Priestesses in the Church? Yes, Mr. Lewis, and bishops too!

This essay entitled “Priestesses in the Church?” by C.S. Lewis really floored me when I first read it a few years ago, so much that, of the essays in God in the Docks, perhaps it was the most memorable. It is particularly relevant today. Libby Lane was ordained today as the first female bishop of the Church of England. I imagine that Lewis would be quite disappointed, although perhaps not surprised, that the ordination of priestesses which he called in his day “unlikely to be seriously considered by the authorities” has not only been considered, but effected, and not only for priestesses, but now for bishops. This trend toward the ordination of women is pervasive in may denominations including the United Methodist, Episcopal, and (even prior to this date) greater Anglican traditions. In fact it is even encouraged among the Brethren in Christ, a brethren or holiness denomination based in Pennsylvania of which my wife’s family are committed members.

Googling the essay produces a very sad assortment of blog rebuttals of the essay which do not understand Lewis’ points and really make fools of themselves blabbering on at straw men. Therefore, although you should really just read the essay itself, I will try to do him some brief justice here. Lewis’ argument could be syllogized this way:

Major Premise: A key role of a priest is to represent God to man.
Minor Premise: God has revealed himself to mankind as masculine.
Conclusion: Therefore, a priest must represent God masculinely.
Second Major Premise: a person’s gender is part of their spirituality, it is a “living and semitive figure which God has painted on the canvas of our nature”.
Second Minor Premise: Men are masculine.
Conclusion: Therefore, a man must represent God to mankind.

I find that the only point that one can bail on this train of logic is at the very beginning–one must deny the mystical, representative nature of the sacerdotal office. Protestant denominations that do so, incidentally may have more of an excuse to allow women as “pastors” but this represents a deficiency in their whole Christian system. The fact that they may allow women to fulfill their version of the priestly office reveals that they have no priestly office at all. And I would submit that churches whose leaders merely educate and administrate and visit the sick are missing something of what Christianity truly is. But that is another issue. For churches who acknowledge the mystical role of the priest in the sacramental economy, and who hold the view that the Bible’s consistently masculine imagery for God was not an oversight on his part (R.I.P., TNIV translators), the ordination of female priests and bishops is a perversion of Christianity in the name of that great insidious god of our times, common sense.

Gender in the Bible

What exactly defines one’s gender and sexuality? There are a lot of things I would consider masculine or feminine, that aren’t associated the same way in other cultures. More importantly, what is the part beneath the cultural variability that matters to God? How does one’s sexual orientation please or displease God? Here are a few scriptures that discuss them overtly, interestingly the same ones usually examined when studying marriage (I bet the passages below are the most quoted at weddings). These verses, however, show that God is quite invested in the distinction between male and female.

Genesis 1:27–28: “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.”

Genesis 2:23–24. When the woman is created from his side, the man exclaims: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.”

Matthew 19:4-6: Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female and said, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh”? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.

Ephesians 5: 24-32: Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. 25 Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. . . . 31 “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” 32 This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.

We are made, male and female, “in God’s image.” We are designed to “become one flesh” and never separated. And this mystery, Paul says, has reflected Christ and the church since the beginning of Creation. In the mingling of a man and woman we get a picture of God’s relationship to us. What it means to be masculine, essentially, is to reflect the relationship that Christ has to the Church. Conversely, femininity is reflecting the role that the Church plays in its relationship to Christ. Gender roles are not about how much hair you have and where. They are not about whether women can wear pants or men can wear skirts (think of the Scots). We can’t hang our hat on any one cultural standard. Fulfilling these roles might look quite different between situations or cultures. (I take it the women chopped wood among the native Americans.) But there is something less specific, but much more profound, real, and significant to the male/female dichotomy. There is a duality at the core of the nature of humanity, and God says he created it so that we would get a clue about what it’s like to relate to him. From the beginning, God designed masculinity and femininity.

But we live in the aftermath of the Great Corruption that occurred after the divine definitions of gender given in Genesis 1 and 2. Our perceptions and intuitions of God’s order are distorted or forgotten (and where they are remembered, resented). Our hearts are governed by passions fixed on objects they were never intended for, because we have lost sight of the Great One who, in being our chief passion, aligns all the rest. Homosexuality is not disease, but a symptom. The disease is that the world groans in an unnatural state of rebellion against God. Our feelings deceive us. In this rebel state our hearts are drawn toward things they should not desire, and repulsed by things they should. To those who say that we should accept gays the way they are, I ask if they gave the same philosophy to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. “That’s just the way the weather cycles go. We have to embrace them.” If it is true that our world is not as it once was — as it should be — then could human sexuality not be part of that which was changed for the worse?

Am I willing to submit every aspect of my current natural self to Christ so that he could do in me a divine work of transformation? Do I cling to my passions and inclinations as my personal property? Am I willing to trust him that his plan for sexuality is the best? Or do I believe that, because I am one way now, that must God’s best for me? But God loves us too much to leave us as we are.

“Yet the call is not only to prostration and awe; it is to a reflection of the Divine life, a creaturely participation in the Divine attributes which is far beyond our present desires. We are bidden to ‘put on Christ,’ to become like God. That is, whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want. Once more, we are embarrassed by the intolerable compliment, by too much love, not too little.” — C.S. Lewis

Respect, gender roles, and sacrificial love

Love and respect
The Bible does not talk much about marriage relationships and gender roles. There are only a few passages that discuss this in the New Testament. I have tried to catalog most of the important ones here. The fascinating discovery is that women and men in relationships are not told to relate to each other in exactly identical ways. Men are told to “love” women, but women are told to “respect” men. Look at some of the patterns in the table below.

Scripture	Husbands	Wives
Colossians 3:18	Love your wives, and do not be harsh with them	Submit to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord
Ephesians 5:22-33	Love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her…to present her to himself in splendor, holy and without blemish	Submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its savior
	Love your wife as your own body	As the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands
	Love your wife as yourself	Respect your husband
Matthew 19:6	So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate
Titus 2:5		Working at home, submissive to their own husbands
1 Peter 3:1-7	Live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel, since they are heirs with you of the grace of life, so that your prayers will not be hindered	Be subject to your own husbands. …your respectful and pure conduct… but let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit …submitting to their own husbands
1 Corinthians 7	Give to his wife her conjugal rights…for the wife has authority over his body	Give to her husband his conjugal rights…for the husband has authority over her body
1 Corinthians 11:3	The head of every man is Christ, the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God.

This is a key distinction that is overlooked by many in our culture. For men, the equivalent of what love does for a woman is a kind of love that is best called “respect.” Notice that most deep man-to-man friendships are built on this kind of love—gruff, unspoken, yet real and strong. Men are giving each other this respect-ish love.

This is important because husbands (or boyfriends) in our culture are often expected to accept from their women the exact same kind of love that women receive best. Asking a woman to respect a man is not cool—it sounds chauvinistic and archaic. But I suggest from personal experience (if sola scriptura were insufficient) that the Bible described things correctly. It is immensely empowering, refreshing and delightful when my lady honors me in public, defers the final call on a decision to me, or trusts my judgment. It makes me love her so much when I sense supportiveness, not competition, from her. Although submission has unfortunately been coerced out of women in former eras, the proper manifestation does wonders to the masculine psyche. We are missing some major aspects of how men are wired that I think are necessary for cultivating the healthiest relationships between men and women.

Equal value, albeit unequal roles
The first objection to the idea of submission is always that it makes women inferior. I suggest that, according to the Bible, women are not at all ontologically subordinate, yet they are at the same time functionally subordinate. In other words, women and men have equal value, but not identical roles. Women are not less important because they are under men in “rank”. We can see this for at least two reasons. First, the top of the hierarchy chain that establishes this functional subordination are God the Father and Jesus (1 Corinthians 11:3), who, although distinctly different in subordination, are nevertheless entirely co-equal. Second, in God’s economy it is not leaders, but servants, who are “the greatest among you” (Matthew 23:11-12); in this sense, the woman’s position is the one of greater honor.

Who has the harder role?
It is harder to do the man’s part of loving or the woman’s part of respecting? The answer is, “Yes.” Because both actions are nuanced by the tendencies of manhood and womanhood, this is really comparing apples and oranges. I can only assume that, in some ultimate sense, they are exactly equal in difficulty. But this is really outside the scope of human evaluation.

It will take sacrifice, not just compromise
When the system of love and respect is broken, one side must go out on a limb to give love that is not guaranteed to return. The simple application for a man is, “love her regardless of whether she respects you, and trust that God will (perhaps gradually) change her heart as you do so.” The application for women is the same. “Respect him regardless of whether he loves you, and trust that God will cause his love for you to grow.” This does not mean that we should perpetually cast ourselves as martyrs into dysfunctional relationships. That is not healthy or helpful. A long period of unreciprocated reaching out might be a red flag to run deeper diagnostics on the relationship. (“Okay, something is broken deep here.”) But we cannot always be waiting for the other person to “come half way” and “meet us in the middle.” No, I suggest that Christ does not model that. He initiated. “We love because he first loved us,” and paid us the intolerable complement of allowing us to never love him back. So, I cannot tap my fingers and wait for my partner to reciprocate. I must give freely. Even if they are in the wrong. (We were in the wrong, not Christ.) This is the difference between simple compromise, which works for most circumstances, and sacrifice, which is the apex and glory of love.

You can only give that kind of love if you have received it
This kind of love can only be motivated and sustained by someone who has a very deep reservoir of love. The natural heart is incapable; it will run out. But if we have the holy spirit of God as the “fountain of living water” in our hearts, by which we continually receive the incomprehensibly sweet love of God, which he showed us on the cross, then we too can love selflessly. If the Lord is my strength, if I commune with him and confide in him and drink strength from him deep in my heart, then I will be empowered to love my significant other with a wild, dangerous, foolish self-sacrifice. And God will thus be glorified in my heart and in my actions.

Gender roles extend into the community
Two passages of scripture, 1 Corinthians 11:1-16 and 1 Timothy 2:1-15, seem to extend these roles to the corporate gathering of believers. As women are to submit to their husbands within the family sphere, so they ought to submit to their husbands in the church sphere, but moreover, women, considered as a group, should corporately submit to men, considered as a group. As a husband leads a wife, so the churchmen lead the churchwomen. Thus, women should not teach the collected church, and when they pray or prophecy, they should do so with a mark of submission. What counts as “teaching” and a “mark of submission” in today’s church is a very difficult question, which I will not attempt to answer here. But the point is clear that the gender roles extend corporately. This is not a popular idea at all, because our culture hates “traditional” gender roles in public even more vehemently than it hates them in the home; but believers today must wrestle with these scriptures and to seek to respect them in contextualized methods.

**Note: read my subsequent post for part two, the role of a man who is to receive submission.**