Four Theologians Disagree With House of Bishops
Diocesan Press Service. November 4, 1974 [74306]
RICHMOND, Va. -- The Episcopal House of Bishops engaged in theological "overkill " when it said that eleven women were not ordained at all in a service of ordination to the priesthood July 29, four theologians from the University of the South said recently.
The statement by the four, including School of Theology dean the Very Rev. Urban T. Holmes, appears in the Nov. 1 issue of The Virginia Churchman, an Episcopal newspaper.
Speaking in response to the House of Bishops' theology committee, the four asserted that the bishops had mistakenly assumed that the church was a "perfected" community. If it were perfect, its Constitution and Canons would be always in line with the action of the Holy Spirit.
Instead, the church is a "pilgrim community," the theologians said. A pilgrim community can only survive and grow if it has prophetic voices to lead it forward. The ordinations in Philadelphia should be understood as a prophetic statement to the church.
If the bishops make the mistake of identifying constitution and canons always with the voice of the Holy Spirit, the theologians caution, they will effectively "cut off the voice of prophecy " in the church.
Prophecy is clearly needed in the women's situation, the four state. "Women have the unquestioned right to take into their own hands their own destiny . . . . At the moment, they are not free to make any decision about ordination." The Philadelphia ordinations are a prophetic judgment against the male institutions which declared them uncanonical.
The theologians suggest that the bishops admit that the service in Philadelphia caused extreme pain, that it took place also because of the great pain of women, and then call the ordinations irregular. The technical question of "validity could be left to some commission," they say.
They state bluntly that the theological debate over the ordination of women is virtually finished. "We believe that there is now a consensus among Anglican theologians that there are no convincing theological reasons upon which to base opposition to women's ordination," they say.
"Because of the mutual pain involved," the Sewanee four caution, "reconciliation will inevitably be difficult."
The statement, entitled "Validity in the Pilgrim Church," was the joint product of written essays among Holmes, the Rev. John M. Gessell, the Rev. Marion J. Hatchett, and the Rev. David H. Fisher, at the request of The Virginia Churchman. "It does not," they say, "necessarily represent the opinions of the entire faculty of the school, nor of individuals on it."