I’m not a theologian, either by training or temperament, but I offer here a fresh argument about the ordination of women. (I can’t believe we’re still discussing this in the third decade of the twenty-first century!) This isn’t so much a brief in favor of women’s ordination as a refutation of one of the principal arguments from those opposed to it.
The Roman Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Convention share very little in common. If you were to plot them on a Venn diagram, I can think of only three major areas of agreement.
First, they both claim to be Christian, although some in both camps would withhold that label from the other.
Second, both have moved far to the political right in recent decades. Catholics, at the behest of John Paul II, repudiated Liberation Theology. Many bishops in the American Catholic hierarchy have also abandoned the venerable tradition of Catholic Social Teaching in favor of hard-right politics.
The Southern Baptist turn toward the right began with the conservative (some say “fundamentalist”) takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1979. This coincided with the emergence of the Religious Right in defense of racial segregation.
Finally, both institutions deny the ordination of women. The Catholic Church has maintained that restriction for centuries. Southern Baptists, who historically have relegated the authority of ordination to individual congregations, only recently have sought to purge women pastors from their ranks.
The arguments against women are similar in both camps, although the burden of tradition weighs more heavily on Roman Catholics. Both point to various Pauline passages about male headship and women remaining silent in gatherings of the faithful.
As Jimmy Carter once observed about his fellow Southern Baptists, they are remarkably skilled at cherry-picking verses aimed at restricting the agency of women. Meanwhile, they figure out how to neglect Paul’s declaration in Galatians about the equality of women and men in Christ and ignore the way Jesus treated women with compassion, not condescension.
A classic case of missing the forest for the trees.
Jesus was living and Paul was writing in the context of the patriarchal society of first-century Palestine, so these sorts of instructions should surprise no one. And isn’t it remarkable that so many of those opposed to women’s ordination have no problem dismissing exhortations about the consumption of pork or the wearing of different fabrics in the Hebrew Bible—or women keeping their hair covered in the New Testament? And still, they refuse similarly to contextualize Paul’s comments about women?
The other argument trotted out is that Jesus chose only men to be his disciples. That’s a contested claim, but once again, it’s not surprising in the context of a patriarchal society. True enough, but if that is an argument for denying women priestly or pastoral functions, then I believe those defenders of male authority—Roman Catholics, Southern Baptists and others—don’t take the argument to its logical conclusion.
The apostles in the New Testament were not only males, but also Semitic males. So if the gender of the disciples is taken as a template for the priesthood or the ministry for millennia thereafter, then why shouldn’t the ethnic composition of the disciples also be determinative?
The priesthood and the ministry according to this logic should be restricted to Jewish men who have converted to Christianity. That’s a pretty small pool, to be sure, but both Southern Baptists and Roman Catholics have been steadfast about restricting the cohort of ministerial candidates.
More is the pity because the Catholic Church is desperate for priestly vocations, and Southern Baptists are relentlessly purging devoted, godly women from its pastoral ranks.
Perhaps it’s time to revisit the tired arguments opposing the ordination of women.
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An Episcopal priest, Balmer is John Phillips Professor in Religion at Dartmouth College and the author of more than a dozen books, with commentaries appearing in newspapers across the country. He is a contributing correspondent at Good Faith Media.