07 — The Ordination Question

This is the section for which this collection will be read, and it is the one where the repository’s methodological discipline is strictest. In her last two decades Behr-Sigel argued that the question of the ordination of women to the priesthood is theologically open in Orthodoxy and should be examined rather than closed by appeal to custom. The Orthodox Church does not ordain women to the priesthood. This collection reports her position accurately and in her own terms, reports the Church’s position and the substantial Orthodox criticism of hers accurately and in their own terms, and advocates nothing in either direction.

Tradition: Orthodox (France — Russian emigration milieu); the Church’s teaching on the priesthood is stated as the Church’s

Files in This Section

• The Question She Raised — what she actually argued, its stages, the 1998/2000 volume with Kallistos Ware, and the places where her own final formulation is contested.
• The Church’s Teaching and the Limits of This Collection — the Orthodox position and its stated grounds, at full strength, and an explicit statement of what this collection does and does not do.

The Discipline of This Section

Four rules govern these two files, and they are stated here so that the reader can hold the collection to them.

1. The Church’s teaching is not revised, qualified, or adjudicated here. Per METHODOLOGY §4.1, this knowledge base is academic from within the Orthodox Church. The Orthodox Church does not ordain women to the presbyterate or the episcopate, and treats the matter as settled tradition rather than as an open question. That is the Church’s, and the Church has stated it. Readers seeking the Church’s teaching should go to the repository’s doctrinal files — Women in Orthodoxy, The Holy Mysteries — and to their own hierarchs, and not to a study of a contested modern author.

2. Her position is her own theological work, reported as hers. A modern theologian’s distinctive theses are expounded accurately and attributed to her, and are never presented as the Church’s doctrine. She was a laywoman, held no ecclesiastical office, and never claimed to speak for the Church.

3. The criticism is reported at full strength, with names. Where her work has been criticized by other Orthodox, that is a live intra-Orthodox dispute, and METHODOLOGY §4.2 requires both sides named and neither adjudicated. Section 08 carries the main weight of this.

4. Where the record is contested, it is marked and not smoothed. Behr-Sigel’s own final formulation is reported in mutually incompatible ways by her admirers, her critics, and at least one ecumenical official who overstated it in her lifetime. [Disputed: ...] notes carry that, rather than a synthesis this collection cannot support.

The repository’s model for this discipline is St. Maria of Paris §07, where the case for and the case against are stated each at full strength and the weighing is left to the reader and to the Church’s continuing reception. The parallel treatment of the same question in the sibling collection on her collaborator is Fr. Kallistos Ware: Women, Priesthood and Same-Sex Relationships; the two files should be read together, and they are written to be consistent.

Why Not Simply Omit It

Because omission is a form of misreporting. Behr-Sigel raised the question publicly, in print, over twenty years, in a book co-authored with an Orthodox bishop and published by the World Council of Churches. The Orthodox conversation about women in the Church since 1976 is not intelligible without her, and the repository’s own Women in Orthodoxy already names her as the most prominent of the voices urging reexamination. A collection about her that passed over the fact would be a piece of concealment, and concealment is not the same as fidelity.

Equally, a collection that presented her case sympathetically without the Church’s teaching and the Orthodox criticism at equal strength would be advocacy. It would also be a poor guide, since the criticism is serious and has been made by serious people.

See Also

• 05 — The Theology of the Person — the anthropology her case rests on
• 06 — The Ministry of Women — the diaconate, which is a different question
• 08 — The Reception and the Critique — the criticism at length
• Women in Orthodoxy — the Church’s teaching and the named positions
• Fr. Kallistos Ware: The Contested Questions — the parallel treatment of her co-author
• St. Maria of Paris: Methodology — the repository’s model for a contested modern reception

References

• Behr-Sigel, Elisabeth, and Bishop Kallistos Ware. The Ordination of Women in the Orthodox Church. Geneva: WCC Publications, 2000 (Risk Book Series; 96 pp.; ISBN 2-8254-1336-4). Three chapters from L’ordination des femmes dans l’Église orthodoxe. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1998.
• Hopko, Thomas, ed. Women and the Priesthood. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1983; rev. ed. 1999.
• METHODOLOGY.md §4.1 and §4.2, this repository.