The 21st-Century Debate on Women in the Priesthood Part II: “Side-Notes” and Tradition

Here's part two from Alaina Mabaso. Staying with the theme of the ordination of women, Alaina shifts her focus to zero in on another inconsistency in the defense of an exclusively male clergy. She points to the problem of painting the proponents of change as heavily influenced by cultural forces while at the same time grounding the supposed doctrinal defenses of the status quo in traditional cultural assumptions. Another well written, easy read which provides valuable perspective on the discussion. Find Alaina's first contribution here. This is number two in the series, Women as Ordained Priests (or Not). -Editor.

This summer, I’ve had the privilege of helping my grandparents into a new phase of their lives. Though they grieve to leave the large, beautiful house where my Dad and his sisters grew up, they know the time is right to downsize.

I’ve spent the last few months purging, sorting and packing their belongings. As devout General Church members active in their community, my grandparents have gathered a lifetime of New Church publications, sermons and papers. Through them, I discover Church controversies in the voices of the time.

One clergyman’s paper from many years ago bemoans upheaval, doubt, and emerging challenges to the authority of General Church policy, especially on questions of proper gender roles.

These problems originated in the 1960’s, he says.

This reminds me of pundits who long for America’s better days. I wonder which good old days they mean – World War I or II? The Great Depression? The Cold War? Jim Crow? Vietnam? We forget how tough things really were just in time to think that our current problems are unique.

Something tells me that challenges to the status quo (whether within the General Church or in society at large) were not invented in the 1960’s. It just seems that way when that’s the moment we’re living in.

Warnings against the influence of our current cultural context continue to weigh heavily on debates of New Church doctrine and policy, and nowhere are these more evident than in the controversy over a female priesthood.

In his 1997 article, “Preaching By Women”, Rev. Walter Orthwein expresses this apparent conflict between doctrine and modern mores: “I assume that our customs have been influenced to some degree by the customs of the world around us; the church as a human organization is not a perfect expression of pure heavenly ideals.”

“The question I hope we ask in regard to every proposed change”, he says, “is whether it represents a move away from worldly thought toward our Divinely revealed doctrine, or away from doctrine toward the way of the world.” Orthwein admits that change is inevitable in the course of the church’s growth, so he is not against change in general. But, he warns, “let’s just be sure that each change is for a good reason, and not just to keep up with the times.”

It’s a distinction New Church members have always raised as they, like society at large, debate questions of gender roles.

Generations of girls at the Academy lived these debates like no-one else. They were forbidden to wear pants to school, shivering through the winter because the doctrine stipulated that pants were unfeminine. They learned that it was improper for them to hold jobs, because according to doctrine, professional roles were exclusively masculine. They were denied organized sports because the doctrine forbade competitive women. Now, most of us realize that the Writings offer little basis for the sartorial, professional and recreational prohibitions New Church girls once experienced.

Just as many people now insist that the Writings ban women from becoming priests, many New Church members likewise argued well into the 1980’s that a female presence on the General Church board would contradict doctrine.

For example, a 1975 letter in New Church Life calls the nomination of two women to the Canadian General Church board “disturbing” (New Church Life 1975. #465.)

Women are represented by their husbands, the writer argues. They can’t function rationally: “women, who are ruled by their affections, tend to become personally involved when it is necessary to judge the matter being discussed objectively.” In addition, “few women are skilled in forensic matters.” Women also impede the work of the board: “the presence of women in a council of men tends to inhibit the freedom of debate.”

Women’s presence on the board “is in opposition to the principles held by the founders,” and is due to “the new liberal thinking… and the modern trend.”

Bishop Louis King, in a 1988 letter to General Church members and friends, lays out conflicting clergy opinions on the issue.

Some believe that female board members are not allowed by our doctrine: “if women serve on the General Church Board we will go against the authority of the plain teachings of the Writings” concerning the importance of masculine and feminine distinctions.

However, others point out that women at the College are educated in business, religion, science and mathematics, and women serve as managers, executives and financial officers in other church and Academy positions – yet we bar them from the board: “Are we not inconsistent?”

“Let us not make spiritual principles out of historic natural applications,” King quotes.

Women who reply to the 1975 letter show similar sentiment. “The fact that the presence of women on boards was ‘in opposition to the principles of the founders’ does not make it in opposition to Divine order!” says one respondent (New Church Life 1976. #26.). If all board members, male and female, were qualified and committed to worthwhile goals, the sex difference wouldn’t stifle debate: this idea “is just part of our traditional conditioning.”

It’s not a new observation to many in the General Church: ministers opposed to female ordination may be “keeping with the times” just as much as women who claim that they should have the right to enter the priesthood – it’s just that the times ministers are keeping with are the times of the late 18th century.

The debate on whether or not our doctrine actually prohibits female priesthood is a great topic for another paper – in fact, I hear that Bishop Kline has recently commissioned one from a wise, experienced and capable woman.

To me, a problem with the debate itself becomes clear when ministers who warn against current influences go on to interpret doctrine primarily through recent cultural tradition.

The fact is, interpreting the Writings is a messy business, especially when it comes to determining God’s word on female priests. A large number of the teachings ministers draw on to oppose the ordination of women do not have explicit application to the question of female priesthood – rather, they are inferences based on various teachings about married partners, masculine and feminine inclinations, or the atmospheres of different parts of heaven.

But things really get complicated when we come to Swedenborg’s Spiritual Diary. Whether or not these posthumously-published passages should comprise holy doctrine is, again, a great topic for another paper. There are also plenty of fascinating debates over the translation – and therefore the real meaning – of passages of Spiritual Diary that seem to pertain to female priests.

The point here is that to interpret these strange, harsh passages, ministers can rely on popular cultural assumptions as much as the religious progressives whose “modern trend” thinking is opposed by the same ministers.

In "Preaching by Women", Rev. Orthwein comments on a translator’s response to Spiritual Diary 5936, a particularly troublesome passage when it comes to modern sensibilities.

Basically, the passage warns that women who “think in the way men do” about religious subjects, talk about them, or preach, “do away with the feminine nature.” Furthermore, though they might seem outwardly stable, women preachers develop base sensuality and a tendency to intellectual insanity. Women belong at home (according to certain translations).

Yikes.

Rev. Orthwein counsels that we should not fear this passage because of the risk that it will be used in too literal a way, to bar women not only from being ministers, but also from leading elementary school or private home worship, or thinking or talking about religion at all. He contends the passage is viable because we’ve been reading it “for over a hundred years” without deciding that women cannot perform these small-scale offices. Talking about religion or leading student worship “are things women in the church routinely do,” he says – therefore the passage couldn’t possibly be prohibiting these things.

“I think the church has taken it for granted all these years that giving worship for little children is not the same as the kind of ‘preaching’ meant by the passage,” he explains. “And the concern that the traditional reading of the passage would forbid all thought or talk by women on religious subjects is shown by long experience to be unfounded.”

It’s fortunate that Rev. Orthwein doesn’t subscribe to the most stringent possible interpretation of this passage. But it’s interesting to see that while he declares later in the same paper that a woman preaching is as much a “departure from reality” as a man giving birth, he implies that we can take related doctrinal interpretations of women’s roles “for granted” because of a cultural basis.

Rev. Jeremy Simons’s 2002 paper, “The Hazards of Ministry”, takes a very similar approach to interpreting this passage. He also affirms that Spiritual Diary 5936 does not bar women from thinking and speaking about spiritual things. Rather, “the issue is ‘speaking much,’ or obsessively, or professionally, on religious topics.”

“Engaging in religious conversations, leading occasional discussions, and giving occasional speeches are not what is meant,” he explains. The passage happily condones women’s religious discourse as long as it’s not done often, and as long as the women are not recognized and paid for their work (they must not speak in an “official capacity”). According to Rev. Simons, the passage allows women to lead public worship services and prayers to “groups of women” and “students or children”. It is when women lead worship for “the general public” that Rev. Simons emphasizes a range of grave outcomes, including the assertion that it’s “very likely” a female minister would become obsessed with material and sensual things, and would become “crazy”.

Rev. Simons’s stipulations are interesting. I think we must ask whether New Church women are allowed to lead worship for certain people, take the Master of Arts in Religious Studies program or give occasional religious speeches because the Writings permit it, or if we infer that the Writings permit it because we’ve become comfortable with women doing that over the years.

And when we subtract children, students, and women from Rev. Simons’s “general public”, who is left?

When he effectively subtracts everyone but the men from his definition of “the general public”, Rev. Simons warns women that the risk of insanity appears only when they presume to lead men in worship.

Do the passages he quotes actually make that distinction? Or is sexism melding with comfortable, existing church practice to create this interpretation?

I’m not promoting a more stringent interpretation than Rev. Orthwein and Rev. Simons espouse. Neither do I want to denigrate their scholarship, or their devotion to the wellbeing of their communities. Rather, I want to point out that in this case, their doctrinal interpretations may be unwittingly born of an investment in current customs as much as doctrinal study.

Perhaps most telling of all, Rev. Simons admits that passages that “speak directly about women in relation to doctrine, preaching, and public prayer do not have a central place in any treatment of the clergy in the Writings.” Instead, these passages on women and priest-like roles are mostly “side-notes” which “merely confirm the long-held assumption that priests should be men, an assumption that has been remarkably consistent over time in the great majority of human cultures.” In other words, these passages are not key pieces of New Church doctrine: rather, they are valuable because they confirm a larger cultural status quo.

Rev. Simons’s own goal in writing the paper is “to discourage women from taking up the ministry as a profession, and to confirm the long-standing Christian tradition of a male priesthood.”

Am I the only one worried that a doctrinal paper states as its goal the continuation of a “long-standing tradition” that excludes women?

One of the last things I helped my grandmother to pack was a bookcase bursting with editions of Swedenborg. Along with various listings, concordances, quotation books, and related New Church literature, they filled several boxes: sober, frayed navy-blue hardbacks alongside inviting new editions, soft covers rich with color and gilt. Thick, dusty battalions of Arcana Celestia rubbed shoulders with the much slimmer “Divine Love and Wisdom”, and various editions of Conjugial Love were a veritable tour through the ages of the church.

Looking at the way the piles of Swedenborg’s books covered the floor, the New Church’s feast of doctrine struck me afresh. With the sheer bulk of the books sprawling around me, the absurdity of denying their interactions with our culture is clear. How could such a giant collection – translated, read and interpreted by so many people for well over two centuries - stay sealed within its own intellectual and spiritual realm? How could the Writings not form our cultural preferences as much as our cultural preferences form our understanding of the Writings?

Ultimately, Rev. Orthwein does not admit this possibility in “Preaching By Women”. “Until recently, I think the church as a whole saw this and was agreed on it, the women as well as the men,” he asserts of a negative view of female priests. It’s that modern thinking which is the trouble: “I have to question whether the new thoughts on this subject reflect a deeper understanding of the Writings, or whether they represent influences from the world around us,” he warns.

If women’s desire to serve in the priesthood is merely a factor of our liberal times, is it an irrelevant coincidence that widespread cultural perceptions of women’s limited roles concurred with the General Church founders’ understanding of doctrine? Were people in the church founders’ time more in tune with the Lord’s true will for women simply because they lived over a century ago – a better, more orderly time, free of the problems that modernity brings?

What is a hundred years to the Lord?

We must do away with the reflexive assumption that “the way of the world” always represents a departure from doctrine. The passage of time has brought many human and spiritual improvements to our way of life: for example, modern racial equality is surely closer to the Lord’s ideal than the segregation of the past. On a much smaller scale, few would argue today that the General Church organization was better off before women began contributing to its administration.

This essay doesn’t claim to solve the controversy over the ordination of women. But I do argue that proponents of change should not see their sincere beliefs and desire to serve marginalized as disorderly social trends, versus the doctrinal high ground of traditionalists, who claim to rely solely on God’s Word, even as they themselves justify their doctrinal positions by pointing to what is commonly done in General Church culture. As this debate moves forward, I would like proponents of the all-male priesthood to admit that people advocating for female priests are not the only ones influenced by the world around them.

Alaina Mabaso

Alaina is a Philadelphia-based freelance writer whose work appears in several venues. She also writes and illustrates humorous real-life essays on her blog at Alainamabaso.wordpress.com, where you can find information about her book, “The Conjugial Culture: A Derived Doctrine of Sex in the New Church.” Alaina is currently working on a second book for Swedenborgian audiences, about the intellectual life of New Church women.

Comments

[Jeremy Simons]

Chelsea and Shada, I love what you have written above. Thank you for the corrective on AC 8994. Both love and wisdom are always needed. Teaching is only half the job.

I don’t think that 8994 says anything negative about women’s love for reading and studying the Word. I think that this love is not only the common experience of people world-wide but is also confirmed in this passage in the statements about women’s love for the truth itself.

[Alaina Mabaso]

Well, I do wish I could make a lengthy reply to ALL of the interesting thoughts and sentiments herein, but then I wouldn’t get any work done. I do have some responses, though.

I was waiting for those quotes about authoresses and the proper exercise of judgment to get dragged out again. They’re always waiting in the wings – thanks, Coleman, my dear old friend. Lots of fascinating thoughts about them – I appreciated each and every one. I still need to say that even with all the rationalizations and well-layered suggestions, the passage about authoresses still leaves me icy on a truly visceral level. I’m not talking icy about the use of the passage or icy about this or that interpretation: I cannot stand the passage itself. Everyone probably has a passage like that, and that one is mine. Forgive me. Perhaps this merely indicates my own spiritual blocks.

Leif – reaching pretty far back here, your comments about the absence of female plumbers made me remember a plumber’s truck I saw once in Philadelphia: it said “[Plumber’s Name] and Daughter” – not “son”! It was the only time I’ve ever seen that, but I loved it. Had to share it.

Shada- love the thing awhile back about the possibility of heaven evolving along with the natural world.

Dylan – I particularly want to be your friend (not to slight anyone else, I’d be pleased to be friends with all of you and already know many of you). Contact me on my blog or something. Your written stuff is just gorgeous, from the logic and the phrasing to the obvious heart underneath. “As a gender, we have really been over the top for the last few centuries.” LOVE IT.
More lovely stuff from Kristin, of course. What a valuable thinker who’s also a fount of charity.

Julie – I was hoping you’d get in on this. I don’t think we’re personally acquainted but I hope we will be in the future. I would LOVE to see your future presentation to the Council. I wish you could bring in a delegation of supporters to listen.

One more thought – a repeating theme in these threads – caught my eye in a big way. Jeremy hits it most often, I think, but others do to. It’s the Big Issue: wouldn’t convincing the minister’s council that women should join involve a change in how we view the Writings? The very ground on which we stand is at stake should this issue come to an actual vote among those with the power to make a change! “Are the Writings valid in their totality? If we promote this change of policy, then we must say, ‘no’!” I think it’s Jeremy who puts it so powerfully: arguing that the clergy should change its policy based on a revised understanding of the Writings is like trying to win a legal case by refuting the US Constitution.

This reminds of something. Please join me a on a little thought journey here. A year or two ago, I read a few books about the ongoing debate in the US about the theory of evolution, and how many religious groups promote the teaching of creationism and/or intelligent design instead. Few things burn me up more than denials of the scientific history of the earth and its marvelous species. I thought I hated those Evolution Deniers. But I understand them a bit better now.

While scientists and logical members of the population are always doing their best to lay out the facts of evolution in a way that will finally convince those backwards religious folk who don’t know the science, the question of whether or the facts of evolution are feasible and/or observable are actually irrelevant to Darwin deniers. Because in their minds, acceptance of evolution is synonymous with a world where there is no overarching spiritual order: a world that is not governed by God. It is not that the biblical version of events necessarily sounds more credible to them. It is this one terrifying idea – that God does not underlie the natural world – that they can’t accept. Believing in evolution feels like throwing away the basis of their entire lives. Faced with this fear, how can they even listen to arguments about the fossil record?

But as New Church members know (thank the Lord), religion and the beautiful science of planet Earth can go hand in hand.

When people say that an alteration of women’s role in the church would bring a seismic, detrimental shift in the perception of doctrine, I am reminded of people who won’t listen to the facts of evolution because they believe science and religion are mutually exclusive. I am guessing that, in entering this debate, some proponents of all-male priesthood feel themselves on the edge of a deep chasm that represents much more than women at the ministers’ meetings: they perceive a challenge to the entire groundwork of their faith and therefore themselves. Listen closely – some proponents of all-male priesthood are not just saying “these are the reasons why women should not be ordained.” They are also crying out, “But this would change EVERYTHING!” It’s a legitimate, completely human fear that we all can relate to.

But I do still hope that women’s spiritual leadership will one day fit as seamlessly into the church the true facts of the natural world do.

[Brian]

Alaina,

It seems to me that there are two ways in which the GC could change its ordination position.

a) We could trust and use its existing (though very limited) process for change, which involves doctrinal studies and discussion among the exclusively male clergy, in the context of some basic assumptions about the nature of the Word. Perhaps this process will result in a change on the ordination policy. This would leave the process and assumptions about the nature of the Word in tact.

b) We could create political events to demonstrate that 1) the doctrinal assumptions about the nature of the Word are already hotly contested 2) that the process of organizational evolution is flawed and needs to be ignored/replaced.

If the first route is taken the church organization may remain in tact.
If the second route is taken, it may be that people accept a much broader, more diffuse set of assumptions and approaches to the nature of the Word as all part of one large umbrella.
OR those with what we might call a "historic General Church" approach to the Writings may once again split off and form a new organization, again with the hope of having an organization which is more fundamentalist about the letter of the Writings.

I know the first approach is my preference, but that is because I am comfortable with operating from the "historic General Church approach." Perhaps thinking about the Writings has already drifted so significantly that the "historic GC approach" is passe.

However, it is exciting to me to hear some people in this conversation talk about the possibility of using the first approach.

Brian

[Kristin Coffin]

I really don't see that the ordination of women does threaten the groundwork of the General Church worldview. Since there are so few party lines, I always thought it was okay not to consider the unpublished works as authoritative, and still call yourself "General Church." I thought it was a matter of opinion to prefer a liberal translation rather than a very literal one, and still be "General Church." I also thought it was valid to read a little more 18th-century into Swedenborg, and still be "General Church." I know ministers who do all these things openly.

Maybe I've misunderstood. I assumed that the baseline was the average of a lot of widely varying opinions and approaches. But perhaps there is a more traditional baseline, and a more solid consensus, than I imagined.

Just because the cultural status quo was one way when the GC was founded, that doesn't mean the same status quo stands today. I wonder how much things have shifted, and if there is any way to measure.

Also, Alaina said, “Are the Writings valid in their totality? If we promote this change of policy, then we must say, ‘no’!” But do we have to say this? Take the Spiritual Experiences problem: the GC apparently doesn't take a side on the nature of unpublished works, but people do quote from this book when they defend the all-male clergy policy. If we reversed the policy, people could still say "We don't take sides, but this is our acting policy." Isn't that the same degree of commitment?

[Brian]

Kristin,

I think you are spot on here.

By not making any position statements, the General Church can't claim it has any party line. The one party line that I observe is that the theological Writings of Swedenborg are the Lord's Word, revealed intentionally and with authority.

However, this line of thinking allows for quite some breadth of interpretation.

I think the General Church could shift to, "our current acting policy is to ordain women, this is based on our best current understanding of the Word."

That would be acceptable to my mind. What would be less acceptable is if we also had to add the clause, " because we ordain women, the General Church takes the position that the non-published works of Swedenborg are non binding."

I don't know that any official statement was made, but we have drifted away from the authority and attention that was once given to Swedenborg's pre-theological scientific works.

[Jeremy Simons]

Kristin and Alaina,

Great observations. As I see it, though, it’s not that ordaining women would change everything, but rather that we would need to modify our view of the Writings in order to do it. This is what would change things.

Kristin, it is true that there are ministers who don’t see the unpublished works (such as Apocalypse Explained, Doctrine of Charity, Coronis, Spiritual Experiences, Canons, Invitation to the New Church, De Verbo, Prophets and Psalms and others) as authoritative. No one gives them an especially hard time about this, but there aren’t many ministers who take this position. Yes, they can do this openly and still claim to be General Church and no one bats an eye. It doesn’t really make much difference.

The clergy is reluctant to formally establish a definitive “canon” because the “edges” of things like this are hard to be precise about. Do we include letters? Notes? Comments in the margins? More importantly, we don’t operate by “authority” anyway. Instead cases are established by showing that something is or is not consistent with many passages throughout the entire body of the Writings. So it is unimportant to strictly define the boundaries.

Regardless, there is pretty wide agreement within the clergy so it isn’t really an issue. It actually tends to come up mainly in the context of this discussion because of Spiritual Experiences 436, 4940 and 5936, and a number of sections in the Marriage Indexes, which raise uncomfortable questions. But these passages are consistent with others found in published works like the Arcana Coelestia and Conjugial Love, so I don’t see the advantage of excluding them.

As for reading the 18th century into Swedenborg, it really depends how people do it. A lot of things are in the Writings because they were current topics, they use examples that were current at the time, they seem to base things on 18th century scientific understanding, and express things in ways that may have been acceptable in the 18th century but which can be seen as old fashioned, biased or insulting in 21st century America.

But this is the way that revelation works. It is always specific to its time period, even though it is eternal in its significance. We need to know how to interpret and understand the system, but this does not mean that we invalidate anything that is said. Doing this is a challenge, and understandably people will do it differently.

[Alaina Mabaso]

just to clarify - I don't hold with the position that a change of the policy would mean a rejection or alteration of the Writings, in whole or in part. I'm just pointing out that some all-male proponents seem to feel this way. I think we could see the shift in perspective that would lead to a change in one of two ways:

A) We are going to ignore/downplay what we think the Writings say in some passages.
B) We admit that our previous interpretation was not as close to the Lord's message as we thought. We've reached a different understanding.

Can't we admit that our understanding has shifted without impugning the Writings themselves? I'm sure this is too relativistic for some folks, and that's ok.

[Annika]

In researching for a completely different topic, I realized that the General Church actually DOES have a precedent for reversing position on an issue believed to be doctrinally supported - interracial marriage! If you follow various articles and discussion earlier in church history (and by earlier, I actually mean all the way 'til the 1970s!) conservative lay and clergy believed they had strong doctrinal support against interracial marriage. At some point, the official "take" on this issue reversed (and with surprisingly little commentary in New Church publications). Was the former consensus on interracial marriage actually wrong? Or have we been enticed by the surrounding culture down a slippery slope to a future when we'll let anyone get married? Or is it actually possible that given the ambiguity of the available texts, our change in interpretation was valid, or even happened later than it should have?

Just something to ponder...

***Disclaimer: not everyone in the church actually does believe that interracial marriage should be allowed/encouraged even in this day and age. I know, because they've told me so (which is always a very awkward conversation).***