01 — Alsace and the Protestant Formation

Élisabeth Charlotte Sigel was born on 21 July 1907 at Schiltigheim, on the edge of Strasbourg, to a Lutheran father and a Jewish mother, in an Alsace then under German rule. She was confirmed in the Lutheran Church at fourteen, studied philosophy and then Protestant theology at Strasbourg among the first women admitted to that faculty, and for a short period served as an auxiliary pastor in an Alsatian parish — one of the first women in France to hold such a charge. This section covers the ground of her formation and the episode that is the most often cited and the most often misdescribed fact about her.

Tradition: Orthodox (France — Russian emigration milieu); this section covers her pre-Orthodox Protestant formation

Files in This Section

• Schiltigheim and the Alsatian Inheritance — the border country, the mixed household, the Lutheran confirmation of 1921, and the student world of the 1920s in which she first met Russians.
• Strasbourg Theology and the Pastorate at Villé — the opening of the Protestant faculty to women in 1927, her theological studies, and the brief pastoral charge of 1931 — what is documented, what is disputed, and why the chronology matters.

Why This Section Comes First

Behr-Sigel never repudiated her Protestant formation and never described her reception into Orthodoxy as a rejection of what had formed her. She spoke of her life as a passage rather than a rupture, and the categories she carried from Strasbourg — the seriousness about Scripture, the ecumenical instinct learned in the student Christian movement, the habit of asking a question rather than reciting an answer — remained visible in her Orthodox writing sixty years later. The temptation with a convert of her stature is to begin the story at the chrismation. The chrismation is in Section 02; this section is what preceded it, told in its own terms.

Two facts of this period have consequences that reach into the rest of her life and into the controversies of Section 07. The first is that she was a woman who had been permitted to study theology at a moment when almost no woman was, and who knew from the inside what that permission had cost and what it had opened. The second is that she exercised a pastoral charge in a Protestant parish — briefly, in an auxiliary capacity, and in circumstances that require careful statement. Both are used, by admirers and by critics, as keys to her later positions. Both are reported here with their documentation and their uncertainties, and neither is treated as a key.

See Also

• 02 — The Turn to Orthodoxy and Lev Gillet — the reception of 1929 and the man who received her
• 08 — The Reception and the Critique — where the Protestant formation is made an argument, in both directions
• Women in Orthodoxy — the repository’s doctrinal treatment

References

• Olga Lossky. Vers le jour sans déclin: Une vie d’Élisabeth Behr-Sigel (1907–2005). Paris: Cerf, 2007. English: Toward the Endless Day: The Life of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, trans. Jerry Ryan, ed. Michael Plekon. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. (The authorized biography, written with her cooperation in the last year of her life.)
• “Élisabeth Behr-Sigel,” French Wikipedia (fr.wikipedia.org), drawing on Lossky’s biography — birth, family, confirmation, studies, the pastoral charge.
• Sarah Hinlicky Wilson. Woman, Women, and the Priesthood in the Trinitarian Theology of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel. London: T&T Clark, 2013.