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.