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Feminine Genius
By Carole | November 5, 2008
Tonight, I will be speaking to a group of young adults on the topic, “Women in the Church: Included or Excluded”? I was told by the organizer that what the group really wants to discuss is women’s ordination, so I am going to take my best shot at that question. It is a question I’ve given a lot of thought to, so I’m looking forward to having a good chat about it. It was kind of fun looking back at my own process of grappling with this question.
I’m expecting that shortly after I open my mouth, someone will say, “Oh, aren’t you de-LIGHT-ed?”
Pray for my game face.
Topics: Uncategorized |
November 5th, 2008 at 3:47 pm
Just one point… Manfred Hauke has written a dissertation in the question… “women in the priesthood?”
Me and a seminarian agreed a while ago, with an inch of joke and some gravity, that should the Church (we don’t fancy it in our wildest dreams, but if) ever accept women into the ordained priesthood, that we would pack our bags and go off to a Buddhist convent in Tibet and wait for the world to end… Just to get the picture of how serious this is…
“Why should a woman not in this [priestly] sense represent God?… Suppose the reformer stops saying that a good woman may be like God and begins saying that God is like a good woman. Suppose he says that we might just as well pray to ‘Our Mother which art in Heaven’ as to ‘Our Father’. Suppose he suggests that the Incarnation might just as well have taken a female as a male form, and the Second Person of the Trinity be as well called the Daughter as the Son. Suppose, finally, that the mystical marriage were reversed, that the Church were the Bridegroom and Christ the Bride. All this, as it seems to me, is involved in the claim that a woman can represent God as a priest does…. …Christians think that God Himself has taught us how to speak of Him. To say that it does not matter is to say… that all the masculine imagery is not inspired, is merely human in origin… And this is surely intolerable: or, if tolerable, it is an argument not in favour of Christian priestesses but against Christianity…. It is also surely based on a shallow view of imagery…. …One of the ends for which sex was created was to symbolize to us the hidden things of God. One of the functions of human marriage is to express the nature of the union between Christ and the Church.”
November 5th, 2008 at 3:48 pm
Manfred Hauke is by the way a professor of dogmatism in some university in Germany and he’s opposed to the whole notion of women’s ordination…
November 5th, 2008 at 6:05 pm
I’ve read Hauke’s book, and it helped to settle my heart with the Church on this issue. I mentioned it in the talk to night.