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Priestesses in the Church? ... from Jack's God in the Dock

PostPosted: August 30th, 2007, 2:32 pm
by Tuke
If Jack were alive today, would he leave the Anglican/Episcopal Church, perhaps following TS Eliot as an Anglo-Catholic, Walter Hooper as a Roman Catholic, or wherever? The reason I ask is because the Anglican Church seems at odds with some of Jack's positions as stated in God in the Dock.

Note: My knowledge of the Anglican/Episcopal Church is limited, but I'm quite comfortable with Jack's doctrinal alignment.

PostPosted: August 31st, 2007, 4:06 am
by rusmeister

PostPosted: August 31st, 2007, 12:43 pm
by Karen
I just came across this article about evangelicals joining the Orthodox church and thought about you, rus: . (It may require you to register, but this article is free.)

PostPosted: August 31st, 2007, 6:16 pm
by rusmeister

PostPosted: August 31st, 2007, 8:07 pm
by Stanley Anderson

Ecce ancilla

PostPosted: August 31st, 2007, 8:44 pm
by Tuke
Please excuse me for quoting Lewis rather than explaining him myself. Sometimes God in the Dock is more of a master for this inadequate servant. I may prove a better editor than commentator.



---------------------------------------------- Priestesses in the Church? (Notes on the Way) -----------------------------------------------

".... These remarks... came into my head when I heard that the Church of England was being advised to declare women capable of Priests' Orders. I am, indeed, informed that such a proposal is very unlikely to be seriously considered by the authorities. [!] To take such a revolutionary step ... would be an almost wanton degree of imprudence. And the Church of England herself would be torn in shreds by the operation....
.... I am tempted to say that the proposed arrangement would make us much more rational 'but not near so much like a Church'.
.... To us a priest... represents us to God and God to us.... Why should a woman not in this sense represent God?....
.... Suppose the reformer stops saying that a good woman may be like God and begins saying that God is like a good woman. Suppose he says that we might just as well pray to 'Our Mother which art in heaven' as to 'Our Father'. Suppose he suggests that the Incarnation might just as well have taken a female as a male form, and the Second Person of the Trinity be as well called the Daughter as the Son. Suppose, finally, that the mystical marriage were reversed, that the Church were the Bridegroom and Christ the Bride. All this, as it seems to me, is involved in the claim that a woman can represent God as a priest does.
Now it is surely the case that if all these supposals were ever carried into effect we should be embarked on a different religion....
.... And this is surely intolerable: or, if tolerable, it is an argument not in favour of Christian priestesses but against Christianity. ....a child who has been taught to pray to a Mother in heaven would have a religious life radically different from that of a Christian child....
....One of the ends for which sex was created was to symbolize to us the hidden things of God. One of the functions of human marriage is to express the nature of the union between Christ and the Church. We have no authority to take the living and semitive figures which God has painted on the canvas of our nature and shift them about as if they were mere geometrical figures.
....The Church claims to be the bearer of a revelation. If that claim is false then we want not to make priestesses but to abolish priests. If it is true, then we should expect to find in the Church an element which unbelievers will call irrational and which believers will call supra-rational....
It is painful, being a man, to have to assert the privilege, or the burden, which Christianity lays upon my own sex. I am crushingly aware how inadequate most of us are, in our actual and historical individualities, to fill the place prepared for us. But it is an old saying in the army that you salute the uniform not the wearer. Only one wearing the masculine uniform can (provisionally, and till the Parousia) represent the Lord to the Church: for we are all, corporately and individually, feminine to Him. We men may often make very bad priests. That is because we are insufficiently masculine. It is no cure to call in those who are not masculine at all. A given man may make a very bad husband; you cannot mend matters by trying to reverse the roles....
....With the Church... 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."
CSL 14 August 1948

PostPosted: August 31st, 2007, 9:07 pm
by Karen

Ecce ancilla

PostPosted: August 31st, 2007, 9:17 pm
by Tuke

Ecce ancilla

PostPosted: August 31st, 2007, 9:23 pm
by Tuke

Re: Ecce ancilla

PostPosted: August 31st, 2007, 10:15 pm
by Karen

Ecce ancilla

PostPosted: August 31st, 2007, 10:30 pm
by Tuke

Re: Ecce ancilla

PostPosted: August 31st, 2007, 10:35 pm
by Stanley Anderson

Ecce ancilla

PostPosted: August 31st, 2007, 10:55 pm
by Tuke
Your comments remind me of Jack's "The Weight of Glory" which is based upon 2nd Corinthians IV.15-17.

Ecce ancilla

PostPosted: August 31st, 2007, 11:52 pm
by Tuke

Re: Ecce ancilla

PostPosted: September 1st, 2007, 12:23 am
by Karen