Divinity Atlas
Ordination of Women Divides Bodies That Agree on Almost Everything Else
Ordination of Women carries four debated facts in this atlas's own record, tied for its single most internally contested entries, and the record states plainly why: the question divides bodies that agree on almost everything else.
Where the Line Already Fell
Reform Judaism ordained Sally Priesand in 1972, the Reconstructionist movement followed in 1974 and the Conservative movement in 1985, while Regina Jonas had already been ordained privately in Germany in 1935; Orthodox Judaism does not ordain women as rabbis. The Church of England voted for women priests in 1992, ordained the first in 1994 and opened the episcopate in 2014, while the atlas records Roman Catholicism as holding that the Church has no authority to confer priestly ordination on women at all, a position stated in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis in 1994, with theologians who dispute that this is a definitive teaching continuing to publish, so the argument is live even where the ruling itself is not.
A Different Kind of Argument in Theravada Buddhism
In Theravada Buddhism the record states the argument is not about doctrine at all but about legal continuity, since the bhikkhuni ordination lineage is widely held to have lapsed. The scholar-monk Analayo argues from the Vinaya that the legal objection does not hold, against the senior monastic authorities of Thailand and of parts of the Burmese and Sri Lankan sangha, and the disagreement has produced expulsions. Ordinations were held at Bodh Gaya in 1998 with the participation of East Asian bhikkhunis whose own lineage never lapsed; some Theravada authorities accept those ordinations and others hold that a lapsed lineage cannot be restored. The historian Gary Macy complicates every version of the argument from a different angle again, the atlas records, showing that what counted as ordination in the medieval West itself changed, so that the modern question is partly an argument about what the word has always meant.
Where To Read More
- Ordination of WomenChurch, Sacraments and AuthorityThe doctrine itself, tied for this atlas's single most internally contested entries