The ordained ministry, the ordained ministry of women and I Tim. 2 are subjects on which many fathoms of ink have been spilled.

This means in my book that discussion of any or all of these, like matrimony, “is not to be enterprised nor taken in hand unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly, but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, and in fear of God”. Our reading, thinking and writing need to be characterized by an appropriate tone and level.

I therefore feel bound to say that I am surprised to read so many remarks on VOL which draw a parallel between the ordination of members of my own sex and that of practising same-sex-attracted people. Sometimes the language used is intemperate to the point of offensiveness. I have been known to tease some of my ‘spikier’ friends for thinking about sex all the time; but seriously, isn't the attempted parallel pretty insulting to exemplary Christian women? There is a parallel only politically; and none of us should be getting ordained as a political act. If the parallel is conceded, it leads straight to the familiar, sickening male homosexual 'Me Too' campaign (so deeply ironical in view of the essentially sexist nature of homosexual attraction).

Some of the opposition to female ordination is and always has been frankly misogynist, provoking an equally pathological reaction. Some of it thinks of Our Lord’s sex as more significant than His full humanity. Some of it represents the attitudes of a 'closed shop' sacerdotalism, often bolstered with half-baked psychology. Some of it reflects a mistaken reliance on Old Testament ideas of priesthood, and expresses itself in horror at the idea of a female in the “sanctuary”, at the ”altar” or getting her paws on the Elements to consecrate them. Some of it is founded on an extremely weak pneumatology, reckoning neither with the deafening silence in the New Testament from Pentecost on as to whether a female can be a Christian (and so receive the Bread and Cup), nor the distribution of spiritual gifts 'to each one' (m. for c. gender), nor Paul's rejection of circumcision as the badge of Church membership. Some of it extrapolates from New Testament teaching about marriage, or worse still from one particular marriage, usually that of the thinker. Some of it says that all that is not permitted is forbidden. And some of it confuses what may have been apostolic assumption with apostolic conviction. We simply do not know, for instance, who presided over the Eucharist in the early years; though we may suppose that it was normally an elder, and normally the host of “the church in thy house”. Might Lydia have done so in her own house, sometimes when she was not on the road? Perhaps not; but if not perhaps for reasons of convention, not doctrine.

I am not at all doctrinaire about female ordination, but on the contrary desire disciplined theological thinking to be applied to the question, even thus late in the day. There was far too little thought applied to ECUSA’s decision, and what there was represented a failure to grow out of an immature 'Silly old St. Paul' attitude characteristic of new converts. That that won’t do has been clear to me since the late 1950s. (By the time I was married in 1962 I was determined for instance to try to obey the word about subjection, however little I understood it.) Some extraordinarily stupid things go on being said about it. Typology, for instance, rules out a feminine Redeemer and a feminine Twelve. We desperately need to disentangle ideas of equality (to my mind ontological and eternal) from ideas of headship and subjection (relational and temporary, like sex-difference itself). I am bound, however, to say that after long study, and an even longer period of several decades when I believed firmly that women cannot be presbyters because we make presbyters teach with authority, I am sure now that the character and gifting are all, the sex immaterial. As a Hellenist I believe that where, as in I Tim. 2, the man/husband and woman/wife words are found close together in a context, the presumption should be that the stress is on the marriage-relation and its central importance as an acted parable before the unbelieving world. The love of God and our response are the point, and that we should not, by our marriages, mar the image of that covenant-relation. Above all the Gospel must be commended. I cannot find it taught in the New Testament that either the world or the Church are supposed to be organised in terms of a layer of men on top of a layer of women; rather all sheep are called to turn into shepherds with all deliberate speed.

What MUST be avoided is a married woman’s being more prominent in church than her husband; the right relation, with his being obviously the senior partner, must be preserved; but there is nothing at all the matter, indeed it is in practice, where it comes about, both admirable and fruitful, when the two form a presbyteral team, or a part of one. That Stott was prepared to admit women to ordained team ministry under male direction surprised me very much years ago, but so to speak softened me up for the idea that female ordination might be right. I did reflect at the time that if priesting of women came about, sooner or later a female, single, widowed, or otherwise not answerable to a man, would necessarily rise to be a senior presbyter or bishop. That is a difficult thing only if you think that the famous [i]authentein andros[/i] has something to do with men in general, and that [i]didaskein[/i] means all authoritative churchly instruction. I am pretty certain now that Paul, with marriage never far from his mind, means that he is opposed to a MARRIED woman’s trying to function as an itinerant teacher (a use of [i]didaskein[/i] which is I think implied in connection with the Lord a couple of times in the Synoptics), and ‘ganging up on’ her husband (i.e. with other women as in the cult of Diana). That fits well with one of the documented senses of the (extremely rare and difficult) [i]authentein[/i], i.e. “conspire to murder”. That he wanted women, or more probably wives, to be instructed represents a dignifying of women in the Faith, for nobody else would have thought that women should enjoy instruction beyond the domestic sphere. His exhortation that they are to live a peaceful and quiet life (the Greek has nothing to do with not speaking in public) is as much a concession to the extremely strenuous nature of the childbearing years as any kind of limitation. That the gynaecological burden was almost insupportable everybody knew. In other words he wants them to live creatively, not kill themselves or their husbands in any sense, and to avoid discrediting the Gospel with behaviour which is outré.

It cannot be irrelevant that there appear to be only two New Testament contexts where limitations are placed on the activities of Christian women, and that is where, in Corinth and Ephesus, the pagan culture was dominated by the cults of two powerful female deities enjoining respectively sexual enmeshment and sexual detachment. The women had been freed in Christ, and some had taken the bit of their new-found freedom between their teeth and had to be reined in. But nobody was starting with the assumption that a main task of Christian leadership was to keep the women down. It was rather to see that all glorified the Lord. If there was an assumption about the relations between the sexes, it was that outside marriage those must be completely asexual at all times.

I have myself passed through many stages in my Christian thinking, in this as in other matters. I have come a very long way since my first year at Cambridge (1957-8), when a certain well-known ‘liberal’ English bishop and I were officers together in the SCM. I had to grow up plenty as an ambitious, combative, fluent new convert. Unchecked I might have turned into something really poisonous, an ecclesiastical animal with all the skills and none of what I really needed. I argued hotly with my father, who was from 1937 until the early 70s a parochial clergyman, about ordination and why I couldn't have it. I was reading, first the Classical Tripos, then two parts of the Theological Tripos, with much more success than the average ordinand. I was becoming much more like my father, as I am to my spouse, than to most of my own sex. The ache to follow in his footsteps professionally as I had reproduced the pattern of his studies was only assuaged by marriage to an already distinguished layman. Since then there has almost never been a time when my not being in orders has stopped me from doing anything for God that I really felt obliged to do. Ordination for me has not mattered at all for well over half my life now: the only impulse towards it has come from wholly unspiritual reactions on my part to certain instances of clerical pride and encroachment quite as insulting to my spouse’s lay priesthood, and to his priesthood in our home, as to me. His priesthood as a Christian husband is a wholly positive thing for me, protecting me like a firewall from the sometimes inordinate demands of other women’s husbands, not to mention other women. Without it a zealous Christian woman like me would frequently feel herself to be torn into as many pieces as there were (older) males in her church circle. I say “older” advisedly, having reached that age when the clergy like the policemen get younger all the time. It is liberating to understand that while I must of course practise normal mutual respect, and respect for respectable leaders, according to the New Testament I have to please only one man. I recognise however that for numbers of women, married or single, their ordination is or has been a central concern. I cannot dismiss all these women as unspiritual, unscriptural, ambitious or perverted. Incidentally in the Canadian diocese which I know best, as in many dioceses, parishes greatly prefer at least certain ordained females to many of the men keen to draw church salaries. In June at the Essentials Conference in Toronto, such women received a public pledge that there would be a role as well as a place for them in a renewed Anglicanism.

My father was an old-style ‘one-man-band’ kind of clergyman in the Church of England; yet I think that given time and experience, for instance an encounter with someone like our Bishop Victoria Matthews, an old-fashioned Anglo-Catholic of whom many of her clergy say that she’s the best bishop they’ve ever had, he would have moved to accept and rejoice in female colleagues in orders. Certainly my mother (for they were, together, much more than the sum of their parts) worked as a presbyter in practice alongside him all their joint life. It seems to me now an anomaly that she was not at least deaconed after their marriage; although in the 1930s it never crossed either of their minds, she could well have gone to Ridley Hall and been priested too.