Women bishops.  What exactly is the problem?

The arguments against seem essentially to be:

- Jesus didn’t have female disciples amongst the twelve.
Given he was so counter-cultural, if it mattered to him surely he would have done.

- Women were clearly excluded by Paul in his letters to the early church.
1 Corinthinans 14, 34-35 is the best known passage covering this.

- Tradition matters, women have never held these positions and why should we bow to modernity when we resist other secularist, relativist approaches.
After all, of the church had bent to every cultural change there would be church weddings for divorced people, gay marriage…

- Man has dominion over woman, and not the other way around.
This is clear from Adam and Eve, was the cultural norm of Old Testament society and is explicitly set out in Paul’s letters.

If you want to read some more about the arguments against, then Bibleprobe is probably the site for you.  If you are of a liberal disposition, you might want to bolt your computer to a table so you don’t accidentally throw it across the room.

What are the arguments in favour of women clergy?

Well, let’s start by attempting some redress of the antis argument. The Catholic website www.womenpriests.org sets out seven good reasons, but let’s focus in on a few…

- there were indeed no female disciples in the twelve – but Jesus was counter-cultural in his treatment of women.
(see this excellent article at www.freeminds.org and this one at the Sophia Network which sets out these arguments far more clearly than I could have done alone).
Jewish men did not speak to women in public as Jesus did (Samaritan woman by the well in John 4).  Jesus comforted the widow of Nain and had compassion on a prostitute.
Women did not take part in public prayer and were segregated within the Temple. But Jesus preached to women and men alike.
And look at the roles of women in Jesus’s life.
Without the artificial conflation of Mary Magdalene with a prostitute mentioned in preceding verses, and without the ridiculous over-interpretation of a “kiss on the mouth” in the gnostic gospel of Philip, we can see the importance and privilege of her role – and she was one of the first to see the resurrected Jesus.
Martha and Mary hosted Jesus equally to their brother Lazarus and studied at his feet.
Joanna and Susanna seem to have funded Jesus’s mission (Luke 8), and Phoebe and Priscilla were early church leaders, and the Freemind article lists further examples of both Biblical and early church history examples of women in senior ministry.
By the way, while none of the named twelve were women, it would have been odd indeed if women had not been present at the Last Supper – it was an all- family meal of religious significance!  Just because the medieval artists excluded them doesn’t mean that they weren’t there…

- Paul was writing to specific churches in specific circumstances
Leaving aside the idea that Paul is such an advocate of celibacy and the inferior status of women because he was himself divorced, what circumstances at the time would mean Paul would take a particularly strong line?
At Ephesus, the cult of Artemis, where women were understood to be superior to men, was the starting place for many of the new Christians.  Another possibility would be the bizarre Gnostic heresies at that time that the women were spreading false doctrines about.
In Corinth, the influence of the Oracle at Delphi was a problem – over-enthusiasm about speaking in tongues amongst the women in the congregation seemed to be linking them too closely with the way the women supported the high priest there.
So relegating women to a quiet, submissive role, allowing men trained in Christian theology to set the direction and not to make a “local version” incorporating rites from other religion.

- Tradition does not exist completely unchanged – why uphold some elements and abandon others?
There is evidence that women were church leaders in early Christian history.  The banning of women from leadership roles in the fifth century shows that they were leading prior to that – so why should we uphold a decision made by Fifth century men over previous decisions?
We also need to question why the word meaning “Deacon” was translated identically for Phoebe and male church leaders in some parts of the Bible, then translated as “servant” in other parts, and that it is the latter that is used to justify saying that she had a different status.

Women are now more educated, more likely to have jobs outside the home, can vote equally to men and are no longer the property of their fathers and passed to be their husband’s property on marriage.  They can own property and income in their own right and – like Joanna and Susanna – can dispose of that income as they wish.
Presumably there were many opponents, male and female, of each of those changes.
But no one outside the Taliban would now argue that as men have always been educated only men should be educated outside the home.

Is Christianity just misogynist?
Arguments about this sort of thing give succour to the theme that actually Christianity is just misogynist.

Radical 1970s feminists tried to reestablish the scared feminine (as indeed does Dan Brown) on the grounds that Christianity has been pursued over the centuries in such a way as to subjugate women.

God (the father) creates Adam (a man) and from Adam’s rib creates Eve (a woman), the only time in the history of humanity that woman has been born of man.(it does – who God chooses to speak for him is very important and we surely should not be narrowing our view of who is “acceptable” when the story of Christianity is that God doesn’t go for the big and obvious…)

Eve not only gives into temptation from the serpent, she also persuades Adam to do so too, and so he is punished for listening to her.

With women set up as the fall guy from the beginning, is it any wonder that church tradition – whether Judaism or Christianity- excluded women from official leadership roles?

If you read the comments added to newspaper websites on this story today, you’ll see a whole load of neoatheist sniping, saying who cares (fine) or that women must be allowed to “propagate lies” equally with men (not fine).

This suggests that this doesn’t matter, but it does.
The real argument to have is the battle against the world that believes what we believe to be at best lunacy and at worst dangerous lies.
The lesson of Christianity’s history is that who God chooses to speak for him is very important and we surely should not be narrowing our view of who is “acceptable” when it is clear that God doesn’t go for the big and obvious…

Related posts:

1. What’s the politics equivalent of CofE?
2. Advent thoughts: if it’s good enough for Africa…
3. Epigenetics and the Guardian, or what happens when science becomes religion?
4. How sure are you? Pascal and “Bad Conscience”
5. Lent – not just a past participle…