Is it correct to say that the Catholic Church denies female priest because they say Jesus was male, whereas some Protestants accept female priests because, they say Christ was both male and female, and Orthodox say that while it is true that the perfect being Christ was both male and female, mankind is still either male or female, because sin created the division and thus they do not accept female priests?
No, the Catholic Church says that they do not ordain women because Christ didn’t, not because he was male.
I don’t think that either Protestant or Orthodox Christians assert that Christ was both male and female. Pretty well all Christians would agree that he was male. The point of difference between them would be over the signficance to be attributed to the fact that he was male.
Catholics do not ordain women because (a) Christ did not, (b) they never have, and © the Pope has formally declared any such attempted ordination to be invalid. Theologians and polemicists arguing for this have advanced a number of reasons, including because the priest represents Christ to his people, and Christ was male.
Orthodox? TTBOMK, they do not because they never have – and decline to formally state theological grounds for this; it could be said tongue-in-cheek that one of the Orthodox dogmas i “If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it.” Change from longstanding tradition is generally to be eschewed, and if essayed at all, only after long discussion and study and a near-consensus that it is right.
Protestants? Other than as a historical term useful for about 30 years in the 1500s, it’s a catch-all phrase made use of by Catholics to lump together every church which does not acknowledge the authority of the Pope except the Orthodox and Assyrians.
Some Protestants are as rock-solid against female clergy as the Catholics, but found their reasons in Scripture. Others accept them and base it on sociological reasons of equality, while still others accept it and found their reasons on the freedom in Christ cited in Scripture.
All this is, of course, both sumary and incomplete, and said as coming from their perspective, not advanced as factually sound reason.
Poly gives a good summary, but I would also add that I am not aware of any Christian church or denomination that teaches that “mankind is still either male or female, because sin created the division.” Humans were created male and female – and declared “Good” by their Creator – before sin entered the world.
Polycarp’s got a great answer. I just thought I’d add a few cents to the discussion.
There are passages in the New Testament that explicitly restrict the roles that women are allowed to have in the church. “Priest” is not really a role defined in the New Testament but the total job description of a modern priest typically includes some of the roles that are restricted from women.
I hate to generalize too much, but the churches that have female priests have concluded that some of those restrictions were situation-specific (i.e. a restriction given to the church in Corinth because of social issues in Corinth is not necessarily meant as a blanket restriction on everyone for all time).
The Catholics have the Pope as an ultimate, authoritative decision-maker on these kinds of issues and the Popes have always said that priests must be men. So that’s pretty much the end of the issue in the Catholic church until you can convince a Pope to change the ruling. Protestant churches cover a lot of different denominations and a lot of non-denominational churches, so there are more people empowered to make an interpretation and set a policy.
I have never heard of the idea that sin created the male/female division.
Another note: some Protestant churches do not have priests, but call their ordained clergy something else (pastors, ministers, etc). This might seem like purely semantics, but there is some doctrinal baggage attached to the position “priest” that they want to avoid.
On the term “priest”:
Scripture uses two terms so translated (the issue lies in English usage, not in the translations). Hierius was used for both the Aaronic priesthood of Jewish cultus and for the pagan priests who conducted public sacrifices. It therefore is taken to mean “sacrificing priest”, that being the thing they had in common. The Christian clergy role was in origin quite different, and an excursus into church-building is needed. When one of the apostles conducted a mission in a city and converted some people, forming a new church, they set apart two groups, some with a vocation to “helps” and hence termed helpers (diakonoi), whence “deacon”; and elder citizens to exercise oversight. “Elders” translates the Greek presbyteroi, and “oversight” episkopé. The apostles were the people individually commissioned by Jesus Himself (or by the Holy Spirit in a couple of cases) to carry out the Great Commission and bring the Good News to all the world; there were only at most 16 of them, by the broadest usage: the Twelve, Judas’s replacement Matthias, Paul, Barnabas. and James the Just, brother of Jesus. As they began dying off, they were not replaced, and the leading presbyter in each city became its overseer (episkopos. After passing through Late Latin and Old French, the word presbyteros became “priest” (O.Fr. pre(s)tre was an intermediate form), and episkopos became bishop. The bishops of five major metropolises whose churches were founded by apostles or by Paul and Barnabas’s companion John Mark (who wrote te Gospel of Mark) were recognized as “patriarchs.” Each bishop was aided in his ministries, preaching and the sacraments, by the other presbyteroi – and as smaller churches were built as missions from the major city church, the modern diocesan structure slowly grew.
Late Medieval Catholicism made much of the “Holy Sacrifice of the Mass,” which people were to attend, subordinating the communion aspect to the sacrificial one, so that the two uses – presbyter and sacrificing priest – became conjoined in popular conception, and English “priest” applied for both words. Against this attitude, the Reformers rebelled, largely substituting the transliteraton presbyter, the translation elder, or the term pastor (shepherd of a metaphrical flock) for the middle order of clergy in place of “priest”, which had connotations they did not wish to keep. But the duties of a Catholic, Orthodox, or Anglican priest, a Presbyterian preaching elder or presbyter, a Methodist elder, or a Lutheran or Baptist pastor are largely identical.
Interesting point. The Pope (JPII, in this case) may have formally declared any such atempted ordination to be invalid, but he didn’t infallibly declare that women cannot be ordained. He did say that the Church has always taught that women cannot be ordained, and the Church tells us that the Church’s teaching, from the beginning, is infallible. But the CDF, in response to questions, said that JPII’s statement was not infallible, although they did say that the Church itself, exercising its infallible teaching authority, had always taught that women cannot be ordained. But the CDF cannot declare anything infallibly. And so, perhaps, just maybe, he was in error, along with the CDF, about the Church having infallibly and always taught that women cannot be ordained.
It’s very, very faint, but there’s a ray of hope in there.
There is an old interpretation common to Judaism, Cabbalism, Gnosticism and some Christians (but denied by most) that Adam was androgynous, and that the two sexes first appeared as a result of sin. Mostly inspired by Genesis 1:27: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” Some Christians then say that Christ, as the perfect being, was likewise androgynous. It was reading on this subject I stumbled on the other take on female priests.
As I understand it (and I tried a quick Google for a good explanation, but didn’t find one I really liked), one of the key points of the Protestant Reformation, on which Martin Luther et al broke with the Catholic Church, is the “priesthood of all believers.” The idea is that a priest is someone who mediates between God and people, or as Polycarp (the Doper) put it, “the priest represents Christ to his people”; whereas Protestants (or at least some of them) insist all Christians have direct access to God and don’t need an intermediary.
I’ve certainly heard the interpretation that Adam was androgynous, originally. The theory goes that he was “human” - neither man or woman (or, more accurately, both) until God put him to sleep and created Eve from his side (“flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone.”) Both are complete humans, but when united in marriage truly become “one flesh” in the sense that the two natures are re-united. I’ve seen this used as an argument in favor of heterosexual-only marriage, i.e. that the partners must be of opposite complementary sexes to become one flesh together.
But all that aside, the Genesis account is pretty clear-cut that it was after Eve was created that God declared all of Creation “very good.” And it was some time later, after the serpent’s temptation, that Adam and Eve fell into sin and introduced it into the world. So attributing the division of the sexes to sin is nonsensical – it was a good thing, according to God.
I had always thought that I Corinthians 14: 34-5 was the crux [sic] of the matter rather than what Jesus did or didn’t do:
I’m assuming that’s what dracoi was referring to, but have heard it applied much more widely than to just the immediate situation in Corinth.
Gyrate, that’s definitely a verse (not the only one) that Protestant denominations who don’t ordain women point to. I recall that from growing up in the Baptist tradition (and a lot of denominations are even more conservative about the role of women than most Baptists). I don’t know how much it plays into the doctrine of the RCC, though - I defer to the posters above.
We Episcopalians (the American offshoot of the Church of England) have been ordaining women since 1976. All of the expected Scriptural objections were raised, discussed, acknowledged but overcome. The decision to ordain women was certainly reflective of changes in American social mores and the march of feminism at the time. It seemed foolish, unjust and chauvinist to deny ordained ministry to half of our membership when so many had served faithfully in other capacities and clearly wanted to serve as priests. We now have many women priests and bishops; in fact, our presiding bishop (the top cleric of the entire denomination) is now a woman: Presiding Bishop Michael Curry – The Episcopal Church.
We are a democratic faith (with a small “d”) in our polity. Each Episcopal parish decides who will serve as its rector or chief priest, and we elect our bishops, with each parish having a voice and vote in the process. ISTR that the first female Episcopal bishop, in the late 1980s, was unwelcome at some conservative parishes in her diocese. When I was on the search committee for my small, traditional Episcopal parish in the early 1990s, looking for our next priest, I was struck by the realization that the members of the committee who were most adamant about calling a male priest were older women, to whom the patriarchal role of the parish priest was very important. Men of all ages on the committee, by contrast, seemed willing to consider calling (appointing) a female priest.
The Church of England is now wrestling with some of the same issues we went through 30-some years ago.
The Protestant church I grew up in, fairly conservative by most standards, has ordained women since the mid 70s - here’s a paper on the subject. I’ve never heard of Christ being androgynous.
The Lutheran Church Missouri Synod’s official position is that God doesn’t call women to the ministry. Asking God “why” is pointless.
Of course, the LCMS isn’t the only theological interpreter of “Lutheranism.” The Evangelical Lutheran Church of America has been ordaining woemn for more than 30 years.
Never heard that brought up, but then, I know quite a few women (including several ordained deaconesses) who would be likely to make any priest claiming that they must be silent in church eat a New Testament, hardcover, raw and unsalted. Of course, trying to get a chorus going while the women stay silent would be kind of difficult; my mother’s parish would lose all its Lectors, if the women stayed silent.
Correct. The Church has always taught this, and the Church’s authority to teach is infallible, but that does not mean that everything the church has taught is also infallible. The Church teaches infallibly on matters of faith or morals.
The decision to not ordain women is not a matter of faith or morals; it is a matter of practice. The Pope could require that henceforth priests celebrating Mass do so in a tux, top hat, and tails. This would be valid and binding on the church, but not “infallible.”
Indeed. As it happens, we have an ELCA (male) associate in our Episcopal parish, with the consent of both the local Lutheran and Episcopal bishops. He’s a great guy and gets along fine with our female associate rector.