I - Questions

There are several questions, namely that of the place of women in the Church, that of their share in the responsibilities and authority it confers, together with that of their possible access to pastoral ministry—meaning their being pastors, leaders of the flock in continuity with the call addressed to Peter by the one true pastor—which together constitute one of modernity’s great challenges to [traditional?] Church bodies. Their responses have been quite varied.

Following often long, impassioned and crisis-laden debates, most of the Churches rooted directly or indirectly in the 16th century Protestant Reformation, including those of the Anglican confession, have decided to ordain women to pastoral ministry. They now include women bishops. Together with the Roman Catholic Church, the Orthodox Churches reject the initiative, citing a break with apostolic Tradition, with the foundations of the ecclesial structure laid down by Christ and those whom we call “Fathers.” This disagreement is a serious one. By compromising the mutual recognition of ministerial roles, and thus of sacramental communion, it would appear to make of ecumenical dialogues intended to restore Christian unity a hopeless illusion. A rift seems to be forming between the Churches that ordain women and those that do not, each accusing the other of failing to obey the will of God which, for some is indistinguishable from the unbroken tradition and for others requires “discerning the signs of the times.” The question is whether a reconciliation of these two perspectives is at all foreseeable.

Orthodox Christians, who are particularly sensitive to the continuity of ecclesial Tradition, often seem the staunchest opponents of the ordination of women. “It has never been done.” For many Orthodox this argument from Epiphanius of Salamis (5th century) against women’s ordination to the priesthood remains valid and sufficient. During the gathering of the World Council of Churches in Harara, in 1998, an Orthodox theologian, representing the Moscow Patriarchate, made a somewhat regrettable reference to the ordination of women within Protestant communities as “blasphemy.” The point must be made, however, that this serious accusation, rather recklessly thrown about, both shocked and scandalized other Orthodox Christians who were present. As an expression of his own disagreement, another Orthodox theologian, also a representative of the Moscow Patriarchate at the council in Harara, gave the WCC’s general secretary, Konrad Raiser, the small volume that had just been published, in which two Orthodox theologians invite their brothers and sisters to consider the complex and difficult problem of the ordination of women as an “open question.”¹ The Orthodox perspective is not unanimous and monolithic. A path to transcend this conflict may yet remain open, not through indifference but through a deepening of the authentic Tradition. It is from this perspective that I would like to offer an overview of Orthodox thinking in response to a matter that, having originated outside the Orthodox Church, is now becoming an internal question: from the first tentative individual responses given in the early 60s to the inter-Orthodox conference of Rhodes, in 1988 and its continuation in the context of recent ecumenical dialogue.

II - The third meeting of the World Council of Churches in New Delhi, in 1961, marked the Orthodox Churches’ “Great entrance” into ecumenism, through the adherence to this institution of the great churches of Eastern Europe: the Church of Russia and those of the Balkans. These had been preceded by the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople and by the ancient patriarchates of Alexandria and Antioch. But henceforth, the influence and commitment of the Orthodox Churches within the movement would be far greater. Thus, within the history of the movement, the meeting in New Delhi represents a genuine turning point. Nevertheless, this same meeting witnessed another event, far less important at first glance: through the pressure of militant western feminism, the problem of the ordination of women to official, ecclesial, sacramental ministry was brought powerfully to the attention of the WCC. Already, the leaders of the WCC recognize a divisive question, as we say in ecumenical jargon. Under the guidance of the “Faith and Order” commission, a subcommittee made up of theologians from various backgrounds is given the task of studying its hermeneutic, theological and ecclesiological implications. It is in this context that Orthodox theologians associated with this communal reflection were confronted with a problem quite new to them and which they were not prepared to address.

The feminist movement that erupted throughout Western Europe after the First World War, and even more so after the Second, reached neither Eastern Europe nor the Middle East, home to the main Orthodox Churches. In the Middle East, under Islamic influence, women generally remained outside public life. The communist regimes, to which the Balkans—with the exception of Greece—and Russia were subject, regarded feminism as a sickness of the western upper class that drew women away from the only worthy effort, namely class struggles. The Orthodox Churches, either persecuted or tolerated as mere vestiges of a past that was soon to disappear completely, were thus in a struggle for their very survival. Believing women courageously participated in the struggle. It is they—as we now know—who to a great extent secured the parishes of the Russian Church by assuming responsibility for them before the local soviet authorities. For them, this Church is like an ancient vessel, both precious and fragile, that they must protect and preserve. Their vision is quite different from that of many western feminists: that of the Church as a male fortress to be besieged and eventually stormed.

In 1964, the presses of the WCC produced On the Ordination of Women: a collection of articles on the subject, written by Lutheran and reformed theologians as well as by one Anglican and two Orthodox, one of them being professor Chitescu, of the department of Canon Law at the Orthodox Theological Faculty of Bucharest, the other, a Lebanese hieromonk, Archimandrite—now Metropolitan—Georges Khodr. The latter attended St Sergius Institute, in Paris. He is also one of the leaders of what is known as the MJO, the Orthodox Youth Movement of the Antiochian Patriarchate, a genuine source of renewal for this ancient patriarchate. Both experiences prepared him well for dialogues with the West.

Both professor Chitescu and Georges Khodr believe and state that women’s accession to priestly ministry is incompatible with the Tradition of the Orthodox Church. Nevertheless, their approaches are quite different from one another. As a professor of Canon Law, the Romanian theologian quotes and lists canonical texts that categorically forbid—he insists—the ordination of women to priestly ministry. These canons are, in his view, the expression of a “sacred and unchangeable” tradition… founded “on the example of Christ who chose not one woman, neither among his disciples nor among the seventy, upon whom to bestow sacramental power.”² This sacred tradition is in no need of justification. Professor Chitescu adds that it can be explained by “the impure state of women” at certain times in their biological cycles during which, according to some canons, they could not even be baptized. I must add, however, that this ancient taboo has since been left out of official Orthodox arguments against the ordination of women. Yet the question remains whether it has in fact disappeared from popular thought or from the subconscious mind. This question must be raised.

Archimandrite Georges’ arguments run a different, much more complex and much more subtle course. As a biblical scholar, he meditates on 1 Cor 11:2-17, an obscure passage, hard to interpret, in which St Paul attempts to justify his directive to women that they cover their heads “whenever they pray or prophesy in the assembly.” Khodr sees therein the idea of a natural, hierarchical primacy of male human beings “according to the created order, patterned after the uncreated order and integrated into the movement of redemption.” God made man, Christ, was a male. It follows that the bishop, “the living image of the Lord […], sacrament” of the one who is the Bridegroom of the Church, “who bears the fullness of the priestly role,” must also be a male human being.³

Nevertheless, for Georges Khodr, the natural hierarchy of the sexes, integrated into God’s plan of salvation and recognized and sanctified by the Church, does not imply any sort of contempt for women, whose dignity is recognized and praised. All stated in quite a modern expression. While men and women are different, he writes, “in a corporeal and mental perspective that is impossible to ignore […] they are determined by their encounter. There is a correlation between them, a confrontation and history ordered by their freedom, which excludes any equation of the two, a union in the flesh which is incompatible with the confusion of roles and tasks.” Though fundamentally different from man, woman is nevertheless not inferior: “While the Church, in structuring its ministry, has not given in to the feminist temptation of confusing roles and tasks, it nevertheless praises certain women as ‘equal to the apostles’… Woman represents the religious soul for she is both gift and self-giving. The fulfillment of woman is that of holiness which is a life hidden in God (Col 3:8).”⁴

In a convergence of old and new—which bears with it the risks of contradiction—the patriarchal notion of a hierarchy of the sexes and the personalism of the Gospel, Archimandrite Georges Khodr’s text signals the new perspective adopted, in the second half of the 20th century, by a number of Orthodox theologians in their arguments against the ordination of women to priestly ministry.

The main proponents of this new perspective were the Franco-Russian theologian, Paul Evdokimov and the North American theologian, Thomas Hopko, former dean of St Vladimir’s Seminary, in Crestwood (N.Y.).

First published in 1958, and again 20 years later with a significant introduction by the French theologian Olivier Clément, Paul Evdokimov’s foundational work, Woman and the Salvation of the World⁵, was particularly well received, both in French-speaking, Orthodox communities in the West and beyond, among certain Catholic and Protestant groups. (It may have contributed to the development of the ideas expressed in Pope John Paul II’s encyclical, Mulieris Dignitatem).

Although no direct influence may be firmly stated, it is our beloved and respected friend, Fr Thomas Hopko who, in less poetic, albeit more systematic terms, formulated and spread throughout English-speaking, Orthodox theological circles, theologoumena in close agreement with the thought of the Franco-Russian theologian.

The starting point for both theologians is the notion of the transcendent femininity of the Holy Spirit. They came by the idea through a few ancient Syriac texts. In Syriac, the term for Spirit is feminine. Aphratus, one of the Syrian Fathers, addresses the Spirit as “Our Mother.” Evdokimov sees in this a special connection between the Spirit and women and with it the parallel notion of a privileged relationship between men and the Son of God. The result would be a differentiation between the charisms of men and women, predisposing them to different ministries.⁶ Through her connection to the Spirit, Evdokimov claims, and through the silent radiance of holiness, woman is called to the salvation of a world in danger of being dehumanized by an excess of male techno-scientific thinking. Sacramental priesthood is not among these charisms. It falls to man as connected with the Son, both active and creative. “Through his essential bond with the Priestly Christ, by means of his priestly function, man sacramentally penetrates the elements of this world in order to sanctify them. He acts by virtue of his masculinity. He is the “violent one” referred to in the Gospel, who takes the Kingdom by force […]. And this treasure is a revelation of holiness, the holiness of being represented by woman […]. Connected to the Holy Spirit by her very essence […] woman is Eve-Life who safeguards, vivifies and protects every parcel of a male creation.”⁷ Paul Evdokimov’s speculations were both daring and reassuring, to all appearances a gratification for women—did they not introduce a transcendent feminine principle in God?—and were well received in Orthodox circles intent on maintaining the traditional structures of ecclesial ministry while at the same time removing any possible suspicion of misogyny from the Orthodox rejection of the ordination of women.

Nevertheless, several questions arise: does the theologically and anthropologically dualistic dichotomy expressed in these theologoumena not represent a contradiction on certain points to the trinitarian theology and the theological anthropology—both universal and personal—expressed by the Fathers? In the actual practice of the historical Church, doesn’t this theological and anthropological dichotomy amount to upholding the institutional structures bearing the stamp of patriarchal cultures by means of a theological justification, even by endowing them with a sacred character?

These questions are also meant for the arguments against women’s ordination to priestly ministry presented by my highly respected friend, Fr Thomas Hopko. Much like Paul Evdokimov, Fr Hopko does not appear in the least to be defending a rigid traditionalism. His arguments against the ordination of women are part of the far broader project discernable in “the signs of the times”—the context for a profound cultural transformation—to develop a theology of sexuality, or rather of gender distinction. A distinction willed by God according to his creative plan. “If it has not been specifically explicated and articulated in the past, it is the present task to show clearly that human community, as the created epiphany of the uncreated Trinity, is made male and female so that it can realize and achieve the divine life given to it by its uncreated Archetype.” So says Fr Thomas in his contribution to the collection entitled Women and the Priesthood (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1983; p 100).

This is the perspective of his thesis, similar to that of Paul Evdokimov, according to which “there is a direct, analogical, symbolic and epiphanic relationship between Adam (as genuine human being) and the Son of God, and between Eve and the Spirit of God. As Adam is the typos of him ‘who was to come’ as the first Adam, the ‘high priest of our confession’ and as the ‘pastor and bishop of our salvation,’ so Eve is the typos as the ‘mother of all living’ of the ‘life-creating Spirit,’ who ‘proceeds from the Father and rests in the Son’” (p 106). What follows from this typology, for Fr Hopko, is that the participation of women in the life of the Church must follow the example of the Holy Spirit resting upon Christ, invisibly and silently, to the exclusion of any public, sacramental ministry (p 111). It marks a vision, a projection onto God of stereotypes and “conventions” concerning women in patriarchal societies, a vision that is in fact foreign to—or at least quite far removed from—a theological anthropology inspired by faith in the One God who exists in a total communion within a distinction, not of gender, but of Persons, of Hypostases, each mysteriously unique and totally open to the Other. I shall return to these questions in my conclusion.

First, I believe it would be helpful briefly to recall a few of the main events that have marked Orthodox reflection on the problem of the ordination of women and, more generally, on the new modes of women’s participation in the life and witness of the Church.

The first, to all appearances rather minor, is the conference in Agapia: first international consultation of Orthodox Christian Women, jointly organized in 1976 by the WCC, the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Romanian Orthodox Church. In the debate concerning the place of women in the Church—one which arose in the context of a deep cultural change together with the globalization of western modernity—the voice of Orthodox Women had thus far hardly been heard: silent, unheard for a number of reasons, both cultural and political, to which I have already alluded. Among these factors is also the fact that in primarily Orthodox regions, women have only very recently had access to theological education. This situation began to change in the 60s and 70s, in the diasporas of Western Europe and North America, but also to a large extent in Greece. In Agapia, an important center for women’s monasticism in Romania, for the first time in the Church’s history, Women from throughout the Orthodox world, from the great traditional Orthodox churches as well as from the Diaspora of Western Europe and North America, had the opportunity to meet, from the 11th to the 17th of September, to discuss very freely their common aspirations as well as their frustrations, under the gentle guidance of three somewhat surprised bishops: bishop Emilianos Timiadis, representing the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, bishop Ignatius Hazim, representing the Patriarchate of Antioch, of which he has now become the Patriarch, and bishop Anothony Plamaldeã, then curate of the Romanian Patriarchate. The ordination of women was not officially on the docket. But the subject was raised in a daring keynote lecture delivered by a French woman theologian, discussed in workshops, and taken up again in the conclusions of the conference.

“That women be present in the places within the Church where decisions are made, that the ancient order of deaconesses be restored; that given the extent of the debate regarding women’s ordination within the Churches of western tradition, the question be made the subject of a serious study in order to clarify the Orthodox position,” these were the desires unanimously expressed by the participants at the meeting in Agapia. They are striking in their courage and temperance.⁸

In the wake of Agapia, several women who had participated in this first meeting were invited to participate in a study entitled The Community of Women and Men in the Church, initiated by the WCC in 1978. The question of women’s ordination having become a burning issue in several Protestant confessions and within the Anglican Communion, it became the underlying topic of an entire process of reflection, marked by various regional and thematic colloquia—on “Christian theological anthropology,” on “the meaning of ecclesial ministry”—and which extended over three long years. The council held at Sheffield, in July 1981, was intended to be its crowning moment. However, in spite of the highly enthusiastic mood, or rather due to an excess of enthusiasm reinforced by a lack of understanding of Orthodox opposition (which the Protestant majority, supporters of women’s ordination, believed they could overcome), Sheffield was a failure from the point of view of ecumenical dialogue. The Letter from Sheffield to the Churches, presented by its writers as inspired by the Spirit and conveyed to the Central Committee of the WCC, requested of its addressees that they take into account the suffering of women “unjustly” denied the ecclesial ministry to which they feel called. Such terms were utterly foreign to the bishops representing the Orthodox Churches who regarded them as an intolerable pressure to which they could not, and must not give in. The misunderstanding on both sides was complete. A few voices were raised, and the curtain fell. The call of the Christian women in Agapia to a peaceful dialogue seemed to have been no more than a voice crying in the wilderness.

Nevertheless, a few Orthodox theologians particularly committed to ecumenical dialogue and mindful of the Gospel’s call to “discern the signs of the times,” continued to hold out hope for away out of this impasse. It is in the spirit of these aspirations, particularly vibrant in the Orthodox Diaspora of Western Europe and North America, that the Ecumenical Patriarchate decided to convene, during the 1980s, an interorthodox consultation on the place of women in the Church and on the problem of the ordination of women. After significant preparation, it was finally held in Rhodes, from October 30th to November 7th, 1988.⁹

The Rhodes Consultation assembled approximately sixty theologians, both laymen and clergy, nearly a third of whom were women—a great novelty!—with as many coming from traditional Orthodox Churches as from the Diaspora. It was, without a doubt, the other major event to mark contemporary Orthodox reflection on the participation of women in the life and in the ministries of the Church.

To the great surprise of the moderators, no doubt, from the very first sessions, the answers to the questions that were raised turned out to be far more diverse and nuanced than they had originally anticipated. There was an obvious split between those for whom the ordination of women was without question an impossibility—having its roots in an immutable Tradition—and those theologians, generally from western cultures, for whom it represented a true problematic, a pointed question in need of an answer yet to be formulated. A third group was made up of those who believed, along with Paul Evdokimov and Fr Thomas Hopko, that the idea of a special connection between “woman” and the Holy Spirit afforded them both a noble and a sufficient reason to keep women from a ministry that is nevertheless recognized as a gift, a charism of the Spirit.

The Conclusions of the meeting in Rhodes clearly indicate a desire to reconcile the various positions and bear the mark of certain contradictions. The principle of an exclusively male priesthood is maintained, although it is founded no longer on the discredited arguments of women’s inferiority and impurity, but on a somewhat confused typology: in Mary, overshadowed by the Spirit but not ordained to the priesthood, we see the typos, the figure, either strictly of Christian women, or of the Church itself which included both men and women. In fact, the argument that emerges, in connection with the notion of an immutable tradition, is that of liturgical symbolism: “It is said that Christ, as High Priest, presents himself to us necessarily and exclusively in male form. Therefore, the bishop and the priest, who are his iconic representation, must also be male.” At the same time, however, the Conclusions of Rhodes state that any discrimination against women “is completely foreign to the theological and ecclesiological principles of the Orthodox Church.” This declaration is followed by a humble confession that “through weakness and human sinfulness, Christian communities have [historically] been unable to come to terms with concepts and practices that amount to discrimination.” Various proposals were put forth to fight this “sin of sexism”—a term used in the debates—and to foster women’s connection with the work and responsibilities assumed within the Church. Among them figured the revitalization of the female deaconate which had flourished in the age of the Church Fathers—a proposal unanimously hailed. More daring yet was the next suggestion: “Taking into account this new reality of a growing number of theologically educated women, would it not be worth considering a special ecclesiastical act to sanctify the implementation by these women of charismatic and theological abilities in the context of teaching and pastoral service?”¹⁰ The term “ordination” is carefully avoided. But the “special ecclesiastical act” under consideration, and meant to “sanctify” the ministry of “teaching” and “pastoral service” of women who have received such charisms, would seem to bear a close resemblance.

The institutional caution and prophetic boldness of the Rhodes Conclusions, their relative obscurity and occasional flashes of brilliance, seem to me to be indicative of an important event whose scope has yet to be fully grasped: through dramatic historical events, the Orthodox Church has been drawn out of the Byzantine and Slavic cocoon which served for centuries both as a refuge and a prison, and has presently entered—albeit in fits and starts—into the age of modernity (or “post modernity,” the particular term is unimportant!). A new world whose language it must speak if it is to bear witness to the Gospel, and all this without losing its deep, spiritual identity. For “if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltness be restored?” (Lk 14:34).

Such is the awesome, double task of Orthodox theologians, as was already foreseen some 40 years ago by Fr John Meyendorff, one of the catalysts of the “patristic renewal” in Orthodox theology. It requires the gift of discernment. “One of the main problems facing Orthodox theologians today,” wrote Fr John Meyendorff, around 1960, “is being able to distinguish the Holy Tradition of the Church—the adequate expression of God’s Revelation—from the human traditions which only express it imperfectly and very often obscure and oppose it […]. The historical merit of the Christian East is in having left the way wide open for a possible reassessment of its thinking.”¹¹

It is in this perspective of openness—even with a door merely ajar—that the Rhodes Conclusions must be situated. But the road is long and the way is narrow.

Continued in Part II

²Op. cit., p 66.

³Op. cit., p 71.

⁴Op. cit., p 72.

⁵Paul Evdokimov, Woman and the Salvation of the World (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press: Crestwood, NY, 1996…?)

⁶ In the Didachè, an early third-century Greek writing of Syrian origin, it is recommended that the deacon be honored as standing in the place of Christ, the deaconess as standing in that of the Spirit.

⁷Paul Evdokimov, Woman and the Salvation of the World…?

⁸On Agapia, cf. Constance J. Tarasar—Irina Kirillova, “Orthodox Women, their role and participation in the Orthodox Church. Agapia 1976,” Geneva 1977.

⁹On the Consultation in Rhodes, see Contacts no. 146—1989/2 (in French). In English: Gennadios Limouris, Ed., “The Place of the Women in the Orthodox Church and the Question of Ordination of Women. Interorthodox Symposium Rhodes,” Katerini, 1992. My references are taken from the French text revised by Nicolas Lossky, who served as one of the editors.

¹⁰Contacts 146, pp 102-104. Italics ours.

¹¹John Meyendorff, The Orthodox Church (SVS Press…)