Women Priests: History and Theology

Since this excellent article of Fr. Reardon's has disappeared from the old
Christian Activist web site and appears to be nowhere else on the web, I am
posting it here for anybody's and everybody's reading pleasure. (Caedmon)

Women Priests - History and Theology, Fr. Patrick Henry Reardon. (Originally
published in Touchstone, 6.1 (Winter 1993), pp. 22-27. )

Let it be said up front that those who would appeal to ancient precedent to
justify the ordination of women to the ministry of presbyter in the Church
are faced with a fairly daunting task. There is no canonical record of any
office of woman presbyters: Indeed there is no literary record of any kind
to that effect.

Oh, that all proponents of women's ordination were honest about the lack of
literary evidence. For example, a 1987 article in the Priscilla Papers
(Volume 1, no. 4) claimed that "St. Cyprian writes [in Epistle 75.10.5] of a
female presbyter [elder] in Cappadocia [also part of modern Turkey] in the
mid-23Os." If true, of course, that would seem to be game point and match,
for what fool would contest the great African Father? A fine shade of doubt
faintly shadows the mind at this point, nonetheless, and I wonder how,
having studied St. Cyprian assiduously from my youth, I had failed to
distinguish this fairly big detail. Well, l didn't. The letter in question
was actually sent to the saintly bishop of Carthage by Firmilian of Caesarea
reporting on what he regarded as the pretentious (deceperat . . . simularet
. . . usurpans), irregular (ab ecclesiastica regula), and even scandalous
(nequissimus daemon per mulierem) activities of some local woman whom he
managed to call just about everything but a presbyter. A delicate and gentle
tact pleads that no more be said about this so-called evidence from the
third century.

Getting slightly, but only slightly, more serious, we know that there are
quite a few early epigraphic references to this or that presbytera
(priestess), and there is no shortage of feminist archaeologists to make the
most of them. These tomb inscriptions, found all around the Mediterranean
basin, would perhaps make a cogent argument for women's ordination if we did
not already know exactly what a presbytera was during the earliest centuries
of Christianity: an elderly woman, often a widow, under the care of the
Church. There is no evidence whatsoever that it referred to an ordained
woman. Consequently, in calling St. Priscilla a "presbytera officiating
along with the presbyteroi in the central act of the worship of the church,"
Torrance employed the word in a sense unknown either in the Christian
literature of the period or in any clear epigraphic examples. Salva
reverentia, this was an unwarranted, eccentric and misleading liberty. (See
Dr. Thomas Torrance, "The Ministry of Women," Touchstone, 5.4, Fall, 1992.)

One finds also a few early epigraphic instances of the word presbytis, but
once again we already know from Titus 2:3-5 and other canonical documents
that this simply means an elderly woman. In the Apostolic Constitutions the
term seems synonymous with presbytera in the sense of a widow or other older
woman in the special care of the Church.

Torrance himself refers to presbytides,, a title signifying women who had
certain special functions in the worship of the Church, but he cites the
testimony of Epiphanius that these women were not to be regarded as
priestesses. Evidently because they functioned that way among the
fourth-century Montanists, Canon 11 of the Council of Laodicea finally
suppressed the title (Hopko, 61-74).

Something more must be said about the later history of presbytera, of which
Torrance admits that it "was sometimes used (and still is in Greece ) to
refer to the wife of a presbyter." Indeed, we should give this usage more
serious attention. I am not aware of literary instances of it before the
sixth century. The earliest witness I know of is Canon 19 of the First
Council of Tours (ca 567), which speaks of a presbyter cum sua presbytema
"priest with his priestess." A nearly contemporary example of this usage is
found in the Dialogues (4.11) of Pope St. Gregory I.

The origins of presbytera in reference to a priest's wife, nonetheless, were
evidently quite a bit earlier. When our literature finally does bear witness
to the custom in the sixth century, the masculine term presbyter was already
in the process of being replaced in Greek by hiereus and in Latin by
sacerdos. It is very important to note, however, that these words, hiereus
and sacerdos, were not feminized by custom; only the older term presbyter
was. That changing of the masculine noun presbyter reflected an alteration
of accent in the theology of the priesthood during that period, but the
significant fact for our investigation is that there was no corresponding
change in the feminine form of the word. A presbytera was simply the wife of
a priest; if I may express it so, the word had only a sociological, not a
theological, reference. At no time was any woman ordained a presbytera; she
became one when her husband was ordained a priest.

Furthermore, this very preservation of the word presbytera in reference to a
priest's wife certainly bears witness to its antiquity and general
acceptance. Some feminist archaeologists, as though they were proving
something, actually present slide shows with perhaps a score of tomb
inscriptions bearing the word presbytera. Well, there are doubtless
thousands more such inscriptions to be found out there, but they add zero to
the feminist case.

It is inadequate to say then, as Torrance does, that it "was sometimes used"
to refer to the wife of a priest (as noted above). After the fifth century
that was the most expected and normal meaning of the word in both Greek and
Latin; the select references to this usage from the sixth century onward
fill more than a column of Du Cange's standard lexicon of medieval Latin.
From the earlier part of that same period there are still, to be sure, a few
instances where the word refers to widows of the Church, and occasionally,
but more especially among the Greeks, it designated an abbess. Still, the
dominant meaning of presbytera after the fifth century was (and has
remained) the wife of a priest. I am aware of no evidence, prior to the
Slavic missions, that a priest's wife was ever called by any name other than
presbytera or, after the seventh century Moslem conquest of Syria , the
Arabic precise equivalent, khoureeye. At absolutely no point in the first
thousand years of Christian history do we find testimony of presbytera
designating an ordained person in the Church.

Another remark is in order here with respect to the presbytera. She was very
often the mother of a priest as well as a priest's wife. While I cannot
speak for Italy or Gaul , where efforts were being made to force celibacy on
the clergy, we know that in many villages of Greece and Syria (and later
among the Slavs), the priesthood tended to stay in the same family for a
number of generations. A presbytera in such a situation acquired a twofold
claim to the name. One observes even today the common Arabic title of
address: "mother of the priest," um-I-khoury.

Essaying candor at the risk of appearing haughty, let me submit that the
exegetical problem here is one of historical continuity . For practical
purposes, only the Eastern Orthodox Christians nowadays know by immediate
social experience what a presbytera is, whether she is called a popadija
(Serbian), a panyi (Carpathian and Ukrainian), a matushka (Russian), a
khoureeye (Syrian), or a presvytera (Greek). (My parishioners are proud to
address my wife as khoureeye, "priestess," but I fear she would do damage to
the hands that tried to ordain her.) This specific sociological creature
called the presbytera almost does not exist today outside of Orthodoxy, even
when, as among the Anglicans, the parish priest is a married man. During the
first 1,000 years, however, she was an ordinary and anticipated phenomenon
in thousands of parish churches.

Because she is culturally alien to them, Western Christians today sometimes
fail to identify the presbytera when they find evidence of her in history.
If I am permitted to say it abruptly and with no desire to find fault, my
meaning is this: the Roman Catholics got rid of the priest's wife, and then
the Protestants got rid of the priest. So at the present moment Western
Christians, who are still very deeply divided among themselves as to what
ordination theologically means or what exactly a person is being ordained
to, are simultaneously speculating whether women themselves should be
ordained. Thus, every time another tomb is discovered bearing the
inscription presbytera, a certain number of them stand around congratulating
one another on how their evidence is piling up, while the others wring their
hands and wonder how to dam the tidal wave. It is a waste of time.

Back to the Catacombs

So Torrance and other proponents of women's ordination, deprived of the
faintest filament of support for their case in either literary or monumental
sources, turn to the iconography of the early Church, a move that this
Eastern Orthodox Christian would frankly like to see become a trend.
Torrance takes us to Rome , there to examine a very early mural in the
Catacomb of St. Priscilla. It depicts seven figures seated at a table, and
these he describes as seven presbyters celebrating the Eucharist in the
catacomb. Torrance , whose eyesight must be infinitely keener than mine,
went so far as to identify two of these figures ("presumably") as the
biblical Aquila and Priscilla, and Touchstone reproduced the picture. (As
noted above).

Well, right now I am recalling some wonderfully enjoyable afternoons of
yesteryear when, after a long northbound bus ride on the Via Nomentana, I
would stand in reverence before that mural and the other fascinating
examples of primitive iconography in the Catacomb of St. Priscilla.
Doubtless my respect for him over the years may prompt me to regard Torrance
as a visionary of sorts, but let me tell you that I never during those
afternoons detected anything on that wall comparable to what he claims to
behold there.

Even now, looking at a photograph of that fresco over and over again, I
discern no trace of what he and some other people say they see. Not terribly
clear in every respect, the picture has been the subject of numerous
conjectures and, since Davin in 1892, even caricatures. Some viewers could
find no male figures in the picture at all (Irvin, 6f.), while Henri
Leclercq, who describes them more generally as personages, sees a bearded
male, évidemment le président, to our left (Dictionnaire 2.2092). It was the
presence of at least one woman at the table that ruled out an early
interpretation that the portrayal was of the seven disciples eating at the
Sea of Tiberias (John 21:12 -23).

Even if this were a realistic picture of the early Eucharist at Rome , it
would add nothing to Torrance 's argument for women's ordination. Even on
that conjecture, it is just not possible to say that anyone at that table is
a female presbyter "concelebrating" the Eucharist. That notion cannot be
dated prior to some two decades ago, I think, when feminism began its
intense feeding frenzy. The world's most eminent liturgical archaeologists
since 1885, including Rossi, Wilpert, and Leclercq, studied the fresco from
every angle without spotting anything of the sort. That was the year, by the
way, that this catacomb was first named for St. Priscilla, largely because
scholars believed that she was in Rome (see Romans 16:3) when the catacomb
was originally dug on the property of the senator Pudens. To my knowledge,
Torrance is the first viewer to spot both Aquila and Priscilla in the mural
itself, a feat in whose emulation I have contracted severe eye strain.

But is this supposed to be a realistic portrayal of an actual celebration of
the Eucharist? There are reasons for thinking that it is not. According to
Justin Martyr, the Eucharist at Rome was celebrated standing and in prayer,
whereas in this scene we are presented with seven figures sitting there at a
table talking and gesticulating to one another in what appear to be three
separate conversations. (One admits readily that random discourse and other
spontaneous pleasantries have also been known to break out from time to time
among the less devout during the Eucharist itself, even in some of the local
parishes of my area, but we rarely memorialize the event in a mural.)

There are scores of extant catacomb icons showing Christians at prayer, and
those all conform to what we know about the usual posture of Christian
prayer from several literary sources: figures standing, arms elevated and
extended in cruciform, eyes raised. Two good examples are the pictures from
the Septuagint Book of Daniel-the praying Susanna and the three boys in the
furnace-which are found right there in the same Capella Graeca as the table
scene we are talking about. In this latter icon, however, there is no
resemblance whatsoever to those other artistic and literary witnesses. All
the figures are seated, not one eye in the painting is cast upward, not a
single hand raised even to shoulder height.

If we are not looking at a realistic portrait of the Eucharist, still it
would be rash to conclude that there is nothing eucharistic about it. The
picture is somewhat complex. We observe that its imagery is drawn in part
from the Last Supper, in part from the Multiplication of the Loaves; one
notes the fish along with the bread and chalice at the table, as well as the
seven baskets of fragments (see Mark 8:8 and 20) off to the sides. This all
suggests a combining, a "compenetration" if you will, of images from two
Gospel scenes. Indeed, the later presence of elevatis oculis in coelum
("with eyes raised to heaven"), a direct quotation from the Multiplication
narrative in Mark 6:41, within the actual Institution Account in the
venerable Roman Liturgy, is a striking testimony of how easily the Roman
Christians combined the two Gospel scenes.

I believe that this is an icon of the Messianic Banquet, of which the
Multiplication of the Loaves was a foreshadowing, and the Eucharist an
anticipation. The seven figures, whom I take to be symbolic of the Church in
her eschatological fullness, are doing exactly what Jesus said his disciples
would do in the kingdom-they are sitting and feasting. The picture is less a
portrayal of how early second-century Christians conducted themselves at the
Eucharist than of how they hoped to behave themselves in heaven.

Theodora Episcopa

But now let us continue to follow the lead of the feminist tour leaders
through the streets of Rome from the Catacomb of St. Priscilla to the Church
of St. Praxedes . There we find a ninth-century mosaic depicting four female
"saints" who w ere dear to Pope Pascal I (817-824), a fierce opponent of
iconoclasm. The heads of three of these women are each shrined in a round
nimbus, signifying that they were already venerated as saints in the
liturgical calendar of the Church: St. Praxedes, the Virgin Mary, and
(supposes Henri Leclercq, who enjoys a kind of infallibility in these
matters) St. Prudentiana. The woman on the extreme left is featured with a
square nimbus, indicating that she was still alive when the mosaic was made.

This woman was also important to Pope Pascal I; she was his mother,
Theodora. (She was not the Empress Theodora, as one might be led to think by
the picture that unfortunately accompanied Torrance 's article in Touchstone
and which I am sure he did not choose.) Undoubtedly, none of this would
solicit our attention in the present discussion on women's ordination were
it not for the inscription to the side of and over her head in the mosaic:
Theodora Episcopa [Theodora the Bishopess]. Torrance , convinced now that he
has at last discovered the smoking gun, sums up his case: "And so we have
papal authority for a woman bishop and an acknowledgment by the pope that he
himself was the son of a woman bishop."

Well, if he insists on grasping for that straw, I am afraid that Torrance 's
proposition must simply sink with it. As I will show in a moment, an
adequate exegesis of that inscription will necessarily involve some element
of reasonable surmise and contextualizing. Torrance 's ipse dixit, however,
cannot seriously be called even a conjecture; it is a revisionist bluff, an
unfounded affront to everything we know about the ninth century by accepted
standards of inference and context. During the period under discussion every
ordination canon in force and every ordinal in use presumes that only
persons of the male sex are ordained. No feminine noun, adjective or
referent is ever employed in those testimonials. Every single contemporary
literary reference to a bishop, whether in sermon, treatise, or letter,
including those of Pope Pascal himself (Volume 129 of Migne's Latin
Petrology), is masculine. To seize on this one inscription, then, and
gratuitously pretend that it documents the existence of a female bishop at
Rome in the ninth century is an embarrassing exercise in ideological
fantasy, first advanced, I believe, by Joan Morris in her 1972
hallucination, The LadyWas a Bishop.

We are left, nonetheless, with the task of finding out what the word
episcopa does mean as it appears over the head of Theodora. Literary
references are the first and most obvious place to look for an answer. Here
the positive and direct evidence, though materially slight, demolishes
Torrance 's thesis. In 813, during Pascal's priestly and monastic ministry
in Rome and just four years before he was made pope, the Second Council of
Tours prescribed the following Canon 13: "Let no entourage of women
accompany a bishop who does not have a bishopess" (Episcopum episcopam non
habentem nulla sequatur turba mulierum). By itself this text is unanswerable
proof that an episcopa in ninth-century Latin was understood to be the wife
of a bishop.

It has also been suggested that episcopa may likewise have meant "abbess." I
am aware of no evidence supporting this attractive suggestion, however,
except the very inscription we are talking about (see the sources cited in
Du Cange's entry episcopa). In our mosaic Theodora does seem to be wearing
the coif normally associated with feminine monasticism. (Indeed, that coif
was once invoked to argue that Theodora was unmarried and thus not the wife
of a bishop!-See Irvin, 6). That the mother of so monastic an enthusiast
should have become a nun in her advancing and widowed years would be no
surprise. Still, in the absence of supporting testimony, it appears to me a
rather shaky business to regard episcopa as the equivalent of abbatissa
solely on the basis of this inscription. I would be delighted, nonetheless,
to have some medievalist show me wrong.

At the risk of seeming fickle, let me submit one more possibility. In spite
of the testimony of the Second Council of Tours cited above, I confess that
I am not really convinced that Pope Pascal's mother was married to a bishop.
My suspicion, based on nothing more than what I know of the folk habits of
Orthodox Christians, and advanced here with all due discretion, is this:
Theodora was called an episcopa or bishopess, simply because she was the
mother of the bishop of Rome. As the latter had no wife (the Roman popes and
most other bishops having been celibate for quite some time) but did have a
popular mother living close at hand, the name episcopa was informally
transferred to her by those who held her in high regard. If this was so,
episcopa in her case was a name of endearment, charmed with that hint of
play and irony that often adorns terms of affection. Pope Pascal's mother
was later remembered as gracious and kind (benignissima genitrix, says a
source cited in Du Cange). In his mosaic crafted during her lifetime, then,
her son memorialized her with that respectful and affectionate name by which
everyone in Rome knew her: the bishopess. It would take another thousand
years and a vastly different ecclesiastical context for that title to be so
totally misunderstood.

So, at the end, how much archaeological evidence has been found for women's
ordination to the priesthood in the Church of the first thousand years?
Zero, and not the faintest fraction more. Those who have sought for solid
historical data in its support have come up with just plain zero.
Unfortunately, they have often enough then proceeded to multiply their zeros
and pretend that they are ready to alter the ministerial structure of the
Church.

It would cause me no grand surprise and only small pain to learn that
sometime in some ecclesiastical back water or infrequently visited village,
some bishop had sneaked his ordaining hands onto some woman's head. But the
proponents of this most novel of novelties have failed to give us even a
single historical example of such a laying on of hands. That has not,
however, prevented their impressive display of sleight of hand.

Theological Reasoning

In the second part of his article Torrance ( as noted above ) advances
speculative theological reasons for female presbyteral ordination,
commencing with the premise that "there is no intrinsic or theological
ground for the exclusion of women." He accuses opponents of women's
ordination of arguing that "it is only a man who can be an icon of Christ at
the altar," and then goes on to show why he thinks them wrong.

Torrance hints repeatedly that those who would restrict presbyteral
ordination to men alone are not taking seriously the biblical doctrine that
both men and women are made in God's image and likeness. In Christ, he
reminds us, there is neither male nor female. So, he argues, "woman as well
as man was made in the image of God, and may therefore be said to be an icon
of God as well as man." This likeness to God, in short, pertains to human
nature, not a specific sex. So if "iconography" is a basis of ordination,
then the male must not be given preference to the female. I trust that this
summary accurately represents the thought of Torrance .

In response, let us ask another question: Can a Christian man icon, or
represent, Christ in a way that is not possible for a Christian woman? If
the answer to this question is yes, then perhaps there may be a doctrinal
basis for ordaining men and not ordaining women . Keep that thought in mind:
if the answer is yes-if the Christian man really can icon or represent
Christ in a way that the Christian woman cannot-then everything today's
feminists write on this matter by way of theological reflection is beside
the point.

If I have correctly understood Torrance , however, his answer to that
question must be no. Indeed, it seems to me that he says repeatedly
throughout his article that, in this matter of iconing or representing
Christ, the male cannot do it in any way not also available to the female.
Such representation always has to do exclusively with human nature as such,
he contends, and never with a specific sex. Now if that is truly what
Torrance is saying, then he is manifestly at odds with Holy Scripture. I
take it to be the clear teaching of the New Testament that the Christian
man, as male and not simply as person, can represent Christ in some way that
the Christian woman cannot.

We are taught in the New Testament that the husband in the Christian family,
precisely as husband, can represent Christ in some way that his wife is not
able to duplicate (Ephesians 5:21 -33), and that this representation has to
do with his specific sex. This representation involves his being masculine
and not feminine. This representation is further described as one of
headship: "the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is head of the
Church." The text here is something of a hard saying in our contemporary
setting precisely because it is so clear and so irreducible. It says that
the Christian husband, as head of the family, represents Christ who is head
of the Church. This representation of Christ in headship pertains to the
husband's specific sex (see also 1 Corinthians 11:3).

Now if that is true, then the answer to the question posed above must be
yes: It is possible for the Christian man to icon Christ in a way that is
not possible for the Christian woman. And if that is true, then there is a
reasonable and possible theological basis for ordaining men and not
ordaining women, and thus Torrance 's major premise is eviscerated.

Please understand, I am not making that argument myself; I am simply saying
that the argument can be made on a scriptural basis. I am reluctant to craft
any such theoretical argument, because I do not want to convey the
impression that the Church's refusal to ordain women is based on some
theological study or speculative reflection. That refusal by the Church is
not founded on any sort of rational theory excogitated by theologians but on
the authority of the living Apostolic Tradition. Quite simply, the
ordination of women was not received from Christ and handed down to us by
the Apostles. It is an alien intrusion, a meddling with Moabites, and
consequently must be numbered among those novelties against which the Bible
warns us.

Male headship, however, does raise an important point of Christology and
Trinitarian doctrine. Prior to becoming a male in the human race, the
eternal Word was already God's Son, not just his offspring. The fatherhood
and the sonship in the Holy Trinity are not simply cultural names. Even if
there were no such things as men and women, God could still be Father, Son,
and Holy Spirit. Male headship in the Church and in the Christian family,
then, is not an arbitrary arrangement. It has to do with the very being of
the God of Christians. Change it and you start to alter that most
patriarchal/of dogmas: the doctrine of the Trinity.

I hasten to add that sex may not be read back into the Being of God as
Father. I simply want to insist that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,
not something else. If it is erroneous to read sex back into God, then it is
at least as wrong to read androgyny or gender-neutrality back into God, and
that is exactly what has happened among some Christians who several years
ago adopted female ordination. Anyone entertaining doubts on this point is
invited to examine the new Methodist service book or the various trial
liturgies recently inflicted on some unsuspecting Episcopalians. The
theology in those books goes out of its way to portray an androgynous
divinity by concentrated and intentional recourse to gender-neutral,
feminine, and even animist metaphors with a view to "balancing" the biblical
names "Father and Son," while these latter are only sparsely employed. The
books are shocking examples of a modem reluctance to voice the two
proclamations given us by the Holy Spirit: "Abba, Father" and "Jesus is
Lord."


Theological Error

Torrance cites with approval George Carey's much publicized assessment that
those who oppose women's ordination are in "serious theological error."
Well, perhaps so. But we may do well to examine the implications of that
assessment. If we are in serious theological error, how did we get that way?
We got that way from the previous generation of Christians. Okay, how did
they come to be in serious theological error? Apparently they got it from
the generation before them, and so forth. A slight difficulty arises here,
however, because it is a matter of historical fact that all generations of
Orthodox Catholic Christians for roughly 2,000 years have been opposed to
the ordination of women. Why? Because of the supposed vestigial Manichaeism
of St. Augustine and his alleged sexual hangups? Be serious. Just where did
the error come from?

The Last Supper, that's where. If we are in error, it is penultimately
because the Apostles themselves got it wrong. And if the Apostles were in
error, they received that error from the One who told them what to do and
how to do it. And if that Person was in error, we-those among us who believe
him to be the Son of God, the Savior of the world and its only hope-have a
rather serious problem on our hands.

That was the whole point of my reference to the neopaganism of the new
Methodist and Episcopalian worship experiments. I trust it will not be a
matter of indifference to Torrance that our opposition to women's ordination
springs from a deeply held conviction that the practice itself is a grave
act of disobedience and a first, but firm, step toward apostasy. In fact,
this was the assessment explicitly asserted by C. S. Lewis several decades
ago in a passage that is well known. Lewis argued that ordaining the male
sex to minister at the Eucharist has to do with the "correct appearance"
("orthodoxy" in Greek), the proper iconography. Change that appearance,
alter that icon, he reasoned, and in due time you are worshipping a
different god. That is precisely what we are witnessing today in
congregations that were still Christian back when C. S. Lewis spoke his
mind.

I see the matter to be every bit as serious as that tiny but notorious
fourth-century iota that Athanasius would have died to keep out of the
Creed. The adoption of female ordination is regarded by some of us as an
implicit but definite challenge to the lordship of Christ and the finality
of his word.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dictionnarie: Henri Leclercq, several articles in Volumes 2 and 14 of
Dictionnarie: d' Archéologic chrétienne et de Liturgie, Paris: Letouzey,
1935, 1948.

Hauke: Manfred Hauke, Women in the Priesthood?, San Francisco : Ignatius,
1988.

Hopko: Thomas Hopko, Women and the Priesthood, Crestwood: St. Vladimir's,
1983.

Irvin: Dorothy Irvin, "Archaeology Supports Women's Ordination," TheWitness,
February 1980.

An Associate Editor of Touchstone, Patrick Henry Reardon, Pastor of St.
Anthony Orthodox Church in Butler , PA , remembers with affectionate
gratitude that Dr. Thomas Torrance published his modest article on John
Calvin two decades ago in The Scottish Journal of Theology. m