How to defend the belief only men should be ordained?

Looks like we have a very different view of the nature of scripture. I find it disappointing that you have to gut the OT in order to support your view. It almost reeks of semi-Marcionism.

 

Marcion wanted rid of it. I don't. I just want people to understand it was written by bronze age people with bronze age ideas in their heads and bronze age attitudes guiding their moral senses of right and wrong, even if many of those ideas were perhaps indeed inspired by God, (particularly the prophets, poets and historians). We have learned a lot from them and even more since them but should not model our society upon theirs as if THEY had got it right and WE have got ours wrong. We are nearly 2000 years on from Jesus Christ the Light of the World. WE now know much more than THEY ever did. Some of us are still learning from Him. Many don't though.

 

Point understood, but have I done that? I don't think so.
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You go first: give us proof texts for the "WO is fine with God" assumption. I asked yesterday and I'm still waiting..............

BTW, thanks to Admin for saving me the trouble of posting on that issue. You sorta took divine inspiration and shot it out the window.

 

Arguably, (if we are just looking at the Bible as merely a set of ancient stories), the New Testament was written by "a bronze age people with bronze age ideas in their heads and bronze age attitudes guiding their moral senses of right and wrong."

"You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; it is these that testify about Me."

"Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfill them."

"Jesus said to them, “While I was still with you, I told you that everything written about me in the Law of Moses, the Books of the Prophets, and in the Psalms had to happen.” Then he helped them understand the Scriptures. He told them, The Scriptures say that the Messiah must suffer, then three days later he will rise from death."

"You know the commandments: ‘Do not commit adultery, Do not kill, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Honor your father and mother."

"Jesus answered him, “What is written in Moses’ Teachings? What do you read there?” He answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind.’ And ‘Love your neighbor as you love yourself.’” Jesus told him, “You’re right! Do this, and life will be yours.”

Jesus repeatedly references the Old Testament as accurately putting forth correct doctrine and as faithfully predicting his own life, death, and resurrection. Furthermore, the idea that somehow the Old Testament either doesn't do a good job of unveiling aspects of God's nature or somehow does so incorrectly is laughable. It almost seems as if you're playing "pick and choose" with how the Bible (OT and NT) presents God. We can either view God in the totality of his divine revelation about himself or write off the aspects we don't like as the ravings of stone-age retards (ie God's prophets, priests, apostles, judges, and even the Lord himself). I would like to see Tiffy enlighten Moses, Samuel, and Isaiah on how their stone-age ramblings cannot match the sheer moral strength of his feminist, LBTQRS+, and woke agenda.

If the OT really was as flawed as you make it out to be, it would have been nice for Christ to have told us, "hey guys, the OT is actually really bad at explaining who I am." It wasn't like Christ was unfamiliar with how God is portrayed in the OT.

Things in the Bible about God we don't like = bronze age attitudes
Things in the Bible about God we do like= Divine revelation

 

What 'age' then was the Old testament written in? None of it was written after 200BC and much of it before 200BC and all of it well after the stone age. That would have seen it written pretty much entirely during the Bronze age I think.

What kind of ideas did Bronze age people have in the Bronze age? Mostly Bronze age ideas, don't you think?

And Bronze age ideas brought forth Bronze age attitudes, surely. If you want a retraction I am willing to offer one. If it was OK for Galileo, surely I shouldn't object.

Some attitudes in the Old Testament though are distincly un-Christlike. Psalm 137:8-9 may indeed be 'inspired' by God, I actually believe it is too, but would you consider it to be currently good advice from God on how one's enemies should be actually treated or just perhaps the opinion and understandable attitude of a bereaved Bronze Age Warrior living through the apalling conditions of a violent Bronze Age Society?
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Which is actually what I wrote, apart from not implying the Old Testament is merely a set of ancient stories, (I actually believe it is inspired and so also did St Paul).

The Old Testament is not a "How to do it properly" book written by God to show us how to regulate society. God does not want to take us all back to the Bronze Age. God wants us all to move forward into the New Covenant Kingdom of God. Our behaviour is regulated by The Holy Spirit and Love, not by a set of Bronze Age Rules drawn up to prepare an ancient rebellious people to form a society fit to receive their Messiah, who would begin the establishment of TRUTH and JUSTICE and HIS Kingdom througout The whole Earth.
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We seem to have moved on now. I'll try and get back to it eventually but you realise the dice are loaded against me because its against the rules to put up any really good reasons for promoting the Ordination of Women in here. I'm not risking getting another 6 months in the slammer.

 

No, really all you need to do is copy and paste the (allegedly) pro-WO scriptures and let them speak for themselves. Can't get into any trouble here that way.

 

Until one starts to get into topics or history that the biblical writers had no knowledge of. What would St. Paul have said about the American Revolution? Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity? Locke’s labor theory of value? Rousseau’s social contract? Abolitionism? Utopian socialism? Supply-side vs. Keynesian economics? The gold standard vs. fiat currency? Likewise, women’s emancipation?

Arguments from silence are weak. The apostles weren’t writing with the assumptions of individualism or civil equality or that there can be progress in knowledge. We can’t know what St. Paul or anyone else from the ancient would have said about later developments based upon those things, simply because those weren’t events and problems that they faced. Reason has to do a lot of the heavy lifting here, as the tradition is of little help.

 

The danger of overthrowing Holy Scripture with the "Goddess of Reason" is a real danger. The Holy Scriptures should guide our lives and actions in every conceivable way.

Invictus may view his Enlightenment values as something far surpassing the "bronze-age" mindsets of Jesus and St. Paul, but students of history should be all too familiar with how such enlightenment values turned out.

"We wished to try the experiment of government without religion, we failed in the attempt. The French did try it, and enthroned the goddess of Reason hard by the reeking guillotine. Moloch might have envied the Goddess the number of her victims, for the streets of Paris ran with blood. The insane ravings of the drunken votaries of Bacchus, were innocency and decency personified, when compared with the mad profanity of Frenchmen, cut loose from religion, and from God."

You can replace the Bible as a civilization's guiding metric with "reason," but one should be aware that the results could look as much like the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars (more than 6,500,000 people dead) as they could look like the American Civil War (1.5 million causalities). But, I guess the road of reason and progress is coated with the millions killed along the way.

One man's reason leads to killing 6 million Jews. Another man's reason leads to killing 25 million Kulaks. A certain Chinese man's reason leads to the deaths of 78 million people. A certain country's reason leads to the deaths of millions of unborn babies.

Reason may discover new "truths," progress may move in new directions, the bodies may pile higher and higher, but the advance of the Gospel and the truth of the Holy Scriptures (Old and New Testaments) can never be halted or waylayed. Long after the ideas of Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau have been deposited in the dust bin of history, the doctrines of the Holy Scriptures will still be believed and acted upon.

 

Nowhere in the Bible does it say "I do not permit women to be ordained". Peter and Paul's endorsements of slavery are more clear than Paul's repudiation of female priests.

Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ;
~ Paul permitting slavery, Ephesians 6.5

Slaves, accept the authority of your masters with all deference, not only those who are kind and gentle but also those who are harsh.
~ Peter permitting slavery, 1 Peter 2.18
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But of course such texts give us scope to still understand slavery as a crime. Other texts that attack slavery, or similar relationships between people, give us ammo to read a deeper interpretation than a plain reading might. In the same way that no one is threatening schism over allowing women into church without head coverings, 1 Timothy 2 can be read today as we read the passages on slavery. Instructions for the time they were in, still containing broader lessons in less specific contexts today, but not direct endorsements of the things they discuss, and able to be read alongside other passages to find a deeper interpretation.

 

No one is saying God is immoral.

People are saying slavery was allowed, but it was still not God's Will for us to subjugate our fellow man. As times changed, as man evolved spiritually to be closer to God (as Irenaeus would describe it) we came to the conclusion that slavery was repugnant. Likewise at some point in time the Church made the decision to formally prohibit women from the priesthood. That may also not be God's Will, to exclude our fellow man (latin man meaning human). As we continue to evolve to be spiritually closer to God, perhaps the previous harms of women teaching no longer exist. Women are no longer intellectually shackled like they were in Roman or Medieval European culture. Men are more capable of appreciating a sermon and discovering something new they hadn't considered without being blinded by the gender of who is talking to them. This is the purpose of the argument from slavery, not to condemn God but to show that our understanding of the same work of Scripture evolves over time for the better.

Scripture, Tradition and Reason. To discount the third leg of Anglicanism is to cut off one of your ears and blind one of your eyes, less able to hear and read the Gospel when you're sitting on the back pew.

 

Again, this has nothing to do with anything I actually said. And it’s starkly un-Anglican. The confessionally Anglican view of Scripture is that it contains all things necessary to salvation, not that it’s intended to be a guide to literally every conceivable subject. I was neither endorsing nor condemning the particular developments I mentioned in my previous post; rather I was pointing out that those things occurred far outside the social and intellectual context with which the authors of Scripture were familiar. We therefore cannot expect to be able to put words in their mouths on those subjects two millennia after the fact and expect to come up with anything coherent either with the world as we now know it or with the Gospel message. The honest approach is to simply let the biblical writers say what they intended to say, and then interpret them accordingly and apply that interpretation in the most adult and responsible way we can, using both tradition and reason as a guide, and by giving due weight to the needs and preferences of individual congregations. There need be nothing controversial about that.

 

Here is an interesting Lutheran treatment of the subject (the conclusion is anti-WO):
http://www.ctsfw.net/media/pdfs/scaerwomenordination.pdf

 

Have you considered that the pro-WO argument is very much an argument from silence, and therefore weak? In fact, there is even less scriptural support for that argument than the one for MO-only. With the latter, we are told how God appointed an all-male priesthood in the time of Moses, and we are never given the barest hint that He ever changed that or intended to change it in the future. And we are told how God appointed (ordained) an all-male circle of apostles. Where is the scriptural evidence for WO? We hear crickets.

Certainly, knowledge has increased (and men run to and fro, as Daniel was told). Does that knowledge make men wiser? No. Has that knowledge brought people closer to God or brought them more understanding of His will for mankind? No.

What knowledge does make men wiser, bring them closer to God, etc.? It's the knowledge of God gleaned from His word and enlightened by His Spirit.

You and Tiffy are characterizing the "biblical writers" as lacking in spiritual enlightenment, by reason of their relative (to us) lack of knowledge of facts for which they had no need. This is utter nonsense. Not knowing modern economic theories has zero bearing on the value and correctness of what they penned, because they wrote as they were moved by the Holy Spirit for the spiritual edification of all future readers.

Yes, reason does have value. But faith has greater value. Have faith in the word of God (in its integrity, its supernatural ability to guide us, and its lasting efficacy to communicate the essential elements of whatever the everlasting God wanted them to write), not faith in reason.

Yet I would hear you out. I invite you to share the "modern-enlightenment" reasons for WO which you find so powerful. Even though they are secular reasonings, perhaps you can share all these reasons and explain why they should have such great effect upon faith and religion that they fairly demand a dramatic change from the practice which the Church has observed and cherished, believing it to be God's will, for all these centuries.