Into the Wardrobe

rusmeister,

Have you thought that maybe no one has challenged Lewis because his arguments in 'Priestesses in the Church' are not worth much?

I have thought a lot about this article and I would like to challenge it. I will post my thoughts about it to this thread. It may take several posts but I expect the moderators will tell me if it gets tedious.

As someone who tends not to support women as priests, I do think Lewis did seem to have a bit of an issue with authoritative women. I find his comments on women in Mere Christianity, the part where he talks about no one really wanting them to be the head of the family, rather less than convincing. The same form of argument could be used to argue the opposite point now, since the prevailing feeling about the issue seems to have changed. He seems to find the whole idea of a society led by women distasteful, an attitude which never seems to lead to fruitful discussion.

I tend to agree with Bluegoat. Whatever you think about women priests or women in authority in general, this issue is one in which Lewis was rather uncharacteristically irrational. He just seemed to think it inherently bad, and never really offered much in the way of argument for it. Even what he offered in Mere Christianity was rather thin.

His characterization of the female head of "Experiment House" in "The Silver Chair" seems to imply that the mere fact that she was a woman should have made it clear she would be a lousy leader.

However, queens seem to be excepted from his distaste for female authority. (I can't prove it, but I get the distinct impression from his work that Lewis was a Monarchist. I could be wrong about that.) To queens he gives reverence due their royal authority, though he makes it quite clear that kings should have even more authority. In CoN, King Edmund seems to outrank the older Queen Susan, though this is never explicitly stated.

However, I would not call this "Anti-Female" bias. Only in the modern, western world does the statement, "This group of people should not be alowed to rise to positions of authority" equate to "This group of people is inferior." In the modern, western world, authority is taken as a sign of superiority. This is an error of our culture, and one so ingrained into us that I despair of ever seeing it corrected.

To be clear, I do not share Lewis' views, or what I perceive to be his views, in general on women in authority. But it should be clear that he does not equate a position of authority with superiority.

I would agree that he took it as fairly obvious (the issue was incipient at the time). I disagree completely that he was emotional about it. The answer is simple. It WAS more obvious to his generation, and it is WE, the moderns, who are further removed from what all of Christianity always believed. - which, again, ought to make you suspicious - being completely divorced from all of Christianity from AD 33 until circa 30-odd years ago. If it is possible that we could learn things a previous generation didn't know (usually the only solid part of the myth of evolutionism), it is equally possible that we could unlearn things and know less than they knew (the fact of degradation), which is the case here.

I don't even see intellectual engagement with my own observations, btw - just a reiteration of how Lewis's article is perceived in general, without specifics.

It might be more fruitful to go over the essay point by point on what exactly you disagree with Lewis on. So far, only KBrowne has done so, and he is only unquestionably right on one point. (Lewis's error on Mary's presence at Pentecost - Acts 1:14)

Unfortunately I don't have a copy of God in the Dock, so I am a bit stuck. I do have Mere Christianity, but I am not sure if the arguments are comparable.

I'm not sure that Lewis was arguing from Tradition alone on this issue, though I suspect that was probably his reason for his stand on this issue. It seems to me, though, that he was trying to argue this as an apologist, and the argument from Tradition doesn't really work well in that context. I don't think that simply because something has Tradition behind it means that people cannot try to figure out the reasoning, or reasons behind something; there are many reasons that it might be a good idea to do this; to try to explain it to outsiders for whom it could be a stumbling block, to understand better how the rule should be applied or stop it from being misapplied, to better know and love God...

And for the record, although I can't speak for anyone else, I do have a decent classical education.

I have not been replying to any of the recent posts because I wanted to get all my comments on Lewis’ article written before joining in the conversation. I hope to be able to answer some of the things that have been said when I have finished. So, rusmeister, I am not ignoring what you have said. But, please, would you not make personal comments about me. You do not know me. You do not and cannot know what books I have or have not read or what kind of education I have had.

Now to Lewis’ argument. Here I have reduced it to a skeleton and numbered each point. I hope to have something to say about each part of the argument after Easter.

1. One of the most important parts of a priest’s job is to ‘represent’ God to the congregation. [I have put represent in inverted commas because it is not quite clear what Lewis means by it.]

2. If a woman ‘represents’ God it will allow or encourage the use of female imagery when people think or talk about God.

3. We know that we should not use female imagery when referring to God because God has told us to use masculine imagery.

4. The use of female imagery would change the whole character of Christianity, [presumably for the worse and presumably whether Christians want the change or not.]