David sings in Psalm 101: “Every morning I will destroy all the wicked of the land, so as to cut off from the city of the LORD all those who do iniquity.” Spiritually, this can be understood in the Church as rooting out schism and heresy early, not waiting until it has gathered its full strength. As such, it will be important to know the tactics of the enemy, the methodology of those who would seek to set the Church against herself.
The Orthodox Church currently finds gestating among certain of her members a Modern, progressive feminist movement, really an unclean spirit, that is manifesting itself as advocacy for a female diaconate. It is especially pernicious because it can only result in division. If not merely naive or unaware, the advocates of a female diaconate are either willfully ignoring the division they are insinuating, or are very aware of it and as such are intentionally maneuvering as if to imperceptibly entrench themselves in a position of political advantage so as to thus champion their cause. This is done while those who, focusing on the faith as received, would rather not speak of or research such things, and so typically remain uninformed and unaware that people are actively and intentionally coordinating efforts to change the practice of the Church.
Given that others have well highlighted important issues related to the problems of a female diaconate (also here and here), it is yet vital to understand and expose the anatomy of how this liturgical progressivism creates enemies out of the Orthodox faithful. To begin, notice that the advocacy group is a para-Church organization. In short, it is outside the Church. And yet, other than being mostly comprised of female academics, by including among its advisory board at least one metropolitan together with two archpriests, it seeks to lend ecclesiastical authority to itself. This is one of the ways that progressivism acts, like a cancerous cell which attaches itself to a body and seeks to insinuate itself into said body's functioning.
By being a para-Church organization, progressivist advocacy can eschew all actual ecclesial oversight. Posing as Orthodox, it is yet outside of the Church's authority structure, therefore maximizing its freedom to advocate while minimizing its accountability. With this methodology it can unilaterally extend its reach into the Church without actually being of the Church. By wrapping itself in a cloak of legitimacy it thus seeks to transform the Church by inserting its ideas into the members of Christ’s Body, all the while acting as a foreign body. Note carefully, however, that it will not present itself this way, but will instead present itself as a friendly and responsible group of like-minded Orthodox Christians compassionately concerned about their concern, which will of course be made to sound neutral and non-threatening.
A major element of this diaconal progressivism is feminism, and so a brief digression concerning how feminism functions as a social reality seems appropriate. Quite simply, feminism is a pseudo-virtue, and essentially a Rorschach, meaning anything from the simple affirmation that women compliment and share equal dignity and opportunity with men, on the one hand, a meaning that is moral but hardly justified by such a binary term as feminism, to the vociferous hating and displacing of men and masculinity, on the other. Such a plastic term is hardly grounds for a moral rallying cry, and its ambiguous import certainly has no place advising the Church or revising her liturgical practice. One characteristic mark of this feminism is that there is no objective “need” beyond the “felt needs” of certain men and women for such a radical change. Emotionally charged, feminism poses as a great virtue, sometimes even as the great virtue, when really it is an empty term which is filled in by the passionate imagination of its adherents. Thus it is a pseudo-virtue, and since it is not a true virtue, it will tend towards vice, a fact amply demonstrated by the successive mutations or “waves” of feminism.
Returning to the manner in which progressivism functions to divide, a key set-up to keep in mind is that progressivism functions to move, always, in the name of some “ideal,” which on the surface appears innocent enough. Ideals, like ideas, have consequences, and so does their promotion. Progressive movement being by nature relative, “progress” always implies a moving beyond others, the non-progressors, so as to achieve said progress, therefore creating at least two groups in the process. Predictably, the group which embraces progress implicitly places themselves in the “moral” group, separating themselves from the non-progressors, which renders those outside the progressive movement backwards, recalcitrant, and submoral, if not evil.
In their minds, at least, the progressives are not progressing for no reason, but for some strongly held reason, typically an ideal. Thus the very energy which motivates their desire for progress creates as an automatic consequence a proportionate “othering,” if not an “enemization,” of those who do not join them in their efforts. The problem of note here, however, is not only the bare fact of creating two necessarily opposed groups, but the insidious way in which the progressives, by intentionally moving out of sync with others, transform them into their opposing “other.” By refusing to cooperate with progressivism, one has quite simply done nothing and yet, remarkably, in doing nothing one has become the enemy of an entire group of people, all through a type of passive-aggressive enemization or “othering.”
As a psychological phenomenon, the schism that is necessarily generated by the progressives is therefore not seen by the progressives as their own fault. In their mind they are innocently and virtuously - even heroically (considering what they are up against!) - seeking their ideal. In the process of creating an “other” where there was none, the progressives end up paradoxically accusing said other of immorality, those whom they acted against, even turning themselves into the victims of those whose only sin was not to agree with their innovation, those who would consciously choose to remain without the supposed “progress.” As a consequence, in the progressive mind, to refuse to “progress” is not simply to be a stick-in-the-mud or old-fashioned, but to commit a manifest wrong.
Of course, outwardly, the progressive may be found to object to the accusation of creating schism. How they are described and how they describe themselves are not the same. They will naively claim that there “need” not be any division… if only the others would agree with them.
To apply the above to the feminist deaconess movement, the function of advocacy of the deaconess will necessarily create schism. With sophistical eloquence, an increasing number will advocate for it, and yet an increasing number will oppose. The progressive will say something to the effect of “but it does not need to be this way, you do not need to resist us, it is ‘traditional,’ you have no need to worry, do you not want women to feel included,” etc. People will fall for this nonsense. The spirit of the age, the unclean spirit of progressivism, will thus wreak havoc in our parishes.
Schism is the inevitable result of the current deaconess movement, and merely seeking to maintain what has been rightly received from our holy fathers and mothers will be treated as if it were the problem. The fault line will run deep, and those who stand outside the Church will relentlessly attempt to appear as though they are inside, and attempt to deceive Orthodox Christians to move away from sacred Tradition. By refusing to truly heed the inevitably divisive consequence of implementing their ideal, their advocacy is actually rendered a sin, even if on the surface the "ideal" appears neutral or even praiseworthy. There is no "progress" in the Church, for the faith was once for all delivered to the saints, and its life is hid with Christ in God (Colossians 3:3).
To conclude, if it has not been made clear, despite its sophistry to the contrary, the female diaconate is not only wrong theoretically. Its great sin is schism. To try to make this clearer, even if, for the mere sake of argument, one were to consider the tenuous web of arguments woven by the progressives, this would not change the schismatic nature of their proposal. In short, even if the progressives were correct in their interpretation of the roles of the historical deaconess, they are still in the wrong in seeking to "restore" it. They are wrong because they knowingly move in a way which will create division and factions. They place their idealizations above the unity of the Church. By seeking to innovate actual received practice on the basis of their historical research and progressive theorizing, they needlessly divide the Church according to the contours of their research and their subsequent theoretical proposals.
The progressives would sacrifice the unity of the Church for the sake of “exploring” their idea, split the Church in persuading to their cause, divide the Church in trying to implement it, and set brother against brother, sister against sister, all for the sake of advancing a “felt need.” Their exegetical arguments are thus not merely for the sake of clarifying history, but of lending weight to their carnal, schismatic progressivism. Capitulating in the least to the unclean spirit of progressivism only emboldens it in further endeavors, until it progressively possesses the whole Church and so destroys it from within by factions and internal divisions. Since there is no "need" for a deaconess, then there is no "need" for the change. To insist that there "needs" to be a change when there is no "need" is inevitably divisive, especially on such a socially charged issue. The Church does not adopt sweeping changes without an actual, objective need.
The progressives would sacrifice the unity of the Church for the sake of “exploring” their idea, split the Church in persuading to their cause, divide the Church in trying to implement it, and set brother against brother, sister against sister, all for the sake of advancing a “felt need.” Their exegetical arguments are thus not merely for the sake of clarifying history, but of lending weight to their carnal, schismatic progressivism. Capitulating in the least to the unclean spirit of progressivism only emboldens it in further endeavors, until it progressively possesses the whole Church and so destroys it from within by factions and internal divisions. Since there is no "need" for a deaconess, then there is no "need" for the change. To insist that there "needs" to be a change when there is no "need" is inevitably divisive, especially on such a socially charged issue. The Church does not adopt sweeping changes without an actual, objective need.
