My thanks to the many who replied positively to yesterday’s post, and in the spirit of that, and as an homage to Jessica, I want to begin the next eight years with a topic which risks taking us back to polemical times, but in a way which invites, I hope, a more considered response. I would add that this is not me advocating any change in my own church, whose position seems clear except to those who don’t like that position. Here goes.
Toward the end of St Paul’s letter to the Romans (and yes, I know that there are those who think it wasn’t by St Paul, but the Church, and Tradition do, and that does it for me) is this salutation:
7 Salute Andronicus and Junias, my kinsmen and fellow prisoners: who are of note among the apostles, who also were in Christ before me.
At least that’s what the Douay-Rheims translation says, as does the American Standard version and the New Life version. The assumption is that this is a male name, athough scholars have been unable to provide any other examples of the name “Junias;” there are numerous examples of the female name, “Junia.” In his homily on Romans, Ambrosiaster, who was writing in the second half of the fourth century wrote:
“Think how great the devotion of this woman Junia might have been that she should be worthy to be called an Apostle!”
Professor Moo, in his great commentary on Romans offers a typically balanced view:
“Paul’s mention of nine women in this list reminds us (if we needed the reminder) that women played an important role in the early church … Ministry in the early church was never confined to men; these greetings and other similar passages show that women engaged in ministries that were as important as those of men. We have created many problems for ourselves by confining ‘ministry’ to what certain full-time Christian workers do. But it is important that we do not overinterpret this evidence either, for nothing Paul says … conflicts with limitations on some kinds of women’s ministry with respect to men such as I think are suggested by 1 Tim. 2:8-15 and other texts.” (Douglas J Moo, New International Commentary (1996)).
The idea that the name “Junias” was to be preferred to the reading “Junia” was a twentieth century phenomenon, based on the assumption that since an “apostle” had to be male, “Junias” had to be the correct reading. The probability that the name is “Junia” and therefore a woman, has, naturally enough, led some modern scholars to argue that this supports the idea of women as priests. That may be as much a case of reading into the text what one wants to read, as the older idea that “Junia” was not a possible reading because a woman could not have been an apostle.
If we assume that “Apostle” is always a position of authoritative leadership, then the case for a female priesthood is certaily strengthened; but must it be read that way? Often Paul uses the word to denote a messenger or emissary (1 Cor. 15:5,7; 1 Cor. 9:5-6; Gal 2:9), and that may be the case here. Just because scholars in the last century went out of their way to insist the name was male because a woman could not be an “apostle’, that is no reason we should do the same the other way – understandable as that temptation might be. (Chapter 9 of Epp, Junia).
One of the problems, or so it seems to me, is that this issue gets swallowed up in an agenda-driven way. On the one hand a swift resort to a version of what Professor Moo has written, which emphasises the other possibilities, minimising the possibility of Junia being an Apostle in the strongest sense of that word. On the other, a ready resort to the claim that it can only be read in this sense seems unwise.
At this point the argument can get taken up with either explaining away or emphasising 1. Tim 2 11-15, 1 Cor 11: 2-16, 1 Cor 14:34-35, and in the literature it is easy to discern why one choice or the other is made. It is important here to emphasise that such discussions take us into the wider realm of how we read Scripture, and how tradition should weigh in the balance. What cannot be in doubt is that for much of the history of Christianity women have not had a sacramental ministry, whatever may, or may not have been the case with the “Apostle” Junia.
If Junia and other women were “Apostles” in the stronger sense of the word then would it make a difference? Well, it would tend against the argument that Jesus chose only men, not least because we know there were many women followers and He appeared first to a woman, but I really don’t want to go down that route here, not least because the chance of it not provoking people is zero. But it is worth reflecting on the experience of the one big communion which has had women priests and bishops, the Anglicans. There, I think many who were against the idea for the usual reasons would say they have found the contribution of their new colleagues invaluable and that women have added a dimension to ministry which, perhaps, Junia would have recognised. Certainly, in my own dealings with women priests, I have been nothing but impressed by what they bring to their vocation, and without their contribution things would be poorer. At that point, I shall stop and await comment.
I cannot read God’s mind but I can clearly see what He did in Scripture.
He breathed life into Adam and then made Eve from Adam; flesh of thy flesh.
He set Aaron up as being the High Priest of His first Church and even his sister was punished for thinking herself equal to Aaron.
Christ too, had many faithful and loving followers amongst women and yet not a single one was invited to His Last Supper which we Catholics see as the first ordaining of Bishops for His Church.
Christ breathes upon the 12 (men) and tells them that they can forgive sin: a type of blessing) and a very important role for the priesthood. This follows from he OT Church which passed blessings on by the laying on of hands to the first born son etc.
We see a man being ordained by the laying on of hands in order to replace Judas.
We see no other texts in the last 2000 years that the Church has ever ordained a woman as a priest or bishop.
Let’s look more closely to make sure that we are not doing what my last post suggested men have done, which is read into Scripture what they think is there, and then to use that as exegesis.
It would be equally true to say that we do not see Jesus breathing upon any men except Jewish men, and that the Apostles, in seeking a successor to Judas do not choose anyone except another Jewish man. Yet no-one would argue that only Jewish men could be ordained, so at some point something happened for which there is no scriptural warrant – that is non-Jews were “ordained.” The quotation marks are there advisedly, because the very use of the word “ordain” is a loaded one. Where, in Scripture, is the word “ordain” used about what the Apostles did? Again, as it is not there, it suggests that as tradition developed it seemed reasonable to apply that word to what happened to Matthias.
If we go back to the examples offered in earlier posts of Junia and Phoebe, I would hope to have made the case that they occupied positions of leadership and that they exercised “ministry”, which raises the interesting question of what that might have meant.
If we begin with the example of the priesthood. Let us follow Scoop’s wise advice and turn to Scripture. Surely, there we shall find something to help us, whom does Paul describe as a “priest”, and what qualifications were there? There are certainly plenty of “priests” in the Jewish Scriptures, and not only are they all men (as Scoop correctly points out with reference to Aaron and Miriam [for some reason while he gives Aaron his name, Miriam is just “his sister”]) but they are all from the tribe of Levi. Alas, here Scripture is not a great deal of help when we get to the New Testament. The word “priest” is never used, and the only use of the word “priesthood” is in Peter’s first epistle (2:5) where it refers to the priesthood of all believers.
Now it might reasonably be argued that the word “priest” is used, what else, might be said, is meant by the word “presbyter”? The answer to that is that, unless we wish to engage in the sort of circular argument which says Junia cannot be a female and an apostle, because women weren’t apostles, but if “she” becomes a “he” called Junias, the problem is neatly solved – and I suggest not going there for the reasons outlined at some length in earlier posts and by C451 – then we would have to admit that the Greek word is capable of a number of translations into English.
In Acts 14:23 and 20:7 the word is translated as “elder”, while in Acts 15:4, 6, 22-23 they are associated with the Apostles. In Philippians 1:1, Paul writes: “To all God’s holy people in Christ Jesus at Philippi, together with the overseers and deacons”, but at no point is anything said about gender here, and indeed, the only person specifically identified by Paul as a deacon, is Phoebe. But, I think I already heard someone cry, “hold on a cotton-picking minute Miss Hoff, with all the Scripture you’re citing, how come you missed 1 Timothy 3:13 and Titus 1:5-9, that wouldn’t be because they totally flatten your argument?” To which my answer is, I needed to deal with the question of the words “presbyter” and “priest” before saying something about these passages. So, to work, woman!
So, what is 1 Timothy 3 about? It is describing the moral character of an “overseer/deacon/bishop”. Where does it say these orders can be held only by men? Indeed, given that we have seen that there were women deacons, and even a woman Apostle, why do we begin by assuming what it is needs to be demonstrated? It only makes sense to say that these verses “prove” that only men could hold them on two conditions: the first is that we disregard everything just said about Phobe and Junia; the second is like unto it, which is that since women could not be deacons and apostles, it follows that these passages refer to men only. But precisely where does Paul say that? Or is this yet another example of reading into the text what we want to see?
What is plain to see is that Paul is describing the moral character of people holding office in the Church. No one but a fool would read this verse literally: “A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife, temperate, sober-minded, of good behavior, hospitable, able to teach”. Why, because it would make a total nonsense of the Romman Catholic and Orthodox view that a bishop must be celibate. Clearly, I hear the chorus (with which I agree), this is not saying that the bishop must be married; why then do we assume that the bishop must be a “he.” The male pronouns are ones inserted, and yet we know that often, in traditional English use, “man includes woman”. Why not assume that here? Ah, I forgot, “because we know that the church never ordained woman.” How do we know? Because the Bible uses the word “he” and 1 Timothy 3 supports that – except, as I have just deminstrated, it doesn’t.
I still hear that chorus, this time thus: “Very ingenious Miss Hoff, but are you not forgetting the order used by Paul – bishops, deacons and then wives and women in general”? No, I am not, I am suggesting that given that there was a female apostle and at least one female deacon he might well be addressing both genders. The counter-argument only works if we presume what it claims to “prove” from Scripture.
Oh well, it might be argued, here is one of those feminist women arguing a novel case because of the times in which we live, it is all part of the dreadful trend that is destroying the Anglican/Catholic/Presbyterian/Lutheran Church. Clearly:
If the testimony borne in these two passages to a ministry of women in apostolic times had not been thus blotted out of our English Bible, attention would probably have been directed to the subject at an earlier date, and our English church would not have remained so long maimed in one of her hands.
Which dreadful modern feminist wrote this? That was a trick question. It was Bishop Lightfoot who was Bishop of Durham from 1879 to 1889 – he is “regarded as one of the greatest New Testament and patristic scholars of the Anglican tradition.” Lightfoot is also germane when we turn to the one question still to handle – the position of Bishop.
Lightfoot, a man steeped in Biblical history and one of the greatest Greek and Bible scholars of his day. Lightfoot did not :
regard the terms episkopos and presbyteros as entirely synonymous. He believed that the second of these had been taken over from the synagogue and was used especially to refer to the leaders of Jewish-Christian congregations, whereas episkopos was an equivalent term used mainly (if not exclusively) among the Gentiles. According to Lightfoot, the difference was one of flavour and reference, rather than one of substance, i.e., what we would now call an early example of ‘cultural contextualisation’.
A fuller discussion of the translation issues connected with the word “bishop” is offered in Loveday’s 2012 lecture in Chester, which I was lucky enough to be able to attend, and the text of which can be found here. Loveday concludes:
Overall what this shows is that most modern translators (even the Catholic JB) have virtually ruled out the possibility that there might be any bishops in the Bible, illustrating graphically how Bible translationreflects not only the changing faces of historical scholarship, but the tradition andecclesiology of the translators.
So yes, tell me firmly that the version of the Bible you use to confute me is from your tradition and accepts its traditional ecclesiology, and I will respond, of course it does, but what it does not do is what Scoop says it does, and shows there were no women bishops. It shows, depending on your ecclesiology and translation that there were no bishops in the Bible until translators put them there.
A reasonable riposte, with which I would agree, would be to argue from tradition and to say that by the time of Ignatius there clearly was a model of what has been called a monarchical bishop, but that tells us only that by the early second century women may not have been playing the role we see them playing in Paul’s epistles. What it simply cannot do is to tell us that Paul was wrong in describing women as being in positions of leadership.
Paul tells is that in being baptised into Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile. Some in the Jerusalem Church were so cross with him that they told Peter off for saying that the old Jewish diatary laws were a dead letter, and it took a heated conference in Jerusalem to decide that despite everything the Jewish Scriptures said on the issue, Paul was correct. Paul also said that in Christ there was neither male nor female. Are we asked to believe that he did not really mean this and that what he really meant was that there is a real distinction, and that in spite of the fact that women were playing leading roles, they were barred from positions such as “bishop” which did not actually exist in Paul’s day? You might argue that there was no equivalent of the Council of Jerusalem on the issue, and you would be right. But might that not mean that no-one thought the issue a problem? Women were taking leading roles, as we have seen, so what?
In short, unless we use tradition to say you can’t have women in positions of leadership in the church, you are on shaky ground basing yourself on Scripture alone, which is why what Scoop says works for his church and for him. But if your tradition does not teach that in some quasi-mystical manner a “priest” represents Christ at Calvary and that as Christ was a man, a priest must be, then even there, your ground for denying the ordination of women is not as firm as all that.
What I wish to suggest in closing, is that none of this is anything to do with strident feminism or modernity, it is to do with there being neither male nor female in Christ, and it is to do with doing justice to the role women have played and can play in the Church. If that also involves questioning the male version of events and that makes me a feminist, then I suppose I can live with that. But it is not the result of wanting to be on trend, but to be in Spirit with the apostolic church.
In Acts 1:24 when a successor to Judas is being mooted, Peter talks about those who accompanied Jesus during his earthly ministry. We know that included among those were many women from what Luke tells us, and that some of these women actually provided the funds to enable Jesus and his followers to live while ministering. That tells us something about the relationship and the role played by women. In that sense they fulfilled one of the requirements to be an Apostle – that is they had been part of the ministry. But they did not, and could not, fulfil the requirement to be a replacement for Judas. The “twelve” represented the twelve tribes of Israel, and only men were allowed to do that, indeed, only Jewish men were allowed to do that. While, in the early Church, the requirement to be Jewish would be gradually abandoned, the requirement to be male was not.
Did that mean that women were not “Apostles” or does it mean that there is more than one sense in which that word could be defined? If we take Luke’s stricter sense, that is being eligible to succeed Judas, the answer is clear enough. But that is not the only sense in which the word is used, not least by the man who often gets a bad rap from feminists, Paul. In his first letter to the Corinthians, in which he claims the title for himself, he defines the role as one who spreads the Gospel of Christ, and we know from Luke, and from Paul himself that women did this. Indeed, rather more than that in some cases, as we know that the very first witness of the risen Lord was one of the women Luke mentions as helping support Jesus and his ministry. It is often asssumed that the seventy two who get sent out were all men, but there is no actual warant for that except the (male) assumption that they must have been men. Yes, the Greek word leads us to that conclusion, but the Greek language has an adrocentric bias, and there is no reason not to read “men” as in some English phrases where “men includes women.”
Paul clearly regards being an Apostle as important, he stresses it often enough for us to be clear that it cannot be read loosely. It involves encountering the risen Christ and receiving the commission to spread the gospel, with all the sufferings that involved. It was certified, so to speak, by signs and mighty works. Junia, as an Apostle, must be said to fit this description, and given what Luke and Paul says about the role women play in the early church, the only occasion for surprise is that this has been ignored and, yes, suppressed for so long.
That last may seem harsh, but how else to characterise an historic position which, when the name was “Junias” and therefore male, accepted that “he” was an apostle, but when it was established that the name was female, argued that she was just “known to the Apostles”? There is, for those who want the detail, an extensive discussion of this in Epps’ book on Junia cited by C451, and also in Richard Bauckham’s excellent and scholarly (i.e. too deep for me in many parts) “Gospel Women” (2002) which goes into an extensive discussion of the koine Greek by experts in the use of the language.
In short, with Junia we are back to church tradition – ironically. It is later commentators, not the Church Fathers usually cited by those defending tradition, on which those defending “Junias” rest; they might ask whether there is any other case in which they’d prefer a twenth century source to a Church Father, and if not, why they feel the need to do so here. Chrysostom wrote:
To be an apostle is something great, but to be outstanding among the apostles – just think what a wonderful song of praise that is! They were outstanding on the basis of their works and virtuous actions. Indeed, how great the wisdom of this woman must have been that she was worthy of the title of apostle.
There is, of course, a possible reason why some modern fathers prefer, for once, to ignore the Church Fathers, and that seems to be to do with the arguments for the ordination of women. For me, and for many others, that argument does not depend upon Junia, but on what one means by “tradition” and whether one thinks of it as static or whether one believes that the Holy Spirit is at work still guiding the Church. If the former is the case, then there’s no argument, although one might well ask how and why the requirement for the twelve to be Jewish was dropped, but the requirement to be men was retained; tradition either develops or it doesn’t. But these are arguments to which I shall hope to return.
In the meantime, we might consider imitating Chrysostom and marvelling at what Junia must have done to have been considered an apostle – and ponder in humility how it could be that she has been almost forgotten and often denied.
Paul realised the revolutionary nature of the Christian life. The world into which he was born had, as all societies do, its established hierarchies. In Judea a male Jewish rabbi held a position of more privilege than another man, whist men held more privileged positions than women, although social class was also a differentiation. Gentiles were not allowed to eat with Jews, and Samaritans were to be shunned. Into this world came the message of the Messiah. Paul is clear about the significance of this.
To the Gentiles he proclaims: “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.” He criticises the Corinthians for the way they have been discriminating against the poor. He makes it clear to Philemon that Onesimus, his slave, is his equall when worshipping God and needs to be treated as such. He could not have put it plainer to the Galatians:
26 For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. 27 For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. 28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
And so we are. The poor God will, we are told, exalt, and the mighty shall be put down from their high positions; the first shall be last and the last shall be first. It was no wonder that Jesus was crucified by the authorities. If this had been a secular message it would have been seen now as communism, but it is not a secular message, it is a call to hope and redemption to us all.
But as part of that, it seems plain that one of the things that was supposed to mark Christian communities was a want of hierarchical differentiation. Grace is free, it cannot be merited and you and I cannot earn it. If we are “good” that is the outworking of Grace and the hope that is in us, it is not because somehow we are earning salvation. Yes, we run the race, as Paul did, because each and every day we wrestle with sin and with our fallen natures. But there is nothing we can do to win Grace.
The twelve Apostles were all Jewish men, and that was to be expected. Thy represented the twelve tribes of Israel. But long ago the Church decided there could be more than twelve bishops and that they did not need to be Jews. Why then, in this revolutionary new life in Christ did they need to be men?
It seems clear from Scripture that they were not all men. Despite centuries of men (interestingly usually from the Reformed traditions) claiming that there was a man called “Junias” who was an Apostle, it is clear that there was no such man, rather there was a woman of that name. As C451 has written on this I will say no more, except to wonder why, even now, men are at such pains to mansplain that the word “Apostle” does not, here, mean what it usually means. It’s a wonderful example of circular logic and goes like this: “we (men) know that all Apostles of the sort of Apostle that Peter was, are men, so, given we have to accept that Paul called this woman an apostle, that word cannot mean here, what it usually means.” Honestly, you could not make it up – except of course, they have. Oddly, when “Junias” was the preferred reading, no one thought anything other than that “he” was an apostle of the usual sort.
What cannot be disputed is that women prophesied in the early Church: Philip had four virgin daughters who prophesied; women in Corinth prophesied (albeit that some didn’t wear head coverings, an issue to which I will return in a later post); and we know that prophesy in the early church had an educational function. We see from Acts, as my next post will outline, how truly the early Church lived up to the revolutionary idea that all were equal in Christ, and I will leave to a third post further reflections on the role of female “Apostles” in Paul’s church, and the issue of how, by concentrating on a particular interpretation of a few verses, that revolutionary insight was watered down by later generations. But for now, I’ll stop here.
It’s a long time since I wrote here, but Chalcedon’s typically kind republication of my little piece on the women at the tomb, and Audre’s lovely piece on the woman at the well prompts a few thoughts to share.
Too much of the commentary on women in the Gospel has been skewed by an almost feverish (often androcentric, but not wholly) desire to explain away what it means to call someone like “Junia” an “Apostle.” It was almost amusing to see the extent to which some of the comments on C’s essay on Junia went to deny the obvious literal reading, which is that a woman called Junia was “prominent among the Apostles”. If I just list the Church Fathers who all acknowledged the fact that “Junia” was a woman and an Apostle, it comes to the sort of list that, if I was using it to illustrate that (as they are) the consecrated bread and wine are the body and blood of Jesus in a way not to be defined), traditionalists would be quick to say ‘there, look at that witness from the Church’; odd how it doesn’t work in Junia’s case. C quotes Ambosiaster (I’m not, by the way criticising him for not including all the others, just doing it myself), to which can be added Origen, Jerome, Chyrsostom, Theodoret and John of Damascus. Of course, you can (as others have in other cases) argue that they all got it wrong, and that it wasn’t until the twelfth century that it got put right; but I sort of feel that in any case other than one concerning women, traditionalists would be the first to say how jolly unlikely that one was! I especially love the example of A.C. Headlam in the late nineteenth century who wrote wrote that the fact the name was borne by an Apostle was decisive: ‘In that case it is hardly likely that the name is femine.’ Not one, then, to let the fact there is no known example of the name ‘Junias’ known in antiquity, get in the way of a conclusion he’d already drawn!
I wonder whether some of this isn’t the fault of women ourselves? How so? We’ve usually gone down this route to argue the case for women’s ordination. In my church that’s a done deal and in our special Anglican way we’ve managed to rub along, on the whole, nicely, so for me that’s a done deal, and those who don’t want it, fine, not my church, not my issue. I say this not to say it doesn’t matter, it does, but to wonder how it looks if we set it aside and ask what role women played in the early church?
How likely, for example, is it that in Jewish and Roman society a mission largely carried on by men would have done what we know it did, which was to bring in many women? It’s always interested me, because I’m as guilty of it as anyone, when the argument is used that the fact that the testimony of women is used by the Gospel writers is a decisive argument in favour of it being true that the tomb was empty, because the testimony of women was not acceptable in Jewish law. Pardon my laughter. No doubt it wasn’t, but the idea that women would ever have gone, ‘oh, you know, it was only a woman who saw that Jesus rise from the dead, so it must be true,’ is to ignore that, to women hearing the story, there would be no such impediment. Apart from anything else, the testimony was not actually being used in courts of law, so I’ve never been clear this mattered as much as we sometimes think. Why then was it used, because it’s right to say it would cause doubt in some quarters.
It’s certainly true that the ancient world shared the view still common in some parts of the modern world that women are a bit gullible in religious matters and prone to hysterical superstitious fantasy (guilty as charged m’lud!) Origen records the awful Celsus, that pagan hater of Christianity, as commenting thus about Mary Magdelen: ‘after death he rose again and showed the marks of his punishment … but who saw this? A hysterical female as you say, and perhaps some other one of those who were deluded by the same sorcery?” But it’s unlikely women shared that view of each other, and it may well be that those women we see in Luke who travelled about with Jesus along with the twelve, played a role in evengelising their own sex.
One reason for emphasising the testimony of women may well have been that those women Luke mentioned remained prominent in the early church. Richard Bauckham has written interestingly about how “Junia” and the “Joanna” mentioned by Luke may well be the same woman, and we know from Paul that women played a prominent part in the early mission of the church. What would be more likely then than mentioning the women because they were well-known in church circles? Mary of Clopas may well have been the mother of Symeon, who succeeded James as head of the church in Jerusalem, if so, mentioning her would have been a powerful testimony in the early church. As Bauckham puts it: ‘they surely continued to be active traditioners whose recognised eyewitness testimony coud act as a touchstone to guarantee the traditions as others relayed them and to protect the traditions from inauthentic developments.’ Which nicely links up with C’s essay on women as protectors of tradition, on which note, I’ll stop wittering and hope that, like me, you’re all managing to survive this ghastly plague. Prayers for you all, anyway.
Now there’s a topic guaranteed to arouse strong feelings. I should be surprised if someone has not already got their answers ready as to why women cannot be priests. Those arguments have a long pedigree and remain convincing to both the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, whilst the Church of England in the UK has managed to find a way of saying that women can be priests, but it is okay if you can’t accept that, as long as you accept it as being the position of the C of E. Naturally that has people at both ends of the spectrum of views on this dissatisfied, and women priests have been known to say occasionally that they feel that the language in which this is sometimes discussed makes them uneasy. Some feel that it is about time that everyone came round to their position, which, in that sense, aligns them squarely with those who have always opposed the idea of women priests. But that’s not what this posting is about, although it is relevant to it.
The readings for the feast of St Mary Magdalen reminded us of something that the Church has not always been good at stressing, which is the role played by women in the Church, and we see this from the beginning. But, as has often been pointed out, the Risen Christ is first seen by a woman, which, in Jewish law as it then existed, was not testimony which would stand up in court. This is of a piece with what we can glean from the New Testament about the earthly Mission of Jesus.
Many posts have appeared here about the role played by women in the New Testament and St Mark tells us that, in addition to those he names, “many other women” came with Jesus to Jerusalem. This was unusual at the time, and we know that the pattern continued from what Paul says. Romans 16 contains a long list of female names, and it is clear that they played a key part in the work of the first generation of the Great Commission. For those interested in a plausible fictional account centred on Phobe, I can recommend Paula Gooder’s book of that name which also contains some useful information on the role women played.
What is worth noting, in addition, is that the vivid picture we get from Paul is of a church where women and men minister together and where there do not seem to be rigid distinctions based on gender; those who can teach, teach, those who can prophesy, prophesy, there was no gender basis on which work you could do for Christ, just as there was no racial basis. Where the Spirit moved you, that was where you went. It is interesting, in relation to Phoebe, to note that St Paul describes her in three ways: as a benefactor, as a deacon but also as a sister. It is not her gifts not her position which define her within the body of Christ, it is the fact that she is a sister.
Those early Christian communities were, in that sense, more like some modern ones than was the case for many hundreds of years, where women and men worked together to build the kingdom. Yes, that is one of the things which led the Church of England down the route of ordaining women, and it is one of the things which its advocates elsewhere press. But if we stand back from the polemic which so often distracts us at this point, and from our current positions and those of our churches, it may just be worth looking at the fruits of the ordination of women and wondering whether they suggest the working of the Spirit or its absence.
The Catholic and Orthodox Churches have a clear position here, and I would hope that those who disagree with it will respect that; but, back to my initial comment, I hope that those of us who take the traditional view will at least be open to the question and examine the evidence. What is at issue here is not, pace the protagonists on both sides, but how we can disagree in faith, hope and charity. Too often our Christian history looks suspiciously like the rest of human history with us moved by the secular emotions of our fallen nature. But, one might protest, “this is a really important issue and it is important to – assert the eternal teaching of the Church/the lessons we have learned/that I am right – [delete according to taste]. It is precisely because it is important and it is precisely because we need to learn lessons that we should disagree as Christians should. The question, which I daresay comments will answer, is whether we can?
The question of how we communicate Christianity is tied up with the question of what we think the Church is for. Too often discussions of this concentrate on what needs to be done to revive the Church (that is, what actions we need to take) rather than on what the Church is for (that is what God meant in founding it). Here I want to begin with some wise words from +Rowan Williams:
the Church is because God is and acts, not because of what we do or think. We did not invent the Church. The Church, the body of Christ, is given to us as the means of our particpation in an eternal reality .
He goes on to write: “to engage in mission is not to engage in a recruitment or publicity campaign. It is to seek day after day to extend the invitation built into God’s very being, the invitation to share God’s very life”. (God’s Church in the World, chapter 1).
Do we do this? To what extent does the prevelance of what one might call “management speak” in talking about the Church and its leadership get in the way of a theologically-informed approach to Ministry? As Professor Martyn Percy wrote in 2016 about the reform programme brought in by ++ Welby: “If the changes he is augmenting don’t have a theological root and depth, then the risk is that the change is one of mere pragmatism and expedient managerialism.”
It is sometimes said that whilst history does not repeat itself, historians do; the same thing might be said of large organisations. As anyone who has endured “Management training days” in any organisation will know to their cost, large organisations tend to buy into management-speak, with its “key performance indicators” (KPIs) and “performance targets,” often with the zeal of the neophypte convert. That said, it would be foolish to ignore gems of wisdom embedded in such programmes, though when examined they do seem to have a tendency to be statements of the blindingly obvious heavily disguised by jargon to make them sound more profound. When it comes to the Church, no doubt secular strategic theory has its place, but if it is not informed by faith, then it’s hard to see how the Church distinguishes itself from other organisations. If that is thought desirable, fair enough, but if it is an unintended by-product, that is a different matter.
Martyn Percy’s words here ring true four years after they were written:
Our calling is not to heroically rescue the church, or to save the world. God, in Christ, has already done both of these. It is this God we need to hear more about – and less about how people currently claim to be operating in his name.
Theology is not a detached exercise of the Christian intellect – or at least it ought not to be for a Christian – it is the life of the Body of Christ. As Rowan Williams has commented: “the Church cannot be reformed by human effort and ingenuity, any more than sin can be eradicated by good will.” (Gill & Kendall, Michael Ramsey as theologian, 1995, p. 12). If you define the Church as a human society for promoting certain kinds of behaviour or codes of practice as specified by an elite governing class, or if, in practice, that is what a Church becomes, and if your theology becomes, in effect an exercise in submission to one supreme legitimate source for imperatives in faith and morals, then that runs several sorts of risk – as history shows.
A Church which amounts to a supreme authority to which its members must unquestioningly submit runs the risks inherent in any organisation staffed by human beings. When Lord Acton commented that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely,” he was writing about the history of the Inquisition. As he told the then Bishop of London, Mandell Creighton:
There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. That is the point at which the negation of Catholicism and the negation of Liberalism meet and keep high festival, and the end learns to justify the means.
Three phenomena tend to accompany such a vision of what Church is: outward conformity out of fear or self interest; conformity because of agreement; nonconformity and schism. The fruits of the former are inward corruption in a whited sepulcre; the fruits of the second are intellectual stagnation and want of lively minds; and the latter, well it usually ends up with the leaders of any particular sect doing precisely what they began by condemning the leaders of their old church for doing: rinse and repeat.
But if we define the Church as a Divine Epiphany, that is a showing of God’s love for us as revealed in Incarnation and Resurrection, and a revelation to us, albeit through a glass darkly, of what can be known about the Infinite by the finite, then we build on rock. We are Christians, that is we are “in Christ.” We can abandon the limitations imposed by our nature which makes us see the Church as a project begun by Christ through His Apostles, struggling against the forces of darkness in this world, and which needs the application of human wisdom through (take your pick) the Inquisition, the Reformation, schemes of Church planting, better management structures or the like, to survive; it already exists in its fullness which is the Eucharist. The real unity of the Church is a sharing of that sacrifice offered once and for all.
Theology and history point, perhaps, in this direction. In the recent post on Junia, the question was asked “what did St Paul mean by ‘Apostle?'” The Bishop or priest presides at the celebration of the Eucharist in order to let the Messiah act through him (or, in the Anglican understanding, her). The first Apostles were not there by some decree of Canon Law, or because of some semi-occult belief that they had special powers denied to others, but because they represented Christ. It is in that showing that the Church exists in its fullness.
In its language and actions the Church is an assembly which draws us towards a fuller, deeper understanding that through the Incarnation and Resurrection, God’s love is poured out for us, not was poured out, but is poured out. It is because of this, because the Eucharist is the essence of the Church that we have missed it so much.
To, no doubt, the unalloyed pleasure of those who like to criticise or praise him, Pope Francis has opined on the question of Female Deacons in the Roman Catholic Church. That is another bone for him and his church to gnaw away at. Naturally, given some of those who welcome the idea, those who don’t see it as the thin end of the wedge for female ordination. It is a shame if the hermeneutic of suspicion casts a cloud over the question of deaconesses, as there is plenty of evidence for their existence in the early Church.
We know from some of the critics of the Church that it attracted a lot of women into it – the early heretic Celsus, criticised it for attracting only “the silly and the mean and the stupid, with women and children.” It should not surprise us that women were powerfully drawn to a faith which disallowed the exposure of female infants on the hillside to die, and which forbade abortion. As we see from Acts and Paul’s letters, women often hosted house churches and were active in the church – in this the early Church reflected Jesus’ own practice. Those who keep telling us that his earthly ministry was conditioned by the contemporary culture (with the sub-text that ours should be too) forget how counter-cultural this was.
It was the women who stayed with Jesus in numbers even at the foot of the Cross; it was to a woman that he first appeared at the Resurrection; and we know that women continued to be active in the very early missions. The list includes Priscilla, Chloe, Lydia, Apphia, Nympha, the mother of John Mark, and possibly (depending on how one reads it) the “elect lady” of John’s second epistle. As for what they did, Celment of Alexandria gives us this insight, telling us that disciples were accompanied on their missionary journeys by women who were not marriage partners, but colleagues:
that they might be their fellow ministers in dealing with housewives. It was through them that the Lord’s teaching penetrated also the women’s quarters without any scandal being aroused. We also know the directions about women deacons which are given by the noble Paul in his letter to Timothy.
Was this the role played by Junia and others mentioned by Paul in Romans 16? She is described as being of ‘note among the Apostles’. Chrysostom wrote: “Oh, how great is the devotion of this woman, that she should even be counted worthy of the appellation of apostle.” Later attempts to claim this person was a man called ‘Junias’ encounter a slight problem – such a name is unknown in Roman times. Phoebe is called a ‘prostasis’ or ‘overseer’ – the Greek word is διάκονον – from which our modern ‘deacon’ comes. Origen, referring to 1 Timothy 3:11 commented:
This text teaches with the authority of the Apostle that even women are instituted deacons in the Church. This is the function which was exercised in the church of Cenchreae by Phoebe, who was the object of high praise and recommendation by Paul . . . And thus this text teaches at the same time two things: that there are, as we have already said, women deacons in the Church, and that women, who by their good works deserve to be praised by the Apostle, ought to be accepted in the diaconate.
We know that they could visit believing women in pagan households where a male deacon would be unacceptable, as well as visiting the sick, bathing those recovering from illness, and ministering to the needy. Women Deacons also assisted in the baptism of women, anointing them with oil and giving them instruction in purity and holiness – in an era when baptism was usually by full immersion, it would hardly have been decent for women to have been accompanied into the water by a male. Canon 15 of Chalcedon made it clear that no woman under the age of 40 could be deacon, and that the role had to be given up on marriage.
So, steering away from the thorny issue of female ordination, there is good evidence that women functioned as deacons in the early Church (and further reading can be found here. I fear, of course, that this will all be ignored and some will focus solely in the issue of women priests – it would be a shame, not least because the evidence there from history is far less clear. But I suppose there will always be those who prefer the later tradition of their own church to the testimony of the early Church. Any how, that’s my historical excursus.
“Whatever you do, do it with your whole heart.” ( Colossians 3: 23 ) - The blog of Father Richard Peers SMMS, Director of Education for the Diocese of Liverpool
All Along the Watchtower 
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