The Question of Women Priests Must Be Addressed

Alice C. Linsley

Read the comments at Kendal Harmon's blog on my article Impressions of the New American Anglicanism.  Fr. Jay Scott Newman's comments are especially astute. Some of these were deleted at T19, but I have preserved them for my readers (see below). The childishness of the comments at T19 makes it clear that intelligent conversation with revisionists and Neo-Anglicans who reject the Received Tradition is nearly impossible.

Matt Kennedy and Sarah Hey call me a liar with a martyr complex. They refuse to address the substance of Fr. Newman's comments and our joint call to catholicity. Their attack on my character is a smoke screen. Kennedy's wife is a "priest" and he is hardly objective about women priests. Sarah, as a member of the revisionist Episcopal Church, lacks objectivity as well.

The seeds of schism were sown in the ACNA the moment the leadership decided to paper over this issue. This created a church in which certain people who are ordained according to the ordinal as clergy of the one holy catholic Church are not able to recognize the female clergy as validly ordained.

I've written a great deal on the error of women's ordination and link to some of those articles below.  I write from personal experience having been a priset in TEC for 16 years.

Women standing at the altar as priests obfuscates that pattern by which we are to contemplate and understand who Jesus is.  It is dangerous tampering with Holy Tradition.  As C.S. Lewis has written, "We cannot shuffle or tamper so much. With the Church, we are farther in: for there we are dealing with male and female not merely as facts of nature but as the live and awful shadows of realities utterly beyond our control and largely beyond our direct knowledge. Or rather, we are not dealing with them but (as we shall soon learn if we meddle) they are dealing with us." (From here.)

Holy Tradition is about the person of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.  The first and last promises of the Bible touch on this.  Genesis 3:15 is God's promise that the Woman's Seed will crush the head of the serpent and restore Paradise.  The final words in Revelation are the promise that He will be with us always.  From beginning to end, the Bible is about the Son of God and the working of the Holy Trinity. This tradition was received by the Apostles, Elders, Prophets, and Ruler-Priests who are named in the New Testament. Tradition in this sense preceded the canon of the Bible. Americans have difficulty with the idea that accurate information can be passed along through many generations that might not also be in the Bible.  As an anthropologist I can point to many instances of this so I can accept that the Samaritan Woman at the well was named Photini and that Joseph of Arimathea came to England and St. Thomas went to India, etc.  That doesn't mean that I accept every legend, only those that can be found to have substance historically, anthropologically and that square with the details of Scripture. Tradition preserves what is important, and, along with the Bible, Tradition protects us from special revelationists.

Before I wrote the article on Impressions of the New American Anglicanism, I communicated with several Anglican bishops. It is my understanding that many recognize the divisive nature of WO.  I've been told that the African Primates are talking through this issue also.

If you've read Louie Crew's Changing the Church, you know that the ordination of women was from the beginning part of the gay strategy. Gene Robinson addressed a conference of gay American Roman Catholic priests and concluded with the following:  "It's too dangerous for you to come out as gay to your superiors, but I believe that if you work for the ordination of women in your church, you will go a long way toward opening the door for the acceptance of gay priests."  Read it all here.

Gay activists pose women priests and gay priests as essential elements of their egalitarian religion. Both represent an attempt to destroy the Christian Priesthood as a unique sign of the Pleromic Blood of Jesus.

Bishop Bob Duncan believes concerning the new American Anglicanism that "The theological center on first-order issues has deep agreement. Most of us hold the issue of the ordination of women to be a second-order issue. We are committed to working with our partners in the communion as we try to come to some lasting agreement. The way I illustrate that is we are now wise enough to understand that we can't settle the issue of reception of the ordination of women. The reason we can't settle it is that East Africa ordains women and West Africa doesn't. We have got to go through this together, and it's going to take a couple generations to do it. There's a deep commitment to one another across this divide." (From here.)

Its time, Bishop Duncan, to address this so-called "second-order issue."

_________________________

Fr. Jay Scott Newman's response to my article on the New American Anglicanism

Fr. Newman wrote: "One of the signal differences, it seems to me, between Evangelicals and Catholics is that the former believe that the nature and number, the origin and efficacy of the sacraments are secondary or even tertiary questions in Christian faith and life, while Catholics hold these questions to be primary because the sacraments are the ordinary means of grace for our justification and sanctification. Get the sacraments wrong, Catholics hold, and you’ll get the Gospel wrong.

This being the case, the truce which has been called on the question of women in the priesthood as a condition for bringing into being the new Anglican bodies in North America seems to me more than a bit like the truce over slavery that was required to bring the United States of American into being. But the latter truce could not hold, and neither can the former. Eventually, the disagreement must be sorted out, and that almost certainly means that the battle must be joined. And when that happens, then the great gulf between Evangelicals and Catholics on the nature and number, the origin and efficacy of the sacraments will once again be a church-dividing gulf.

That seems to me to be the fatal flaw in all present efforts to conjure up new Anglican jurisdictions from the wreckage of the Episcopal Church. Alice Linsley’s impressions only verify my conviction."

He also wrote:  "No Catholic, including no Anglo-Catholic, can accept that there only two sacraments, and to dismiss the other five—most especially the sacramental priesthood of bishops and presbyters—is, in effect, to deny the sacramentality of the Eucharist. My point was simple: Evangelicals (including Evangelical Anglicans) and Catholics (including Anglo-Catholics) have a fundamental disagreement about the nature and number, the origin and efficacy of the sacraments. Moreover, for the moment, that disagreement has been set aside in the interest of co-belligerancy against the enormities of the Episcopal Church, but it is inevitable that this disagreement will again come to the fore and prove the undoing of whatever institutional unity is contrived for new Anglican jurisdictions in North America. Put most simply: an Anglican who believes that there is a divinely instituted priesthood in the Church on which the celebration of the Holy Eucharist depends and that women cannot (not should not, cannot) hold this priesthood, cannot receive the sacramental ministrations of an ordained woman. When that dispute returns to center stage, as it must, then Evangelicals and Catholics in the new Anglican jurisdictions will find themselves back where they have ever been—divided by a matter of faith."

"For a Catholic, to say that a sacrament was not instituted by Christ is to say that it is not a sacrament of New Covenant. Also for a Catholic, there is no possibility of the Eucharist without the sacramental priesthood. That is why Catholics insist that it is logically impossible to talk about the Eucharist as a sacrament without also talking about the priesthood as a sacrament. I realize that Evangelicals, including Evangelical Anglicans, do not believe this to be true, and that is precisely my point: these two approaches to the number and origin of the sacraments are logically, ontologically, and theologically irreconcilable, but that fact is simply being ignored at the moment because traditional Anglicans of both persuasions have temporarily set aside their church dividing disagreement about this issue in the face of open war with the Episcopal Church. Once that war is concluded, however, then the old differences will once again be unavoidable. Please understand, my point in every comment on this thread is not to make an argument for the Catholic understanding of the sacraments; it is simply to point out that the Catholic and Evangelical ways of understanding of the sacraments cannot, finally, be sustained together in one church. The Anglican attempt to do so has failed, and the results of the failure are depriving congregations of their property and clerics of their livelihood. Ideas, after all, do have consequences.

The primary category mistake of most Anglicans seems to be a refusal to accept the Principle of Non-Contradiction. For example, either sodomy is a grave sin or the foundation of a sacrament, but it can’t be both. Or, either it is possible that women have the capacity to receive presbyteral and episcopal ordination or they do not, but it can’t be both. Let’s forgot for a moment the authority of Apostolic Tradition which every Catholic must believe is an intrinsic part of the Gospel (no sola Scriptura for us), when a foundational principle of right reason like Non-Contradiction is routinely denied in practice if not in theory, then the only thing left is raw will to power. Hence the General Convention of the Episcopal Church. Kyrie eleison."

Related reading:

The Mushy Thinking of Neo-Anglicans
What is a Priest?
C.S. Lewis on Priestesses in the Church
What is the Priesthood?
A Serious Argument Against the Ordination of Women to the Priesthood by Bishop John Rodgers
Rejoinder to Dr. Rodgers by Dr. Peter Moore
Response to Dr. Peter Moore on Women Priests by Alice C. Linsley
The Priesthood in Anthropological Perspective
Women Priests and the Anglican Church of North America
Women's Ordination Must be Addressed
Impressions of North American Anglicanism
The Feminization of Anglican Orders
Shamanic Practice and the Priesthood
Female Shamans, Not Women Priests
Why Women Were Never Priests
What is Lost When Women Serve as Priests?
Binary Distinctions of the Hebrew Horites
Blood Guilt and Christ's Priesthood
God as Male Priest
Priests and Shamans Hold Different Worldviews
What Christians Believe

What is the Priesthood?

Christ enthroned as Priest and King.

Alice C. Linsley


The unique nature of the priesthood is inextricably linked to God's nature and God's ordinabce of such among the early Hebrew (4400-2000 BC).

God is the first priest (Gen. 3:21) and the priesthood, like God, is eternal. This is what stands behind the biblical references to Melchizedek, a type of Christ our Great High Priest whose priesthood is eternal. 

The question of "What is a Priest?" is taken up in another article, which I recommend reading before this one.

The priesthood of Jesus Christ is the single true Form of the Priesthood. Every authentic priest, either living before or after Christ’s Incarnation, stands as a sign to this one priesthood. The priesthood is unique, and it is impossible to change it in any essential way. It involves an ontological pattern that is beyond human contrivance. It is a benefit divinely bestowed. All attempts to change the priesthood, such as developed out of Protestant theology or the ordination of women, corrupt the sign so that it no longer points to the Messiah, the Son of God. The Church itself has no authority to change the ontological pattern since the one Priesthood that points to Christ existed before the Church and, though acknowledged by the Apostles, was not established by them.

The priesthood existed before the time of Abraham, as is evidenced by Melchizedek, the Priest-King of Salem. He is the first priest mentioned in the Bible, but clearly Melchizedek does not represent the beginning of the institution of priest, but rather an advanced level of development. This being so, the priesthood was not established by the Apostles nor is its authority derived from the Apostles, though apostolic succession through the laying on of hands is part of the proper ordination of priests. According to St. John Chrysostom, the priesthood "is ranked among heavenly ordinances. And this is only right, for no man, no angel, no archangel, no other created power, but the Paraclete himself ordained this succession..." (On the Priesthood, 1977, St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, p. 70). The question then is whether a "heavenly ordinance" is eternal in essence or is it something man can change.

If the Apostles are not the source of the Christian priesthood, what is the source? It can only be the eternal Christ, who is one with the Father and the Spirit. Christ is the eternal Form of priest and the eternal Truth signified by the Priesthood. He alone is Priest, fulfilling atonement through the shedding of His own Blood. This is why the one Priesthood is inextricably tied to the Blood of the Son of God.

Today there is much confusion about the Priesthood because a false priesthood exists that denies the atoning nature of Jesus' Blood. Whoever denies the necessity of repentance and the uniqueness of Jesus' Blood as the ground of Life and the singular substance for remission of sins, is a false priest.

The author of Hebrews expresses this reality in these words: "This hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast, and which enters the Presence behind the veil, where the forerunner has entered for us, even Jesus, having become High Priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek." (Hebrews 6:13-20)

What can we say about this priesthood?

First, we can say that the priesthood is verifiably one of the oldest religious institutions in the world, traced back to at least 7000 B.C. It is first found among Abraham's Nilotic ancestors: the Horite and Sethite Hebrew who served at the temples of the ancient world. 

The priest emerges out of primeval perceptions of blood as the substance of life, purity and rightness. This conception is so old that it has a wide linguistic dispersion. The Hebrew root "thr" = to be pure, corresponds to the Hausa/Hahm "toro" = clean, and to the Tamil "tiru" = holy. All are related to the proto-Dravidian "tor" = blood. These cognates point to an ancient priesthood for which purity, holiness and blood are related concepts. (Go here for linguistics insights into the origins of the Afro-Asiatic priesthood.)

The ritual shedding of blood in animal sacrifice was done by priests and patriarchs, but not a single reference can be found in which the same is performed by a woman. Again, this is because there is but one priesthood (in the Platonic sense, one Form) and it pertains to Jesus Christ, the Man. This is why the author of Hebrews makes the connection between Melchizedek and Christ.

From the dawn of time, humans recognized that life is in the blood. They saw offspring born of water and the blood. They knew that the loss of blood could bring death. Hunting animals meant death so that their community could live. 

For at least 100,000 years, they buried their rulers and high-ranking persons in red ochre dust, a symbolic blood covering. Sophisticated mining operations in places such as the Lebombo Mountains of southern Africa reveal that thousands of workers were extracting red ochre which was ground into powder and used in the burial of nobles. Red ocher burials have been found in present day Israel, Wales, Czechoslovakia, Russia, Pakistan and Australia. Anthropologists agree that this red powder symbolized blood and its use in burial appears to represent hope for life after death.

I believe that God planted eternity in our hearts and that we know innately that Christ's pleromic blood is not only redemptive, but also the very source of our life. The Pleromic Blood means that there is but one dispensation throughout all time, found in Christ from before the foundation of the world. This is what St. Paul calls "the mystery of Christ." He articulated his understanding of the pleroma as early as his second missionary journey when he preached to the Athenians that, “in Him [Jesus Christ] we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:28)

In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of His grace which He made to abound toward us in all wisdom and prudence, having made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His good pleasure which He purposed in Himself, that in the dispensation of the fullness of the times, He might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth. (Ephesians 1:7-10)

The Trinity underlies Paul’s understanding of the pleroma. He speaks of the distinct Persons of the Trinity and of the oneness of the Body of Christ in the language of Shema: “There is one Body, one Spirit, just as one hope is the goal of your calling by God. There is one Lord, one Faith, one baptism, and one God and father of all, over all, through all and within all.” (Eph. 4:4-5)

These words follow Paul’s explanation of the saving work of Jesus Christ in Ephesians: But now in Christ Jesus, you that used to be so far apart from us have been brought very close, by the blood of Christ. For He is peace between us, and has made the two into one and broken down the barrier which used to keep them apart, actually destroying in His own person the hostility caused by the rules and decrees of the Law. This was to create one single man in Himself out of the two of them and by restoring peace through the Cross, to unite them both in a single body and reconcile them with God. In His own person He killed the hostility... Through Him, both of us have in one Spirit our way to come to the Father. (Eph. 2:13-14)

Second, we know that the priesthood functions to mitigate blood guilt. Anthropologists have noted that there is considerable anxiety about shed blood among primitive peoples. (This has been discussed in many of the great monographs: Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture, Lévi-Strauss' The Raw and the Cooked, and Turnbull's The Forest People). Among the early Hebrew, the priesthood served to relieve blood guilt and anxiety and to make atonement for offenses. These continue to be the primary functions of the Priest, although the sacrifice offered at the altar is bloodless and he also has pastoral responsibilities. However, when pastoral responsibilities and preaching minimize the sacramental role of the priest in confession and the Eucharist, the priest no longer serves as a unique sign of the Messianic Priesthood of Jesus Christ. Likewise, the priest who ignores the sacramental work that is uniquely binding on him fails his flock and betrays his vows.

Third, we know that no woman entered into the Holy Place where blood was offered through atoning death. The Hebrew ruler-priests, from who delivered to the Church the unique institution of the Priesthood, believed that the blood shed by men in war, hunting, execution, and animal sacrifice could not be in the same space as the blood shed by women in their monthly flow and in birthing. Sacred law prohibited the blood of killing (male) and the blood of giving life (female) to share the same space. We are not to confuse the distinctions of life and death. This distinction stands behind the prohibition against boiling the young goat in its mother’s milk (Deut. 14:21).

The Priest deals with blood impurities by seeking the purification made available in the Pleromic Blood. The priest also addresses anxiety about shed blood for men and women through the Pleromic Blood of Jesus. This is the history of the "churching" of women, a practice regarded by modern western women as offensive. Since they do not understand that there is but one priesthood, they are easily swayed by the muddy thinking of contemporary activists. The world religions textbooks are rife with this kind of thinking. They fail to make important distinctions between priests and shamans which serve similar functions within their communities but hold different worldviews.

So called "priestesses" of ancient Greece were not priests at all. They were seers who pronounced oracles in a trace state, like shamans. Likewise, Shinto "priests" are also shamans as they deal with the spirits. Use of the term "priest" in both cases reveals ignorance about the difference between priests and shamans, an ignorance that pervades 20th century writings.

God has not changed this unique office of the priesthood. It survives in Christian communities that preserve catholic Holy Tradition. When the priesthood is held high and priests live above contamination, the world is drawn to Jesus Christ. This happens because, in reality, there is but one Priesthood, One Priest, One Blood.


Related reading: Ten Objections to Women Priests; Why Women Were Never Priests; God as Male Priest; Growing Consensus that WO Must Be Addressed; Just Genesis : The Church's Consensus on Women and the Priesthood

Dispensationalism and the Three Witnesses

Alice C. Linsley


I'm not a Dispensationalist in the tradition of the 1917 Scofield Bible but I find two dispensations in the Bible. The older dispensation involves those who anticipated the appearing of the Son of God according to the Edenic Promise that was given to their ancestors. The second involves those who believe that Jesus is the Son of God, the fulfillment of the Edenic Promise (Gen. 3:15). Yet these are not really two dispensations.  They are one and the same, unified by the Pleromic Blood of Jesus Christ. This is evident in history, becuse in both dispensations it is always the same three witnesses who testify and their testimony never changes.

According to Semitic law, the testimony of three witnesses is binding and the number three in Genesis always represents a unity. The witnesses are the water, the blood and the Spirit, and they bind the two dispensations of which Jesus and St. Paul speak: the old and the new.

The sign of the Old Covenant is the blood of lambs and the sign of the New Covenant is the Blood of The Lamb. None can be saved by the blood of animals, regardless how unblemished. God's provision of the Christ Lamb makes it clear that blood is the essential life-giving and life-redeeming substance, but not the blood of beasts. So the two dispensations speak of blood and contrast the efficacy of the blood of sacrificed animals and the blood of the Christ.

The nexus of the dispensations is the point in time when the three witnesses give consistent and unified testimony to Christ's appearing and His identity at Jesus' presentation in the Temple and at His baptism at Nimrah (waters of God).

The blood  is represented by the Priest Simeon. The water is represented by the Baptizer John, and the Spirit  is represented by the Prophetess Anna. Note the message of each witness: Simeon said that his eyes had beheld the fulfillment of the promise to Israel. John pointed to Jesus and called Him the "Lamb of God" and Anna spoke of Jesus to all in Jerusalem who were awaiting salvation.

John points to the Three Witnesses when he writes: "Who is it that overcomes the world? Only he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God. This is the one who came by water and blood - Jesus Christ. He did not come by water only, but by water and blood. And it is the Spirit who testifies, because the Spirit is truth. For there are three that testify: the Spirit, the water and the blood; and the three are in agreement." (I John 5:5-8)

The Pleromic Blood is what justifies all who believe, regardless if they lived before the Incarnation or after the Incarnation. There can be no remission without the shedding of blood. Even more, there can be no life without the Pleromic Blood.

This truth must have been apparent to people who lived long before Abraham because the use of red ochre in burial was widespread in prehistoric times. A man buried 45,000 years ago at La Chapelle-aux-Saints in southern France, was packed in red ochre. “The Red Lady of Paviland” in Wales was buried in red ochre about 20,000 years ago. Her skeletal remains and burial artifacts are encrusted with the red ore. P.L. Kirk reports that prehistoric Australian aboriginal burials reveal pink staining of the soil around the skeleton, indicating that red ochre had been sprinkled over the body. The ‘Fox Lady’ of Doini Vestonice, Czechoslovakia (near Russia) who was buried 23,000 years ago, was also covered in red ochre. Anthropologists generally agree that the red ochre dust represented blood and the ritual burials were done in the hope that, by virtue of the blood, the dead would live again.

The Pleromic Blood can be traced through the Scriptures as the scarlet cord that ties all things together. In other words, all things are made one in Jesus Christ and this is confirmed by the Three Witnesses.

The division of biblical history into more than these two dispensations causes us to overlook the centrality of Christ and the Three Witnesses. Instead, Dispensationalism asks us to focus on the signs of God's various covenants: the rainbow, circumcision, etc. Focusing on the signs rather than on the One to whom the signs point is spiritually counter-productive.

Finally, there is the distinctive kinship pattern among Abraham's people which, by its numerical symbolism, speaks of the Kingdom of God as consisting of  two households. Just as the rulers among Abraham's people required two wives in separate locations to establish a kingdom, so God's Kingdom is comprised of two groups: those who share the benefits of the Pleromic Blood before Christ's Incarnation and those who share those benefits in the dispensation of His appearing. Both groups enter by faith, responding to the voice of the Good Shepherd. This is why Jesus spoke of having two flocks (John 10:16) . The bridge between the two flocks is the unified testimony of the Three Witnesses, and the Shepherd of both is the same Jesus Christ, the Son of God.


Related Reading:  The Messianic Priesthood of Jesus, God Has Made Progress With Us; The Testimony of Blessed John, Forerunner; Nimrod and the Baptism of Jesus