IB World Religions 3.5.4. Gender and Religious Experience: Ordination Debates and Women Mystics Notes

3.5.4. Gender and Religious Experience: Ordination Debates and Women Mystics

Gender and Christian experience

1. Christians meet God through the roles their churches make available to them, and those roles have differed by gender for most of Christian history. Gender is therefore treated as one of the conditions that shape religious experience.
2. The New Testament supplies texts that pull in both directions. Galatians 3:28 says there is no male and female in Christ, while 1 Timothy 2:12 forbids a woman to teach or to hold authority over a man.
3. Women make up the majority of worshippers in most Christian communities. Surveys across Europe and the Americas continue to record higher rates of prayer and attendance among women than among men.
4. Language for God belongs to the question too. Most Christians address God as Father and Jesus as Son, while some also use the biblical images of God as a mother in labour in Isaiah and as a hen gathering her chicks.
5. Women's experience has often been expressed through channels other than office. Monastic life, the teaching and nursing religious orders, missionary work and hymn writing carried it for centuries.
6. The two areas named in this topic are the ordination of women and women mystics, and they are connected. Mystical experience gave some women a public voice at times when ordained office was closed to them.

Arguments in the ordination debate

1. Churches that do not ordain women rest the case on tradition and on the example of Jesus, who chose twelve men as apostles. They hold that the Church has no authority to alter a pattern it received.
2. Roman Catholic teaching adds an argument from sacramental sign. A priest acts in persona Christi, in the person of Christ, and the declaration Inter Insigniores of 1976 held that this sign requires a male minister.
3. Pope John Paul II stated in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis in 1994 that the Church has no authority to confer ordination on women. The Eastern Orthodox churches maintain the same practice, resting it on unbroken tradition.
4. Churches that ordain women argue from baptism, holding that all the baptized share Christ's priesthood and that a woman saved by Christ can represent him. They read Galatians 3:28 as a principle to be applied rather than a slogan.
5. They also read the New Testament for women already leading. Phoebe is called a deacon in Romans 16, Junia is described there as outstanding among the apostles, and Priscilla instructs the preacher Apollos in Acts 18.
6. Conservative Protestant opposition runs on different lines again. Complementarian theology holds that women and men are equal in worth and given different roles, so that senior pastoral authority rests with men.

Denominational practice today

1. The Salvation Army has commissioned women officers since its founding in 1878, and Quakers recognized women as ministers from the seventeenth century onwards.
2. Most Protestant churches began ordaining women during the twentieth century. Congregationalists in England ordained Constance Coltman in 1917, and Lutheran, Methodist and Presbyterian churches followed through the middle decades.
3. The Church of England ordained its first women priests in 1994 and consecrated Libby Lane as its first woman bishop in 2015. Both steps followed long synod debates and were accompanied by provision for parishes that disagree.
4. The Episcopal Church in the United States moved earlier and less smoothly. Eleven women were ordained without authorization in Philadelphia in 1974, and the church regularized the practice two years later.
5. Pentecostal churches have often had prominent women preachers without settling a theology of ordination. Aimee Semple McPherson founded a denomination in 1927, and women lead many independent congregations today.
6. The Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox churches and the Southern Baptist Convention do not ordain women. Between them they account for a large majority of the world's Christians.

Women's experience of ministry

1. Churches that do not ordain women still give women wide public roles, and how those roles are experienced is the question this topic asks.
2. Catholic women religious, the sisters and nuns of the orders, run schools, hospitals and missions across the world. Many describe their vocation as a call no less direct than a priest's.
3. Some medieval abbesses held real jurisdiction. The abbess of a double monastery governed both women and men, and Hildegard of Bingen ruled her community while corresponding with popes and emperors.
4. Catholic parishes without a resident priest are often led day to day by women as pastoral coordinators. Pope Francis appointed commissions in 2016 and again in 2020 to study the women deacons of the early Church.
5. Orthodox women serve as monastics, iconographers, choir directors and academic theologians. Several synods have discussed restoring the ancient order of deaconess, which the Church of Greece voted to revive in 2004.
6. Ordained women report their own difficulties. Studies in Anglican and Lutheran churches record slower advancement, smaller parishes and congregations that ask for a male minister instead.

Women mystics

1. Mysticism gave women a recognized religious authority long before office did. A vision was held to come from God directly, so it needed no ordination in order to be taken seriously.
2. Hildegard of Bingen, a twelfth century German abbess, recorded her visions in Scivias, composed music and preached publicly on four tours. She was named a Doctor of the Church in 2012.
3. Julian of Norwich received sixteen showings during an illness in 1373 and spent decades interpreting them as an anchoress in a cell attached to a Norwich church.
4. Her Revelations of Divine Love is the earliest surviving book in English known to be by a woman. It holds the image of all creation as a hazelnut in God's hand and the promise that all shall be well.
5. Julian also writes at length of Jesus as mother, drawing on Gospel and earlier monastic images and developing them further than any writer before her.
6. Teresa of Avila, a sixteenth century Spanish Carmelite, described the soul in The Interior Castle as seven mansions leading inward to union with God. She reformed her order while under repeated investigation by the Inquisition.
7. Catherine of Siena, a fourteenth century Dominican laywoman, dictated The Dialogue to secretaries and wrote letters pressing the pope to return from Avignon to Rome.

Authority through experience

1. These women were heard because of what they claimed to have received. Direct experience of God worked as a credential that the ordinary structures did not supply to them.
2. The credential was fragile and constantly tested. Teresa was investigated by the Inquisition, Margery Kempe was examined for heresy several times, and Julian wrote carefully as a woman without formal learning.
3. Recognition often came centuries late. Teresa of Avila and Catherine of Siena were declared Doctors of the Church in 1970, the first women given the title, and Thérèse of Lisieux followed in 1997.
4. Their writings now cross denominational lines freely. Anglican and Lutheran calendars keep Julian's day, and her sayings appear in Protestant devotional books and hymns.
5. Modern readers draw on them in opposite directions. Some argue the mystics show that women can teach the whole Church, while others read them as evidence that the deepest Christian authority never rested on office at all.
6. The two halves of the topic meet at exactly that point. Churches remain divided over who may preside, and agree that the experience of God is not limited by gender.