THE FIRST STEP IN INTRODUCING ANY ABNORMALITY IS TO CHANGE
LANGUAGE. A FEMALE ASSUMING A PRIESTLY ROLE IS PROPERLY CALLED
A PRIESTESS – NOT A PRIEST.
BECAUSE THE WORD PRIESTESS CONJURES UP CONNOTATIONS OF
PAGANISM,
THOSE WHO SEEK TO SUBVERT THE FAITH CALL WOMEN A PRIEST IN ORDER
TO AVOID THE REALITY THAT WHAT THEY MEAN IS A
PRIESTESS.
WOMEN CANNOT BE ORDAINED TO THE HOLY PRIESTHOOD WITHOUT
INTRODUCING
PAGANISM INTO THE CHURCH. TODAY IN SUCH GROUPS AS THE ANGLICAN
CHURCH, EPISCOPALIAN CHURCH, SOME SMALLER GROUPS
WE SEE A MIXTURE OF CHRISTIANITY AND PAGANISM.
TRUE CHRISTIANITY CANNOT CO-EXIST WITH PAGANISM.
May
10, 2010 By Fr. John A. Peck
A
convert to Orthodoxy from being an Episcopalian priestess, Ms. Linsley renounced
her priestly order in March 2004. She left the Episcopal ministry on the Sunday
that Gene Robinson was consecrated and has not entered an Episcopal church
since. After years of studying the question of women priestesses she is
persuaded that this innovation is the root cause of the schism within
Anglicanism. She is also the author of the excellent blog: Just Genesis.
One
of the most important functions of preaching is teaching, and Linsley’s article
is an excellent source of how to teach about the priesthood.
The
Messianic priesthood of Jesus Christ is the true and single Form[1] of the
Priesthood. Every priest, either living before Christ or after Christ’s
appearing, stands as a sign to this one priesthood. The priesthood is unique and
it is impossible to change it in any essential way.
All
attempts to change the priesthood, such as developed out of Protestant theology
or the ordination of women, corrupt the sign so that it no longer points to
Messiah. The Church itself has no authority to change the ontological pattern
since the Priesthood existed before the Church and was not established by the
Apostles.
The
first priest mentioned in the Bible is Melchizedek who lived during the time of
Abraham. The author of Hebrews tells us that Melchizedek is a type pointing to
Jesus as the true Form/Priest:
“This
hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast, and which enters
the Presence behind the veil, where the forerunner has entered for us, even
Jesus, having become High Priest forever according to the order of
Melchizedek.”
(Hebrews
6:13-20)
Melchizedek
represents the Messianic priesthood, but he doesn’t represent the beginning of
the priesthood. Cain and Abel acted as priests when they offered sacrifices in
Genesis 4. This means that the priesthood was not established by the Apostles,
it existed long before them. According to Saint John Chrysostom, a Church
Father, the priesthood “is ranked among heavenly ordinances. And this is only
right, for no man, no angel, no archangel, no other created power, but the
Paraclete himself ordained this succession…”.[2]
If
the Apostles are not the source of the Christian priesthood, what is the source?
It can only be the eternal Christ, who is the eternal Form/Priest. Through Jesus
Christ the eternal truth signified by the Priesthood comes into focus. He alone
is Priest, fulfilling atonement through His own shed blood. The Priesthood
therefore, is necessarily tied to the Blood of Jesus Christ. Where people deny
the saving nature of Jesus’ Blood there can be no true Priesthood. A priest who
denies the necessity of repentance and trust in Jesus’ Blood as the means of
forgiveness, is a false priest.
What
can we say about the Priesthood?
First,
we can say that the priesthood is verifiably one of the oldest religious offices
in the world, traced back to at least 7000 B.C. It emerges out of the
Afro-Asiatic civilization that, at its peak, extended from the Atlantic coast of
modern Nigeria to the Indus River Valley. The Brahmanas (Hindu Priest Manuals)
[3] express the richness of this institution. The “priest” offered
sacrifice at fire altars which they constructed according to geometry and at the
proper seasons which they determined through astronomy. The Vedas also reveal
the danger of a priestly order that becomes too powerful and self-serving, as
happened also with the priests of Jesus’ time. When the True Priest appeared
among them, they were unable to recognize Him because their understanding of the
office of the Priest had become corrupted.
The
priest emerges out of primeval perceptions of blood as the substance of life,
purity and righteousness. We are able to verify that this conception is very old
because it has a wide linguistic dispersion.[4] The Hebrew root “thr” = to be
pure, corresponds to the Hausa/Hahm (West Africa) “toro” = clean, and to the
Tamil (India) “tiru” = holy. All are related to the proto-Dravidian (Pakistan)
“tor” = blood. These cognates point to an ancient priesthood for which purity,
holiness and blood are related concepts.
From
the dawn of time humans recognized that life is in the blood. They saw offspring
born of water and the blood. They knew that the loss of blood could bring death.
Killing animals in the hunt also meant life for the community. They sought ways
to ensure that their dead entered life beyond the grave, especially their rulers
who could intercede for them before the Deity.
This
is why peoples around the world covered their dead rulers in red ochre dust as
early as 80,000 years ago.[5] This red dust is a sign pointing to the Pleromic
Blood of Jesus.[6]
God
planted eternity in our hearts so we innately know that Christ’s Blood is not
only redemptive, but also the source of our life. This is what St. Paul calls
“the mystery of Christ”. As his second missionary journey, Paul preached
that,
“in
Him [Jesus Christ] we live and move and have our being.” (Acts
17:28)
He
also wrote:
“In
Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to
the riches of His grace which He made to abound toward us in all wisdom and
prudence, having made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His good
pleasure which He purposed in Himself, that in the dispensation of the fullness
of the times, He might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which
are in heaven and which are on earth.” (Ephesians 1:7-10)
These
words follow Paul’s explanation of the saving work of Jesus Christ in
Ephesians:
But
now in Christ Jesus, you that used to be so far apart from us have been brought
very close, by the blood of Christ. For He is peace between us, and has made the
two into one and broken down the barrier which used to keep them apart, actually
destroying in His own person the hostility caused by the rules and decrees of
the Law. This was to create one single man in Himself out of the two of them and
by restoring peace through the Cross, to unite them both in a single body and
reconcile them with God. In His own person He killed the hostility… Through Him,
both of us have in one Spirit our way to come to the Father. (Eph.
2:13-14)
Second,
we know that the priest functions to mitigate blood guilt. Anthropologists have
noted that there is considerable anxiety about shed blood among primitive
peoples.[7] Among the Afro-Asiatics, the priesthood served to relieve blood
guilt and anxiety and to perform rites of purity. The priest addresses
impurities by seeking purification through blood sacrifice. He also addresses
anxiety about shed blood through blood sacrifice.
Third,
we know that no woman served as a priest in any official capacity. Women didn’t
enter the area of the altar where blood was offered in animal sacrifice. We know
this because the Afro-Asiatics, from whom we received the priestly office,
believed that the blood shed by men and women were never to mix or even be in
the same place. Sacred law prohibited the blood shed in killing (male) and the
blood shed in giving life (female) to share the same
space.
This
binary worldview supports clear distinction between life and
death.
The
same distinction of life-taking and life-giving is behind the law that forbids
boiling a young goat in its mother’s milk (Deut. 14:21).
The
main Christian denomination in the United States to have women priests is the
Episcopal Church. Not surprisingly, the Episcopal Church also has a Seminary
President, Katharine Ragsdale, who recently stated in a
sermon:
Let
me hear you say it:
Abortion
is a blessing and our work is not done.
Abortion
is a blessing and our work is not done.
Abortion
is a blessing and our work is not done.[8]
Women
Leaders in the Church are Never Priests
In
this essay we have discussed the origins and nature of the priesthood. Holy
Tradition and Scripture reveal numerous women in positions of leadership;
Deborah and Huldah among them. Daughters of priests are remembered as great
women also, Asenath and Zipporah among them. However not a single women can be
identified as a priest in Holy Tradition or the Bible. It is clear then that
women have never been priests and that the nature of the priesthood from the
beginning has been such that it pertains only to men.
So
called “priestesses” of ancient Greece were not priests at all. They were seers
who pronounced oracles in a trace state, like shamans. Likewise, Shinto
“priests” are also shamans as they deal with the spirits. Use of the term
“priest” in both cases reveals ignorance about the different worldviews of
priests and shamans [8], an ignorance (or bias?) that pervades 20th century
academia.
God
has not changed the office of the priesthood. It survives in Christian
communities that preserve catholic Holy Tradition. [9] When the priesthood is
held high and priests live above contamination, the world is drawn to Jesus
Christ. This happens because there is only one Priesthood: the Messianic
Priesthood. There is only one Priest: Jesus Christ, and there is only one Blood,
Christ’s pleromic blood which is the life of the world. St. Paul expresses it
this way:
“There
is one Body, one Spirit, just as one hope is the goal of your calling by God.
There is one Lord, one Faith, one baptism, and one God and father of all, over
all, through all and within all.” (Eph. 4:4-5)
As
C.S. Lewis has written:
“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.” (From C.S. Lewis’ “Priestesses in the Church?”)
NOTES
1.
Plato taught that there is but one true Form of all observable entities and this
Form exists in eternity (outside of time and space). Species of natural objects
observed in the world are merely reflections of their true Forms. We know what
trees are because one Form/Tree exists, which our souls intuitively
recognize.
2.
St. John Chrysostom, On the Priesthood, St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press (1977), p.
70.
3.
The Brahamas are Vedic texts that provide instruction for Hindu priests. These
texts give detailed instructions about sacrifices offered at altars of fire.
They also make it evident that the Priest is a close associate of the King and
the King relies heavily upon the Priests’ services. This is evident in the
Priest-King relationship that we find n the Old Testament. For more on this, see
Bujor Avari’s book India: The Ancient Past, pp. 77-79.
4.
Anthropologists have discovered that the wider the dispersion of a culture trait
the older the trait.
5.
Sophisticated mining operations in the Lebombo Mountains of southern Africa
reveal that thousands of workers were extracting red ochre which was ground into
powder and used in the burial of nobles in places as distant as Wales,
Czechoslovakia and Australia. Anthropologists agree that this red powder
symbolized blood and its use in burial represented hope for the renewal of
life.
6.
“Pleroma” means the fullness or totality of all things. Blood symbolizes life.
Since the Blood of Jesus works to bring life both in time and in eternity, the
Blood of Jesus is perceived to be the original source of life and the means of
eternal life.
7.
This has been discussed in many of the great monographs: Benedict’s Patterns of
Culture, Lévi-Strauss’ The Raw and the Cooked, and Turnbull’s The Forest
People.
8.
Read the full report on President Ragsdale here:
http://www.virtueonline.org/portal/modules/news/article.php?storyid=10231
9.
To read about the difference between the worldview of the Priest and the Shaman,
go here:
http://jandyongenesis.blogspot.com/2007/08/shamanic-practice-and-priesthood.html
©
2010, Fr. John A. Peck. All rights reserved.
http://www.celticorthodoxy.com/bkceltic-orthodox-church