Making Women Priests
"I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man, but to be in silence."
St Paul, I Timothy 2:12.
On The Ordination of Women
Bishop Herbert Hensely Henson (1863-1947)
"I think that we are in real danger of exaggerating the novelty of the problem as it presents itself to the modern Church. The Apostles were as well acquainted as we are with the spiritual competence of women. Priscilla, Phoebe, Junia, the four prophesying daughters of Philip the evangelist, to say nothing of Euodia and Syntyche, illustrated as fully as any Christian women of later times the ability of individual women to teach, preach, and manage.
Moreover the Church approached the practical problem with a prepossession which was equally inevitable and potent. In the mystery of the Incarnation a woman had been called to play a part which, as its full significance was apprehended, could not but prohibit once and for all every treatment of women by the Christian Church which could really imply inferiority, while it clothed motherhood, woman's distinctive natural function, with an ineffable glory."(page 7).
"Nor do I think it is really true that the conditions under which women lived in antiquity were universally or even generally such as to make it practically impossible, if the Lord and His Apostles had so willed, for them to have included women among the regular clergy. Indeed the history of Montanism(note M) suggests that such inclusion would have seemed natural enough.
The significant thing is that, with a frank recognition of the spiritual equality of the sexes, and a familiar acquaintance of the ability of individual Christian women, the Apostles and their immediate successors never introduced them into the number of Bishops and Priests." (page 7/8).
"Moreover, the world needs now a faithful fulfilment of woman's normal natural function far more than such an addition to its resources of professional Christian ministry as female ordination can bring. For what is the most menacing evil of our time? Is it not precisely the repudiation of wifely and motherly function by women? ... The world wants desperately, not female priests and bishops, but Christian wives and mothers. When the home is, as St Chrysostom calls it, 'a little church', there is a firm foundation laid on which can be built the fabric of a female ministry in society wide enough to satisfy the keenest individual zeal. The only equality of the sexes which the Church can rightly make the basis of its practical system recognises difference of natural function. ... Only by frankly admitting difference can genuine equality be secured. Subordination is the very principle of ordered society, and it has its first expression and ultimate sanction in the Home.
Christianity is a religion of authority as well as a religion of the spirit. Discipleship involves for all of us obedience and subjection. Membership of the Body of Christ implies separateness of function and co-ordination in activity. Equality is not identity: nor is freedom anarchy. We are all, men and women alike, under obedience: and for us all God's Service is perfect freedom. In discipleship we are committed to the paradox which makes law and liberty inseparable." (page 10)
[All quotes from The Ordination of Women, Bishoprick Papers, 1946].