradition for which there is no actual evidence is not a tradition at all.

(2) is essentially an admission that the “tradition” is not based on good reasons, and is subject to the criticism of all versions of “enthusiasm.” Unspecified “intuitions” can lead to any conceivable theological outcome. It should not need to be pointed out that this claim of a previously inarticulated “intuitional consensus” is parallel to the arguments used by theological liberals within the church to justify blessing same-sex unions.

(3) is essentially an admission that a previous tradition of the church has been abandoned and replaced with a new tradition. To the extent, for instance, that contemporary opponents of women’s ordination allow women to do such things as teach men but not be ordained, they have abandoned a tradition of the church that was as much established as the tradition not to ordain women. Complementarian Protestants are at least consistent here.

Despite his rhetoric, Perkins is mistaken when he claims that I am simply rejecting tradition. I certainly accept the understanding of the relationship between Scripture and tradition found in historic Anglican figures such as Richard Hooker. I endorse the kind of argument that one finds in authors like Hooker or Archbishop Arthur Michael Ramsey that, as successors to the apostles, bishops occupy a role of oversight and pastoral care that corresponded in certain senses to the roles of NT apostles. (BTW, later in life, Ramsey came to endorse te ordination of women!) What I am challenging is not the church’s historic tradition that bishops and clergy are in some sense successors to the apostles, but that there is anything inherent to the logic of the offices of bishop, presbyter, or deacon, that would restrict their practice to men alone.

I no more reject tradition than do those Orthodox and Roman Catholic authors to whom I appeal in my book, for example, Jesuit Edward Kilmartin, whom I quote:: “[The] current theological arguments against the ordination of women to the ministerial priesthood in official Catholic circles are rather weak.”¹⁷ Along with Orthodox theologians like Kallistos Ware and Elisabeth Behr-Sigel and Catholics like Kilmartin, I recognize that the church’s practice against ordaining women was based on assumptions concerning female inferiority that the church has subsequently rejected. In light of the church’s fairly recent affirmations concerning women’s equality, it is entirely in accord with an understanding of the church as the “Spirit-filled Mystical Body of Christ” to ordain women – since the historic reasons for opposition were based on faulty assumptions concerning female inequality that the church has since understood to be mistaken. This is no more to reject the tradition of the church than was the opposition of nineteenth-century abolitionsts to slavery a rejection of the church’s tradition – although there were those at the time who defended slavery by appealing not only to church tradition, but also to what they claimed was the clear teaching of Scripture.

Despite Perkins’ rhetoric, there have been numerous times in the past when the church altered a previously accepted “universal tradition.” (Perkins appeals to Vincent of Lerins’ Quod Ubique, Semper, et Ab Omnibus: what had been believed everywhere, always and by everyone. The citation of Vincent is ironic in that Vincent was likely a semi-Pelagian, a heresy rejected by the church):

1) Constantinianism to Separation of Church and State: From the time of the recognition of the church by Constantine I, an alliance grew up between church and state (“Constantinianism”) that prevailed through the entire history of Christendom. In the Reformation Church of England, this occurred as “Erastianism,” and after the Reformation-era “Wars of Religion” was settled by the principle of cuius regio, cuius religio (“Whose reign, his religion”). It has only been in the modern era that churches gradually came to embrace “separation of church and state,” religious freedom, and freedom of conscience. The Roman Catholic Church finally embraced religious freedom at Vatican II (Dignitatus Humanae, “Declaration on Religious Freedom”).

2) Persecution of Heretics to Ecumenical Dialogue: Beginning with Augustine’s endorsement of the coercion of Donatist heretics, the church’s historic position had been that “error has no rights.” It was the failure of the Wars of Religion that gradually led first Protestant countries, and eventually even the Roman Catholic Church to not only tolerate, but to promote, religious freedom and ecumenical dialogue.

3) Slavery to Abolitionism: Throughout much of its history, the church tolerated, and sometimes not only endorsed, but even practiced slave-holding. Although the owning of Christian slaves was discouraged beginning in the Middle Ages, slave-holding of non-Christians was permitted, and it was not until the nineteenth century that Pope Gregory XVI condemned all slavery. Among Protestants, it was not until the Abolitionist movement beginning in the early nineteenth-century that the church began to challenge slavery, leading to its eventual abolition. Nonetheless, numerous Christians (both Catholic and Protestant) continued to defend slavery until abolition was decided by secular law.

4) Serfdom to Workers’ Rights: Luther responded to the Peasants’ Rebellion by claiming that Christian liberty included only spiritual liberty, not freedom in one’s person, and encouraged suppression of the peasants. It was only in subsequent centuries that Christians came to understand that the Gospel had social implications concerning workers’ rights. Beginning with Rerum Novarum (1891),the Catholic Social Encyclicals mark a significant shift on this question.

5) Pacifism to Just War: Early Christians (like Origen) were emphatically pacifist. It was only after the rise of Constantinianism that Christians came to endorse what became known as “Just War” theory.

6) “Usury” to Loaning at Interest: Historically, Christians opposed loaning at interest as the sin of “usury,” basing their condemnation on the clear teaching of Scripture. Only after the Reformation did Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, come to endorse modern banking practices, based on lending money at interest.

7) Antisemitism to Dialogue: Christian writing against Jews is historically laced with antisemitism. Medieval Passion Plays often contained antisemitic language and imagery, and Good Friday observances often led to violence against local Jewish communities. Since the Nazi Holocaust resulting in the death of six million Jews, Christian churches consistently condemn antisemitism.

8) Ontological Inferiority to Women’s Equality: As documented in my book, Christian writers consistently assumed that women were ontologically inferior to men: less intelligent, emotionally unstable, subject to temptation. Since the mid-twentieth century, all mainline churches have affirmed women’s essential equality to men.

While the above shifts mark abandonment of what had previously been universally affirmed church “tradition,” the charitable way to refer to these changes would be as examples of “development of doctrine.” Perkins ignores or misses a significant footnote in my book in which I contrast John Henry Newman’s position concerning development of doctrine with that of Anglican James B. Mozley: “This book argues that the notions of ‘social liberty and equality’ as a development of the notion of Christian liberty, and the ordination of women as a development from the church’s affirmation of the ontological equality of women, are developments [of doctrine]. They do not add something new in the sense of something ‘different,’ but something new in the sense of an explanatory process or drawing out of the logical implications of something inherent in the original subject matter of Christian faith” (410, n. 3). My point is not to reject the church’s tradition, but to argue for a legitimate development of doctrine concerning the practice of ordination to church office.

 

Church Office in the New Testament

Finally, addressing one last issue concerning historical continuity, Perkins complains that I invent an imaginary history of “egalitarianism” in the church, which then mysteriously disappeared.

We are left to wonder why the Church utterly failed to discern a biblical egalitarianism that, Witt claims, was always present but never seen. Advocates for women’s ordination have yet to produce a plausible historical explanation for how this purportedly egalitarian New Testament became an early Church that excluded women from ordained ministry. They must suppose that Jesus and St. Paul tossed the reasons for male-only ordination overboard and opened the way for women to serve in exactly the same capacity as men — but that either this opening was slammed shut immediately after the closing of the New Testament without any hint of debate or protest in the historical record, or that there was at some point a remarkably successful Da-Vinci-Code-style conspiracy to suppress the record. Alternatively, we could accept that male-only ordination in the Scriptures is rooted more deeply than ephemeral ritual purity laws or agrarian socio-economics.

This is, again, a misrepresentation or at least serious misreading of what I actually wrote. Nowhere do I suggest that either Jesus or Paul simply “overthrew” traditional patriarchy. Concerning Jesus, the question of ordination simply does not arise, since, as I point out in my book, Jesus did not ordain anyone. I also point out, following Karl Barth, that Jesus did not directly challenge the rule of the Roman empire, that he accepted the temple and the Jewish rulers, that he did not explicitly oppose the economic systems of the time, including slavery. At the same time, Jesus put all of these cultural systems into question through a process of what I call “Christological subversion.” Throughout chapter 6, I document the way that Jesus actually challenged Mediterranean “honor culture,” offered an alternative understanding of “servanthood” and “submission,” and the ways in which challenges appeared in Jesus’ relationship with women, particularly women disciples.

Concerning Paul, I wrote:

Paul does not directly overthrow the paterfamilias patriarchal structures of the first-century Mediterranean family. He does not explicitly tell Christians to free their slaves. He does not explicitly advocate egalitarianism between men and women [emphasis added]. But he modifies the ancient “household codes” (Haustafeln) in such a way that the implications are subversive. . . . Far from endorsing the top-down understanding of hierarchical authority of husbands over wives, of domineering parents over children, and masters over slaves, Paul undermines them. Christians are not masters demanding obedience from one another, but servants of one another who voluntarily yield to one another out of love. (Icons, 115)

In chapter 15, I discuss women’s ministry in the New Testament, focusing specifically on Romans 16, where Paul addresses ten women (out of twenty-six persons). Concerning leadership in the church, I state, “Paul’s primary criteria for leadership was that of service in building up the body of Christ. In this way, although he did not abolish social distinctions he used them for the benefit of the church, and thus turned social categories upside down” (Icons, 299, emphasis added). I point out that in Romans 16, Paul refers to three women holding some kind of office: Phoebe (a deacon), Prisca (a co-worker and teacher), and Junia (an apostle). I also point out that Paul uses the same words describing these women that he uses to describe his male associates – “co-worker” “fellow-worker” – and describes them the same way that he does men. I conclude by pointing out that if applying the same kind of language and description to male colleagues, no one would hesitate to describe these positions as “office.”

Nowhere in these chapters do I describe the position of women as disciples of Jesus or as exercising significant roles of leadership in the churches of Paul as examples of an “egalitarian” utopia. To the contrary, my language of “christological subversion,” “servanthood,” and “mutual submission” says something about the way in which both Jesus and Paul subverted first-century patriarchal honor-culture without explicitly overthrowing it. It would have been no more possible for Jesus and Paul simply to overthrow patriarchy in the first-century Mediterranean world than to abolish slavery.

There can, however, be no question that a significant loss took place when we pass from the role of women as disciples of Jesus and as partners (“co-workers”) in Paul’s ministry, to what was later possible for women in post-New Testament churches. To notice this change, all one has to do is to compare the way in which Jesus treats women in the Gospels with the quotations I had provided from figures such as Tertullian, Epiphanius, or even Chrysostom. Compare the roles that women exercised in the Book of Acts and Romans 16 with the kinds of things women were allowed to do in the later patristic church. Perkins seems to have missed my reference to a passage from a book by Ben Witherington III: “Witherington points to a heightened emphasis on asceticism, celibacy, and virginity that arose in the patristic period following the New Testament, and that led to a devaluing of marriage. This meant that women in the church could either serve in the celibate ministries of deaconesses, virgins, or widows, or they could marry, in which case, their role was restricted to wife and mother. The consequence was that the sexual identity of women as women was devalued.”¹⁸

No “DaVinci Code style conspiracy” is needed to “suppress the record.” All one has to do is to compare the plain sense of the NT texts that show how both Jesus and Paul interacted with women, and the significant roles those women played as followers of Jesus and as partners in Paul’s ministry, to their far more restricted options in the later patristic church in order to recognizee that something significant changed. It is just not possible that the Paul who wrote Romans 16 could have written the kinds of statements describing women that we find in figures such as Origen, Epiphanius, or, again, even Chrysostom.

 

Conclusion

Perkins reads my argument selectively. Rather than recognizing or addressing the argument as a whole, he focuses on each chapter as an isolated unit, and responds with diatribe rather than argument. Perkins labels my arguments as “arbitrary,” but he is so committed to showing me wrong that he misses the central connection that runs through the entire discussion of history and church tradition.

The real issue has to do with the answer to three questions:

Why did men in the Old Testament period, in the New Testament and Mediterranean world, and later in most of church history exercise public roles while women were confined largely to domestic tasks?

Second, did Jesus and the later New Testament church (especially St. Paul) simply accept this historic public/private division between men’s and women’s roles, or did they challenge it?

Third, did the post-NT church act consistently with the teaching and practice of Jesus and Paul, or did they rather echo the preindustrial understandings of the socieietal roles of men and women based on traditional distinctions between the public and private nature of men’s and women’s work respectively? If the latter, did they provide some specifically Christian rationale for upholding preindustrial understandings, or did they rather echo the kinds of assumptions of female ontological inferiority that were largely introduced by pagan Hellenistic culture?

Fourth, in light of Jesus’ and the New Tetament church’s (especially St. Paul’s), challenge to the historic public/private division, what should be the contemporary church’s response?