On Women’s Ordination, Part 2
This is post two in my series of reflections on the question of women’s ordination as I read through William Witt’s Icons of Christ. Read the first post here.
It’s about Office
Witt begins his book by clearly defining what he is arguing: women should be ordained to the presbyterate. Witt’s book isn’t going to be about women in ministry (as it is sometimes put), but women being ordained to a particular office of the church, namely, the presbyterate (“priest” in Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican traditions; “pastor” in other Protestant churches). Too often I have seen confusion arise because of a lack of clarity between “ministries” broadly speaking and office. Some argue that since women can do all ministries then the office should be open to them as well. However, this is to equate (often without explicit argument) that an office is the same as a ministry. But is this the case? Looking at the New Testament witness, I can see how such confusion might arise. The list of spiritual gifts that we see in 1 Corinthians 12, Romans 12, and Ephesians 4 could be read as referring to “jobs” (and therefore offices) in the church. However, I think these should be considered distinct from the particular offices of episkopos, diakonos, and presbyteros as they have developed historically.
Gifts, Ministry, and Office
Before considering the historical development, I want to first clarify the differences between spiritual gifts, ministries, and offices. Gifts are the easiest to distinguish between the three in that it is something given and not a “job” or role. In the spiritual gift passages, it is what makes either those roles or activities possible, but it is not equated with them. Ministries and offices, however, are more difficult to separate. By ministries, I mean works of service (ἔργον διακονίας; Eph 4:12). These are unofficial activities empowered to be performed by the gifts of the Spirit. In this sense, for a ministry to be a ministry, a spiritual gift is per se required. An office is 1) not a gift, 2) can be a ministry, but 3) a ministry is not necessarily an office.
Romans 12 would be a helpful place to start. Here we see a connection between the gift and a particular activity (e.g., prophecy → prophesying). The gift is the source and grounds of the ministry/activity. 1 Corinthians 12 and Ephesians 4, however, use nouns in relation to the gifts, which makes them seem more like an office (apostles, prophets, teachers, etc…). If these nominal forms point to something more permanent, then it is easy to see how ministries and offices could be confused. For example, someone might prophesy, but this does not mean that every person who prophesies holds the office of prophet. Could someone have a ministry of prophecy but not have the office of a prophet? We see examples of people prophesying when the Spirit comes upon them without any indication that they subsequently assumed the office of a prophet (1 Samuel 19:19–24; Acts 19:6). Understanding that the lists in these passages are by no means the only necessary possibilities, one might still break down the gifts, ministries, and offices in this way:
This is, admittedly, highly speculative, but it at least shows the difficulty in trying to distinguish what might be a ministry from an office and how they might overlap. Minimally, we can assume a distinction between gifts, ministries, and offices even if the borders between them are not always clear.
Which Office? Whose Presbyterate?
Now I would like to consider the historical development of the offices of bishop, priest, and deacon. I have found Alistair Stewart’s book The Original Bishops to be particularly helpful in my understanding of the historical development and will try to summarize his conclusions (which I will take as true for the sake of this argument). The first churches that met in households were led by the patronage of the householder. This is not an office; it is the normal expectations of those with means in Greco-Roman society. We must not underestimate just how important patronage was in the time of the New Testament. Cities do not function without patronage; social gatherings of any kind do not function without patronage. Patronage is a cultural institution but not an office. There is no ceremony by which one ascends to the office of patron, but there is an expectation on those with the financial means to be patrons. In this scenario, there indeed could be women householders of means who offer patronage in which they provide the food and order necessary for the communal banquet. There would be nothing particularly revolutionary about this and I think it is a mistake to try to parse out our concepts of “leadership” from that of patronage. A patron was a leader and leaders were patrons. This is why you can find different glosses of προστάτις in Romans 16:2 (applied to Pheobe): patron, leader, benefactor, helper, succourer, etc.¹ But a patron does not just dole out money to someone else and step aside. A patron has an obligation to provide for and lead the community. Yet, again, we must not confuse leadership here with the exercise of an office.
As the church grows and multiple households combine, the need arises for someone to take on a higher level of patronal responsibilities, that is the economic responsibilities associated with the distribution of food, money, and caring for those in need (e.g., the poor and widows). Stewart argues that this is just what the office of episkopos was, and the diakonos was an assistant to the episkopos in those functions. The episkopos was not, therefore, a monepiskopos of a city, but of a particular ekklesia within a city. At this stage, he argues, presbyteros is not an office. Instead, there is an overlap in how the terms are used in and after the New Testament. The first is a designation for presbyteroi kata polin, that is when the episkopoi from individual ekklesiai gather together, they function as presbyteroi, with the particular function of boundary keeping within the wider Christian community. From such gatherings, a single leader may be chosen to represent the gathered assembly in relation to other cities (e.g., what we see happening in 1 Clement). It is that individual who becomes what later is known as episkopos, whereas the title of presbyteros, once only used of the gathered episkopoi kata polin, becomes the title used of the episkopos kat’ oikon. The other use of presbyteroi is of elders as a status (as in, elder in physical age or “faith” age) who command respect and offer patronage within the community (e.g., 1 Tim 5:17–21). This, Stewart argues, disappears as the functions they serve (which include preaching, teaching, and patronage) are taken over by the household episkopos (e.g., our current presbyteros).
So when we come to ask the question of whether women can be ordained to the office of presbyterate, it needs to be clear what exactly we are referring to for there is not a one-to-one correspondence between the current presbyterate and the offices that we see described in the New Testament (that is, the minimally economic functions of the episkopos and diakonos). There is overlap, however, in that the office is, as Witt describes, a permanent position that presides over the communal gathering, has some kind of authority within the community, and is set apart by a ceremony (e.g., laying on of hands). This seems to be a sufficient definition of office, and, since I cannot find a clear definition in Stewart’s work, it will have to suffice for now.
Perhaps one of the differences between our current presbyterate and the episkopos in the New Testament is in relation to preaching and teaching which seems to be less centralized in the episkopos/presyberos in the New Testament (more on that below). If this outline is correct, then the spiritual gift passages such as 1 Corinthians 12, Romans 12, and Ephesians 4 do not directly apply to the question of office (though this by no means makes them irrelevant). That is, to ask if women can fulfill the activities described in those passages is to ask a different question from “can women be ordained to the office of presbyteros.” This is not to argue that gifting and ministries (that is, works of service [ἔργον διακονίας] Eph 4:12) are irrelevant to the office of presbyter, only that “ministries” and office cannot be equated. Indeed, I think this point is strengthened when one considers that in 1 Timothy 3 the qualifications for episkopos and diakonos are virtues and not spiritual gifts (not to say that those can be completely separated!) and that Timothy’s (spiritual?) gift was given with the laying on of hands (1 Tim 4:14) and not recognized prior to his ordination.
The Number of Offices
Even if one were to admit that gifts or ministries are not equal to offices, one would still need to determine just how many offices were there in the New Testament. As mentioned above, I will use Witt’s definition of office which require three features:
- Permanency — The role is not temporary or at least can potentially be held for a significant period of time.
- Authority — The office has rights or privileges not available to all in the community.
- Ceremony — An event or ritual that is public and marks the point after which the individual is recognized as holding the position (e.g., the laying on of hands or the casting of lots).
Following Stewart’s argument outlined above, I have counted three so far: episkopos, diakonos, and presbyteros kata polin. The presbyteros within a local congregation that we see in 1 Timothy 4 would be a status, the result of chronological age — or faith age — that would come with certain assumed responsibilities, such as patronage, preaching, and teaching (1 Tim 5:17). There is no clear evidence, however, that this was an office.
One’s mind might go straight to Ephesians 4:11 which lists what seems to be offices of a kind that Christ gave for the building up of the church: apostles, prophets, the evangelists, pastors, and teachers. Are these offices? What is an office? Thus far, I have been assuming that what distinguishes an office from a particular gifting or ministry is the public commissioning for the particular task. The laying on of hands would be a clear example of the form such commissioning might take (see Acts 13:1–3). The twelve Apostles, having gone through a kind of commissioning service by Christ, and so that clearly seems to be an office. Matthias is elected by the other Apostles, though by lot and not by the laying on of hands, so the presence of that particular form is not necessary for the definition of an office, only that there is some specific action, publicly recognized, that serves to set a particular person aside for a particular task.
What about the others? I can’t think of an example where there is a public commissioning for those particular tasks. There might have been a public ceremony placing someone in an office of preacher, teacher, or prophet, but if so we have no New Testament evidence of it. A prophet, as we see in the Old Testament, could be called and commissioned by God, but that doesn’t seem to be necessarily a public activity involving others in the community. These might all be a list of ministries, a combination of offices and ministries, or just a list of offices. I tend toward the first option, but admit it is hard to prove one way or the other.
What example of commissioning do we have of episkopos, diakonos, or presbyteros kata polin? For diakonos we have the clear example of Acts 6:1–6. For presbyteros kata polin, one could point to Titus 1:5 by the presence of the term “appoint” (καθίστημι), though this is by no means certain. We don’t have an example of episkopos being appointed in the New Testament (unless we consider Timothy an episkopos and 1 Tim 4:14 as his appointment), but we do see it in Didache 15:1. I think it is plausible, then, to see these three as offices.
This analysis is, admittedly, speculative. So what if I speculate in the opposite direction? Let us assume that all of the nouns in Ephesians 4:11 refer to offices in the church, whether exercised locally within a singular community or more itinerant amongst all the Christian communities (e.g., Didache 11:3–12). What are the qualifications for these offices? Apostle probably gives the clearest description of qualifications, which we see in Acts 1:21–22: 1) a man, and 2) who was with the rest of the apostles following Jesus from Jesus’s baptism until that time. Are these the qualifications for all apostles or for the replacement of Judas? The latter seems more likely as a) that is the context of the appointment of Matthias and b) Paul identifies himself as an apostle but was not a follower of Jesus prior to the resurrection. So, perhaps a more general qualification would be one who is sent by Jesus. This could apply to a woman, but that is by no means certain (I leave aside the interpretation of Junia in Romans 16:7). Mary Magdalene is sent by Jesus, but is this an appointment beyond the one instance? Jesus sends out the 72, but they are differentiated from the twelve disciples who are “Apostles”. It would seem, then, that not every sending by Jesus creates an office, but some who are commissioned to bear witness to the resurrection do so as a permanent office.
What about the other possible offices from Ephesians 4:11? I can’t think of an example where qualifications are listed as a prerequisite to the office, but only a judgment of whether or not one is exercising that office well. That is, such people are judged during or after they prophesy, evangelize, preach, or teach. The qualifications for a teacher are that they do teach what accords with sound doctrine, not that they first demonstrate their faithfulness and then are allowed to teach. Paul does say, however, in 1 Tim 2:7 that he was appointed herald/preacher (which has some overlap with evangelist), apostle, and teacher to the Gentiles, but what qualifications were given are not clear.
What makes this analysis difficult is that the functions of these offices might overlap. Surely apostles also engage in the activity of prophecy, evangelizing, pastoring, and teaching, but not every prophet, evangelist, pastor, or teacher is then considered an apostle.
Preach It
Considering the functions of prophet, evangelist, pastor, and teacher leads me to consider another historical observation, this time about preaching (relying again, on the work of Stewart but this time, From Prophecy to Preaching): when we ask the question of whether a woman should preach (as an activity of the office), we are not speaking of the same activity that we read about in the New Testament. It seems to me that sometimes those who are against women’s ordination take their image of what preaching is (authoritative teaching of the Bible), argue that women are excluded from that (via 1 Tim 2), and thus conclude they cannot hold the office of presbyter. While this has the appearance of a sound argument, its soundness would ultimately depend on the identity of our current conception of preaching and the paraklesis of the New Testament, but this needs to be argued for and not assumed.
While I’m not a strict proponent of form criticism, Stewart’s analysis is sufficient to show that what we might consider being examples of preaching (παράκλησις) in the New Testament are not strictly identical to what may have taken place during Christian gatherings at the time of the New Testament. Stewart argues that preaching was informal and (probably) conversational (ὁμιλία) with interaction from the group via give-and-take between the audience and the speaker. We must not imagine Gregory of Nazianzus’s Theological Orations when we read the New Testament.
The aim of preaching is to reinforce the values and beliefs of the congregation. That is, preaching was primarily epideictic (Stewart, 38). It was not primarily catechetical, which is how we often view preaching today. But this form of preaching changes over time. To summarize Stewart’s conclusion near the end of his book (190):
1. Prophecy was a form of Christian preaching.
2. Prophecy becomes a means of interpreting Scripture and Scripture a means of testing prophecy.
3. The prophet-as-exegete is eventually replaced by the teachers-as-exegete.
This last step was a result of the scholasticization of early Christian communities (on the scholastic nature of Pauline communities, see Dr. Clair Smith’s examination in Pauline Communities as “Scholastic Communities”; her analysis is stimulating, even if I agree more with Stewart that such scholastic activity can be understood under the association model of early Christian communities). Scholasticization was a shift in the institutional structures/setting that develops prophecy into something less like prophecy and more like exposition. The institutional shift is particularly important because, as Markschies argues in his Christian Theology and Its Institutions in the Early Roman Empire, institutional structures have a certain force in shaping the theology of an institution.
Institutions
Institutions come in all shapes and sizes. Even the earliest single-household Christian communities are institutions that exert a conceptual force on the beliefs and practices of those within them. This is not a shift from charismatic leadership to institutional (Weber’s model), but, following Markschies, from one institutional structure to another. Institutions are a basic sociological facts. In this model, they are
‘social arrangements that outwardly and inwardly effectively suggest and bring into force stability and duration’ and in which especially ‘the action-guiding and communication-directing foundations of an order are also always symbolically brought to expression’ (Markschies, 22–23).
This last part of the definition is important. Institutions are the incarnation of an idea, providing the concrete embodiment that allows the idea to survive over time. Without institutions, ideas struggle to be passed along from one person or generation to another.
New ideas require the social basis of an institution in order to establish themselves, and therefore people who want to establish a new idea in a society must create such a social basis” (23).
This raises a whole slew of questions. What then, one may ask, are the ideas being expressed in the New Testament texts typically discussed in debates over women’s ordination? What are the institutional ideas being defended by those who are against it? Is the sometimes visceral response witnessed by anti-women’s ordination advocates a defensive response arising from the challenge of an unspoken idea that is embedded in the institution? What are the institutional ideas being promoted by those who are for women’s ordination? Is the push for women’s ordination in the 20th century the natural institutionalization of an idea?
The Birth of an Idea
Many already debate what idea is trying to find expression in the push for women’s ordination. The two most common proposals I find are feminism and modernity. However, I find these proposals to be insufficient. For one thing, these are too abstract. Feminism is rarely defined (which one?) and “modernity” more often refers to a time period in which many different ideas are being exchanged, sifted, and struggling to find institutionalization. Even if modernity itself is an idea, it is not always clear whether someone is talking about a) that idea, b) the time period, c) the myriad of ideas that developed within the time period of “modernity”, or d) the shifting institutional structures that themselves modify the previous institutions and their ideas or house those newly developed or changing ideas. Such ambiguity makes analyzing the relationship between “feminism” or “modernity” to women’s ordination problematic. The line from the former to the latter is more often imposed than discovered.
Drawing causal lines from ideas such as “feminism” or “modernity” seems intuitively plausible, but falls prey to the post hoc fallacy. This is an easy trap to fall into, in part because this is how our mind naturally works (see Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, especially his discussion on the features of “System 1” thinking). However, chronology does not equal causality. The chronological priority of the rise of feminism to the push for women’s ordination does not per se mean that feminism is the cause of women’s ordination. It may be just one of the many conditions which make women’s ordination conceptually conceivable. In other words, feminism may be a sufficient but not necessary cause of women’s ordination. Mere chronology is insufficient to establish feminism as a necessary cause (the same is true for modernity).
The question would still remain, however, whether women’s ordination is true or not. It seems that those contrary to women’s ordination who point to feminism as a cause think that, if it is a cause, this would mean it is wrong. However, the truth of a proposition is not determined by causality, but by — in traditional logic — the relation of the proposition to reality. This means we should distinguish the historical proposition “Feminism caused women’s ordination” from the proposition “women can/can’t (should/shouldn’t) be ordained”. Failure to distinguish these two propositions results in a subtle sleight of hand: which proposition are we talking about? This doesn’t mean that the role of feminism (and which feminism) is unimportant, it just means we are talking about a new topic.
Additionally, the question of the role of feminism in women’s ordination points to the idea that women’s ordination is wrong because it is caused by a foreign concept. Two things should be said in response.
- It must be said that this is not unimportant. Concepts that are adopted and adapted from other sources outside of a tradition can have subtle effects on the other concepts that were “native” to the tradition. Yet, at the same time, a) the tradition already adopted and adapted concepts that arose externally from it (and so to deny a new one is, formally, to deny the old ones), and, more importantly, b) a concept is true or false on its own merits, not because of its source.
- Traditions must work hard to transform the concepts they adopt in order to strive for continuity of the tradition as a whole. New concepts can bring illumination to areas we once ignored or never cared about, and this is most beneficial, but that does not make them free from danger.
Like an invasive species introduced — knowingly or unknowingly — to an environment, new ideas or concepts can do significant damage to native species, or they can strengthen the environment as a whole. In both scenarios, there will be a struggle to maintain the carrying capacity of the environment — to hold the center. In the history of Christianity theology, this is nothing new (think of the concepts adopted and adapted in defining the Trinity; or the transformation of Aristotle under Aquinas). We will, in the end, benefit from the struggle, as uncomfortable as it may seem.
Conclusion
The preceding exploration of the differences between a) gift, ministry, and office, b) the historical development of the terminology used for office, c) the form and function of preaching (one of the most prominent features in our understanding of the function of the office), and d) institutions and their ideas highlight just some of the additional difficulties in answering the already contentious question of women’s ordination. These conceptual and terminological differences arising from scholasticization and the development of early Christian communities from a single household to multiple households produce a corresponding shift in the theology of those institutions from gifting and ministries to centralization in the office. As such, the ministry of women is reshaped accordingly to the growing scholastic institutional structures. We can not read passages about gifting as speaking directly to the question of women’s ordination, though again, they are not entirely irrelevant. Likewise, we must also be attentive to how institution structures play a role in the adoption, adaptation, and formal features of ideas, old and new.
The point of noting the historical difference between what we currently consider to be the office of presbyter and what we see as potential offices exercised in the New Testament is that when we ask the question of whether women can be presbyters we are in fact asking a different question from what we see in the New Testament. It is not enough to just simply point to women exercising any office (e.g., prophet). This is because we are referring to something different than the office of presbyter as it historically developed. To avoid confusion, we must have a clear understanding of the necessary conditions for determining the answer to that question. Whatever principles, commands, or any other theological or scriptural evidence we may bring to bear must be directly aimed at answering that specific question. However, it seems to me that just straightforwardly applying the conditions for being in another office — e.g., prophet — is insufficient. Conditions that must obtain in order to be in the (New Testament) office of the prophet are not necessarily the conditions that must obtain to be in the, later, office of presbyter. Or, at least it must be shown how it could be so.
[1] In 1 Tim 5:17, elders are said to rule (προεστῶτες > προίστημι), which is the same word used to describe Pheobe’s activity in the church (πρόστατις is the feminine form προστάτης > προίστημι). On Stewart’s model, this can be explained as patronal leadership in both cases. For those who hold to synonymy of episkopos and presbyteros, they must explain the use of the word for Pheobe. Those for women’s ordination might see this as evidence for Pheobe exercising an office. For those against women’s ordination, they must produce — without special pleading — a reason why Pheobe isn’t an officeholder. However, if the ruling is used in a non-official sense, then both cases can be understood as patron-leaders.
