This is an update and expansion of an earlier post, in order to address additional pushback and further reader questions.
In correspondence with readers, I am sometimes asked to comment on debates going on in other parts of Christendom. Recently people have talked to me—from both sides of the debate—about women’s ordination in general, and the concept of “dual integrities” in particular.
“Dual integrities” is the official stance of the ACNA (Anglican Church of North America) to describe the present situation of recognizing the validity of female holy orders without compelling particular bishops to ordain women.
So here are my thoughts. The reason that “dual integrities” can never work is because what is at stake is two fundamentally contrary conceptions of the pastoral office, both rooted in competing anthropological metaphysics.
Once you reduce the pastoral office to preaching, teaching, and counseling, then female ordination makes total sense, just like once you reduce marriage to bonding then same-sex relationships makes sense. However, in both cases, the reductionism functions merely as a stopgap toward something else. We saw how the argument that marriage is fundamentally about bonding quickly gave way to same-sex couples demanding that the right to children are integral to their unions, and then using that to mainstream new paradigms of family life (i.e., a specifically “queer approach” to the family). As Dr. Douglas Farrow and others have noted, what was initially conceptualized in merely quantitative terms (i.e., “we just want what to expand the pool of people allowed to marry”) collapsed into a qualitative shift in how marriage and family was understood – again, a specifically “queer” approach to family life. This shift has been more apparent in commonwealth nations but is increasingly coming to define the discourse in the United States as well. Similarly, I would suggest that the notion that the pastoral office is fundamentally about preaching, teaching and counseling is ultimately transitional to new understandings of the pastoral office, including mainstreaming the need for the priestess paradigm – a specifically female approach to the pastoral office that is increasingly present in the Episcopal church and will likely become equally pervasive in the ACNA given sufficient time.
At the present moment this itinerary may seem unthinkable in the ACNA, as female ordination is being conceptualized entirely against the backdrop of an egalitarian anthropology, which offers a gender neutrality quite at odds with the priestess paradigm. But egalitarianism is bad metaphysics and will not survive here any more than it survived the transgender movement. Just as we have entered a stage in the transgender debate where the gender binary has ceased to be problematized but is actually affirmed and required (or else the conceptual template about transitioning collapses), so denominations that ordain women eventually enter a stage where a specifically feminine approach to the priesthood becomes a feature and not a bug. For example, a well-informed friend told me last week that within the Episcopal church, the parishes that advocate female priesthood on egalitarian grounds are the healthiest, as about 50% have now transitioned to the quasi-paganism of the priestess paradigm.
Make no mistake, women do have a unique perspective to bring to church qua women. The question is whether healthy feminine contribution to church life will be strengthened or undermined by tethering it to conceptual shifts in the nature of the pastoral office.
I would actually contend that these conceptual shifts in the doctrine of the pastoral office ultimately reflect shifts in what it means to be a human being. Because Egalitarianism offers an incoherent understanding of humanity (see my earlier article, “Boersma’s Insights on Hierarchy & Modern Authoritarianism“) it may actually make more sense to argue for women’s ordination against the backdrop of a quasi-pagan understanding of the pastoral office rooted in the priestess paradigm. That would be sub-Christian, for sure, but it maintains a coherent anthropology in a way that egalitarianism does not, and it also retains the remnants of a sacramental approach to pastoral office in the way that the flattened revisionist notion (i.e., that the pastoral office is merely about preaching, counseling, and evangelism) does not. Consider that in the priestess paradigm, it could make sense for seminary professors to offer a course on helping their female seminarians learn to model the Blessed Virgin Mary in ministry through and because of their own femininity – an approach that would be quite incongruous when the doctrine of the office remains tethered to an egalitarian anthropology. So at least the priestess approach takes seriously the integration of gender and spirituality, rather than treating gender as something that can be left behind once a person assumes clerical vestments, or as a bit of irrelevant epiphenomena that never informs pastoral ministry.
I said this post is an update from an earlier one. One of the objections I received when I first ran this post is that my comments about the ACNA going on the trajectory of a “priestess” model of the pastoral office is an instance of the slippery slope fallacy.
Ok….so technically, a slippery slope argument involves inferring a succession of events from a preceding one without direct evidence, which is to say there is a lack of epistemic warrant that the events will actually follow. In formal instances of the fallacy, a pattern is inferred on the basis of a single example. Ergo, in the present case, only if we start by assuming that my concerns lack warrant can it be said to be an instance of the slippery slope fallacy. Now, in fact, I was not making an argument at all, but offering a well-informed prediction based on observation of historical and cultural dynamics, much like Edmund Burke was able to predict the reign of terror during the early days of the French Revolution. Moreover, when I predict anything related to shifting cultural dynamics, including those within ecclesial subcultures, this is against the backdrop of a quite complex theory of causation that I have developed elsewhere. By contrast, slippery slope arguments tend to hinge on simplistic notions of historical causality.
My prediction that the ACNA is on a certain trajectory is rooted in an understanding that no matter how much we suppress gender in our vocations—treating it as either irrelevant or a bit of non-essential epiphenomena—it will always take its revenge because gender is basic to our identity as human beings. Women who enter the pastoral ministry under egalitarian notions cannot but hunger to find ways to bring a female-shaped flavor to their work because that is how we were meant to approach vocation. And female ministers should want to model the great female saints, abbesses, nuns, and female mystics whose stories show how to bring their unique insights qua women into the church through their vocations. The egalitarian framework, if really believed, would squelch this feminine ressourcement by treating gender as irrelevant to vocation. On the other hand, once we recognize that a woman’s femininity is a gift to be brought into non-pastoral ministry vocations, then we can dispense with the egalitarianism in which concepts of women’s ordination are ostensibly grounded, and begin having a fruitful conversation about the best form female ministry can take. Then we can ask, do women serve the church best *qua women* as priestesses, or in other vocations they have historically filled (professors, missionaries, artists, evangelists, godmothers, abbesses, parish counsel members, nuns, wives of clergy, even deaconesses in certain times of history)?
Another question that someone texted me in response to the first iteration of this post. “What do you see as the role or ‘nature’ of the pastoral office?” That is certainly beyond the scope of a short blog post to answer, but I will try to sketch some considerations that, were I ever to write a longer treatment of the issue, would be worth developing. The New Testament, and particularly the pastoral epistles, make clear that priests are called to be formed in the likeness of Christ, and to care for those under their care even as Jesus did. Even as the church mediates Christ to the world for the healing of the latter, so priests mediate Christ to the parish for the healing of the men and women in the community. Of course, that involves preaching, teaching, and counseling, but at the center of this mediation is the sacramental role he plays in the Mass, representing Christ when he declares, “This is my body.”
Historically, this healing ministry has been understood to take place against the backdrop of the great chain of being. We see the world organized according to certain hierarchies. Among inanimate objects there are things like rocks that do not grow and lack motion (if rocks are in motion it means something is wrong); there are plants that do grow but lack mobility; there are animals that have mobility but lack reason; and there are humans which possess both mobility and reason. We might keep going up the chain of being through the ranks of angels until we reach God, who is not one point in the chain of being but the ground of the entire chain and thus, as Dionysius reminds us, “beyond being.”
Priests mediate Christ’s healing presence to the world within a particular place in the great chain of being, as represented by this diagram that the Anglican theologian Hans Boersma designed (from his article, “Dionysian Power A Positively Medieval Hierarchy“).
Boersma, of course, gets this from Pseudo-Dionysius. Read his entire article at Touchstone or my summary of it. I share it here because this framework is incompatible with the anti-egalitarian that undergirds shifting concept of the pastoral office within parts of the ACNA, thus underscoring my concern that before we can have a discussion of Holy Orders, we need to have a discussion of metaphysics.
One more thing I’ll say about this, and then I’ll stop. Whenever the value of women is tied to a certain function (i.e., as in any form of the argument “women are so valuable that they should start fulfilling such-and-such a role, and if you deny this, then you are undermining the value and dignity of women“), I get concerned about the presence of incipit misogyny. Here’s how I explained the problem in a Salvo article about women being drafted into combat positions. I think the principles apply to women’s ordination whenever the latter is defended on function-determines-value grounds.
The principles behind the move to allow women into combat roles hinge on some of the same assumptions held by misogynist societies that cruelly subjugate females. Individuals and societies that are abusive towards women typically assume that a woman’s significance is determined by her role. In such contexts, a woman’s value is determined by what she does, not who she is.
Those who believe that women have been victims of the military’s sexist policies also typically assume that a woman’s worth is determined by what she is able to do, as well as by where she is situated in the social strata. According to this mindset, women’s worth has been marginalized by military policies that, until last January, discriminated against would-be female combatants.
But this mindset is just as wrongheaded as that found in misogynist cultures. Whether a woman’s role is characterized by subjugation (as in misogynist societies) or by the lack of any gender-specific boundaries (as in societies tinctured by feminism), it is regarded as the basis for determining her personal worth. Both systems wrongly insist that personal role is correlated to personal worth. Recognizing this fact has led Bible scholar Raymond Orlund to suggest that feminism and male domination are merely two sides of the same coin: “Ironically, feminism shares the very premise upon which male domination is founded, namely, that my personal significance is measured according to my rung on the ladder, and my opportunity for personal fulfillment enlarges or contracts according to my role. By this line of reasoning, the goal of life degenerates into competition for power, and no one hungers and thirsts for true fulfillment in righteousness. No wonder both male domination and feminism are tearing people apart.”
If women are eventually drafted into combat positions, will this be the ultimate triumph of male domination or of feminism? It’s hard to say. But the reason it’s hard to say is that this is one of those topsy-turvy situations in which those who want to protect women from the horrors of battle (and from possible sexual exploitation if they are captured) get accused of being anti-woman.
Ok, let’s move onto another question. One reader asked me about gender complementarianism. The reader wrote, “What is it about Protestant attempts at hierarchy that goes so catastrophically wrong? Evangelical complementarianism is just as much of a disaster as [Douglas] Wilson’s patriarchy.”
In my reply to this reader, I said that I strongly doubted whether complementarianism per se is the problem. Abusus non tollit usum. Where I see things going wrong is when a complementarian anthropology is layered on top of a nominalist metaphysic (nominalism being very strong in Calvinism), with the result that the scriptural commands about men and women become mere authoritarian edicts detached from nature. Such detachment renders the injunctions inherent in “biblical manhood and womanhood” as mere fiat rather than reflective of a primal ontological ordering. Some of Lily Cherney’s work on complementarian addresses this problem. I actually see a similar nominalism occurring in the same-sex relationship debate, with those who seem to be the strongest in holding the ground for Christian orthodoxy (people like Matt Walsh and Rosaria Butterfield) actually succumbing to a biological reductionism that separates the norms and imperatives of our body from any higher ontological ordering, so that form follows function rather than function following form (a problem I address in the second half of this article).
I also got some pushback to my recent Substack article alleging that President Trump and his base have gone woke. In that article I referred to Tucker Carlson as the spiritual leader of the woke right, and I linked to my 2022 article, “Tucker Carlson – Man of the Left.” One reader replied, “Tucker and co genuinely seem interested in the facts.” Here’s part of my response:
Given Carlson’s current wealth, influence, and independence from established media, he is in a position to pay researchers to find out genuinely interesting things that he can then talk about in his programs. This means that he routinely puts out genuinely helpful information that many people might never find out about if it were not for him. But in itself that doesn’t imply that Carlson isn’t fundamentally an ideologue or “simple” in the language of Proverbs, or even a fake reporter. It’s interesting that in a 2020 defamation lawsuit against Tucker brought by Karen McDougal, Fox News lawyers argued that Carlson’s statements couldn’t be taken as factual reporting. Summarizing the arguments of Carlson’s lawyers, the judge declared that the “‘general tenor’ of the show should then inform a viewer that [Carlson] is not ‘stating actual facts’ about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in ‘exaggeration’ and ‘non-literal commentary.’” In other words, Carlson should not be held to the standard of journalistic ethics because he’s not a real journalist! That would be like saying a gossip shouldn’t feel bad spreading wild rumors at a family reunion because it’s social entertainment rather than real betrayal, or that a magician shouldn’t be blamed for breaking someone’s watch during a trick because it’s theatrical flair rather than real theft. Those may seem like extreme examples, but Fox News essentially used the same argument, suggesting that Tucker Carlson shouldn’t be measured against the standards of journalistic integrity because he’s a propogandist not a real journalist. By contrast, reporters for CNN have been sacked for factual errors that seem comparatively minor compared to Tucker’s misrepresentations (I discussed that in my video about Fake News).
I appreciate that Tucker has supposedly taken a shift since he left Fox. Many people have told me he has become more thoughtful since he struck out on his own. But my challenge would be this: do people come away from watching his programs with more or less of the epistemic virtues – character traits such as fair-mindedness, metacognition, intellectual humility, even-handedness, reflectiveness, prudence, tolerance for ambiguity, non-dismissive consideration of arguments, charitable interpretation of opposing arguments, slowness when analyzing information, attentiveness, patience, cognitive empathy, low perception gaps, etc.?
Finally, a reader chastised me about my article on Alexander Dugin alleging “it was very sloppy scholarship. It made me ashamed frankly that you would turn out such an article.” Let me be clear that I was not attempting to offer a point-by-point critique of Dugin’s The Fourth Political Theory, nor to enter into the scholarship surrounding Dugin studies. Rather, I was sharing some on-the-ground reporting to undermine (or at least, to seriously question) the popular narrative that Putin and Dugin have been working in close collaboration. I also attempted to offer some big picture concerns about why the ressourcement of Heidegger for a post-liberal order is a dead-end. If those who were ashamed of me for writing such an article would like to provide critical feedback and counter-argumentation, I welcome that.