Chatting with an Exvangelical friend about women’s ordination

I have a friend who is an old figure in American Evangelicalism who, with great integrity and at considerable cost to himself, has walked away from the MAGA Evangelical freak show in favor of being a disciple of Jesus. He is very open to a great deal the Catholic tradition has to say. He is currently reading my book The Church’s Best-Kept Secret: A Primer on Catholic Social Teaching and writes to discuss ideas sparked by it. Although the book does not tackle issues like the nature of the sacraments or, beyond a few cursory remarks, the nature of governance in the Church, he writes the following and I thought it an interesting conversation, so I share it here:

Mark, I’m reading your helpful book. And playing it low key for now re posting on it, not in small part because I feel too uninformed to even bring up questions in the deepest way. But here’s one I’m happy for you to use publicly, with or without mentioning me. It has to do with the intriguing idea of “Development of Doctrine.” Right away I like this idea. But I might like it because it gives me hope that Catholics might bend in (for instance) issues regarding women fully sharing in ordination w/ men, even as far as the possibility of a woman pope. I guess that brings up a few questions, though. For instance, is this development of doctrine only meant in the sense of making things clearer. Say, as with the Trinity, which though present implicitly in Scripture isn’t overtly discussed in one chunk as we all do. Or, can we see it going further, the Church coming to a point where it says “We all saw this as wholly true, but now we need to admit we were wrong on that point”? Mormons have what they call “progressive revelation,” which to my cynical eye appears merely a quick way for them to simply, by fiat, declare they are (for instance) no longer racists. Even though Smith and Young overtly were and embedded racism in their doctrines. I don’t like the Mormon usage of their “progressive revelation” (not in small part because Mormonism isn’t doctrinally repairable IMO). But I do like the idea that doctrine could be, uh, progressive or developmental. Obviously the extreme usage of developmental could result in a wholesale assault on, say, the Divinity of Jesus or even Him having physically risen from the dead. That would be the fundamentalist / Evangelical rejection of said idea, if in fact I even understand Evangelical theology any more. Well, anyway, no pressure. Just interesting…. I’m pressing on into Chapter 2 at this stage.

The difference between development as the Church means it and progressive revelation as Mormons mean it is the difference between the mustard seed becoming a mustard plant and the mustard seed becoming an elephant or a pine tree. The Church’s revelation becomes more itself. It cannot flatly contradict itself. This is often a subtle and tricky business.

For example, first century Judaizers thought that a flat reversal was exactly what had happened at the Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15) when the Church (in their view) swept away 2000 years of tradition and said Gentiles could join the covenant people without being circumcised or keeping kosher. But the reality was that Christ did not abolish but fulfilled the law.

Mormon conceptions of progressive revelation really do seem to me to violate this inner integrity and simply sweep away things that had hitherto been really integral to the claims of Mormonism. The $64,000 question with respect to ordination is: what is integral to the sacrament?

I think the Church is still noodling that question and is doing so very cautiously, so any changes, if they ever come, will be slow.

Basically, the problem is this: the Church sees no problem with women occupying the prophetic or kingly offices. So the Church has never had an issue with women doing kingly stuff from abbess to university professor to preacher to queen to president to premier. There is nothing, aside from slowness of human custom, to prevent lay women from being cardinals because the office of cardinal is nothing but a human system devised a millennium ago to elect popes, It’s a sort of glorified parish council and there is nothing, theologically speaking, to prevent women from joining it.

Similarly, women are and always have been prophets in the Church, as we see in Acts 21 with Philip’s daughters or with the various women prophets in the Old Testament. And so women have filled that role in big and little ways ever since. Hence we see women declared Doctors of the Church, for instance.

Women also participate in the common office of priest as all the baptized do, mediating God to man and man to God, as all priests do.

But weirdly, in the apostolic tradition (Catholic, Orthodox, and other traditions with priesthoods dating back to the first century) there simply is not a sacerdotal priesthood in which women were the matter of the sacrament of ordination any more than wine was the matter of baptism or water was the matter of the Eucharist. There is nothing wrong or inferior about women, water, or wine. But neither Jesus nor the apostles–in a world chockablock with priestesses–ever ordained a woman as priest or bishop to confect the sacraments. They were evangelists, heroes, martyrs, scholars, philosophers, poets, leaders, queens, generals in the army of France, founders of hospitals and religious orders and every other role, but never sacerdotal priests.

So John Paul II in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, says not that the Church forbids women priests but that the Church is not competent to ordain women priests. That is, she can no more change the matter of the sacrament of ordination than she can baptize in wine or confect water as the blood of Christ, because that is not what Christ or the apostles handed down and she is stuck with that.

The idea is that sacraments symbolize what they do and do what they symbolize, and the sacrament of the priesthood symbolizes Christ the Bridegroom to the Church his Bride.

This is, very obviously, a frustrating notion to huge percentages of modern readers. The thing is, it’s also a fact all the way back to Christ and the apostles and is backed up by an awful lot of history. It may, for all I know, be scrutinized and re-evaluated to bits in coming years, but I can certainly see the logic of the argument and I have no ready replies to it myself since the insuperable problem that I run into is that almost nobody discussing women’s ordination seem to me to approach the sacrament from any perspective but that of equal rights, which appears to me to have nothing to do with the logic of the sacraments.

Sacraments are graces, not rights. Gifts, not something we can ever claim in civil court. It sure looks to me like Jesus and the apostles established the male sacerdotal priesthood, as they established the other sacraments to have very particular matter to be consecrated: water in baptism and not wine; olive oil in anointing, not butter; bread and wine in the Eucharist, not beef and beer, and so on.

The matter of ordination is men and not women and I don’t see how the Church can simply change that by fiat, precisely because we are not Mormons and cannot simply declare new Revelation.

There is, of course, a lot of cogitating happening on the nature and significance of gender these days and no doubt there are a lot of theologians who are pondering all that with respect to ordination. But for my part, I have not yet heard any especially clinching replies to Ordinatio Sacerdotalis‘ point that the Church is not competent to alter the matter of the sacraments.

What has to be shown–assuming it can be shown–is that ordaining women does not alter the matter of the sacraments. If doctrine ever develops in that area, that is how it will develop or it will never develop at all in that direction.