Show me how the Episcopal Church teaches Heresy (officially)

Ok, but this still doesn’t get past the Is/Ought Problem: just because the Apostles were men doesn’t mean they ought to have been men, or that subsequent Orders which they did(n’t?) found must consist of men. If we’re going to treat the NT as legislation rather than as a record of ‘Good News’, we can’t pick and choose when we’re going to be strict constructionists about it. Absent a positive command/prohibition, one cannot say that women are disallowed from entering Holy Orders on the basis of the NT. It’s simply not there.

 

Can you give me chapter and verse of the 'fact' that the 72 were all men please? Where did you get this 'information' from?

We can be fairly sure there were no priests among the 72, so why should there be any priestesses either. Especially since priestesses were all pagans and the 72 were all presumably Hebrews. Later on though there is no way of knowing now how many pagan 'priestesses' may have become believing Christians. Melchizedek was not Jewish you know. Not even Hebrew. He was King of Salem, (probably Jerusalem), but that would have been long before Jerusalem was the City of David and anything to do with the Hebrews. Melchisedek would have been a Canaanite and therefore a Gentile. This was all long before the conquest of Canaan by Joshua. So you can't afford to get too sniffy over it because Jesus is now High priest tracing his line back to a Gentile pagan.
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Sorry that was meant to be Council of Nicea. The AC has other anti-WO statements, but the Council of Nicea saw fit to write this in its canons:

“we mean by deaconesses such as have assumed the habit, but who, since they have no imposition of hands, are to be numbered only among the laity.” (Canon 19, Council of Nicaea)

 

Canon 19 is referring to the followers of Paul of Samosata. It seems unlikely that anything more general can be inferred from that canon. None of that matters, of course, if the canon isn’t actively in force now. It would seem that we aren’t bound by it. Canon law is disciplinary by nature, and is promulgated on the authority of the Church to which it applies. In other words, since canon law functions the same way as civil law, what matters (for us) is whether that canon still forms part of the code of canon law in the respective member Churches of the Anglican Communion. To my knowledge, this canon is not currently part of the canon law of the Church of England, or the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States. It is a historical curiosity, but not something we are bound by today.

 

That conflates my argument with saying presbyter is also a substantive descriptor. A presbyter, in all cases in the NT, just means 'elder' or 'wise person'. It never describes someone who has a certain job or a universally understood role in the church. The same is not true for deacon and bishop. Sometimes deacon and bishop do refer to someone who has a mutually understood role in a Church. Again, why would Paul have taken the time to detail them in 1 Timothy 3 if they were just convenient terms and we could replace the term "deacon" with "assistant" or "person who washes the cups". Early Christians understood the specific job that was meant by the term deacon and episkopon.

Okay, but that's not on me. I said deacon and bishop, and those two specifically, had substantive jobs even in the NT times. Apostle, at that time, just meant a public advocate in all cases. It was later that we started referring to the first twelve as The Apostles. It would be a bit awkward if Paul talked himself up like that in his letters.

Sure, I will add it to the reading list.

 

Paul called to be an apostle of Jesus Christ through the will of God, and Sosthenes our brother, 1 Cor 1:1

 

"Heresy" is a big word!
I wonder what the answer might be.

 

I think what you're actually looking for is Mark 3.14 - "And he appointed twelve, whom he also named apostles, to be with him, and to be sent out to proclaim the message,".

They aren't The Apostles. The emphasis on the The. They're merely apostles - meaning advocates. The earliest possible time we could argue they are called The Apostles is the time of Luke, about 30-35 years after Paul died, by the earliest estimates. Before then each Apostle is merely "a Apostle". As Paul calls himself. "I am an apostle to the Gentiles" not "I am the apostle to the Gentiles".

All that to say apostle, as we read it in the NT, should be read to mean an advocate, and only with context can we understand if they mean it to mean one of the original twelve apostles.

 

The major point in all this being the change in the meaning within the church and society generally, of the word Apostle. Anyone sent with a message from someone else was an apostle and any written letter to anyone was an epistle. Now both these words have taken on a load of extra 'meaning' to the extent that Apostle now means one of a very select few, endowed by Christ with supernatural faith and mental recall, and Epistle means an inspired piece of scripture written by someone with supernatural insight. (but there were always more than 12 because Paul was never one of the twelve, neither was Luke or the James who became leader of the Jerusalem Church or the one who wrote the Epistle, and the twelve were only a representative number which even scipture does not agree entirely upon as to who they actually all were).

Words may change in the meanings they are given by us, but the meanings we give them does not necessarily make OUR meanings the same as the meanings intended by the oroginal authors of them.

The problem is that WE assume our modern understanding of the meaning is the only correct one, and that is what raises issues.
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Oh I’m only mentioning it to show the mind of the Church Fathers on the question of deaconesses (and on WO as a whole).

Yes, the sect of Paul of Samosata tried to get this, which shows us who in the early church pushed for WO, that they weren’t exactly orthodox Christians.

 

But the canon specifically says that the ‘deaconesses’ hadn’t been ordained, i.e., that there had been no “laying on of hands”. This means that they did not need to be reordained, unlike the clergy received into the Church from that sect. In effect, the canon says the exact opposite of what you’re claiming.

 

Let’s be clear about “what I’m claiming”. What I’m claiming is that the women servings as deaconesses in the early church were not seen as ordained, but as lay. Here we have the Council of Nicea making a judgment about how to deal with women who had some of the functions of deacons, and were even called under they name, “deaconesses”. The Council rules that these similarities to men were important enough to make a Canon just for this alone, that this similarity should not obfuscate a fundamental distinction, that they actually are not ordained, none of them, not even a single one, whatever dress and functions and titles they may go under.

 

Okay so you already agree with me that Presbyter is not a substantive noun in the NT. Now all we need to deal with is Deacon and Episkopos. If we can do those two, then the thesis of Lancelot Andrews is vindicated that all three were not (yet) substantive in the NT.

For Deacon I would first and foremost propose the verse calling emperor Nero a Deacon. Just as Presbyter meant elder, so Deacon just meant helper or minister, that’s all. And thus, in many English translations that verse translates Nero as being a “minister of the Lord”, which is accurate.

And as for Episkopos, I’m in transit now, but shall I find non-substantive examples of that word being used? And if I do, will that settle the issue?

1 Tim. 3 lists the qualifications for an episkopos. And if we go with Andrews, these are not qualifications for a specific office, but would apply to anyone who served the function of oversight in the Church. It wouldn’t apply only to what are called bishops today, but every officer in the Church. Thus I would apply 1. Tim. 3 to everyone in today's holy orders, not just bishops but priests and deacons too.

 

Here is the text of the canon in full:

Bearing in mind that it doesn't alter my view one way or the other, nor am I bound by, what canon 19 of the Council of Nicaea said - as Councils "may err, and sometimes have erred, even in things pertaining unto God" (Art. 21) - it remains the case that a trained lawyer could have a field day with this canon. The text concerns a specific group, the Paulianists. It discusses rebaptism for the laity, rebaptism and reordination for the clergy, and then appears to make mutually exclusive statements in two different independent clauses referring to "deaconesses". Almost as though the second clause on deaconesses were an interpolation or a gloss, there was apparently some felt need to define the term, as though there were another category of deaconesses with which the intended readership of the canons at the time might have also been familiar. Given the limited scope of the canon in its own day, and the fact that there are no more Paulianists, the canon is obsolete. Even if it were more than a historical curiosity and the canon were actually in force today, there would still need to be some ecclesiastical authority to interpret the canon, especially regarding the ambiguity of some of the language. Those authorities today are the Church of England, the Anglican Church of Canada, the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States, etc.

I also would not rely on the so-called Apostolic Constitutions. The Arian associations of that work - including within the history of the Church of England (cf. Whiston) - are well known.

 

Definitely not. Finding a single case where it does not refer to a specific job does not mean in all cases it does not refer to a specific job. We can understand the meaning of it in each use by reading it in context. In the context of Chloe, it's clearly a job title - I gave the arguments for it already in post #92

Suppose I wrote a book that regularly referred to characters who were farmers. And then in one chapter I said "Nero, the farmer of ill-will". Nero is clearly not a literal farmer. Would you then use that as evidence no other character is an actual farmer either? At this point I'll also just re-iterate that Romans 13 is not explicitly talking about Nero, it's talking about the Roman State in specific, and all forms of authority generally.

I imagine this discussion will probably be a lot more useful after I've read Andrews, so if I have meaningful thoughts after reading it I might make a new thread at that point to restart this discussion.

 

Again you're shifting the goalposts, since I never cited it as an instance of legislation. I cited it precisely as a historical curiosity. It is a window into the mind of the Church Fathers (one of many) on the question of Women's Ordination. Were they in favor of it? Here you have the answer.

It's even a precise answer on the question of deaconesses in the early church, which is a favorite stalking horse of WO advocates; "didn't the early church have deaconesses? Look at this mosaic of women in ecclesiastical garb! QED." And here we are given a devastating answer. The Council of Nicea gives us a gloss for what these women meant, and how they were understood. Even despite a deacon-like title, despite ecclesiastical appearances, and even ecclesiastical functions, the entire Church of the 300s AD saw fit to speak with a unified voice, and craft a canon solely just on this: no the women are not to be considered as ordained. That's a pretty devastating testimony of the mind of the Church Fathers.

Can you elaborate?

 

It’s common knowledge, but here is a link to a good article that discusses it:
https://biblicalstudies.org.uk/pdf/jts/016_523.pdf
Ultimately if you’re not talking about legislation, you have to deal with the Is/Ought problem. Just because the Fathers may have thought it, doesn’t mean that their opinion should be normative for us.

 

It should also be noted that the context in which Nero or the oppressive state he epitomised, might be called 'deacon' in scripture is more sarcastic than any 'male only priesthood' advocate wil ever like to admit. Sarcasm and irony were a well know literary way of avoiding getting onself crucified and set on fire on the orders of the likes of 'deacon' Nero at the time, and to compare the use of the term in any similar way to the complimentary way it is used in reference to a woman, clearly considered to be a leader of high esteem in a local church, is to say the least mendacious.

It rings of someone desperate to convince us that women were never esteemed deacons i.e. those with the Christ appointed responsibility of co-shepherding of a flock with or without an overseeing 'bishop'.
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