The Church’s Teaching and the Limits of This Collection

The Orthodox Church does not ordain women to the priesthood or the episcopate, and treats the matter as settled tradition rather than as an open question. This file states that teaching and the grounds its defenders give for it, at full strength and in their own terms; and it states explicitly what this collection does and does not do with the fact that one of its subject’s positions stands against it.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (the Church’s teaching and discipline); with a statement of this collection’s method

The Teaching

The Orthodox Church confers the presbyterate and the episcopate on men only. The practice is universal across the canonical Orthodox Churches, is unbroken from the apostolic age, and is treated by the Churches and by the great majority of Orthodox theologians and hierarchs as settled tradition and not as an open question. The repository’s doctrinal treatment states it in those terms (see Women in Orthodoxy and The Holy Mysteries).

This is not a matter on which this collection has an opinion to offer, and per METHODOLOGY §4.1 it is not treated as a question between competing views to be balanced. It is the Church’s discipline, and it is stated here as the Church’s.

The Grounds, as Its Defenders Give Them

The classic Orthodox statement in English is the symposium edited by Fr. Thomas Hopko, Women and the Priesthood (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1983; rev. ed. 1999), whose contributors included Hopko, Bishop Kallistos Ware, Fr. Georges Barrois, Fr. Nicholas Afanasiev, Kyriaki Karidoyanes FitzGerald, Sister Nonna Verna Harrison, and Deborah Belonick. The grounds set out there and in subsequent Orthodox theology are four, and they are given here in the form its defenders give them, not in a form convenient to reply to.

1. Christ’s choice of twelve male apostles. The choice is understood as normative and not merely culturally conditioned, given that Christ broke other social conventions concerning women freely and repeatedly — speaking with the Samaritan woman, receiving women disciples, appearing first to the myrrhbearers and sending them to the Apostles. A Lord who did all that and still chose twelve men is not plausibly read as having yielded to convention at that one point.

2. The priest as icon of Christ. In the Liturgy the priest images Christ the Bridegroom toward the Church the Bride. The maleness of the priest belongs to this iconic and nuptial symbolism and is not a biological accident — as it is not accidental that the eucharistic elements are bread and wine, or the baptismal element water. Sacramental signs are given, not devised, and the Church does not hold itself free to substitute at will (Hopko, ed., Women and the Priesthood, 1999).

3. The unbroken tradition. A practice universal in time and place from the apostolic age carries normative weight as expressing the mind of the Church guided by the Holy Spirit. It is not a custom alterable by majority vote, by scholarly consensus, or by the pressure of the surrounding culture. Against the objection that an argument from custom is not a theological argument, the reply is that in Orthodox ecclesiology the Church’s continuous practice is a locus of theology and not a substitute for one (see Holy Tradition).

4. Anthropological complementarity. Equality of dignity in the image of God without interchangeability of role. The Church’s anthropology has never held that the difference of the sexes is theologically inert; the summit of created personhood in Orthodox devotion is a woman, the Theotokos, “more honorable than the cherubim,” and the Church’s highest honor after God is given to her (see The Theotokos and Theological Anthropology).

To these a fifth is often added in the pastoral register: that the dignity of women in the Church is not measured by access to the altar but by the call of every baptized person to holiness, of which the Theotokos and the women saints are the proof — a claim made by defenders of the discipline and by many who urge reexamination alike (Women in Orthodoxy).

Where Behr-Sigel Stands Relative to This

She accepted (4) in its first half and denied its second half’s application to orders; she contested (2) on christological grounds; she contested (3) as an argument, holding that the absence of a conciliar definition means the Church has not in fact spoken on the question as such; and she treated (1) as requiring theological interpretation rather than as self-interpreting. Her arguments are set out in The Question She Raised and the replies to them in The Orthodox Criticism.

It is worth stating what the disagreement is not about, since this is often lost. Behr-Sigel did not hold that women are equal in the image of God — everyone in the argument holds that, and the Fathers hold it emphatically. She did not hold that the priesthood is a right, a career, or a status; she was, on the contrary, formed by a tradition of hesychast prayer and by fifty years’ study of ascetic sanctity. And she did not hold that the Church should conform itself to the age. The disagreement is narrower and harder: whether the theological reasons given for a universal practice are sound, and whether a practice universal but unlegislated is thereby closed to inquiry.

What This Collection Does

Explicitly, and so that it may be checked:

It reports her position accurately, in her own terms, with citations. Accuracy toward an interlocutor is not agreement with her. This is the same discipline the repository applies to heterodox positions under METHODOLOGY §4.1: the position is reported as what it is, in its own words, and assessed from the Orthodox side.

It reports the Church’s teaching as the Church’s. Not as one option among several, not with a qualification, and not as a position needing defense from this collection.

It reports the Orthodox criticism of her at full strength, with names. Section 08 names her critics and states their arguments as they state them.

It marks the record where the record is contested. Including on the point that matters most — the exact form of her final position (see the [Disputed: ...] note in The Question She Raised).

What This Collection Does Not Do

It does not revise the Church’s teaching, or qualify it, or treat it as under negotiation. Nothing in these files is an argument that the Orthodox Church should ordain women, and nothing in them is to be cited as such.

It does not adjudicate the intra-Orthodox dispute about her. Whether her arguments succeed, whether her critics have answered them, and how she should finally be assessed are questions this collection leaves to the reader and to the Church’s continuing judgment — the same discipline applied to a contested modern reception in St. Maria of Paris: Methodology.

It does not present her as an authority. She was a laywoman and a theologian, not a hierarch, not a council, and not a saint. This collection titles her plainly “Elisabeth Behr-Sigel,” never “St.,” and does not present her as glorified or as speaking for the Church (see the caveat in the master README).

It does not conceal, minimize, or euphemize her position. A collection that reported the deaconess advocacy and passed silently over the priesthood question would be misrepresenting her, and a reader who came to it for an honest account would have been failed.

And it does not polemicize against her. She is treated here as the tradition treats a serious person who was wrong or may have been wrong about something serious: with the argument stated and answered, not with contempt.

A Note on Why Both Files Exist

The two files of this section are deliberately separate rather than blended, because a blended treatment tends to produce a document in which the Church’s teaching appears as one voice in a conversation. It is not one voice in a conversation. It is the discipline of the Church, and a study of a theologian who questioned it is a study of the questioning, not of the discipline. Keeping them apart lets each be stated without the other’s qualifications running through it — and lets a reader who wants only the Church’s position find it in one place.

See Also

• The Question She Raised — her argument, at strength
• The Orthodox Criticism — the replies, at strength
• Women in Orthodoxy — the repository’s doctrinal treatment
• The Holy Mysteries — the mystery of orders
• The Theotokos — the highest of created persons
• Theological Anthropology — image and likeness, male and female
• Holy Tradition — the normative weight of the Church’s continuous practice
• METHODOLOGY.md — §4.1 and §4.2

References

• Hopko, Thomas, ed. Women and the Priesthood. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1983; rev. ed. 1999. (The classic Orthodox statement; contributors including Hopko, Kallistos Ware, Georges Barrois, Nicholas Afanasiev, Kyriaki Karidoyanes FitzGerald, Nonna Verna Harrison, and Deborah Belonick.)
• Women in Orthodoxy — ../../orthodoxy/12-church-and-world/women-in-orthodoxy.md. (The repository’s statement of the consensus position and its four stated grounds, and of the voices urging reexamination.)
• The Deaconess: Ancient Order, Decline, and Modern Revival — ../../orthodoxy/12-church-and-world/deaconess-history.md.
• Behr-Sigel, Elisabeth, and Bishop Kallistos Ware. The Ordination of Women in the Orthodox Church. Geneva: WCC Publications, 2000.
• METHODOLOGY.md §4.1 (confessional standpoint) and §4.2 (scope of both-sides treatment), this repository.
• Scripture: Genesis 1:27; Galatians 3:28; Romans 16:1–2; John 4:1–42; Mark 16:1–8.
• Axion Estin (“It Is Truly Meet”), the hymn to the Theotokos: “more honorable than the cherubim.”