Reform Ireland has published this:
Appointment of the new Bishop of Meath
The Church of Ireland, in common with the Anglican Communion worldwide, has always prized doing things ‘decently and in order’ (1Corinthians 14:40). With the appointment of the first woman bishop in Britain and Ireland, it has furthered the disorder in God’s church that it originally initiated with the decision to appoint women as presbyters and bishops by an act of Synod in 1990.
God’s order for the family and for his church is male headship, a loving, Christ-like, self-sacrificing leadership for the purpose of leading others into maturity and fellowship in Christ. This ordering, initiated by God at the creation of man and woman, is not based upon or designed to produce any inferiority or inequality of woman to man. Rather, it is based upon the very nature and purpose of relationships within the Trinity itself.
As God’s Word makes clear, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are co-equal persons of the eternal Trinity, ‘One God world without end.’ Yet, the Son is eternally submissive to the Father (1Cor.11:3), who is described as his ‘head’, and similarly the Holy Spirit’s role in the economy of God is to serve the Father and the Son. Such headship of the Father does not imply the inferiority of the Son or the Spirit. Rather, the submissiveness of the Son within the Trinity is for the purpose of a perfect loving fellowship where there is mutual glorification of the other.
In 1 Corinthians 11, the NT teaches that the principle of male headship in the family and the church is modelled upon the relationship of the Father and the Son. Male and female are equal in status (Galatians 3:28) but woman is called to be submissive to God’s design for male headship in the church. This voluntary acceptance by a co-equal of her role in the church is her Christ-like service of God, and like Christ does not imply any inferiority or inequality. On the contrary, like the voluntary submissive relationships within the Trinity, the purpose of the woman and the man in playing such complimentary roles is for the purpose of mutual glorification of the other in Christ.
This complementarian approach is creational, biblical and crucial for our sanctification in Christ. To ignore God’s design for man and woman is to bring disharmony and disorder into Christ’s body. The Church of Ireland, by its recent appointment of a woman to be Bishop, has not only brought more disharmony and disorder into God’s church, but it has also side-lined Christ in his own church. If God’s Word does not rule his body, the church, then Christ is a mere figure-head and not the captain of his people.
By ignoring God’s equality agenda and role for man and woman and substituting it with a ‘spirit-of-the-age’ equality agenda, the Church of Ireland has in effect discriminated against those who hold to a biblical position. This decision will not only prevent those who believe in God’s agenda for man and woman being able to serve in Meath diocese, but also impair fellowship throughout the Church of Ireland. The appointment to Meath is therefore a sad day for many in the Church of Ireland because it is one more indication that the Church of Ireland is no longer listening to God’s purposes for his church.
23th Sep 2013
The only response to this nonsense could not possibly published in this family friendly blog.
A very sad, if, not unexpected, comment. I do not see the saving grace of Jesus Christ in the Reform Ireland comment.
Jesus wept.
“By ignoring God’s equality agenda and role for man and woman and substituting it with a ‘spirit-of-the-age’ equality agenda,…”
What, not even an acknowledgement that the others base their difference in sound theology? That there IS sound theology that Reform just happens not to agree with?
And we want to accommodate these people? Why?
I got so cross reading this. I celebrated last week with the apt of Pat Storey and look forward with huge excitment to when the same happens in the C if E. It’s been a long painful road, but developments like this in Ireland and Wales recently give us hope.
What a bunch of nonsensical special pleading! Does anyone outside of a tiny group of entirely self-focused male clerics find this other than ridiculous? Fortunately, their day is long gone in both the Church and the world.
No good deed will go unpunished.
“The Church of Ireland, by its recent appointment of a woman to be Bishop, has not only brought more disharmony and disorder into God’s church, but it has also side-lined Christ in his own church. If God’s Word does not rule his body, the church, then Christ is a mere figure-head and not the captain of his people.”
This is not just ridiculous. It’s illogical. Embarrassing. Even disgusting.
Not to mention misogynistic. And therefore the very opposite of Christ-like.
Christ was forever raising women up.
The bishop designate is condemned by some because of her chromosomal constitution and genitalia, and by others because of her avowedly evangelical anti-LGBT rhetoric. It’s possible that the latter may be subject to ‘nuancing’, au Justin, but hardy the former. Those who take the Holy Bible as the inerrant word of God will reject her for one and accept her for the other. For those who accept that Holy Scripture is a product of a certain time and place, it will be vice versa. Though there is no provision for dissenters here, not all clergy of the Church of Ireland… Read more »
Men are called to Christlike self-sacrificing leadership, and women are called to Christlike self-sacrificing submissiveness.
Self-sacrificing leadership surely means sharing leadership with others – or even giving power (that’s what we’re talking about ultimately) away altogether.
What I think is most damaging is the message to women in abusive relationships (and not every abusive relationship involves violence) that their role is a dependency and a loss of autonomy. And that that is what the gospel is about?
Beyond parody.
Enough with complementarity!!! Nuts and bolts need to be complementary. Electric plugs and electrical outlets need to be complementary. But people are NOT machine parts. And equality? I bet Reform doesn’t believe in “kirche, kochen, und kinde” for men! The notion that men should be head of the family and the earthly church in the same manner that Jesus is supreme head of the church, quite frankly, I find frightening. In that Pauline model, Jesus is absolute master. His word is Law, not to be disobeyed, period. But, according to Christianity (simplified), Jesus is God. Human males are definitely not.… Read more »
My mind is boggling at the thought that there are people who actually believe this – totally illogical and demeaning, to women and to men.
I am not a theolgian but isn’t the submission of the Son to the Father in the Trinity a heresy, and where does that leave the poor Holy Spirit? Out on a limb as usual, especially as she is usually depicted as female and presumably subservient as well.
Consubstantial, co-eternal.. .
In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God…
Perhaps I have missed something in all those years of hymn singing, listening to the scriptures etc?
Sounds like another entry on the list I carry in my head entitled “Glad I’m a Quaker”…
Whilst evangelicalism is strong in the Church of Ireland…especially in the north, it is far closer to Fulcrum than Reform. You see having one theological college has toned down the once almost Sydney style Protestantism of the Church of Ireland.
If you live in the Diocese of Chichester you get used to people (and their fellow travellers from the opposite wing)who live in a world before women even got the vote!
To argue that women are equal to men and at the same time submissive to them looks like sheer nonsense. I wonder why I bother to read this stuff.
I simply cannot understand the position that a God that supposedly loves each individual simply created us as breeding stock.
How, really, is that different than the Sumerian deities that supposedly created Humanity to be mere self-replicating slaves?
No one seems to be willing to engage with that question, the basic one, beyond even rights or equality issues. I don’t see how it can *not* be seen as a deformation of the relationship between God and His Creation and the supposedly special place humans have in that Creation. I find it, personally, obscene.
Drivel.
Is it denigrating women, or is it raising men to Christ-like stature? Or both? Or does it matter…? Crazy.
“As God’s Word makes clear, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are co-equal persons of the eternal Trinity…” so clear it took us four centuries of theological disputes to clarify it. And to draw a parallel between complementarianism and the doctrine of the Trinity is gobsmacking.
As a Catholic I totally agree with Reform. Here is a statement from the Church of Ireland website: “The Church of Ireland is Catholic because it is in possession of a continuous tradition of faith and practice, based on Scripture and early traditions, enshrined in the Catholic Creeds, together with the sacraments and apostolic ministry. The Church of Ireland is Protestant, or Reformed, because it affirms ‘its constant witness against all those innovations in doctrine and worship, whereby the Primitive Faith hath been from time to time defaced or overlaid.’ (Preamble and Declaration to the Constitution of the Church of… Read more »
This is so sad
I also have to agree with Lorenzo – the disconnected parallel between animalistic complementarity and (which no two preachers, let alone a whole Church understand as being made clear in Scripture or anywhere else) is perfectly baffling. There is no attempt to elucidate the correlation between the two, no attempt to demonstrate the assumptions made about the nature of the interrelationships in the Trinitarian formula here; all there is is an apparent assumption that because certain people have said it, no further proof is needed. The only evidence of authority is its presumption that it exists, which seems to be… Read more »
Locuste Iste, I’d be surprised if you actually agreed with Reform. Because your Catholic arguments are based on sacramental assurance, whereas theirs are based on St Paul’s idea that women should not teach men. I can’t tell you how often FiF people have told me that they do emphatically not believe that women should be subordinate and that it would undermine their whole argument. Reform, on the other hand, are not interested in sacramental assurance but in male headship. You come from two completely different corners and just happen to meet in the “no girls allowed” position in the middle.… Read more »
Reform’s is not an entirely new utilisation of the Doctrine of The Trinity as an excuse for the subjugation of women in religious affairs. Patriarchy has long been the edifice on which male supremacy has tottered. To try to justify present-day misogyny with either quoting Trinitarian or Old Testament typology is just lazy theological non-speculation. Despite the tendency to equate power and authority with the human male, I’m not sure that we need any longer to assert ‘Male Headship’ as any longer an excuse for the suppression of women’s rights and dignity – and the under-valuation of women’s contribution towards… Read more »
Yes, the view of the Trinity espoused here is akin to Arianism. Kevin Giles has written two good books (as an evangelical) exploding this nonsense.
Reform’s position is at odds with what the universal church has always believed and taught about the Trinity. It’s not so much ‘trinitarianism’ as ‘bifurcarianism’, in that it drives apart the first and second persons of the Trinity and marginalises the third. I just made that word up but you are welcome to borrow it! Reform also remind us why theology matters, because if you get the original building blocks in the wrong places whatever you put on top will be wobbly, such as their harmful teaching about female subordination. The Church knows this, which is what it went to… Read more »
Does this mean that ‘Reform’ clergymen (they will, of course be ‘men’) in the Church of Ireland will actively conspire against the ministry of the first Woman Bishop in their Church? Let’s hope the C. of I. authorities will be prepared to dismiss from their posts any clergy who refuse to accept that women are legally part of the ministry of the C. of I.
‘Locus Iste’. Your argument is not one appropriate to membership of the Church of Ireland (Anglican). You are (rightly, for you) espousing the doctrine of your own faith community, which does not happen to coincide with the doctrine of the C. of I., and may therefore not be relevant to this discussion.
I am so pleased that the Church of Ireland has had the courage to make this appointment – the first of the four British and Irish Anglican Churches to do so. We should not be allowing the inevitable sour grapes articles like this one distract from celebrating this Good News! Alleluia. Amen.
I live in the diocese of Chichester and can confirm that ‘Sussex’ is indeed ‘confused’.
Reform have spoken well.
Many seem to forget that God has not been made in our fallen image, but we were made unfallen in His – and we were made male and female.
It seems also that many have forgotten that our Creator God has spoken and acted in His Son to recreate us fallen creatures in Christ.
So we can have hope! – notwithstanding the outcries here.
William,
while what you say is all undoubtedly true, what does it have to do with the question of who can be a priest?
From the statement, “God’s order for the family and for his church is male headship, ….This ordering, initiated by God at the creation of man and woman, is not based upon or designed to produce any inferiority or inequality of woman to man…” Sure it is. Ah yes, we are all equal but some are more equal than others because God says so, and we know God says so because it is written thus by men. Just more sexist rationalizing in an attempt to give socially constructed roles a divine mandate. Human and civil rights are merely the “spirit of… Read more »
Well, its been a long time since I took anything from Reform seriously.
This time, though, I just fell about laughing!
Reform lecturing the Church on abandoning Catholic order! That is priceless!!
I can only imagine that the author was having great fun composing this.
You see evangelicals believe mono-episcopacy is historic and not apostolic in origin,and that it is of the bene esse of the Church not the esse.
Erika is absolutely spot on….
Reading the last paragraph, about how the CofI will now be discriminating against those “who hold biblical beliefs” reminds me of this cartoon.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/nakedpastor/2013/09/we-no-longer-stone-now-we-stonewall/
It’s not my world, but why don’t people who think that the Anglican Church is insufficiently Catholic just become Catholics? I mean, I can see why people who think the Labour Party is insufficiently left wing stay rather than join some random bunch of Trots, because the Labour Party (even today) has money and volunteers and the machinery of politics. Bending the Labour Party to your will is substantially more politically effective than flogging badly printed newspapers outside railway stations. But that’s not the case here, because anything Anglicanism can do (money, buildings, ability to get an audience with world… Read more »
‘So if you want the Catholic Church, why not just join it?’
A fascinating question, IO, which has puzzled low church Anglicans since the beginning of the Oxford Movement! 🙂
‘So if you want the Catholic Church, why not just join it?’ But that question has been answered here, thoughtfully and comprehensively, by a number of contributors who have not yet converted to Rome precisely because they do not accept many of the Roman doctrines, but they believe in what the CoE still held to be true 20 years ago. It’s not about money, power or influence, it’s simply about not being able to swallow Papal infallibility, some of the Mary doctrines etc. We should accept that one can hold very traditional views on sacramental assurance without being a Roman… Read more »
Thank you, Erika. My Dad (strongly evangelical, as you know) used to say ‘All the things I disagreed with about Rome yesterday, I still disagree with today’.
‘So if you want the Catholic Church, why not just join it?’
A fascinating question, IO, which has puzzled low church Anglicans since the beginning of the Oxford Movement! 🙂
This is rather incredible. We ARE the Catholic Church, Tim – or don’t you believe in the erm, Catholic Creeds of your Church ?
The Church of Rome is not ‘the Catholic Church.’
David on Wednesday, 25 September 2013 at 8:51pm BST,
Thank you! That cartoon is spot on!
Here across the Pond, we have innumerable types, both religious and secular, complaining about taking away their rights to take away GLBT rights.
In the Church of England we are (General Synod has entrusted a group with the task of …) trying to establish a principle of supporting “mutual flourishing” – or not. This statement suggests the answer is “not”. Or is there evidence otherwise?