Sacramental Sexuality
and the Ordination of Women
Father Donald J. Keefe, S.J.
In a paper presented at an ITEST conference held at Fordyce House
two years ago, a theology of sexuality was sketched as a basis
for the consideration of the moral questions posed by the
fertilization “in vitro” of human ova. Such a theology could not
but carry over into other fields of considers e ecumenical
concern. A contemporary focal point for that concern is the much
discussed issue of the ordination of women. If the further
development of that theology in the present essay is to be kept
within reasonable bounds, it must be understood to require as its
preface the Proceedings of the October, 1974 ITEST Conference,
and particularly the article in which its scriptural ground, or
perhaps support, was proposed.(1) Even so, the sum of the present
article cannot amount to more than an introduction to the
questions which such ordination raises and a pointer to the
direction in which their solution lies.
In broadest outline, that earlier paper tied the transvaluation
of cosmic or nonhistorical sexual symbolism,(2) e.g., that of the
Babylonian mythology, to a conversion to the worship of the Lord
of history, a worship which is integral with faith in the
fundamental goodness of creation. More precisely, such faith
causes or is constituted by this transvaluation. The cosmic
religions expressed their ambivalent experience of the universe
in terms of an ambivalent relation between the sexes, a relation
whose liturgical expression variously required priests who were
kingly, and priests who were castrate; virgin guardians of the
temple, and temple prostitutes. The metaphysical expression of
this experience oscillated between a dualist alienation of the
principles of transcendence and immanence, and their monist
identifications.(3) Its supreme poetic integration is the
tragedy,(4) in which human futility and human dignity are found
implacably and eternally opposed.
That cosmic ambivalence found the feminine principle, in all its
manifestations, irreconciliable with that of masculinity; the
exaltation of the one is inevitably the suppression of the other.
Human existence thus experienced and a cosmos thus structured
cannot be called good; their salvation must come from their
dissolution, from the elimination of those antagonisms which are
encountered universally.(5) The experience of all qualification
of reality and of all differentiation as injustice, as strife and
pain puts limits upon what salvation can mean. From this cosmic
point of view, the escape from evil, from the fallenness of
things, is by deliverance from all qualitative differentiation.
The religious, and later the theoretical, explorations of this
salvation found that two modalities were possible to it: the
masculine one of absolute transcendence, the transcendence of an
unqualified self, and the feminine one of an absolute immanence,
the immanence of the absolute community. In either mode an utter
serenity, an unqualified consciousness is attained; the past is
concluded and the future foregone in an intuition of the real
which refuses value to whatever is resistant to undifferentiated
unity. This vision has been competitive with Christianity from
its beginnings, and continues to be in our own day.(6)
The faith of the covenanted people of Yahweh in the goodness of
historical creation, in the goodness of the covenanted history of
Israel, was simultaneously a refusal to accept the cosmic
conflict between transcendence and immanence, between God and his
creation. This faith was identical with an experience of order in
history under Yahweh’s lordship. Within this covenant experience
evil was not encountered as a blind inevitability in the
universe; rather it was experienced as the result of a free
refusal of Yahweh’s good creation. Such a refusal could not avoid
a return to the cosmic religion, lived out in a pagan use of
sexual symbols. No longer expressive of the good creation, such a
use was seen as unholy, as whoring and fornication, and at the
same time as idolatry. The prophetic condemnation of this
infidelity to Yahweh condemns it as adultery, for Yahweh is
understood to be in a marital relation to his people, to the good
creation formed by his continual presence to it as the Lord of
history. By this marital presence, which knows no primal
ambivalence, Yahweh affirms the immanent good of his creation in
a word which the New Testament knows to have been irrevocably
given and uttered into the good creation.(7) That word is his
covenant, the definitive institution of a free people whose
freedom is their history, their worship of the Lord of history.
In this worship they are delivered from slavery to the cosmic
powers through the continual offer of a future which transcends
their past, and in which they can be sustained by him alone. His
word is not uttered in vain; it evokes the created response which
is wisdom, the splendor and fulness of his creation. This
response the Old Testament recognizes to be feminine; by this
insight the cosmic notion of the feminine is transvalued, and the
new realization enters, through the appropriation process which
is the worship of Yahweh, into the reassessment of the marital
relation itself.
This process is impeded by the fallenness of the covenanted
people, who hesitated then as now before the demands of
historical existence. Their fallenness is portrayed in the
prophets by the imagery of a woman unfaithful to her marriage
vows who turns away from Yahweh, the giver of life, toward
sterility and death. But the prophetic protest against Israel’s
and Judah’s sin, however concerned with the threat of divorce and
abandonment by Yahweh, concludes in the later books with the
assurance of his forgiveness and the final consummation of
Yahweh’s covenant with his bridal people. Out of this struggle
emerged a consciousness of the strict connection between the good
creation, the covenant, and the marital relation: all of these
involve the same conversion, the same transvaluation, the same
historical existence, the same faith.
Thus baldly summarized, the Old Testament symbolism announces a
reversal of the pagan assessment of the masculine-feminine
polarity: that polarity is now the structure of the creation
which is good, and the bisexuality which once signalized the
ambivalence of the finite world becomes the symbol of the
reciprocity of God’s love for the people he has made his own, and
their love for him. As this is seen to be the meaning of the
holy, so also the marital relation is transformed, to become a
religious sign and realization of the covenant which grounds
it.(8) In this transformation, the world ceases to be an
ambivalent reflection of masculine value and feminine disvalue;
that ancient antagonism is concluded. The masculine henceforth is
so by a creative and life-giving love, not by isolation from or
supression of a destructive femininity, while the feminine is so
by her mediation of that love, not by subordination to an alien
power. Nor is this symbolism dispensable, as peripheral to
Judaism, for it is integral to the revelation itself; Yahweh is
known only in his election of his people, and that elective love
is marital.(9)
This Old Testament use of marital symbolism is given its highest
development in the Pauline letters, particularly in Ephesians,
whose marital doctrine is rooted in Gen 2:24, “Therefore a man
leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and
they become one Flesh.”(10) In this letter Paul integrates the
First and Second Adam theme of Rom 5 and 1 Cor 15, the Church as
Body theme of 1 Cor 15, the tangled intimation of the sexual
bipolarity of the human image of God which we find in I Cor 7 and
11, and the passing reference in 2 Cor 11 to the Church as the
Bride of Christ in an unexplored comparison to Eve. His struggle
to express the truth he had received culminates in a contrapuntal
theology of the New Creation, the New Man and the New Bride whose
Head purifies her by the sacrifice of his body and blood, by
which sacrifice he is “one flesh” with his body.(11) In this New
Creation Christ is the incarnate image of the unseen God; the
letter to the Colossians puts him at the center of the universe
and of humanity. But he is thus Image and Creator as Head of the
Church, his Bride; he is Image as sacrifice, as priest, as the
second Adam to her whom the patristic reflection designated the
second Eve. By this bipolarity Christ is incarnate, and Image.
Luke adds a further modulation to this marital symbolism, in the
parallel accounts of the descent of the Spirit upon Mary, whereby
she becomes the “Theotokos,” and upon the apostles at Pentecost,
where, in what may have been a celebration of the New Covenant, a
commemoration of the body and blood of the sacrifice, the Church
comes to be.(12) The patristic meditation upon the interrelation
of these themes has found in Mary’s virginal motherhood of our
Lord the antitype of the Head-Body relation which constitutes the
Church: it is by Christ’s mission from the Father that his Spirit
inspires at once the freedom of Mary’s “Fiat” and the New
Creation within her body, a child whose masculinity was conceived
by her immaculate response to God’s elective love.(13) By Mary’s
free worship, the New Covenant is given, and the New Israel is
formed, in and to whom God is definitively present, because made
man. The masculine-feminine dialectic is identical in Acts: the
descent of the Spirit of Christ creates the Church in a moment of
ecstatic freedom whose prius is the Eucharistic immanence of the
risen Christ. The “one flesh” of Mary’s conception of her Lord is
identically the “one flesh” of the Church’s celebration of her
Head, the sacramental consummation of the New Covenant which she,
in the integral freedom of her worship, conceived.
The theological development of these themes has found in Gen 2:24
the summary of the New Creation, the New Covenant, the New Adam
and the New Eve, “Una Caro.”(14) There also, inchoate, is the
charter of all Christian sacramentalism, the revelation that
God’s creative freedom is most powerfully exercised in the
creation of our own free response to him, a creation in and of
the Church by the presence in it of His Son. This sacramental
structure of reality, of the good creation which is created in
Christ, is the warrant for Christian freedom and the basis for
Christian morality: it provides the meaning and the significance
of human life and history. This meaning, this value and truth, is
not abstract, not a matter submitted to the judgment of
scholarship and theory. It is a gift, not a necessity of thought,
and it is given concretely in the life of worship which is our
existence in Christ., our communion in the ‘one flesh’ of his
union with his Church.
Within the communion of Roman Catholicism, ordination has
traditionally been reserved to men. This reservation was first
put in question within the less tradition-oriented Protestant
communions; the question is now raised by Catholic theologians.
Because the sacramental principle is so integral with the Church,
any theological discussion of it is inevitably also an
ecclesiology. Disputes over the ordination of women tend to
become disputes over the nature of the Church, and thus to range
beyond the limits of the initial subject matter. In fact, the
ordination of women is often advocated as the implication of a
more fundamental argument.
A most instructive development of the ecclesiological and
sacramental theology which is found consistent with the
ordination of women has been presented in a recent article by
Edward Kilmartin.(15) Kilmartin has been teaching and writing in
this field for some twenty years; his theological credentials are
of a very high order. It may not be too much to say that no more
cogent statement of the theses underlying the advocacy of women’s
ordination is available in English.
The basic concern of Kilmartin’s article is the inadequacy of the
“ex opere operato” doctrine of the Eucharistic worship. He finds
this device employed in such a fashion as to disintegrate the
organic unity of Eucharistic worship; specifically, it reduces
the role of the laity in the congregation to mere passivity while
reserving to the consecrating priest the substance of the
worship. By way of corrective, Kilmartin examines the meaning of
the Church’s apostolicity, and concludes that this meaning is to
be derived from the fundamental mode of the immanence of the
Risen Christ in the Eucharistic community. Kilmartin understands
this fundamental presence of Christ to be a presence by faith.
This faith is of course caused by the gift of the Spirit, a gift
given by the risen Christ. The Spirit inspired in the apostles
that faith which is the faith of the Church; the Church is made
to be Church by this faith, the first effect of the presence of
the Spirit. The faith of the apostles is then a secondary
consequence; Kilmartin understands them to be dependent upon the
prior faith of the Church. Their apostolic office’ is
consequently a participation in the power of the Spirit only as
this power is mediated to them by the Church: they participate
only indirectly in the priesthood of Christ, as do all other
Christians. Thus understood, apostolicity is not a ‘character’ or
an ‘office’ or a ‘power’ distinct from the one gift of the
Spirit, mediated by the Church, which is faith.
There is no question then of an ontological reality passed on
from the apostles to their successors by the sacrament of orders
in such wise that any bearer of the apostolic character is
dependent for that character upon a line of direct succession by
ordination from one of the apostles upon whom that office first
rested, whether by the descent of the Spirit at Pentecost, or by
a mission from the risen Christ. Rather, office in the Church is
understood now to be a function delegated to an office holder by
the local Church in which apostolicity primarily resides. This
view of office as functional rather than as ontological removes
from it any intrinsic characteristic which the Church must
consider as visibly and historically constitutive for Eucharistic
worship and thus for the Church itself. Instead it is the
Church’s faith, seen as a spiritual “anamnesis” of the sacrifice
of the Cross, which is constitutive for the worship as for the
Church; absent this “anamnesis”-faith, there is no Eucharist, no
Body of Christ, no presence of Christ, no Church. If the
“anamnesis” is given, no particular ordination ritual may be
insisted upon as necessary for the Eucharist, for Eucharistic
presence is by faith, not by an “ex opere operato” effective
consecration by a priest of the bread and wine of the sacrifice.
The radical consequence of this theology is that the Church is
not caused by the sacramental-historical event of Christ’s
sacrificial relation to the Church in and by which he is
sacramentally present as at once priest and sacrifice. Rather,
the Church is caused, created, by the presence of the Spirit sent
by the risen Christ, who is ‘not here.’ The ontological
Eucharistic presence is identified with faith.
Kilmartin draws a number of conclusions from this notion of
apostolicity; they are those already familiar to the Christianity
of the Reformation. They are (1) Priestly character can no longer
be considered the power to consecrate, for the functional nature
of the priesthood excludes such a power; (2) Apostolic office is
required, not for the Church’s liturgy, nor because the power of
orders makes the priest the direct representative of Christ,
“alter Christus,” but because the priest must be linked
historically to an office instituted by Christ for stewardship
over the faith; (3) The role of the priest in the Eucharistic
liturgy is the ritual expression of the faith of the Church;
apart from this faith there is no Eucharist; (4) There can be no
ordination except to a function in a local Church; all absolute
ordination to the Church at large is excluded; (5) The priest
cannot distribute the fruits of the Mass, because he is not an
“alter Christus”; (6) Protestant Eucharists cannot be judged
invalid for failure of valid orders; they must be judged only in
terms of the relation they signify and symbolize between “the
comprehensive ecclesial reality” and the Eucharist; (7) There can
be no basic objection to the ordination of women, since priests
represent directly not the Christ but the one Church which,
according to Gal 3:28, transcends all masculine-feminine
distinction; (8) The pope is not the vicar of Christ in the sense
of effectively playing the role of Christ.
The logic of Kilmartin’s reasoning is unassailable; once the
original concession is made, the conclusions he arrives at are
inevitable, as are others which he does not pursue. When the
presence of the risen Christ to the Church, by which the Church
is created, is understood to be a presence by faith, there is in
view an ecclesiology completely different from that which
understands the Church to subsist and be caused by the immanence
in her of the risen Lord as the unfailing consequence of her
visible and historical worship. In the technical language of
classical sacramental theology, Kilmartin’s theory denies the
infallible efficacy of the sacramental sign (“sacramentum
tantum”) and as a necessary consequence denies the infallible
effect (“res et sacramentum”) of that sign. All saving efficacy
of the Cross is now detached from any free human activity save
that of Jesus on the Cross, and even the efficacy of the Cross is
no longer referred to any contemporary historical event or
structure. The Christian’s worship is now reduced to an absolute
simplicity: that “anamnesis” of the Cross which is without any
identifying characteristics which might distinguish it from
non-worship. The refusal of the “ex opere operato” efficacy of
the sacramental sign (i.e., the denial of the distinct reality of
the “res et sacramentum,” whether the baptismal or priestly
character, the event of absolution, the sacrifice of the Mass as
the re-presentation of the Cross — in brief the denial of the
reliable historicity of Christian worship) rejects the intrinsic
value of all human and historical reality. Any alternative
inevitably tends toward a vainglorious theology of the Church
triumphal, a theology which does not understand how the
significance of the Cross must include the denial of our own
significance.(16)
For Kilmartin then,, the reformation of Catholic Eucharistic
worship requires its being telescoped: the sacramental sign
(“sacramentum tantum”) is dispensable because without any
intrinsic significance and without any spiritual and creative
efficacy; it then follows that there is no sacramental effect of
such a sign, an effect which itself signifies and causes union
with Christ but is not itself that union (i.e., no “res et
sacramentum”). All that remains is the Cross of Christ and the
salvation which it causes. Christ’s deed empties human history of
meaning, instead of filling it with meaning; His deed is
discontinuous with all of ours in this life, doomed as our lives
are to complete inefficacy, for without him we can do nothing,
and he is not here but in his Kingdom, the only “res sacramenti.”
The denial of the good creation which this theology entails is
obvious. We should not then be surprised that attached to it is
the refusal of the marital symbolism by which the Old Testament
and the New have known and uttered the goodness of creation.
The union of the faithful with Christ can no longer be understood
in Kilmartin’s theology as the union of the Head and the Body,
for such a comprehension, native to the classical theology, rests
upon the supposition that marriage is a sacrament, a historical
sign of worship whose unfailing effect, the marriage bond (“res
et sacramentum”), is a sign of the greater mystery to which it
can only point, the union of the faithful in Christ. That the
marriage bond, with its exclusivity, its indissolubility, its
sexual bipolarity, is a sacrament means at a minimum that Christ
is to his Body as bridegroom to bride. The classical theology
reinforces this relation by its insistence upon the historical
immanence of the sacrifice of Christ in the historical Church.
The marital dialectic of the Eucharistic ‘one flesh’ is
eliminated with the elimination of all concrete presence of the
sacrificed and sacrificing Christ to his Body, to the Bride for
whom the sacrifice is offered and by which she is created through
the gift to her, in her history, of the Spirit. That dialectic
falls within the condemnation of “ex opere operato” historical
efficacity of all sacramental signs, whether marital or
Eucharistic. Head and Body are now blended in a unity
transcending all masculinity and femininity (we are referred to
Gal 3:28), a unity which must become a logical identity as soon
as the inability of any historical and intrinsically
differentiated symbol to signify it sacramentally is seriously
accepted. Of this Christ-faithful union the most complete union
fallen humanity knows has nothing to say, being utterly
transcended by it. Sacramental signs have been reduced to a
pragmatic gesturing, of some social and psychological value, but
without any intrinsic relation to our salvation, for that faith
has no historical expression which may be relied upon. This
isolation of ritual from any significance, from any efficacy, is
the hallmark of the decadent scholasticism of the 14th and 15th
century; its rejection of all secondary causality prepared the
way for the ‘total corruption’ pessimism of the Reformation: the
road is a well-travelled one.
As Kilmartin observes, his ecclesiology requires that the one
Church “transcend all masculine-feminine distinction.” Once the
sacrifice of the Mass is dismissed by the reduction of the
presence of Christ in the Church to a presence by faith, all
concrete qualification of historical human existence loses
religious value, because every such qualification stands in
contradiction to the ineffable “Una Sancta,” the Church which has
no immanence in the historical humanity it utterly transcends:
absent the Head, absent also the Body. The antihistorical cosmic
salvation is restored, again androgynous, the nullification
rather than the fulfillment of creation in the Image of God.(17)
Such an ecciesiology makes of the Christ an “Uebermensch” whose
transcendence is rationalized; no longer in mysterious union with
his immanence, his transcendence is controlled by an inexorable a
priori logic which forbids such immanence. His unique sacrifice
submits to the same logic, to become the nullification rather
than the sustenance and support of our historical significance,
our worship. Once the proposition is accepted that the sacrifice
of Jesus the Christ on the Cross admits no representation in the
Mass, this cosmic nullification of history is already in effect.
The event of the Cross then has the mythic quality of an event
“in illo tempore,” a moment entirely discontinuous with our
fallen futility.
Whether such a theology as Kilmartin has offered is always and
everywhere satisfactory to those who advocate the ordination of
women may be doubted; certainly some would consider their
ordination consistent with the traditional notion of the
priesthood. But it is upon notions such as his that most
systematic justifications for the ordination of women rest;(18)
at a minimum they play down the sacrificial aspect of the
priestly office as the corollary of the contention that the
priestly role is not that of an “alter Christus,” and therefore
not limited to men. Rather, the priest should be understood as
“alter ecclesia,” as Kilmartin has suggested; sometimes one hears
“alter Spiritus.” With whatever accent the redesignation is
proposed, the meaning of the Catholic worship is transformed: the
Mass, the Eucharistic celebration becomes a faith-response to the
Event “in illo tempore” which voids history of significance, the
event of the Cross. The response which is fit is thereby
problematic, for it can be annexed to no effective sign: the new
notion of worship cannot permit sacramental efficacy. We begin to
hear again echoes of the late medieval dissolution of all
experienced meaning by means of logical analysis, a dissolution
which so separated the elements of reality as to deprive the
created world of immanent value as of transcendent significance,
and so of mediation of God. Upon this we cannot delay, save to
observe that the decision to reduce all worship to faith can rest
only upon a reduction of all human life in history to
insignificance. If this be the remedy for such exaggerations as
have been foisted upon the sacramental worship of Roman
Catholicism, one cannot but wonder at the diagnosis.
That Kilmartin does not push the logic of his reworking of the
Eucharist to its cosmic extremity is clear enough; neither did
the “sanior pars” of the Reformation, but the objections to such
extrapolation are themselves irrational, as the Calvinists
pointed out to the Lutherans, and the sacramentarians to the
Calvinists. When theology does not find its unity in the
historical tradition of the Church, by which the revelation is
mediated, that unity will be found in the ideal immediacy of
God.(19) Only the former position is Catholic; the latter is
cosmic, founded upon the logical isolation of God from man which,
in default of the historical revelation, is understood to be
ontological as well. Between the Catholic and the cosmic there is
no bargaining space. When it is urged that the theological
principle which travels under the tag of “ex opere operato” has
served only to corrupt the Eucharistic worship of the Church, the
appropriate therapy would appear to be the renewal of the primacy
of the reality which is to be understood over the speculative
devices by which theologians have managed to misunderstand it.
One cannot reasonably abandon the ecclesial tradition because it
has been misunderstood by theologians or liturgists; to do so is
to make the same mistake against which the original complaint had
been lodged. It is really not possible to restore the true
function of the lay congregation in the Eucharist by unfrocking
the priest if the reason for so doing is that his performance is
a nullity in any event: what is left to be presided over? Are
women then to be ordained on the grounds that they are no more
futile than men?
The most immediately appealing objection to the restriction of
orders to men is that it is unjust, that it entails a religious
subjugation of women, and their ontological subordination: in
brief, that this practice, however time-honored, amounts to an
indignity. The charge is a serious one, but its correctness is
not self-evident, except on grounds of a cosmic egalitarianism.
These have been found wanting, not applicable to the human
reality; the good creation by whose goodness justice is given its
Christian meaning, is a rejection of the egalitarian cosmos in
which all differentiation is accounted unjust.(20) If we are to
take the charge of injustice with that seriousness which it
merits, we must place it in a Christian frame of reference, that
of the Eucharistic celebration.
This is the celebration of the definitive presence of the Lord of
history in his people, the liturgical promulgation of the Good
News of the definitively Good Creation whose goodness is by the
Trinitarian mission of the Son and the Spirit into the world.
This sending of the Son by the Father, and the Spirit by the
Father and the Son, is not distinct from the creation of the
world. If we are truly to understand what it is we celebrate, it
is necessary to rid our imaginations of the exaggerated reading
of Anselm which later theology accepted in the distinction
between a “natural” creation by the One God, and a subsequent
Trinitarian presence in the world simply “propter peccatum.”(21)
The mistake of this theology was that it made the Incarnation of
the Son merely incidental to the world of man and to his history,
and reduced the role of the Spirit to one of repair, rather than
admit the creativity the liturgy has affirmed of Him. But the
Christocentric theology which began with Scotus finds it
impossible to maintain the distinction which Thomas accepted
between a natural creation “ad imaginem,” and a supernatural
“recreatio”: the Creator and the Christ are one God: as
incarnate, Christ is also his Image, the adequate utterance into
creation of the truth of God. This truth is not information about
an abstract deity, but the truth of God’s relation to his
creation. This truth is the revelation, concretely uttered into
the world at the moment of Mary’s acceptance. But truth and
reality cannot be distinguished: if the truth of creation is
concrete in the Christ, so also is the reality of creation: His
lordship, His revelation and his creation are the some, his
headship and his imaging.
The good creation which is actual in Christ is not then to be
thought of as an object or thing “placed outside its causes” as
an older theology expressed it in quite nominalist terms. The
victory of Christocentrism is required by the doctrine of Mary’s
Immaculate Conception, in which Christ’s grace is understood to
be effective in history prior to the Incarnation, and effective
precisely as creative. His Lordship transcends all time, and all
time is meaningful, historical time only by that Lordship,
through which its discrete moments are unified and valorized. His
lordship is similarly transcendent to space, making it a world;
to humanity, making it the people, the Church; in all its
exercise, his transcendence is effective by his immanence. He is
the creator-redeemer, present in his creation as Image, by a
communication which is “ex nihilo,” without any antecedent
possibility. His presence is so total as to be in personal
identity with himself, not the suppression of any human being by
its subordination to his divinity, but the constitution of his
own humanity in the evocation of the integrally free affirmation
of it in that acme of worship which is Mary’s conception of her
Lord. Her affirmation is constitutive for his imaging; precisely,
it is the constitution of his masculinity, which was not imposed
upon her, but conceived by her in untrammelled freedom as the
total expression of the perfection of her worship, as her
femininity is that in which the Good creation worships, the
wisdom and loveliness by which it glorifies God in the joyful
celebration of the presence of the Lord.
It is this dialectic within creation, now a fallen creation, that
Ephesians 5:22ff describes. Christ’s lordship, his presence in
creation, is his submission to sin and death, and the sacrifice
of the Cross, at once the triumphant vindication of his creative
mission from the Father, of his obedience and of his Lordship,
and the pouring out of his Spirit upon his Bride, the second Eve,
the Church itself, “societas qua inhereamus Deo,” caused by the
offering of his body and his blood. As Mary is intelligible only
within the masculine-feminine polarity by which she is
“theotokos,” the Church is intelligible only through the polarity
by which she is “Sponsa Christi,” continually redeemed by his
sacrifice, continually rejoicing in, celebrating the Good News of
the Good Creation which is in his Image. The reality of his
presence is her food and drink, her daily bread. As Christ is the
Christ by his total self-giving, the Church is Church by her
response to the gift, the worship by which she mediates the more
abundant life he died to give us. In this mediation, the
distribution of the bread of life, she is the second Eve, taken
from the side of Jesus on the Cross, the second Adam. It is as
priest and as sacrifice that Christ is present to the Church; it
is by his sacrifice that the Church is designated the Body of
which he is the Head. The Eucharistic Body which the Church
distributes and by which it lives is the one flesh of her union
with her Lord. If we admit the historicity of this union, we must
admit the historicity of its polar elements, and recognize with
Paul that it is in this union that the full value of human
sexuality is to be found; this is what the sacramentality of
marriage means. Nothing in the relation between Christ and the
Church is unjust, for both exist by their total affirmation of
the other; in this mutuality the Good Creation is actual in its
imaging of God.
Does the Eucharistic worship in which this relation is concrete
require the altereity between Church and alter Christus which the
classical view of apostolicity supposes to be essential to the
Eucharist? Does it require a sacramental representative of the
Head, in order that his sacrifice be sacramentally offered, and
his,Body sanctified by communion in one flesh with him? The
affirmative response which the sacrificial and event-character of
the Eucharist requires does not at first glance force the
conclusion that women should not be ordained, however much it may
suggest it. If Christ’s masculinity is inseparable from his
relation to the Church, it is evidently appropriate that the
priest who stands in his place in the Eucharistic celebration
should be male. But is it necessary? Does masculinity enter into
the very sign-value of the Eucharistic consecration, of the words
of institution, by which the sacrifice of the Cross is
re-presented? To assert such an integration of masculinity with
the priesthood is to assert also that human sexuality, masculine
or feminine, is integral with the personal existence in Christ
which is personal participation in the Church’s worship. This
integration is the fundamental assertion of Eph 5:21-33, an
assertion not in tension with that of Gal 3:28.(22) The latter
speaks of the full equality of all human beings in Christ; to
construe this as removing all religious significance from
masculinity and femininity is to presuppose that our unity in
Christ is unqualified, undifferentiated, which Paul notoriously
denies. Whatever heretofore undiscovered meanings exegesis may
find in Gal 3:28, Paul’s enlistment in unisex will not be among
them. But it is in the Letter to the Ephesians that the
sacramentality of our sexual bipolarity is assured, by the
discovery of the meaning and significance of sexual love in the
relation between Christ and his Church. This Pauline
understanding of marriage is grounded in the ‘one flesh’ of Gen
2:24;(23) it does not at all depend upon the sentence passed on
the fallen Eve. For Paul, the full meaning of Gen 2:24 is found
in the relation of Christ to his Church; in this relation,
marriage has its ground, as from it masculinity and femininity
draw their value and significance. These are indispensable to the
New Testament as to the Old, to the good creation in the image of
God, and to the New Creation in Christ.
The citation of Gen 2:24 in Ephesians 5:31 establishes the
continuity of Paul’s theology of marriage with that of the Old
Testament, wherein it was seen to be holy with that holiness
which belongs to the unfallen condition of humanity: sexual
bipolarity belongs to the Good Creation.(24) Paul merely takes
this insight and adapts it to the New Creation in Christ: the
relation of Christ, the Head, to his Body which is the Church
reflects the Old Testament covenantal relation between Yahweh and
his people. What was there implicit is now explicit: the meaning
of marriage, in which the truth of sexuality is given its
concrete and historical expression, is a matter of mystery, to be
discovered in its wellspring, the mutuality of Christ and the
Church, in which the full meaning of masculinity and femininity
is given, and given in the Revelation whose truth is
appropriated, not by human cleverness, but only in worship. Only
thus is its mystery respected, and the full significance of human
sexuality realized into history.
Paul has no difficulty in expressing the sacrificial nucleus of
Christ’s marital relation to his Body, the Bridal Church. He has
no difficulty in asserting the full equality of husband and wife;
they are to be mutually submissive, each seeking the good of the
other, without any ontological superiority on either side. Nor is
there much difficulty today in seeing that the covenantal
relation which must govern the Church’s bridal response to the
Christ is also the norm for the wife in marriage; her virtue,
like her husband’s, is covenant virtue. Our whole problem lies in
language, in finding words responsive to the truth of the marital
relation thus derived. All our language is tainted by its cosmic
origins, and by our penchant for rationalization. Paul’s language
can be understood only when one keeps firmly in mind that its
meaning is governed not by ordinary usage or by ordinary common
sense; these are not in service of the revelation which he
serves. Paul’s use of such antagonistic words as fear, submission
and the like, to describe the appropriate reaction of the
Christian wife to her husband is entirely misunderstood when it
is forgotten that we do not know what this language means in any
adequate sense.(25) We do know that Paul is neither a dualist nor
a monistic egalitarian; he insists at once upon the full
equality, the full human dignity, of both sexes, and also insists
upon their difference and irreducibility. This is simply
incomprehensible to our ordinary and quite pagan way of thinking,
as the history of theology shows quite plainly. There is no room
here for an examination of the history in the Old and New
Testaments of Paul’s language; it is evident enough that such
words are used in relation to the old Israel and the New without
any consequent demonization of Yahweh or of his Messiah, although
this use involved a complete reassessment of their meaning. One
may then assert the real difference in the masculine and the
feminine modes of worship in the Church without placing a greater
ontological value in one than in the other; only in a cosmic
religious context does qualitative differentiation imply
indignity.
Nor is this qualitative differentiation between man and woman of
only occasional significance; it characterizes our creation and
our existence. It is not simply by a violation of the marriage
bond that one profanes the sacramental significance of one’s
sexuality, but by whatever expression of sexuality that
contravenes the meaning which is revealed in Christ’s relation to
the Church, and the Church’s reciprocal relation to Christ. This
is the foundation of Paul’s condemnations of promiscuity; it
underlies
the “Pauline privilege” as well. We are members of the
Body as masculine or as feminine, not as members of a
qualitatively indifferent fellowship; there is no aspect of our
worship, or of our existence “in Christ” which is neuter, in
which our sexuality is without significance and sacramentality.
If it be true that masculinity and femininity are thus
sacramental, and that all human existence is engaged in this
signing, it must follow that the only paradigms by which the
mystery, the meaning, of masculinity and femininity may be
approached are those provided by the marital relation between
Christ and his Church, between the Head and the Body, a polarity
intrinsic to the New Covenant, to the New Creation, to the
imaging of God. The appropriation of this sacramental truth is
identical to the worship of the Church, for in and by this
worship the Good News which is preached and celebrated is no more
or less than the truth of humanity which is revealed in Christ.
No one can enter into this worship except as a man or as a woman,
as the bearer of an existential meaning which is holy, and whose
affirmation is inseparable from one’s prayer. The content of this
affirmation is the self, which is uttered, not to a neutral and
merely reciprocal Thou, but to another mystery by whom one’s own
is itself affirmed in an utterance which is not repetitive but
responsive to oneself. In this mutuality, that of the Covenant,
the meaning of masculinity is complete in Christ’s sacrificial
relation to the Church, and the sacramentality of every masculine
existence is tested by its conformity to that model. The meaning
of femininity is complete in the Church, and the sacramental
truth of all feminine existence and worship is tested by its
conformity to that model. There has been very little attention
paid to the historical content of this sacramentality, even in
Catholic theology, and it is evidently not possible to make up
for that neglect by any less strenuous device than a thorough
re-examination of the entirety of the Catholic tradition:
scriptural, patristic, liturgical, and also cultural. But short
of that endeavor, we are not entirely ignorant, not entirely
controlled by stereotypes. The Catholic insistence upon the
sacramentality of masculinity and femininity rests upon the
Catholic faith in the historical actuality of the Head-Body
relation of the sacrificing and sacrificed Christ to the Church
in the event of the Eucharistic worship. If this sacrificial
Head-Body relation is not actual in the here and now of our
worship, then the marital relation has nothing to signify, and
sexuality becomes religiously unimportant, deprived of
sacramentality, as all our worship is deprived. Reduced to faith,
no expression of our worship has any intrinsic historical
importance, and no problem exists with regard to the ordination
of women, or indeed with regard to anything else, insofar as
intrinsic structure and value are concerned. Much of contemporary
moral theology is already embarked upon this path. But if we
reject this nihilism, admit the transcendent importance of being
a man or a woman, then the other consequences of sacramental
realism “ex opere operato” also follow; they are in brief the
negatives of those which Kilmartin s drawn and to which we have
already referred. Particularly, the sacramentality of feminine
existence and worship is that of the historical Church, “alter
ecclesia,” which cannot be identified with or assimilated to the
worship of the consecrating and sacrificing priest, “alter
Christus,” in the Eucharistic celebration; the alternative is
that merger of Christ and his Church which would make of them one
nature, “mia physis.” But between this monophysitism and the “una
caro” of the marital symbolism which celebrates rather than
supresses the dignity of sexuality, there is all the difference
which separates the Judaeo-Christian faith in the goodness of the
historical creation from all its counterfeits and from their
devaluation of the humanity which God made in his image, as of
the history through which the good creation is redeemed. Many
voices now urge this devaluation, not least those advocating the
ordination of women to the priesthood. If as seems to be the
case, such a devaluation of human sexuality and human history is
integral to that advocacy, it must follow that such ordination
cannot take place within the Catholic Church.
FOOTNOTES
1. D. Keefe, “Biblical Symbolism and the Morality of “in vitro”
Fertilization,” Proceedings, ITEST Conference on Fabricated Man,
Oct., 1974; reprinted in “Theology Digest” (Winter, 1974)
308-323.
2. M. Barth, “Ephesians: Translation and Commentary on Chapters
4-6” (Anchor Bible, vol. 34a) Doubleday and Company, Inc., Garden
City, New York, 1977, 687.
3. P. Tillich, “Systematic Theology,” 3 vols., University of
Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill., 1951-63, I, 23lff.
4. Werner Jaeger, “Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture,” 3
vols., tr. Gilbert Highet, Oxford University Press, New York,
1965, 1, 237-2-85; Tillich, op. cit., III, 92.
5. Werner Jaeger, Op. cit., 110, 156f wherein appears a
commentary upon Anaximander’s famous dictum, “It is necessary
that things should pass away into that from which they are born.
For things must pay one another the penalty and compensation for
their injustice according to the ordinance of time.”
Anaximander’s discovery of a cosmic order of justice is a
liberation from the mythic notion of fate by the substitution for
it of a no less fatal physical necessity, the remote anticipation
of the iron laws of thermodynamics.
6. The universal solvent for all problems, difficulties, and
suffering, from this point of view, is always a return to the
lost primal unity; only thus is the spectre of injustice
exercised. This solution to the problems posed in contemporary
theology is well known in ecumenical circles; it seeks for the
primal unity of Christians in a least common denominator of
doctrine, liturgy and morality. The temptation posed to Catholic
participants in such discussions is considerable, for they also
are frequently against injustice. A fair example of the Catholic
discovery of injustice in the non-ordination of women is George
Tavard’s “Woman in Christian Tradition,” University of Notre Dame
Press, 1973, whose axial theme is the equation drawn between
injustice and the admission of religiously significant sexual
differentiation. This equation is founded upon an egalitarian —
and cosmic — reading of Gal 3:28, which, if taken seriously,
simply puts an end to the sacramental worship of Roman
Catholicism. See esp. pp. 77 and 96.
7. M. Barth, Op. cit., 688.
8. Ibid., 630, footnote 85, citing J. Pedersen’s “Israel, Its
Life and Culture,” 2nd ed., Oxford University Press, 1946, 1-11;
702, in which Barth expressly refers to God’s marital covenant
with Israel; Georges Azou, in “The Formation of the Bible,” tr.
Josepha Thornton, The B. Herder Book Co., St. Louis and London,
1963, proposes the same idea (60-61); John L. McKenzie’s “Aspects
of Old Testament Thought,” The Jerome Biblical Commentary,
Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1968, 11,
752-753, para. 95-8 should be read in this connection. See also
K. Barth, “Church Dogmatics” III, The Doctrine of Creation,” Part
four, ed. G. Bromley and T. Torrance, Edinburgh, 1961, 197-198,
wherein Barth refers to marriage as the supreme manifestation of
God’s covenant.
9. M. Barth, Op. cit., 707.
10. Ibid., 615, 618, 669, 720.
11. Ibid., 614, 618-19, 645, 723, 729ff.
12. J. Munck, “The Acts of the Apostles: Introduction,
Translation, and Notes.” Revised by William F. Albright and C.S.
Mann. (Anchor Bible, vol. 31); Doubleday and Company, Inc.,
Garden City, New York, 1967, 232. See also 0. Cullmann, “Early
Christian Worship, Studies in Biblical Theology” 10, tr. A.
Stewart Todd and James B. Torrance, S.C.M. Press, Ltd. 966, 21,
footnote 1.
13. This meditation seems to have begun with Irenaeus, probably
in response to the gnostic use of Ephesians 5 alluded to by M.
Barth, (644-45,, op. cit.) Tavard, op. Cit., 69-70, provides an
interesting commentary upon Irenaeus’ development of these
themes.
14. H. de Lubac, “Corpus Mysticum: L’Eucharistie et L’eglise au
Moyen Age. Etude Historique.” Revue et augmentee. Aubier,
Editions Montaigne, Paris, 1949, 139-209, provides an
indispensable account of the development of the “Una Caro”
terminology in its application to the Eucharist from Jerome
onward through the 12th century. Before Berengarius, its
dialectic served to unite the three bodies’ of the Eucharistic
worship: The Church, the crucified and risen Lord, the Body of
the Eucharistic sacrifice. The interrelation of marriage and
Eucharist was again emphasized by Bossuet; see G. Bacon, “La
pensee de Bossuet sur l’Eucharistie, mystere d’unite,” Revue des
sciences religieuses xlv, (1971) 209-239. Most recently A.
Ambrosiano has returned to the topic in “Mariage et Eucharistie,”
Nouvelle revue theologique, 98 (1976) 289-305.
15. E. Kilmartin, “Apostolic Office: Sacrament of Christ,”
Theological Studies 36:2 (1975) 243-264. Kilmartin’s
ecclesiology, while of an evident ecumenical interest, is not
essential to that interest; see Emmanuel Lanne’s “L’Eucharistie
dans la recherche oecumenique actuelle,” Irenikon, 1975, 48:2,
201-214. The controversy within Catholic theology which surrounds
views such as Kilmartin now proposes is well illustrated by C.J.
Vogel, “Die Eucharistie heute,” Zeitschrift fur Katholische
Theologie 97:4 (1975) 389-414, responded to by Alexander Gerken,
“Kann sich die Eucharistielehre „ndern?” in the same issue.
Joseph Finkenzeller has recently addressed the same questions as
Kilmartin: “Zur Diskussion uber das Verstandnis der apostolischen
Sukzession,” Theologisch-praktische Quartalschrift 123:4 (1975)
321-340, and “Das kirchliche Amt und die Eucharistie,”
Theologisch-praktische Quartalschrift 124:1 (1976) 3-14.
16. Gunther Bornkamm, Luthers Auslegen der Galatersbrief, Walter
de Gruyter & Co., Berlin, 1963, 277-280, provides the radical
interpretation of Gal 3:28 upon which ecclesiologies such as
Kilmartin’s rest: insofar as our justification is concerned, we
are bound to no external work whatever (nulli prorsus uni externo
operi sumus alligati). And the consequence is accepted: the man
of faith is without a name, without species or difference,
without “persona” (homo sine nomine, sine specie, sine
differentia, sine persona). Luther himself of course refused to
deduce social revolutions from his doctrine, a point of view
which is entirely consistent with its dehistoricizing thrust. The
distinction between the “volkisch” and the “religios” sense of
Gal 3:28 is still controlling in D. Albrecht Oepke, “Der Brief des
Paulus an die Galater, 2nd ed., Evangelischer Verlagsanstalt,
Berlin, 1957, 90-91.
“Da das zweite Glied unmoglisch in Sinne der Sklaven, (I KR
7, 20ff) das dritte nicht in dem der Frauenmanzipation
gemeint sein kann (I Kr 11, 7ff; KI 3, 18; Eph 5:22ff) so
ware es ebenfalls verfehit, das erste in Sinne eines blassen
Internationalismus verstehen zu wolien.” Nonetheless: “Die
Glaubigen sind in Christus’ zu einer Person verschmolzen.
The religious unity in Christ with which Galatians is concerned
has no particular social relevance: “non alligati sumus”; between
the sacred and the secular a disjunction is set which no “works”
can bridge, which no sacramental sign can transcend.
17. 0. Cullmann, “Baptism in the New Testament (Studies in
Biblical
Theology 4)”, S.C.M. Press, London, 1950, 30, uses Col
1:24, 2 Cor 1:5 and 1 Pet 4:13 to establish that the Body of
Christ into which we are baptized, the Church, is the crucified
and risen body of Jesus; this theme had been more particularly
developed in his “La delivrance anticipee du corps humain d’apres
le Nouveau Testament,” “Homage et Reconnaissance: Recueil de
travaux publie a l’occasion du 60e anniversaire de Karl Barth,
Cahiers Theologiques de l’Actualite Protestante, Hors Serie 2,”
Delachaux et Niestle, Neuchatel, 1946, 31-40, in which he also
makes some attempt to accommodate the “mysterious identity” of
Christ-Church to the marital symbolism of Eph 5:22ff. This
attempt requires a careful avoidance of the Head-Body language of
Ephesians and Colossians, by which the duality-in-unity of Christ
and the Church as the antitype of the marital ‘one flesh’ is
affirmed, for in Cullmann’s theology there is no Christ-Church
union to be symbolized by marriage: there is only an identity,
mysterious no doubt, but still identity. Thus he understands the
‘one flesh’ of Gen 2:24 and Eph 5:31, leaving quite unresolved
the difficulty of understanding how the inherent duality of
marriage can have any reference to the much-insisted-upon
identity of Christ and his Church. In this connection, see his
“Baptism in the N.T.,” 45, note 1. Cullmann’s reading of Gal 3:28
is consistent with his reading of one flesh’; “every difference
between men and women here disappears.” (Baptism, 65.) For
Cullmann as for Kilmartin, the active role of the congregation in
worship excludes all “ex opere operato” sacramental efficacy. In
his controversy with K. Barth over infant baptism, Cullmann
insists upon the absolute passivity of all incorporation by
baptism into the Body, which knows no moment of free becoming,
“contra” the doctrine of Eph 5:21-33, in which the Body-Church is
in a relation of freedom to the Head who is Christ. Despite
Cullmann’s well-known stress upon salvation history, his
ecclesiology is finally reducible to an eschatology: between the
Cross and the Parousia, nothing of significance is effected
through the use of historical human freedom. The parallel between
Cullmann’s development and Kilmartin’s seems clear.
18. Paul K. Jewett, “Man as Male and Female: A Study in Sexual
Relationships from a Theological Point of View,” William B.
Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, Mich., 1975, is a fair
illustration. He assumes the anti-sacramental stance proper to
Protestant theology from its inception, with the expected
results.
19. Luther’s insistence upon the objectivity of Christ’s
Eucharistic presence, as forced upon him by his loyalty to
Scripture, is in a considerable tension with the theological
account of that presence, which looked upon it as a special
instance of divine omnipresence. The event-character of the
Eucharistic worship having been abandoned with its sacrificial
character, the Eucharistic presence becomes accountable for only
in non-historic terms.
20. P. Tavard, op. cit., 184, 191, 195; P. Jewett, op. cit., has
the same difficulty as Tavard in admitting that the “submission”
language with which Paul points to the paradigmatic relation of
the Church to her Head need not and cannot be understood as
demanding the ontological inferiority of the feminine. Karl
Barth’s explanation of “submission” as existence within the order
of creation (examined in pages 69-82) is also used by M. Barth,
op. cit. 709. This coincides with the phraseology used by
Voegelin and von Rad to which reference was made in the article
to which the present one is sequel. See footnote 1.
21. M. Barth, op. cit., 654, 731.
22. The interpretation of Gal 3:28 which Joseph Fitzmyer has
contributed to the Jerome Biblical Commentary (11, 242a) reads:
“Secondary differences vanish through the effects of this primary
incorporation of Christians into Christ’s body through “one
Spirit” (1 Cor 12:13). This verse is really the climax of Paul’s
letter.” At first glance, this language has considerable
affinities with the Lutheran phraseology cited in note 16, as
with the contemporary views of Kilmartin and Tavard. The
implications which a literalist reading of e.g. Fitzmyer’s
summary statement has for Catholic sacramentalism have been
pointed out. It is curious that even after the 1965 endorsement
by Danielou (v. Tavard’s citation, op. cit., 217, note 10) and
its later popularization via the CTSA (v. vol. 24 (1969) of the
CTSA Proceedings) in this country and the works of Hans Kung
internationally, the recent commentaries on Galatians pay little
attention to the bearing of 3:28 upon women’s ordination. Pierre
Bonnard, “L’Epitre de Saint Paul aux Galates,” 2nd ed., revue et
augmentee, Delachaux et Niestle, 1972, writes, of the distinction
between male and female, “Depasse’es et non supprimees, ces
distinctions ne sont pas abolies dans l’eglise.” (78-79) John
Bligh, in “Galatians: A Discussion of St. Paul’s Epistle,”
Householder Commentaries, No. 1, St. Paul Publications, London,
1969, writes “St. Paul is discussing, Who are the heirs of
Abraham? His answer is that the distinctions between Jew and
Greek, slave and free, male and female are irrelevant here. All
Christians are equally heirs.” (327) Franz Mussner, in “Der
Galater Brief, Herder Theologischer Kommentar zum Neuen
Testament,” ix, Herder, Freiberg, Basel, Wien, 1974, writes “Der
Apostel will domit seltstverstandlich nicht sagen, dass derartige
Unterschiede 5usserlich nicht mehr bestehen — Mann bleibt Mann
und Frau bleibt Frau, auch nach der Taufe –. aber sie haben
jegliche Heilsbedeutung vor Gott verloren.” Mussner does exclude
any identification of Christ ard the faithful, but when he tries
to elucidate further what the baptismal unity might be, he falls
back upon metaphor: “Diese Heils-sprare’ noch naher zu
bezeichnen, ist sprachlich keim moglich.” (264, 265) “Im ubrigen
redet hier Paulus von einem Mysterium, das sich begrifflich nicht
vollkommen fassen lasst, am wenigsten mit Kategorien moderner
Existenialanalyse.” (266) The categories Paul uses in Ephesians
5:21-33 evidently do not occur to Mussner as applicable here. And
this is odd. Heinrich Schlier has been more sensitive to the
issues raised by Gal 3:28; in the 13th edition of “Der Brief an
der Galater, (Kritisch-Exegetischer Kommentar Uber das Neue
Testament Begrundet von Heinrich August Wilhelm Meyer, Siebente
Abteilung),” Gottingen, 1965, 175, he remarks, albeit in a
footnote, “Erkennt man diese Enschranking der Aussage in V.28, so
hutet man sich, aus ihm direkte Folgerungen fur die Ordnung des
kirchlichen Amtes oder auch der politisehen (sic) Geselischaft zu
ziehen. Das kirchliche Amt beruht ja nicht direkt auf der Taufe,
sondern, auf der Sendung, und die politische Gesellschaft ist
niemals identisch mit dem Leibe Christi.” (Note 4)
23. M. Barth, Op. cit., 734; see also 641, 703.
24. Ibid., 645.
25. Ibid., 630-715.
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