IB World Religions 3.2.5. Gender and Ritual: Authority and the Ordination of Women Notes

3.2.5. Gender and Ritual: Authority and the Ordination of Women

Gender and ritual roles

1. Every Christian rite assigns roles: who presides, who preaches, who reads, who serves at the table and who gives out communion. Because those roles carry authority, the question of who may hold them has been live in every denomination.
2. Women have always held some of them. They have taught the young, led music, prepared the church, visited the sick, served as deaconesses in the early East and governed religious orders under their own superiors.
3. Some roles were closed and have since opened. Roman Catholic girls were formally permitted to serve at the altar in 1994, and in 2021 Pope Francis opened the instituted ministries of lector and acolyte to women.
4. Anglican and Protestant churches have long appointed women as readers, elders, churchwardens and lay ministers of communion, so much of the ritual work of a parish is already shared.
5. The disputed role is presiding: leading the Eucharist and pronouncing absolution and blessing. The argument concentrates there because those acts are held to require ordination.
6. The dispute is therefore about ordination rather than about worth. Every church in the argument affirms that women and men are equally made in the image of God and equally baptised.

The three orders

1. Catholic, Orthodox and Anglican churches order ministry in three degrees: deacon, priest, also called presbyter, and bishop. A candidate is ordained into each in turn.
2. Catholics and Orthodox count that act among the sacraments under the name holy orders. They teach that it marks the person permanently rather than appointing them to a job they might later leave.
3. On that account the priest at the altar acts in persona Christi capitis, in the person of Christ the head. The sign made at the altar is therefore held to matter alongside the words spoken.
4. Reformation churches recast the act. Lutheran, Reformed, Methodist and Baptist bodies mostly treat ordination as the church recognising a call and setting someone apart for a function, not as a sacrament that changes the person.
5. That difference explains why the argument runs differently in different places. Where ordination recognises function, the question is whether a woman can do the work; where it is sacramental and iconic, the question is whether a woman can be the sign.
6. Some bodies ordain nobody. Quakers have never had a separated ministry, and the Salvation Army commissions officers of both sexes without ordaining any of them.

Arguments against women's ordination

1. The Roman Catholic position was set out in Inter Insigniores in 1976 and restated by John Paul II in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis in 1994, which declared that the Church has no authority to confer priestly ordination on women.
2. Its first reason is the calling of the Twelve. Jesus chose only men as apostles, and the documents hold this was deliberate rather than a concession to custom, since he broke other conventions about women freely.
3. Its second reason is unbroken tradition. Catholic and Orthodox teaching holds that the Church received this practice rather than inventing it, and so has no power to change it.
4. Its third reason is the iconic argument. If the priest stands in the person of Christ, then a natural resemblance between the sign and the one signified is held to belong to the sacrament itself.
5. Orthodox theologians make the arguments from tradition and typology in similar terms. They add that the male priesthood sits inside a wider set of symbols in which the Church is the bride and Christ the bridegroom.
6. Protestant opponents argue from scripture instead. Complementarian readings of 1 Timothy 2:12, 1 Corinthians 14:34 and Ephesians 5 hold that women and men are equal in worth but given different roles, with teaching and governing authority in the congregation given to men.

Arguments for women's ordination

1. Supporters usually begin with Galatians 3:28, which states that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female.
2. They point to the resurrection accounts. All four Gospels make women the first witnesses, and later tradition calls Mary Magdalene the apostle to the apostles.
3. They read Paul's own greetings as evidence of women leading. Phoebe is called a diakonos of the church at Cenchreae in Romans 16, Junia is described there as outstanding among the apostles, and Priscilla instructs Apollos in Acts.
4. They argue that the restrictive texts address particular disorders in particular congregations rather than setting a permanent rule, noting that Paul assumes in 1 Corinthians 11 that women pray and prophesy in the assembly.
5. They argue from baptism. If baptism rather than gender makes a person a member of the body of Christ, then a call to ministry should be tested by gifts and fruit rather than by sex.
6. Anglicans added a procedural argument called reception. A change of this size may be adopted while the wider Church tests it over time, rather than waiting for universal agreement before acting.

Denominational practice today

1. Congregational and Free churches moved first. Constance Coltman was ordained in England in 1917, and the Salvation Army had commissioned women officers from its foundation under Catherine Booth.
2. Lutheran churches followed in the middle of the twentieth century. Sweden ordained its first women priests in 1960, and most Nordic and German churches now have women bishops.
3. Anglicans began under wartime pressure, when Li Tim-Oi was ordained priest in Hong Kong in 1944. The Episcopal Church in the United States followed in the 1970s, the Church of England ordained women priests in 1994 and consecrated its first woman bishop in 2015.
4. Anglican practice is not uniform. Some dioceses, including Sydney in Australia, ordain women as deacons but not as priests, and several provinces ordain none.
5. Methodist, Presbyterian, United Reformed and most British Baptist churches ordain women. The Southern Baptist Convention in the United States reserves the office of pastor to men and has expelled congregations that appointed women.
6. Pentecostal practice is mixed and often early. Aimee Semple McPherson founded a denomination in 1927, and many Pentecostal and independent churches have women pastors while others do not.
7. Catholic and Orthodox churches ordain no women to the priesthood. Both have examined the ancient order of deaconess: the Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria appointed deaconesses in 2017, and two Vatican commissions have studied the question since 2016 without changing the discipline.

Consequences in ritual life

1. Where women are ordained the change is visible in every rite, at the font, in the pulpit, at the graveside and at the altar. Congregations that once found it strange now largely take it for granted.
2. Churches that changed have had to make room for those who did not accept it. The Church of England provides alternative episcopal oversight, and its Five Guiding Principles ask both convictions to be treated as loyal Anglican positions.
3. The change carried an ecumenical cost. Rome and the Orthodox churches treated it as a new obstacle to unity, and the Catholic Personal Ordinariates created in 2009 received Anglican clergy and parishes who left partly over this question.
4. Ritual language has shifted alongside ritual roles. Many churches have revised prayers and hymns that addressed the congregation as men, and some now avoid exclusively male language for God.
5. Where women are not ordained they still carry substantial ritual roles. Catholic women serve as extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion, act as readers and catechists and lead the daily office in their communities, while Orthodox women chant, sing and tend the church.
6. Some rites have quietly gone. The churching of women after childbirth has largely given way to services of thanksgiving, and customs restricting women during menstruation survive only in a few local settings.