Ordaining Women in the Orthodox Church

I was born into the Anglican Church of Canada just a few short years before it decided to proceed with the ordination of women. By the time I was growing up in the 1980s, a few ordinations had happened but women clergy were still vanishingly rare in my experience, and I remained very ambivalent about the issue. It was nothing to do with women, gender, or sex, for my grandmother was an Anglican lay reader who led summer services when our rector was on holiday and I always assisted her with delight; and I had plenty of hugely competent and adored female teachers (far more than the shabby and sometimes terrifying male teachers, at least one of whom, I discovered a few years ago, was jailed for abusing students not long after I had him); and my psychoanalyst was a wonderful woman I still think of almost daily. Instead, I kept asking myself: what does this decision to proceed with ordaining women do to Anglicanism's claim to being a part of the Church catholic if it proceeds with a practice the other two "branches"--Orthodoxy and Catholicism--cannot countenance?

The Catholic Church has tried to obliterate the discussion since the early 1990s when the late Pope John Paul II tried to order everyone to stop talking about it, which of course is the surest and most reliable technique for achieving the very opposite of what you ostensibly desire.

Orthodoxy has never been so heavy-handed, but it lacks nothing of the conservatism of Catholicism on this issue even if some of its more prominent hierarchs and spokesmen (!) have rather wanly suggested that the question remains open in Orthodoxy.

Some of those prominent leaders are featured in this new collection, which Carrie Frederick Frost (whom I interviewed here about her fascinating book) drew to my attention last week: Women and Ordination in the Orthodox Church: Explorations in Theology and Practice, eds. Gabrielle Thomas and Elena Narinskaya  (Wipf and Stock, 2020), 232pp.

The publisher tells us this:

This book—a collaborative, international initiative, involving academic theologians and practitioners—invites the reader into a conversation about the ordination of women in the Orthodox Church. It explores questions relating to the significance of being human, Eve’s curse, sexed bodies, the place of Mary, the nature of priesthood, the role of the deacon, and the task of being a priest in the twenty-first century. The reflections move across three main areas of discussion: issues of theological anthropology, particular questions pertaining to the priesthood and the diaconate, and contemporary practices. In each area the implications for ordaining women in the Orthodox Church today are explored.

We are also given the list of contributors and following endorsements:

Fr. John Behr
Dr Spyridoula Athanasopoulou-Kypriou
Dr. Dionysios Skliris
Fr. Andrew Louth
Dr Mary Cunningham
Met Kallistos Ware
Rev Dr Sarah Hinlicky Wilson
Dr Kyriaki Karidoyanes FitzGerald
Dr Carrie Frederick Frost
Dr Paul Ladouceur
Luis Josué Salés


“Some traditions are old because they are truly valuable, while some are valued only because they are old. The exclusion of women from the priesthood is a practice for which the theological arguments are notoriously weak—to the point of fatuity in many cases—but Orthodoxy’s veneration of the past has usually made it impossible to undertake a serious reconsideration of the issue. A book like this, encompassing essays by such eminent scholars, has long been desperately needed.”

—David Bentley Hart, author of That All Shall Be Saved


“This collection of essays represents by far the most thorough engagement within Orthodox theology with the question of women’s ordination. With contributions from some of the most recognizable scholars of Orthodox Christianity, this volume advances the discussion in such a way that the idea of women deacons—or even priests and bishops—within the Orthodox church cannot be so easily ignored or dismissed as being in contradiction with the Tradition.”

—Aristotle Papanikolaou, Archbishop Demetrios Chair in Orthodox Theology and Culture, Fordham University, and co-founding Director of Orthodox Christian Studies Center

Deaconesses in Orthodoxy

As the discussion about women in diaconal ministries (broadly defined) in both Orthodoxy and Catholicism continues, a new publication could not be more timely: Deaconesses, the Ordination of Women and Orthodox Theology, eds. Niki Papageorgiou, Eleni Kasselouri-Hatzivassiliadi, and Petros Vassiliadis (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2017), 585pp.

About this book we are told:

This collection of essays highlights the thorny and divisive issue of the admission of women into the sacramental diaconal priesthood of the Christian Church from the Orthodox theological perspective. The contributions here stem from scientific papers presented at an international conference titled Deaconesses, Ordination of Women and Orthodox Theology, organized in Thessaloniki, Greece, in 2015 by the Center of Ecumenical, Missiological and Environmental Studies (CEMES). They cover almost all the fields of biblical, liturgical, patristic, systematic, canonical, and historical theology. The volumes main focus is the ancient order of deaconesses, in connection with the overall issue of the ordination of women. Although most papers address the issues from an Orthodox perspective, their sober analysis can provide theological argumentation for the wider Christian community, both the Churches and Christian denominations that exclude women from the sacramental priesthood, and those that have already adopted their ordination.

Female Deacons in the East

Nearly twenty years ago now the late Pope John Paul II declared that the question of the presbyteral ordination of women was an officially closed question, but that did not touch the question of diaconal ordination, for which, as several reputable Eastern Christian historians have repeatedly provided evidence, we have a good deal of proof in the first millennium. A short new book, to be published at the end of this month, reviews some of that evidence for us: Phyllis Zagano, ed., Ordination of Women to the Diaconate in the Eastern Churches: Essays by Cipriano Vagaggini (Michael Glazier, 2014), 64pp.

About this book we are told:

The question of restoring women to the ordained diaconate surfaced during the Second Vatican Council and continued to resound in academic and pastoral circles well after Pope Paul VI restored the diaconate as a permanent state for the church in the West in 1967. Available for the first time in English, these two documents by Cipriano Vagaggini, OSB. Cam., on the historical details of women ordained as deacons in the Greek and Byzantine traditions demonstrate that women were sacramentally ordained to the major order of deacon over the course of many centuries in many parts of the Greek and Byzantine East. Vagaggini introduces the conclusions to his study by noting that "in Christian antiquity there were different beliefs and tendencies distinguishing between ministry and ministry, ordination and ordination, with regard to the nature and significance of the respective orders or ranks."

Sarah Hinlicky Wilson on Elisabeth Behr-Sigel

Last week I received from the publisher a copy of Sarah Hinlicky Wilson's book Woman, Women, and the Priesthood in the Trinitarian Theology of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel (T&T Clark, 2013).

I have been reading it with great interest after being introduced to Elisabeth Behr-Sigel by my friend Michael Plekon who, over lunch a few years ago, gave me a copy of a wonderful biography he edited, Toward the Endless Day: The Life of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel. If you are interested in her fascinating life, or simply want a good biography about an unusual figure who led a long and interesting life, this biography is for you. 

(photo credit: Jim Forrest)

Elisabeth Behr-Sigel (EBS) (left) is not as well known as some of her other contemporary Orthodox theologians, perhaps in part because she does not fit into the usual categories. Her thought on several issues stands out, but it is perhaps on the question of women, and their possible sacramental ordination in the Orthodox Church, that most marks Behr-Sigel's thought. This question has been treated in a new book just published by Sarah Hinlicky Wilson, whom I asked for an interview. Here are her thoughts:

AD: Tell us a bit about your background:

SHW: I’m an east-coast American Lutheran of assorted European heritage who lived in a very Lutheran bubble until leaving college. Thereafter I worked at a journal under the leadership of an ardent Catholic, went to a Presbyterian seminary, and ended up the consultant to the international Lutheran-Orthodox dialogue at the Institute for Ecumenical Research in Strasbourg, France, which serves the Lutheran World Federation, itself an organ of communion among about 95% of the world’s Lutherans.

Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

AD: How did you, an American Lutheran writing a dissertation at the Presbyterian-affiliated Princeton Theological Seminary, end up writing about a French Orthodox theologian?  

SHW: The easy and uninteresting answer is: I needed a topic I could finish in a year, so that meant Luther was out of the question! I highly recommend doing dissertations where the secondary literature is virtually nonexistent. 

The more interesting answer is this. During my college years, I was in a very Catholic-oriented crowd of Lutherans, and some of them thought that eliminating the ordination of women in Lutheranism would increase our chances of ecumenical reconciliation with Catholics. (Now I think that’s not only placing an unfair burden on women but ignores the vast number of other issues that continue to separate us.) At the same time, one of my mentors said to me, “You’re the only reason I still believe in the ordination of women.” I was really shocked by this ad hominem (ad feminam?) argument, which I knew he would refuse in any other context. Ironically, I didn’t actually have any intention at the time of becoming a pastor—for awhile I myself was opposed to the ordination of women because it was the surest way to keep safe from such a terrible fate! 

Enter my friend Michael Plekon, an esteemed Orthodox theologian and priest, who said: you need to read Elisabeth Behr-Sigel’s book. I did, and it cleared my head beautifully. Here was a woman outside of the Lutheran-Catholic crossfire, who knew and appreciated feminism but did not consider it determinative for Christian faith, and who built on Scripture, patristic studies, and contemporary Orthodox theology to make a case for the ordination of women. Though the set of arguments on this topic is different depending on one’s confessional location, tracing the argument in another church’s setting was extremely illuminating of my own. I went to France to meet her the following year and exchanged occasional letters with her until her death. In many ways, my dissertation was paying a debt of gratitude to this remarkable woman. (And I did end up getting ordained after all. Oh well.)  

AD: You currently hold a position at the Institute for Ecumenical Research in Strasbourg. Among some Orthodox (and others) “ecumenical” is a bad word (the “pan-heresy” even), thought to mean the evacuation of all doctrine and the reduction of Christianity to the lowest common denominator. Tell us how you understand ecumenism and the search for Christian unity. 
 

I think we can get at ecumenism best via a cultural analogy. The gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost was not to make everybody speak and understand one language, but to make all the people there understand the gospel in their own language. In mission, we don’t seek to draw all people into one single culture that alone houses the gospel, but for the gospel to move out into every culture and make each culture its dwelling place. This means that people are entitled to remain “at home” in their own cultures, even as the gospel takes hold of those cultures, inhabits them, and transforms them. But Pentecost also implies that we need to step outside of our home cultures, out of those places comfortable for us, to see what other people’s homes are like. Note how hard it was even for the apostles to leave Jerusalem; the Spirit had to keep nudging them out—sometimes only persecution would do the job! It is an essential part of growth into Christian maturity not to make the mistake of thinking that the gospel and our home culture are logical equivalents; we will naturally equate the two if not pushed beyond our boundaries. The tension between “at home” and “away” has to be maintained, not eliminated. We are allowed to be at home where we are at home; we are not allowed to deny other people the right to be at home where they are at home. 

Analogously, ecumenism should not demand that no one feel at home anymore, leaving one theological tradition for an ecumenical super-theology or minimum-theology that belongs to everybody and nobody. But ecumenism should drive people to travel beyond the borders of their home theology and home church to see what else is out there, which will then help them to be better Christians both at home and abroad. Ecumenical voyaging helps people see the weaknesses and failures in their home church—every church has them, for none can manage everything perfectly—and also to recognize their own real strengths. It should make them discover that there are real Christians over there—and thus that their church is also Christ’s church, which means it is also our church, even if in different clothing! We may legitimately critique other Christians, but we may not deny them the baptism that made and keeps them Christian. I think there has to be a lot more of this “ecumenical voyaging” before any further talk about unity can even be meaningful.

AD: Elisabeth Behr-Sigel herself had an interesting “ecumenical” path in her own life, moving from the Protestant tradition to Orthodoxy but continuing to be deeply engaged with the World Council of Churches and other Christians. What message does her life have for Orthodox Christians today--and others?

I think of Elisabeth as a shining example of the beauty of hybridity in Christian faith. We have only one God, but where creation is concerned we are not to be locked boxes or fall into essentializing delusions. Elisabeth’s earliest experience was of the cultural hybridity of Alsace (where I live now!), a place both French and German, always negotiating those two realities. Then there was her multilayered religious hybridity: her father was a Protestant Christian but her mother was Jewish. Elisabeth was baptized in a Lutheran church but experienced the friendly engagement of Lutherans and Reformed, something that has been impossible or rejected in other parts of the world, and her most significant mentors in her teen years were Reformed. Then she became Orthodox through chrismation, not rebaptism—but even after that, she served as a lay pastor in a Reformed church for eight months. She married a Russian, learned the language, and participated in Orthodox churches whose identity at the time was much more Russian than French. Her dearest friend Lev Gillet had a Catholic-Orthodox hybrid identity. And on and on. 

The basic thing she calls into question is the idea that authenticity means closure. I resonate deeply with this part of her witness. Earlier in life I would have thought that ecumenism would mean watering down my Lutheranism; in reality, I think it’s made me a better Lutheran, because I am no longer an ideological Lutheran: I have a better sense of our genuine strengths as well as a humbling sense of our serious weaknesses. (I also am an American living in France, and a white mother of a brown child, so I experience hybridity at many levels of my being.) I once thought ecumenism was a winner-takes-all struggle to be the true church—whether through the triumph of one confession over the others, or a reduction of all local and confessional details to a minimal acceptable homogenous standard. These kinds of perspectives only survive if you assume that you have to be one thing and one thing only. If hybridity is OK, proper to the church instead of alien to it, the whole question shifts radically. I think this is the challenge that world Christianity especially poses to “historic” churches.

AD: You note in your introduction that the question of The Ordination of Women in the Orthodox Church is assumed by some to be an “intrusion” of “secularism” or “feminism.” You argue that it was not so with EBS. Tell us how she approached the question.

It wasn’t an intrusion, because Elisabeth went out after it herself! Again, such a perspective assumes a “locked box” attitude toward the church, which is further premised on some kind of competition between creation and redemption. They’re not the same thing, but they’re not mortal enemies, either. Changes and movements in the world’s history and culture may have prompted the discussion about women in the church, but Elisabeth was convinced that these changes were already the long-term outcome of the gospel itself: that the leaven of Galatians 3:28 had taken nearly two millennia to raise the heavy lump of pagan societies. To assume that questions about women are an intrusion is basically to assume that being a woman is somehow not natural or proper to Christian life. Well, you can find remarks to that effect here and there—but these must be considered as much a heresy as a radical feminist denial of the Fatherhood of God or the incarnation of Jesus Christ.

AD: Your second chapter is devoted to Paul Evdokimov’s thought on women. I’ve heard it repeatedly said that, had he lived longer, he would have revised his writing and thinking in the area. If so, what in his thinking likely could or should have been revised?

He said as much to his wife, who reported this in a letter to Michael Plekon—that’s my hard proof—though I think others heard him say the same. Evdokimov was a pioneer: nobody had thought and written so extensively but also positively about women in the Orthodox world before him (and it wasn’t exactly an ancient tradition in the Western world by his time, either). He wanted to validate and honor women in the church and criticize their maltreatment. He also perceived a particular variant of feminism that actually despised sexual difference and wanted to make women the same as men, so he set out to oppose that. (I find many people think that this is the single unanimous goal of feminism; it is certainly not.) So it always happens that people at the forefront are starting from scratch, trying things out, making things up—and some things work, while others don’t. What Elisabeth ultimately came to differ with Evdokimov on was his essentializing of feminine being and attributing it to the being of God the Spirit. The more she searched, the less she could find to support such a notion. Had Evdokimov lived longer and stayed in conversation with Elisabeth, I think he probably would have begun to revise in the direction she laid out.

AD: Your third chapter begins by noting that prior to 1976, EBS had never put anything in print about women in the Church. What led to the change in her thinking and writing? 
 

I expect she thought about it quite a bit before. But the impetus for writing was her invitation to give the keynote address at the first-ever international gathering of Orthodox women at the Agapia convent in Romania. By then, the ordination of women was in the air in the West, so she touched on the matter briefly (and rejected it). But I think a lifetime’s experience as a woman in the Orthodox church was ready to erupt, and once she got started there was no holding her back!

AD: Tell us a bit about the female diaconate, treated in your sixth chapter. I’ve often heard it remarked by competent historians (e.g., Robert Taft) that the evidence of female deacons cannot be doubted. How did EBS approach the question? 

She accepted the conclusions of many scholars that there had once been an active female diaconate, and she spearheaded a petition to the ecumenical patriarch asking for it to be reinstated—however, not simply re-created from the past, but adapted to present needs. At the same time, she was concerned it could be seen as “throwing a bone” to women as a way of giving them an office but avoiding further discussion of ordination to the presbyteral and episcopal offices. My own sense is that the interrelationship of the three offices is strong enough that there is great fear that a real female diaconate today would inevitably lead to a female presbyterate—and that has been enough to strangle all progress on reinstating a female diaconate.  

AD: Ultimately your argument, if I understand it correctly, is that discussions about the ordination of women to the priesthood depend less on what Tradition says, or which passages of Scripture one consults. Ultimately everything rests on Trinitarian theology—an argument I’ve made elsewhere in writing about same-sex marriage. Tell us what light Trinitarian theology sheds on these debates. 
 

Yes, the Trinity is determinative, but probably not in the way expected. Elisabeth doesn’t follow the social trinitarian approach of community-in-diversity. In fact, had she known it, I think she would have been suspicious of it, because it was precisely the assertion of gender diversity within God that she found so problematic. Evdokimov had argued that the Son is masculine, the Spirit is feminine, the two together image the unknowable Father; Thomas Hopko made this line of thought famous, and it was finally accepted by the Rhodes Consultation on women in the church in 1998. Elisabeth, by contrast, followed the trail blazed by Vladimir Lossky and his work on personhood in both God and humanity. To be a person is to be fully one’s nature and yet not reducible to one’s nature, not enclosed by it or self-identical to it. For Lossky, this was the proper reading of what it means to be in God’s image—we don’t share God’s nature, but we share God’s non-reducibility to His nature in His tripartite personhood. For Elisabeth, this is how Jesus could take on and redeem the flesh of women without sharing their “female nature,” and therefore why women could iconically image Jesus as priests. The last chapter of my book traces this out at greater length, for while Elisabeth referred to Lossky frequently, she never developed the exact line of correspondence between her thinking and Losksy’s, so I tried to reconstruct her line of thought to make it clearer.

AD: Having finished this book, what writing projects are you at work on now? 
 

Most immediately in front of me is a kind of handbook on Pentecostalism and charismatic movements for Lutheran churches in the Lutheran World Federation, as Pentecostalism is our most pressing ecumenical challenge at the moment (and the other side of my responsibilities at the Institute, along with Orthodoxy). Longer term, I’m working on re-evaluating the practice and theology of saint veneration within Lutheranism. While we definitely dispensed with the invocation of the saints, I see compelling evidence that we quietly created our own Lutheran version of veneration, including of our own indigenous Lutheran saints. Once again, Elisabeth was a huge help to me here, as a practitioner of the “new hagiography”: one that doesn’t shy away from the flaws and failures of the saints but takes them up into the greater view of God’s transformation of humanity. I think there is a great deal of ecumenical potential to be found in attention to one another’s saints. For my basic perspective on the matter, see my contribution to Church and Culture!

The Ordination of Women

The question of whether Catholic and Orthodox women may be ordained to the diaconate and priesthood continues to be debated, as I noted last summer. This month T&T Clark released a paperback of a book they published in 2008: Ian Jones, Kirsty Thorpe, and Janet Wootton, eds., Women and Ordination in the Christian Churches: International Perspectives (2012, 256pp.)

About this book the publisher tells us:

The growth of women’s ordained ministry is one of the most remarkable and significant developments in the recent history of Christianity. This collection of essays brings together leading contributors from both academic and church contexts to explore Christian experiences of ordaining women in theological, sociological, historical and anthropological perspective.  Key questions include: How have national, denominational and ecclesial cultures shaped the different ways in which women’s ordination is debated and/or enacted? What differences have women’s ordained ministry, and debates on women’s ordination, made in various church contexts? What ‘unfinished business’ remains (in both congregational and wider ministry)? How have Christians variously conceived ordained ministry which includes both women and men?  How do ordained women and men work together in practice? What have been the particular implications for female clergy? And for male clergy? What distinctive issues are raised by women’s entry into senior ordained/leadership positions?  How do episcopal and non-episcopal traditions differ in this?

Chapter 3 will be of especial interest: "The Ordination of Women from an Orthodox Perspective" by Katerina Karkala-Zorba.

Female Deacons and Priests?

One of the questions that has aroused great controversy in our time has been the ordination of women. Many continue to press for this or to assert that history "shows" that women were actually ordained. Most of the evidence for such claims is controverted, and much of it transparently tendentious, but some of it (at least for the diaconate in the East) is credible according to such scholars as John McGuckin. Now a new book comes along to push the debate forward: Kevin Magidan and Carolyn Osiek, eds., Ordained Women in the Early Church: A Documentary History (John Hopkins University Press, 2011), 240pp,

About this book the publisher claims:

In a time when the ordination of women is an ongoing and passionate debate, the study of women's ministry in the early church is a timely and significant one. There is much evidence from documents, doctrine, and artifacts that supports the acceptance of women as presbyters and deacons in the early church. While this evidence has been published previously, it has never before appeared in one complete English-language collection.

With this book, church historians Kevin Madigan and Carolyn Osiek present fully translated literary, epigraphical, and canonical references to women in early church offices. Through these documents, Madigan and Osiek seek to understand who these women were and how they related to and were received by, the church through the sixth century. They chart women's participation in church office and their eventual exclusion from its leadership roles.

The editors introduce each document with a detailed headnote that contextualizes the text and discusses specific issues of interpretation and meaning. They also provide bibliographical notes and cross-reference original texts. Madigan and Osiek assemble relevant material from both Western and Eastern Christendom.

Chapter 3 ("Women Deacons in the East: Literary Texts, Literary Allusions, Inscriptions") precedes Ch. 4 ("Women Deacons in the East: Canons and Comments on Church Practices") and Ch. 5 ("Women Deacons in the East: Later Texts").  Ch. 8 ("Women Presybters") has a sub-section on the East.

We will see about having this book expertly reviewed in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies.