The Orthodox Criticism

Behr-Sigel’s positions have drawn substantial criticism from Orthodox clergy and theologians. This file states the objections at full strength, in the terms their proponents use, with names where names are available; it also states the replies her defenders make. Per METHODOLOGY §4.2 this is a live intra-Orthodox dispute, and the collection names the parties and adjudicates nothing.

Tradition: Orthodox (France — Russian emigration milieu); §4.2 both-sides file

1. The Exegetical Charge

The most direct published criticism located for this file is from Fr. Lawrence Farley, whose essay “Women, Lived Orthodoxy, and Ordination” (orthochristian.com) argues that the exclusion of women from the ordained priesthood is theologically and not culturally grounded.

Farley’s positive case is that 1 Timothy 2:11–12 rests on “the hierarchical order of creation” rather than on the contingent educational or political situation of first-century women; that the priesthood is “not something that a person does, but something a person is” — an icon of paternal authority, the priest standing to the Church as father, which he holds requires maleness rooted in biology; and that the expansion of women’s roles in secular society is irrelevant, since corporate and political offices are “human constructions” unrelated to the divine hierarchical realities the family embodies (Farley, “Women, Lived Orthodoxy, and Ordination,” orthochristian.com).

Of Behr-Sigel specifically he writes that “Denouncing this as ‘Rabbinical exegesis’ (in the words of Behr-Sigel) is unworthy of truly Orthodox exegesis,” and characterizes her, with Eva Topping, as having “pushed this agenda for many years” (Farley, same essay).

The charge, stated fairly: that Behr-Sigel’s handling of the apostolic texts dissolves their authority by historicizing them — treating what the Apostle grounds in creation as culturally conditioned — and that this is a method foreign to Orthodox exegesis whatever its scholarly credentials.

The reply her defenders make: that distinguishing what a text asserts from the cultural forms in which it is expressed is not dissolution but interpretation, and is done routinely by every Orthodox commentator on, for example, slavery or head-covering; and that Farley engages her characterization rather than her argument. Readers should note that this collection could not locate the context of Behr-Sigel’s “Rabbinical exegesis” phrase, and that Farley’s essay is a short polemical piece rather than a sustained engagement with her books.

[Disputed: the source and context of Behr-Sigel's phrase "Rabbinical exegesis." It is quoted by Farley as hers; the original text, its date, and what she was describing were not established for this file.]

2. The Personalist Charge

A more serious and more academic objection targets the anthropology rather than the exegesis. Behr-Sigel’s mature case rests on Vladimir Lossky’s distinction between person and nature, extended to the claim that vocation is not determined by sex (see Person and Nature after Lossky).

The charge: that the “personalist turn” in twentieth-century Orthodox theology — Lossky, and after him Zizioulas, Yannaras and others — reads a modern, post-Kantian notion of the person back into patristic vocabulary, and that arguments built on it inherit the defect. If hypostasis in the Fathers does not mean what “person” means in modern personalism, then the claim that a person is “not reducible to her nature” is doing philosophical work the Fathers did not authorize. This is a live intra-Orthodox debate about the whole neo-patristic and personalist project, not a criticism invented for Behr-Sigel (see John Zizioulas and Christos Yannaras for the wider argument).

A second and independent form of the charge: that even granting the anthropology entirely, irreducibility does not entail interchangeability. The sacramental order deals in embodied signs, in which the natural is not incidental. One may hold with Behr-Sigel that women are persons whose vocations are not deducible from their sex, and hold with the tradition that the presbyterate is not among the vocations open to them, without contradiction — because the second is a claim about a sacramental sign, not about personal capacity.

The reply: that the tradition’s own defenders have consistently argued the case in ontological and anthropological terms — Evdokimov’s eternal feminine, the charisms of the sexes — and cannot now retreat to a pure argument from sign when the anthropology is contested; and that if the argument really is only about signs, then most of what Orthodox theologians have written on the subject was beside the point.

3. The Protestant-Residue Charge

A recurring criticism, more often insinuated than argued, is biographical: that Behr-Sigel’s method is Protestant. She was formed in a Protestant faculty, trained in critical exegesis, briefly a Protestant auxiliary pastor, and shaped by the student Christian movement of the 1920s; her instinct is to put a question where the tradition hands on an answer.

The charge, stated at its strength: that the residue is not a matter of conclusions but of form — that she treats the Church’s practice as a proposition requiring justification, which is precisely the move Orthodoxy does not make about its liturgical and sacramental life; and that a convert’s freedom from inherited assumptions, which is a real gift, becomes in this register a freedom from the tradition itself.

The reply: that the charge is a genetic fallacy unless it identifies an actual error; that Behr-Sigel’s fifty years of work before 1976 were on hesychast prayer, Russian sanctity, and a nineteenth-century Russian archimandrite, which is not a Protestant program; that she lived and died in the Orthodox Church under a fifty-year spiritual fatherhood; and that Orthodox theology has always been able to ask why. The observation that the sequence of her life runs the other way from the usual telling — chrismation in 1929, pastorate in 1931, silence on the woman question until 1976 — is set out in Strasbourg Theology and the Pastorate at Villé.

4. The Ecumenical Charge

Traditionalist critics treat her positions as of a piece with the ecumenical movement in which she worked, and treat that movement as the vector by which Western theological assumptions enter Orthodoxy. Her platform was very largely a World Council of Churches platform: Agapia 1976 was a WCC consultation, the English Ordination of Women in the Orthodox Church was a WCC Risk Book, and her international reputation was made in ecumenical forums.

The charge: that an Orthodox theologian whose principal audience is Protestant, and whose principal publisher on the contested question is the WCC, will be heard — and will be used — as supplying an Orthodox warrant for conclusions Protestants have already reached; and that the willingness to occupy that position is itself a theological judgment. The same criticism has been directed at her collaborator Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, in Hieromonk Patapios’s “A Traditionalist Critique of The Orthodox Church” (Orthodox Tradition XVI, no. 1, 39–72) and elsewhere (see Fr. Kallistos Ware: Women, Priesthood and Same-Sex Relationships).

The reply: that her ecumenical work also carried Orthodox positions into forums that would not otherwise have heard them; that she was invited to Agapia by Orthodox members of the WCC staff, encouraged by Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh and Metropolitan Emilianos Timiadis, and taught at Orthodox institutions; and that she cannot be held responsible for every use made of her name. The last point is where this charge meets the documented over-claiming, treated in The Over-Claiming and the Record. On the wider dispute see The Ecumenism Debate.

5. The Slippery-Slope Charge

The most practically consequential objection concerns the diaconate. The second of the three standard objections to restoring the female diaconate, as recorded in the repository’s deaconess history, is that restoration “responds to secular feminist pressure rather than genuine ecclesial need, and risks becoming a step toward the (rejected) ordination of women to the priesthood” (see “A Public Statement on Orthodox Deaconesses by Concerned Clergy and Laity,” orthodoxethos.com, 2018).

Behr-Sigel is the strongest available evidence for this charge, and it must be said plainly: she is the prominent advocate of the diaconate who also held that the priesthood question should be deliberated alongside it rather than excluded in advance. Critics who argue that the two questions do not stay separate in practice can point to her and say: here is the case.

The reply: that most advocates of the deaconess reject the presbyterate absolutely; that the Church of Greece’s decision of 8 October 2004 restores the one while explicitly excluding the other, demonstrating that the distinction holds in practice; and that a legitimate recovery is not defeated by the possibility of illegitimate extension. The counter-reply: that a distinction which requires vigilance to maintain is not the same as a distinction that maintains itself, and that the burden of the objection is precisely about institutional trajectories rather than logical entailments.

This collection records that both sides here are making claims about consequences, that consequences are not settled by argument alone, and that nearly forty years after Rhodes the evidence is thin in both directions.

6. The “No Ecclesial Weight” Response

The most common Orthodox reaction to Behr-Sigel — and to Ware on the same question — has not been refutation but relegation: the treatment of the position as a personal opinion carrying no ecclesial authority. The characterization that recurs in the literature is that such views “are nothing more than personal opinions and do not represent any ‘current trend’ in Orthodox Christianity” (as recorded in the parallel treatment at Fr. Kallistos Ware).

This response is worth naming as a response, because it is neither agreement nor refutation and is often mistaken for both. Its force is ecclesiological: in Orthodoxy a theologian’s view is not a teaching of the Church, and no amount of scholarly distinction makes it one. Its weakness, as her defenders point out, is that it settles nothing about whether the arguments are right — and that Rhodes 1988, at which she was a theological architect, was not a private opinion but a consultation of twelve autocephalous Churches.

Two facts belong here, on both sides of the ledger. No Orthodox Church has taken any formal action concerning her writings; she taught at Orthodox institutions and was invited to give the Florovsky Lecture at St. Vladimir’s Seminary in 2003, five years after the most contested of her books (OCA, “In Memoriam,” oca.org, 2005). And: no Orthodox Church has adopted her conclusions on the presbyterate, and none shows any sign of doing so. The Church’s response has been neither condemnation nor reception.

A Note on the Absence of a Sustained Refutation

One feature of the record deserves comment. This collection did not locate a book-length or article-length Orthodox refutation of Behr-Sigel’s mature argument. The criticism located is either brief and polemical (Farley), or directed at the general position rather than at her (the Hopko volume, which predates her mature work in its first edition and does not engage her directly in its second), or a matter of relegation rather than engagement.

This can be read two ways, and both readings are current. Her defenders read it as evidence that the argument has not been answered. Her critics read it as evidence that the Orthodox world did not regard it as requiring an answer — that a settled discipline does not owe a rebuttal to every theologian who questions it. This collection records the absence and both readings of it, and does not choose.

[Disputed: whether a substantial Orthodox scholarly engagement with Behr-Sigel's mature argument exists. The searches conducted for this file did not find one, which is not the same as establishing that none exists; French-language and Greek-language responses in particular were not systematically surveyed, and the periodical literature around *Contacts*, *Le Messager orthodoxe*, and the Greek theological reviews may well contain sustained replies. The claim here is about what this collection found, not about the state of the literature.]

References

Farley, Lawrence, Fr. “Women, Lived Orthodoxy, and Ordination.” orthochristian.com. (1 Timothy 2:11–12 and “the hierarchical order of creation”; the priesthood as what a person is; “Denouncing this as ‘Rabbinical exegesis’ (in the words of Behr-Sigel) is unworthy of truly Orthodox exegesis”; Behr-Sigel and Eva Topping as having “pushed this agenda for many years.”)
Hopko, Thomas, ed. Women and the Priesthood. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1983; rev. ed. 1999. (The standard Orthodox case against, and its four grounds.)
Patapios, Hieromonk. “A Traditionalist Critique of The Orthodox Church.” Orthodox Tradition XVI, no. 1, 39–72. (The traditionalist critique of the ecumenical position, directed at Ware.)
“A Public Statement on Orthodox Deaconesses by Concerned Clergy and Laity.” orthodoxethos.com, 2018. (The slippery-slope objection.)
Hinlicky Wilson, Sarah. Woman, Women, and the Priesthood in the Trinitarian Theology of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel. London: T&T Clark, 2013. (The principal sympathetic scholarly treatment; the source for the stages of her position.)
Lossky, Vladimir. In the Image and Likeness of God. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1974. (The anthropology at issue in the personalist charge.)
Orthodox Church in America. “In Memoriam: Madame Elizabeth Behr-Sigal.” oca.org, December 2005. (The 2003 Florovsky Lecture.)
Scripture: 1 Timothy 2:11–12; 1 Corinthians 12; Galatians 3:28.