A Female Priesthood: How We Know it is Wrong

Many can be heard to say, “I don’t need anyone to tell me murder is wrong!” And yet, as anyone knowledgeable in history will know, this ethical principle has not been universally held or recognized.

Now, what does this have to do with why women are not permitted to be priests? A lot, and the answer shall be made clear.

Returning to the groundwork of the argument, it is known that approximately eleven million non-combatants did not spontaneously die in Germany during World War II. They were murdered. Likewise, tens of millions of people in Russia, China, and elsewhere, were also murdered in the early and mid 20th Century. Going further back in history, the Mongol hordes are thought to have murdered tens of millions of people as they swept like a furious storm through the steppes of Eurasia. What is more, there have been numerous cultures who had "practices" such as cannibalism and human sacrifice.

Instances of the consistent practice of murder throughout history and across the entire planet are innumerable. It is a sad tale, but why mention it? Well, clearly these people did not heed what some appear to claim to be the nigh universal intuition that murder is wrong, that harming others is unethical, that chattel slavery, rape, and genocide are wicked evils. These wicked people lived (and still live) in the same world as those who state that they do not need to be told that murder is wrong, and yet still they murdered and saw no problem with it. It is therefore fair to say that the intuition maintaining that murder is wrong is not universally held, is not self-evident, and is not entirely obvious. In fact, it is possible that few people really know why murder is wrong, and likely attribute it to some innate ethical knowing, a moral instinct that all people share (which clearly all people do not).

The statement that people do not need to be taught that murder is wrong is, frankly, a lie. Too many people treat it as self-evident, but this is a confusion based on the fact that in our current society most people typically agree that it is wrong. But this only underscores the fact that people do need to be taught that murder is wrong, and moreover there need to be laws that announce it, and that prevent and punish for it. Those who state that they do not need to be taught that murder is wrong, that it is self-evident, are self-deceived by their conditioning, because they have been taught that murder is wrong, and having been taught that it is wrong they got the idea that it is wrong.

The philosophy of natural law certainly can, of course, inform us that murder is wrong, for God does write this on our hearts, and many cultures have come to agree with this truth, but with seared consciences not everyone is sensitive to this or receptive to the reasoning, and always evil geniuses are ready to spin reasons why the murder of certain people is okay, whether they be of a certain faith, race, territory, group, or age. For example, today millions are murdered in abortion clinics, and yet so-called civil society promotes this form of murder in the mainstream media and even frames it as a practice born of enlightened thinking. Apparently these people also need to be taught that it is wrong to murder unborn human beings.

Quite simply, it is God who, through His divine and revealed command against it, teaches us that murder is wrong. We are informed that it is wrong. It did not magically or spontaneously appear as an intuition that murder is wrong; it was not a long chain of syllogistic reasoning that convinced humanity; it was not the result of pragmatism that caused us to agree that murder is wrong. Some might think that it is more pragmatic to kill undesirables. In fact, apes kill other apes and they don’t get in any trouble, and apparently do not feel remorse. Nature kills all the time. Time itself kills all. Only the fittest survive. Many people reason similarly that lying and stealing are justified, and thus pragmatist arguments built of autonomous human reasoning might make these all together sound acceptable. Communist countries killed millions on this very basis.

It is clear that moral knowledge was not the result of the sustained brilliance and authority of human reasoning. We had to be told by God in order for it to become clear. God revealed His will that murder, lying, and stealing are wrong, and therefore it is clear. It is His will that we are obeying when we agree that these are wrong, and the fact of their wrongness has no other ontological foundation than the divine, revealed will.

Coming to the point of whether or not women should be ordained to the priesthood, the principle is the same: It is God’s will that only men be priests. It is thus not an issue of pragmatism or human reasoning. It is not an issue of women’s ability or inability. It is not a matter of culture (as this has been maintained since the Temple period and throughout the entire history of the Church and throughout all cultures). It is also not a matter of dragons who will fly in to eat any women that are found in the altar such that, in order to protect them, we must not ordain them. These are all red herrings. God wills that men be priests, and so the Church obeys, just as she obeys His will not to murder, lie, or steal.

It must be noted that famous and public Orthodox Christians are currently promoting the issue of why women might be ordained. One well-known nun has publicly stated:

“Women can be priests. We don't want them to be priests.' Because you see, God can do anything, and the Church, by divine authority, can do anything, but, the Church doesn't want to - and that's a legitimate reason.”

As if the Church’s wish is arbitrary, this nun frames the issue as the Church basing its decision on what it wants, not what God wants. God, according to her reasoning, grants divine authority to the Church, and so the Church with divine authority can say no, but the Church’s no, according to this reasoning, is disjointed from God’s will, and so the Church simply enforces its own wish, albeit authoritatively. She states it is the Church that doesn’t want to ordain women, which presupposes that the Church’s desire is somehow autonomous, not rooted essentially in God’s will, and that its autonomy being given divine sanction and authority can make what it wants binding.

The problem is, she has changed who said what. A more accurate thing to say is that God almighty wills that women not be ordained, and that the Church is simply obeying what He has revealed in, to, and through the Church, and that with divine authority the Church is simply preserving what He has willed to reveal through the Church’s unchanging praxis of male ordination, which itself can be traced back to the founding of the Levitical priesthood. The Church, in other words, is not a merely human institution, but the very Body of Christ, and as such her will is not her own, but reflects His divine will.

She concluded:

“Nowadays some people who are at pains to argue against females in priesthood- whereas I don't think there's a big problem, we should just say honestly, ‘We don't want women to be priests. As Church, we don't want that.’ That's fine, you know, that's fine, but we shouldn't say that we couldn’t have women as priests.”

Actually, the Church cannot have women priests, quite simply because God forbids it, and we can know He forbids based on His unchanging will regarding this matter, from the founding of the male Levitical priesthood through to the Apostles, through the post-Apostolic Fathers, through ante-Nicene Fathers, through the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, through the Middle Ages, through the Fall of Byzantium, through to this very day. The Church, in fact, never made the decision not to ordain women, because it was never up to her. The decision was made by God and she simply perseveres in it.

To conclude, it may not be evident to many people why ordaining women is wrong, but when the foundations of morality are examined, we find that God is the only real foundation for any moral claim. Even the wrongness of such things as lying, stealing, and murder, as history has shown time and again, are not self-evident. Many cultures have made a living on doing those very things. It is made evident by God, however, that lying, stealing, and murder are wrong, because He reveals His will. In the case of lying, stealing, and murdering, these were condemned in the Ten Commandments. In the case of the male priesthood, this is revealed in the Old Testament Levitical priesthood, in the Apostolic continuation of this in the Church, and in the Church’s two thousand year liturgical Tradition. In continuity with Scripture, this liturgical Tradition is a mode of God’s self-disclosure, a self-disclosure which also bespeaks of His will. Since, in obedience to this revealed will of God, the Temple and the Church have always had an only-male priesthood, therefore it is simply the divine obligation of the Church to continue in this.

The Anatomy of Schism: How Advocating a Female Diaconate Divides the Church

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.