Strasbourg Theology and the Pastorate at Villé

In 1927 the Protestant faculty of theology at Strasbourg opened its advanced degrees to women, and Élisabeth Sigel was among the first to enroll. In 1931, back in France from a year of research in Germany, she was appointed auxiliary pastor of a Protestant parish in the Bas-Rhin — reported as the first woman in France charged with such a ministry — and served for a matter of months. She was by then already Orthodox. This file sets out what is documented, what is disputed, and why the sequence, which is almost always told wrongly, matters.

Tradition: Orthodox (France — Russian emigration milieu); this file covers her pre-Orthodox and transitional years

The Faculty Opens

The Faculty of Protestant Theology at Strasbourg admitted women to its degree programs in 1927, and Élisabeth Sigel enrolled at once, having already read philosophy in the same university (fr.wikipedia.org, “Élisabeth Behr-Sigel,” following Olga Lossky, Vers le jour sans déclin, Cerf, 2007). The Orthodox Church in America’s memorial notice describes her simply as “one of the first French women to study theology,” a graduate of the University of Strasbourg (OCA, “In Memoriam: Madame Elizabeth Behr-Sigal,” oca.org, December 2005).

This is not a decorative fact. Behr-Sigel belonged to the first cohort of women anywhere in French Christianity to receive a full academic theological formation. Everything she later said about women’s capacity for theology she said as someone who had been in the room when the question was still whether women could be admitted to the room at all — and she was formed by teachers who had decided that they could.

In 1930 she went to Germany to work on her maîtrise, a study of Russian sanctity, assisted by the historian Georges Fedotov, then the leading scholar of Russian holiness (fr.wikipedia.org, following Lossky). That thesis is the seed of her first book, Prière et sainteté dans l’Église russe (see Prière et sainteté and the New Hagiography). Her scholarly subject was therefore Orthodox from the beginning of her academic life — she was writing on Russian saints for a Protestant faculty.

The Pastoral Charge

On her return to France in 1931 she was appointed pasteur auxiliaire (auxiliary pastor) in the Protestant parish of Villé-Climont, in the Bas-Rhin — the biographical record describing her as “the first woman in France invested with this charge.” She served for about eight months, and she did so while already a member of the Orthodox Church (fr.wikipedia.org, following Lossky, Vers le jour sans déclin).

The corroborating notices agree on the substance and vary in the details. The French biographical record describes her as the first woman authorized by the Reformed Church of Alsace-Lorraine to exercise a pastoral ministry. A French Orthodox profile places the parish “in the Vosges” and says that her decision to enter the Orthodox Church put an end to her Protestant ministry (Chroniques du Sycomore, “Élisabeth Behr-Sigel (1907–2005), pionnière de la théologie orthodoxe au féminin”). The OCA memorial says she “pastored a Reformed Church parish” after graduating from Strasbourg (oca.org, 2005). Sarah Hinlicky Wilson writes that she “began a pastoral ministry, though it lasted only a year,” and that she embraced Orthodoxy officially at the age of twenty-four (Hinlicky Wilson, as summarized in the published notices of Woman, Women, and the Priesthood, T&T Clark, 2013).

[Disputed: the date, duration, place-name, and confessional label of the pastoral charge. (a) *Dates*: the fullest record gives 1931, on her return from Germany, for about eight months, ending with her marriage in early 1933 or before it; other summaries say simply "a year," and some accounts place the episode as early as 1929. The range 1929–1932 is what the sources jointly permit; 1931 is the best-attested single year. (b) *Place*: given as "Villé-Climont (Bas-Rhin)" in the fullest record and as "in the Vosges" in a French Orthodox profile — Villé lies in the Bas-Rhin at the foot of the Vosges massif, and the Climont is the mountain above it, so the two descriptions are compatible rather than contradictory, but no source consulted names the parish more precisely. (c) *Confession*: described as "Protestant," as "Reformed," and as authorized by "the Reformed Church of Alsace-Lorraine"; Alsatian Protestantism comprises both a Lutheran and a Reformed church, and the sources do not agree on which body issued the authorization. (d) *Title*: the charge is consistently described as **auxiliary**, i.e. an assisting rather than an incumbent ministry. These are the points on which this collection could not reach certainty; readers needing precision must consult Lossky's biography.]

Why the Sequence Matters

The episode is cited constantly, and almost always in a form that reverses the chronology. The usual telling is: she was a woman Protestant pastor, and then she converted, and that is why she later argued for the ordination of women. The documented sequence is the other way round.

She was received into the Orthodox Church by chrismation on 12 December 1929 (see The Chrismation of 1929). The pastoral charge follows, in 1931. She held it, as the record has it, while remaining a member of the Orthodox Church, and she gave it up on marrying André Behr in February 1933.

Three observations follow, and this collection offers them as observations rather than as a verdict.

First, the episode is not a career but an interval. Eight months in an auxiliary charge, in a small Alsatian parish, at twenty-four. It is historically striking because of who else was doing it — nobody — and not because of what it amounted to in her life. She never afterwards described herself as a former pastor, and she did not build her later arguments on the experience.

Second, it is genuinely irregular, and this collection does not smooth it over. A person chrismated into the Orthodox Church who then exercises, for a period, a ministry in a Protestant body is in a canonically anomalous position, and no source consulted reports any Orthodox authority sanctioning or examining the arrangement. The most that can be said from the record is that it happened in a corner of Alsace in 1931, in a francophone Orthodoxy that barely existed institutionally, under the pastoral care of a priest — Fr. Lev Gillet — whose own canonical situation was famously unusual, and that it ended within two years. Readers who find the episode troubling are not misreading it.

Third, it does not settle anything about her later theology. Both directions of inference are made and both are weak. Her critics treat the pastorate as the biographical key to everything: she had been a woman minister, and she spent her old age trying to make Orthodoxy admit that she could have been. Her defenders treat it as proof that she knew from experience what she was talking about. But the record shows a woman who left the charge without complaint on marrying, who then published nothing whatever on the question of women in the Church for the next forty-five years, until she was invited to speak at Agapia in 1976 at the age of sixty-nine (Hinlicky Wilson, interview, Eastern Christian Books, 2013: before 1976 “she had published nothing on women in the church”). A grievance nursed for forty-five years in total silence is a strange kind of grievance. The honest statement is that the two facts — the early pastorate and the late writing — sit at opposite ends of a long life with a great deal between them, and that neither the causal story nor its denial is established by the sources.

What She Took From Strasbourg

Whatever the pastorate did or did not do, the faculty gave her a set of habits that Orthodox readers recognize in her writing and that some of them resist.

Scripture read closely and critically. She had a Protestant exegetical training and used it. Her essays argue from texts, and she is willing to ask what a Pauline passage meant in its own setting before asking what the tradition has made of it. Her sharpest Orthodox critics have called this the residue of a foreign method (see The Orthodox Criticism).
The question as a legitimate form. Academic theology proceeds by putting a question; much of Orthodox catechesis proceeds by handing on an answer. Behr-Sigel’s most contested writings are, formally, questions — and a considerable part of the controversy about her turns on whether an Orthodox theologian is entitled to leave a question open that the Church’s practice has closed.
Ecumenical fluency without confessional indifference. She could speak to Protestants in their own idiom because it had been hers, and she used that fluency, in the World Council of Churches and elsewhere, to state Orthodox positions her interlocutors would otherwise not have heard. She also, on the record, allowed her name to be attached to ecumenical statements of her views that overstated them, which is a real cost of that fluency (see The Over-Claiming and the Record).

References

Lossky, Olga. Vers le jour sans déclin: Une vie d’Élisabeth Behr-Sigel (1907–2005). Paris: Cerf, 2007. English: Toward the Endless Day, trans. Jerry Ryan, ed. Michael Plekon. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. (The primary biographical authority for the pastorate; consult it for the details this file could not pin.)
“Élisabeth Behr-Sigel.” French Wikipedia (fr.wikipedia.org), following Lossky. (Faculty opened to women 1927; the maîtrise on Russian sanctity in Germany, 1930, with Georges Fedotov; appointment as pasteur auxiliaire at Villé-Climont, Bas-Rhin, 1931, “the first woman in France invested with this charge,” for eight months, while an Orthodox; marriage February 1933 and resignation of the charge.)
Chroniques du Sycomore. “Élisabeth Behr-Sigel (1907–2005), pionnière de la théologie orthodoxe au féminin.” (The parish “in the Vosges”; Orthodoxy ending the Protestant ministry; marriage to André Behr in 1933.)
Orthodox Church in America. “In Memoriam: Madame Elizabeth Behr-Sigal.” oca.org, December 2005. (“One of the first French women to study theology”; pastored a Reformed Church parish.)
Hinlicky Wilson, Sarah. Woman, Women, and the Priesthood in the Trinitarian Theology of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel. London: T&T Clark, 2013; interview, Eastern Christian Books, November 2013. (The ministry that “lasted only a year”; official embrace of Orthodoxy at twenty-four; nothing published on women in the Church before 1976.)