Myrrhbearer wrote:I understand Choirs, and all, but if the Lord directs us, through St. Paul, that women shouldn't teach men or read in church...shouldn't this follow through today?
I would question whether St Paul does indeed direct that women should not teach men. The wording seems to suggest that he was simply writing about how he ordered the Church under his particular area of jurisdiction.
When St Paul speaks universally, he uses the word should. See his requirements of the qualities required of a bishop. However, in this instance, he does not say, "A woman should not teach or have authority over a man". He says "I do not permit a woman to teach or have authority over a man". He didn't apply it as a universal doctrinal ideal, but merely as a statement of fact as to how he ordered the part of God's vineyard over which he had charge.
A few years back, during my Anglican days, when I was an ardent supporter of the ordination of women to the episcopate and priesthood, I saw that the priest was sacramentally acting in persona Christi (in the person of Christ), but I would only have argued that the priest would need to be human in order to do this. In my view, as it then was, any further requirement (such as maleness) would also mean that the priest would have to be Jewish, in his late 20s/early 30s, perhaps have a mole behind his left ear (if Our Lord had such a mole) and so forth. The Creed stated that Christ became man (in the sense of human) and that was enough for me.
In light of that, the only argument opposed to the ordination of women for which I had any sympathy was not a doctrinal one about the nature of priesthood, but was the question of authority. I put this to the back of my mind until the Gene Robinson debate came up a couple of years later, and I began to reassess it again. Incidentally, it is this exploration of authority and where it lies in the Church that brought me to Orthodoxy, but I digress.
It is only later that I was introduced to a concept that I had never before considered, and that was that gender (and I say gender as I get confused by the debates that go on about what is and isn't correct use of gender and sex in which no consensus ever seems to be reached) is intrinsic to the nature of a person in a way that ethnicity, eye colour, &c. are not.
This was new to me and caused me to perhaps step back from my ardent support for the ordination of women, as I realised that I perhaps had not considered all of the issues. I still haven't delved into this in great depth, I must admit, but accepting, for argument's sake, that the Sacramental and Eucharistic Sacrificial nature of Christ's nature is intrinsically male, which would mean that the episcopate (and also priesthood) would also be intrinsically male, I don't see how it would necessarily follow that the same would apply to the diaconate.
Now I admit that this may be due to a flawed understanding of diaconate on my part, but it still seems to me (in my perhaps flawed understanding) that the disctinctions between episcopate & priesthood on the one hand, and the diaconate on the other, are sufficient to make the "maleness" of the sacrificing bishop/priest not necessarily applicable to deacons.
That doesn't mean, of course, that I reject the practice of the Church in this regard. I just would like to gain an understanding for myself.
