巡礼者の小道(Pursuing Veritas)

聖書の真理を愛し、歌い、どこまでも探求の旅をつづけたい。

私が女性司祭であることを辞めた理由ーー元聖公会司祭アリス・C・リンスリー女史の証し

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 私が女性司祭であることを辞めた理由

 

 

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アリス・C・リンスリー(元聖公会司祭)。聖書人類学者。American Scientific AffiliationおよびChristian Women in Scienceの会員。リンスリー女史は、2004年3月、司祭職を公に辞任しました。長年に渡る女性司祭問題についての研究の末、彼女が達した結論は、「教会に取り込まれたこのイノベーションこそが、聖公会内での分裂の根本原因である」ということでした。同じく聖公会の信者であったC・S・ルイスは、1948年という早い段階で、女性司祭・牧師制度が非正統的なものであることを論文「教会の女性祭司たち?("Priestesses in the Church?")」の中で鋭く指摘しています。尚、リンスリー女史はその後、東方正教会に改宗しました。

 

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本稿の中で私たちは、祭司制の起源および性質について考察してまいりました。聖伝および聖書は、指導的な立場にいた数多くの女性たちのことを明かしています。デボラやフルダもそうです。また祭司たちの娘も尊敬されていました(チッポラ等)。

 

しかしながら、聖伝および聖書の中で、ただ一人して、「司祭」とみなされていた女性はいません。それゆえ、女性たちはこれまで一度も司祭ではなかったのであり、原始より祭司制の本質がそうであったがゆえに、それは男性だけに付属するものです。

 

出典

 

米国聖公会では、「女性司祭制度」という新しい企画導入により、教派内に大きな混乱と分裂がもたらされています。そしてこの混乱/分裂はアングリカン聖公会全体に拡がりつつあります。司祭としての女性が祭壇に立つことは、聖母マリヤを表すべく男性イメージが企画されるのと同じ位、人々を混乱させるものです。

 

もしも司祭がイエス・キリストの像(icon)であるのなら、祭司制はキリスト論的事項であるということにもなります。そしてそうであるからには、それは必然的に救済論にも接触することになります。これは二次的な問題として済ますことのできない深刻な問題です。

 

聖公会の信者たちは、たとい司教であっても、イエス・キリストに関する受け入れられた伝承(the received tradition)に変更を加える権利を持ってはいません。実にイエス・キリストこそ私たちの大祭司(Priest)であり、人の救いのために全き犠牲としてご自身をお捧げになりました。

 

古代ギリシャのいわゆる「女性祭司(巫女たち)」は、聖書が言うところの祭司では全くありません。彼女たちは占い師であり、シャーマンのようにトランス状態で神託を宣べ伝えていました。神道の「祭司たち」もまた、諸霊を取り扱うシャーマンです。ですから、聖書内、聖書外の二つの諸事例に同じ「祭司」という用語をあてがい、同列に論を進めていくことは、両者の異なる世界観に対する無知を露わにする行為です*1。しかしながら、こういった種類の無知(もしくは偏見?)は、現代のアカデミック界に充満しています。

 

神はキリスト教の祭司職に変更を加えてはおられません。それは、公同的聖伝を保持しているキリスト教諸共同体において現在も存続しています*2*3。祭司制が高く保持され、聖職者たちが堕落することなく生きるなら、この世の人々はイエス・キリストの元に引き寄せられるでしょう。

 

ー終わりー

 

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japanesebiblewoman.hatenadiary.com

 

"Priestesses in the Church?" by C. S. Lewis

 

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C・S・ルイス(1898-1963)

 

'I should like Balls infinitely better,' said Caroline Bingley, 'if they were carried on in a much different manner . . . It would surely be much more rational if conversation instead of dancing made the order of the day.' 'Much more rational, I dare say,' replied her brother, 'but it would not be near so much like a Ball.'

 

We are told that the lady was silenced: yet it could be maintained that Jane Austen has not allowed Bingley to put forward the full strength of his position. He ought to have replied with a distinguo. In one sense conversation is more rational for conversation may exercise the reason alone, dancing does not. But there is nothing irrational in exercising other powers than our reason.

 

On certain occasions and for certain purposes the real irrationality is with those who will not do so. The man who would try to break a horse or write a poem or beget a child by pure syllogizing is in itself a more rational activity than the activities demanded by these achievements. It is rational not to reason, or not to limit oneself to reason, in the wrong place; and the more rational a man is the better he knows this.

 

These remarks are not intended as a contribution to the criticism of Pride and Prejudice. They came into my head when I heard that the Church of England was being advised to declare women capable of Priests' Orders. I am, indeed, informed that such a proposal is very unlikely to be seriously considered by the authorities.

 

To take such a revolutionary step at the present moment, to cut ourselves off from the Christian past and to widen the divisions between ourselves and other Churches by establishing an order of priestesses in our midst, would be an almost wanton degree of imprudence. And the Church of England herself would be torn in shreds by the operation. My concern with the proposal is of a more theoretical kind. The question involves something even deeper than a revolution in order.

 

I have every respect for those who wish women to be priestesses. I think they are sincere and pious and sensible people. Indeed, in a way they are too sensible. That is where my dissent from them resembles Bingley's dissent from his sister. I am tempted to say that the proposed arrangement would make us much more rational 'but not near so much like a Church.'

 

For at first sight all the rationality (in Caroline Bingley's sense) is on the side of the innovators. We are short of priests. We have discovered in one profession after another that women can do very well at all sorts of things which were once supposed to be in the power of men alone. No one among those who dislike the proposal is maintaining that women are less capable of men of piety, zeal, learning and whatever else seems necessary for the pastoral office.

 

What, then, except prejudice begotten by tradition, forbids us to draw on the huge reserves which could pour into the priesthood if women were here, as in so many other professions, put on the same footing as men? And against this flood of common sense, the opposers (many of them women) can produce at fist nothing but an inarticulate distaste, a sense of discomfort which they themselves find it hard to analyse.

 

That this reaction does not spring from any contempt for women is, I think, plain from history. The Middle Ages carried their reverence for one Woman to a point at which the charge could plausibly made that the Blessed Virgin became in their eyes almost 'a fourth Person of the Trinity.' But never, so far as I know, in all those ages was anything remotely resembling a sacerdotal office attributed to her.

 

All salvation depends on the decision which she made in the words Ecce ancilla [Behold the handmaid of the Lord]; she is united in nine months' inconceivable intimacy with the eternal Word; she stands at the foot of the cross. But she is absent both from the Last Supper and from the descent of the Spirit at Pentecost. Such is the record of Scripture. Nor can you daff it aside by saying that local and temporary conditions condemned women to silence and private life. There were female preachers. One man had four daughters who all 'prophesied,' i.e. preached. There were prophetesses even in the old Testament times. Prophetesses, not priestesses.

 

At this point the common sensible reformer is apt to ask why, if women can preach, they cannot do all the rest of a priest's work. this question deepens the discomfort of my side. We begin to feel that what really divides us from our opponents is a difference between the meaning which they and we speak (and speak truly) about the competence of women in administration, their tact and sympathy as advisors, their national talent for 'visiting,' the more we feel that the central thing is being forgotten.

 

To us a priest is primarily a representative, who represents us to God and God to us. Our very eyes teach us this in church. Sometimes the priest turns his back on us and faces the East -- he speaks to God for us: sometimes he faces us and speaks to us for God. We have no objection to a woman doing the first: the whole difficulty is about the second.

 

But why? Why should a woman not in this sense represent God? Certainly not because she is necessarily, or even probably, less holy or less charitable or stupider than a man. In that sense she may be as 'God-like' as a man; and a given woman much more so than a given man. The sense in which se cannot represent God will perhaps be plainer if we look at the thing the other way round.

 

Suppose the reformer stops saying that a good woman may be like God and begins saying that God is like a good woman. Suppose he says that we might just as well pray to 'Our Mother which art in heaven' as to 'Our Father.' Suppose he suggests that the Incarnation might just as well have taken a female as a male form, and the Second Person of the Trinity be as well called the Daughter as the son. Suppose, finally, that the mystical marriage were reversed, that the Church were the Bridegroom and Christ the Bride. All this, as it seems to me, is involved in the claim that a woman can represent God as a priest does.

 

Now it is surely the case that if all the supposals were ever carried into effect we should be embarked on a different religion. Goddesses have, of course, been worshipped: many religions have had priestesses. But they are religions quite different in character from Christianity.

 

Common sense, disregarding the discomfort, or even the horror, which the idea of turning all our theological language into the feminine gender arouses in most Christians, will as 'Why not? Since God is in fact not a biological being and has no sex, what can it matter whether we say He or She, Father or Mother, Son or Daughter?'

 

But Christians think that God Himself has taught us how to speak of Him. To say that it does not matter is to say either that all the masculine imagery is not inspired, is merely human in origin, or else that, though inspired, it is quite arbitrary and unessential. And this is surely intolerable: or, if tolerable, it is an argument not in favour of Christian priestesses but against Christianity. It is also surely based on a shallow view of imagery.

 

Without drawing upon religion, we know from our poetical experience that image and apprehension cleave closer together than common sense is here prepared to admit; that a child who has been taught to pray to a Mother in Heaven would have a religious life radically different from that of a Christian child. And as image and apprehension are in an organic unity, so, for a Christian, are human body and human soul.

 

The innovators are really implying that sex is something superficial, irrelevant to the spiritual life. To say that men and women are equally eligible for a certain profession is to say that for the purpose of that profession their sex is irrelevant. We are, within that context, treating both as neuters.

 

As the State grows more like a hive or an ant-hill it needs an increasing number of workers who can be treated as neuters. This may be inevitable for our secular life. But in our Christian life we must return to reality. There we are not homogeneous units, but different and complementary organs of a mystical body.

 

Lady Nunburnholme has claimed that the equality of men and women is a Christian principle. I do not remember the text in scripture nor the Fathers, nor Hooker, nor the Prayer Book which asserts it; but that is not here my point. The point is that unless 'equal' means 'interchangeable,' equality means nothing for the priesthood of women. And the kind of equality which in lies that the equals are interchangeable (like counters or identical machines) is, among humans, a legal fiction. It may be useful legal fiction. But in church we turn our back on fictions.

 

One of the ends for which sex was created was to symbolize to us the hidden things of God. One of the functions of human marriage is to express the nature of the union between Christ and the Church. We have no authority to take the living and sensitive figures which God has painted on the canvas of our nature and shift them about as if they were mere geometrical figures.

 

This is what common sense will call 'mystical.' Exactly. The Church claims to be the bearer of a revelation. If that claim is false then we want not to make priestesses but to abolish priests. If it is true, then we should expect to find in the Church an element which unbelievers will call irrational and which believers call supra-rational.

 

There ought to be something in it opaque to our reason though not contrary to it -- as the facts of sex and sense on the natural level are opaque. And that is the real issue. The Church of England can remain a church only if she retains this opaque element. If we abandon that, if we retain only what can be justified by standards of prudence and convenience at the bar of enlightened common sense, then we exchange revelation for that old wraith Natural Religion.

 

It is painful, being a man, to have to assert the privilege, or the burden, which Christianity lays upon my own sex. I am crushingly aware how inadequate most of us are, in our actual and historical individualities, to fill the place prepared for us. But it is an old saying in the Army that you salute the uniform and not the wearer. Only one wearing the masculine uniform can (provisionally, and till the Parousia) represent the Lord of the Church; for we are all, corporately and individually, feminine to Him.

 

We men may often make very bad priests. That is because we rare insufficiently masculine. It is no cure to call in those who are not masculine at all. A given man may make a very bad husband; you cannot end matters by trying to reverse the roles. He may make a bad male partner in a dance. The cure for that is that men should more diligently attend dancing classes; not that the ballroom should henceforward ignore distinctions of sex and treat all dancers as neuter. That would, of course, be eminently sensible, civilized, and enlightened, but, once more, 'not near so much like a Ball.'

 

And this parallel between the Church and the Ball is not so fanciful as some would think. The Church ought to be more like a Ball than it is like a factory or a political party. Or, to speak more strictly, they are at the circumference and the Church at the Centre and the Ball comes in between. The factory and the political party are artificial creations -- 'a breath can make them as a breath has made.'

 

In them we are not dealing with human beings in their concrete entirety -- only with 'hands' or voters. I am not of course using 'artificial' in any derogatory sense. Such artifices are necessary; but because they are our artifices we are free to shuffle, scrap and experiment as we please. But the Ball exists to stylize something which is natural and which concerns human beings in their entirety -- namely, courtship.

 

We cannot shuffle or tamper so much. With the Church, we are farther in: for there we are dealing with male and female not merely as facts of nature but as the live and awful shadows of realities utterly beyond our control and largely beyond our direct knowledge. Or rather, we are not dealing with them but (as we shall soon learn if we meddle) they are dealing with us.

 

*1:Read the full report on President Ragsdale here.

*2:To read about the difference between the worldview of the Priest and the Shaman, go here

*3:聖公会の女性司祭問題に関する、東方正教会からのコメント「女性司祭」について