There has been a back and forth exchange between myself and the 'flyingvic' in the post below on why I believe Rowan Williams was wrong on seeing Ordo as a secondary issue. What I would like to do is to bring this discussion to the public in case many people who read the blog don't necessarily get around to reading the comments. So, here is the latest comment from 'flyingvic'. My comments that he is responding to will be highligted in red."You a teacher of Israel and ignorant of such things!" said Jesus.The question is how to deal with divine law. For instance, is the divine law, 'You shall not commit adultery' not yet complete? How about, 'You shall not steal'? Again, my question is, who is to make this decision about the completion or non-completion of our understanding of divine law? Where is the spark that tells us what we are doing is right especially if the "new thing" is completely contradictory to that which has gone before?
How has the church ever decided upon matters that have come new to its attention? By prayer, by study, by learned and spiritual discussion and - where what is new has already been for a while in existence - by a careful study of its fruits.
"...a hard capsule to swallow that the Spirit has moved in such a way that if Jesus were alive today he would call women to be bishops, priests or deacons. This is simply unacceptable theologically."
Does not that give pause for thought? Because your theology has decided that Ordo is of Divine Law and not human development, your theology also dictates that Jesus would be as incapable today of involving women in apostleship as he was, for whatever reason, unwilling to do so two thousand years ago. Because your theology decided that Ordo is of Divine Law, the Holy Spirit COULD NOT decide to embrace particular changes today. When we find ourselves limiting the scope of the Almighty because of a particular theological position we have adopted, is not the first step to question whether the original theology was correct?
I get extremely uneasy, as you may have gathered, when it seems to me that all too fallible human logic is applied to the things of God with the apparent expectation that God will meekly follow along, persuaded by the force of the argument.
"If something is of divine law how can something completely contradictory be of the same Spirit?" I accept the force of the question. Do you accept that our understanding of that divine law might not yet be complete?
The problem that I have with 'flyingvic's' theology is that it is very much anthropologically centred and lacks Christocentricity. What do I mean? Ordination is something that Christ gives as a gift and he does so by way of exclusive calling of males and he even excludes in his calling from all baptised males in the Church. Let me say this very clearly: NO ONE HAS THE RIGHT TO RECEIVE THE SACRAMENT OF HOLY ORDERS. One is not sent by his own desires either. It is the authority of the Church that decides who Jesus has given the responsibility to call someone to receive the gift.
We might not understand all of God's ways and we often have to submit to his divine prerogative on matters that are a mystery to us. But, because we don't understand does not give us the authority to change what he has given to his Church. We are all under that authority, including the Magisterium of the Church. What I think much of this type of 'spirit-speak' is nothing less than people preaching themselves and trying to re-invent the faith. Pope Benedict said it well in his book on Principles of Catholic Theology.
No one goes to church to hear someone else's personal opinions. I am simply not interested in what fantasies this or that individual priest may have spun for himself regarding questions of Christian faith. They may be appropriate for an evenings' conversation but not for that obligation that brings me to church Sunday after Sunday. Anyone who preaches himself in this way overrates himself and attributes to himself an importance he does not have. When I go to church, it is not to find there my own or anyone else's innovations but what we have all received as the faith of the Church--the faith that spans the centuries and can support us all.I am sorry, but approaches to theology that disregard the teaching of the Church and completely contradict what has come before is not the development of doctrine but the innovations stemming from human pride and autonomy. It is for this reason that I left Anglicanism to become a Catholic and have never been better for it and happier in the Christian faith of 2,000 years.
9 comments:
Do you accept that our understanding of that divine law might not yet be complete?
The first question (and I list it first because the objections from it, even if I'm not going into details, are more important than my questions listed below) is not so much whether our understanding is absolutely complete or absolutely incomplete - obviously it's neither - but how complete it is (in this particular area), and whether it is possible that any gap in our knowledge could lead to the drastic change that flyingvic and others desire. For example, before Einstein's theory of gravity, people had Newton's theory, which was incomplete. When it comes to the fine details of the orbit of Mercury, Newton's theory of gravity is not accurate enough. However, it is more than accurate enough to tell us that an apple won't rise upwards when it detaches itself from the tree. The first question is whether women's ordination is consistent with only requiring a small tuning of the finer details of doctrine allowed by the fact that we still don't know everything and there are uncertainties in our knowledge, or whether it is a large enough deviation to be ruled out by what we already know, beyond any possible uncertainty. In other words, is it equivalent to the procession of the perihelion of mercury or the apple? Father Steel believes, from a Catholic perspective, that it is the latter, as do I from a more evangelical perspective. Or theology and reason is not infallible, but it is still God given: neither is it completely flawed. We are not expecting God to follow our theology; our theology is an attempt to describe what God is so that we can use it, being properly aware of its limitations but also not exaggerating those limitations, to judge whether something new comes from God or from elsewhere.
The second question, after one has somehow convinced oneself of a favourable answer to the first question, is whether a possible gap in our knowledge -- which, being unknown may obviously go either way, either in support of women's ordination, or to strengthen the case against it even further -- is enough to proceed with the practice despite the clear dangers, which Father Steel is outlining on this blog, if it is wrong. Again, you will have a great deal of trouble convincing the Catholic or classical evangelical of that.
The third question is whether such a move would be beneficial for the church. Again, the evidence we have gathered in the past 15 years or so seems to be firmly against it. You cannot describe the Church of England in its current state as being healthy. That's not proof, of course, that the decline is caused or partially caused or accelerated by the ordination of women, since there are many other factors involved, just as had the Church of England thrived since the measure was passed it would not be proof that the ordination of women was beneficial (or enough to convince either Father Steel or myself given that WO failed to pass either of the first two tests), but it is not something that can or should be ignored by the church as it attempts to expand the measure to the episcopate.
(continued)
One thing that we do know for certain is that God is immutable, both in his nature and his purposes for the Church. If there is a change in God's actions in the Church it must be caused by a change in ourselves. To argue that the Holy Spirit is now calling women to ordained ministry when He has never in the past, and indeed led our ancestors to a firm opposition to the idea whenever it was mentioned, therefore requires one to say that there has been a change in the ontology of manhood and womanhood in the past 40 or 50 years or so, and that that change is in line with God's purposes for the human race (yet which, for some reason, He waited 1900 years after He founded the Church to provide, declining to bestow this apparent grace on our more devout ancestors.). A change in the culture is not enough, particularly since the culture we are in is growing increasing anti-Christian and particularly self destructive. If this change in our nature is beneficial for us, then it would have been beneficial for our predecessors from the very beginning, and God would have provided some clear indication of the possibility in either scripture or apostolic tradition, even if the possibility never became the norm, to help shape Christians towards this supposedly beneficial change. It seems to me that this is very far-fetched, and it is far more plausible to say that, since none of us are yet perfect, women are mistaking a call to ministry as a call to ordained ministry, or perhaps misunderstanding what the ordained ministry is and means, than to say that the Holy Spirit is leading the Church of our day in a direction which is a complete contradiction to the direction in which He led our ancestors.
Tradition is hugely important: it helps us to understand that we are part of a living body, that we are not the only ones spoken to by God, and to distinguish between modern fashions and fads, which are almost invariably destructive, and the eternal truth of the gospel. To override the voice of tradition in favour of an uncertain modern understanding is utter foolishness. In all that I've read on this subject, I have never seen anyone argue convincingly why women's ordination or consecration to the episcopate should be necessary now when it was not necessary (indeed, it's prohibition was seen as necessary) in the past. If God is giving us this grace now, then why did He despise our ancestors so much that He would not equally give it to them? Unless, of course, it is no grace.
Praying the Rosary dispels heresy, that's a promise, one of fifteen given by Our Lady for anyone who regularly and prayerfully recites the Rosary. It's worth every Christian's while to try this, in order to find unity amongst the brethren. It's all found in scripture(it's text).I have put a link to a Evangelical Anglican Marian Rosary on my blog, about the fourth link down on the left, after all the Roman ones(well as you know, we do like our Rosaries)!!
Wonderful. Rosary spam. :)
Very good post, Jeffery.
(I still wish you were Anglican, though.)
a hard capsule to swallow that the Spirit has moved in such a way that if Jesus were alive today he would call women to be bishops, priests or deacons. This is simply unacceptable theologically.
It's not a pill that we need to swallow at all. If Jesus were to come to Earth today and ordain women to Holy Orders, He can. He is Jesus. He is the one who took the existing institution of priesthood and made it a Sacrament, gave it a new nature (still rooted in its old nature) in His New Covenant. In short, God created the Sacrament of Holy Orders and the sacerdotal priesthood, He can redefine it.
The question is not what Jesus *would* do today, that is pure speculation. The question is what we *can* do today. Jesus can redefine the priesthood all He wants because He created it, the Church cannot redefine the priesthood because we did not create it, we received it.
WannabeAnglican
re the Rosary
It works if you pray it, so say it!
Link on my blog is second down on the left now!
Thank you for the excellent series of timely and highly informed articles on ordination and doctrine.
I pray many "pre-converts" will discover this site and are led home to Rome.
Pax et bonum.
I must thank you for taking my questions seriously enough to write a blog about them - even if you don't answer all of them!
You suggested once that I was using a 'proof-text' and that I was wrong to do so; yet it seems to me that the entire Roman doctrinal position on priesthood is based on a particular interpretation of Matthew 16.18, and that you don't have any problem with that!
Let me tell you - leaving aside any other possible interpretations of that verse - there are many who simply cannot believe that when Jesus spoke to Peter he already had in mind an institutional and threefold hierarchy of bishops, priests and deacons, eternally and irrevocably male, whose primary function would for ever be to offer up the sacrifice of the mass in remembrance of a passion and death that had not yet taken place. And I don't buy it either.
We do know that Jesus chose only male disciples; we do not know why. To elevate that unexplained choice into a divine law to bear comparison with the direct and unequivocal language of the Ten Commandments is plainly ridiculous.
Nor is it necessarily true to say that the Holy Spirit must now be leading the Church in an entirely different or contradictory direction. That would presuppose that the Church had always been right. God has always called women into the service of Christ, from the first witnesses of the resurrection on Easter morning onwards. It was the Church that effectively decided the nature of the priesthood. Perhaps the Church has failed to listen carefully enough to the promptings of the Holy Spirit. Jesus was not subject to cultural constraints; but perhaps a patriarchal Church did feel so constrained. Perhaps the Holy Spirit always wanted women to have the same priestly role to fallen humanity as Tradition has only given to men. Did the Holy Spirit despise our ancestors so much that he withheld from them so long the 'truth' of Papal Infallibility and the Assumption of Mary?
I am truly sorry that you do not regard my theology as sufficiently Christocentric. It is a harsh judgement on one you do not know, and your explanation seems to suggest that I regard ordination as a right rather than as a gift. I should be grateful indeed if you were to indicate where I have made any such pronouncement.
flying vic, sorry to just be getting to this. I've had internet problems with BT and I approved the comment from work the other day and forgotten about it until I received a childish email from some irritating person. I do apologise for not getting back to you.
flyingvic writes,
"You suggested once that I was using a 'proof-text' and that I was wrong to do so; yet it seems to me that the entire Roman doctrinal position on priesthood is based on a particular interpretation of Matthew 16.18, and that you don't have any problem with that!"
One thing that cannot be proven from my posts throughout this theological issue is that the Catholic theology of priesthood is based on Matt. 16.18 alone. That is a ridiculous accusation.
Why is the comparison of divine law something that is plainly ridiculous?
You mix things up now in your paragraph on the Holy Spirit. No one denies that women are called to service as disciples of Jesus and that women have an important role in ministry. You seem to want to throw out the symbolism of marriage and every other aspect of creation and redemption in your views of sacramental priesthood. That was my point about your position. Christ has entrusted this theology of priesthood to his apostles and binded them to it and therefore it cannot be changed so the Church hasn't failed to listen to the Holy Spirit but has done so through listening to her apostles and those who succeed her in teaching Christ's doctrine. This is how I believe you depart from a Christocentric theology of priesthood. Paul lays out this theology in action as seen in many of his letters that describe his Christocentric teaching to the churches.
Your comment about infallibility and the Assumption of Mary are red herrings because they are not teachings which completely contradict Jesus' apostolic ministry.
Post a Comment