Women's Ordination and Gregory the Theologian

As a fairly conservative Catholic who believes that the male-only priesthood is correct, one of the things that bothers me is the really bad arguments that conservatives often make in order to justify the Church's practice.

The problem with most of the arguments I've heard is that they imply that Christ assumed manhood, but not womanhood.

Now, this might not sound so bad to a lot of conservatives, but having recently been studying how the early Church hammered out Christology, it strikes me as incompatible with one of the fundamental principles of Christian doctrine.

"That which is not assumed is not healed" -- Saint Gregory the Theologian

If Christ assumed manhood, but not womanhood, then following St. Gregory's principle, women cannot be saved. Obviously this is heretical. But it seems the natural conclusion of the arguments conservatives typically use.

So, the trick is to find a way to articulate the necessity of an all-male priesthood without saying that Christ assumed manhood, but not womanhood.

Perhaps rather than focusing on manhood/womanhood as if they were things that could be assumed independent of each other, we should speak of Christ assuming Human Nature as a whole, including the sexual differentiation that encompasses both manhood and womanhood.*

Of course, that might mean no longer attempting to use Christ's incarnation as male to explain the all-male priesthood. On the other hand, perhaps there is a way to do so without running afoul of St. Gregory's principle. I'm just not sure what it might be yet.

* The medieval mystics, notably Julian of Norwich, managed to conceive of Christ as both male and masculine while simultaneously feminine (though not female).

Body, Blood, Soul & Divinity

I think that often, Protestant/Evangelical reactions against the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist are not reactions so much against the doctrine itself as a against a perception of the doctrine as "cutting up" Christ for our analysis. This is ironic, because from the Catholic perspective, the whole point of saying that Christ is substantially present, body, blood, soul & divinity in the Eucharist is to say that Christ's entire person meets us and nourishes us. In this understanding, taking away any part of this presence is a terrible deprivation because it does not allow us to meet the Lord in the entirety of His Divine/Human person.

Ben Myers on Pope Benedict's Jesus of Nazareth

A few days ago, Ben Myers posted a review of Gerd Ludemann's book on "The Pope's Jesus."

While I appreciate the fairness of the review to Benedict, I do take issue with a few things, mostly from this portion of the article.

Lüdemann’s longest chapter (pp. 95-120) is devoted to Benedict’s use of the Fourth Gospel, and it is here that some of the central problems in Benedict’s methodology are brought into view. Benedict privileges the Fourth Gospel and freely uses it as a source of historical information about Jesus, but he offers “no convincing arguments against the scholarly consensus that the Johannine discourses have nothing to do with what Jesus himself actually said” (p. 120). Of course, some scholars are more optimistic about identifying historically authentic layers in the Fourth Gospel; but it is nevertheless rather baffling to hear Benedict assert that “[t]he Jesus of the Fourth Gospel and the Jesus of the Synoptics is one and the same: the true ‘historical’ Jesus” (Jesus of Nazareth, p. 111).

Such methodological shortcomings should be taken seriously in any evaluation of Benedict’s book. Indeed, the fact that Benedict presupposes the divine “inspiration” of the biblical texts is already a significant obstacle to historical understanding. Lüdemann is surely right to insist that the texts cannot be properly understood on the basis of any “supposed divine inspiration”: “Whoever has given a little finger to the historical-critical method must give the whole hand” (p. 151). Of course, I myself think it is still possible to confess the “inspiration” of the canon – but this confession should arise subsequently from an encounter with the witness of the texts, and should not be introduced as a methodological presupposition which guarantees the texts’ reliability in advance.

(Bold is my emphasis. Italics are in the original.)

I am not at all "baffled" by the pope's treatment of John as a legitimate source of knowledge about the historical Jesus, though I am a bit confused by Myers' bafflement. It seems to me rather as if his critique of the use of John introduces the same sort of faith/history dichotomy as Ludemann's, albeit in a less radical form.

That the Gospel of John tells us about the Jesus of faith is, I take it, relatively uncontroversial. Whether it tells us about the Jesus of history is not. But Benedict's basic point (as Myers seems to understand elsewhere in his review) is that the Jesus of history and the Jesus of faith are the same Jesus.

This being the case, it would appear that Myers' objection only makes sense if he is privileging the Jesus of history over against John's Jesus of faith. But this is the very thing that he takes issue with in Ludemann.

The relation between scripture and witness in my (and Benedict's?) understanding seems to be quite different from Myer's as well.

In my understanding, the primary witness to Christ is the church as a whole. Included in this, of course, is scripture (written by the early church). But scripture does not stand by itself as witness to it's authenticity and inspiration. The past and present of the community of faith also constitutes a witness to the inspiration of scripture.

Thus it makes sense to me that doing theology and exegesis within the community of faith (rather than engaging in "pure apologetics" or "academic theology") not only can, but should presuppose the inspiration of scripture.

I'm not sure whether this is a Catholic/Protestant difference, or whether certain forms of Protestantism can adopt a similar approach. I suspect that they can.