Scripture and Ministerial Tradition
We have a problem in the orthodox Anglican world. Over at AnglicanInk, George Congar critiqued Jay Thomas’s article pointing out the lamentable inconsistency of the communion over women’s ordination. There is much to be said on this issue. For instance, Anglicans need to be active in developing a rich, sacramental framework for situating the orthodox view of sex and gender.
This will be done in due time. However, we need to first defend our anchor-points from which to develop a broader theology of sex and gender: marriage and the Priesthood. In this post, I will argue that our sources of authority as Anglicans unambiguously and overwhelming force us to reject women’s ordination to the Priesthood. The only possible way to accept an egalitarian Priesthood, in other words, will be to cease using our sources of authority and pretend to an Anglican farce that is Anglican in name only.
First, I’ll sketch our sources of authority: the rule of faith and general and perpetual consensus as our hermeneutical guide. From this, I will point out why it is overwhelmingly obvious that endless debates on the meaning of αυθεντειν are at best a colossal waste of time in adjudicating the question of the male-only Priesthood.
The Rule of Faith and General and Perpetual Consent
George Congar overplays his hand by writing the following:
“Thomas repeatedly invokes “the church’s historic and magisterial tradition” as though this settles the matter. But whose tradition? Interpreted how? Adjudicated by whom?
Here’s where Thomas’s argument reveals its true colors. His appeal to natural law and magisterial tradition as co-equal authorities with Scripture sounds Anglican—until you remember that the English Reformers explicitly rejected precisely this formulation. Article VI doesn’t say Scripture is prima inter pares among authorities; it says Scripture “containeth all things necessary to salvation” and that nothing not found there or provable thereby may be required as doctrine. Article XX forbids the Church from ordaining “any thing that is contrary to God’s Word written.”
He exposes the fact that he knows next to nothing about how our historic formularies work. To pretend that appealing to natural law and tradition as bounds outside of which we cannot go somehow makes them “co-equal” with Scripture means he has not read the figures he has briefly referenced (Richard Hooker, the Caroline Divines, etcetera).
To situate this question rightly, we need to define the Rule of Faith and show how this generates Sola Scriptura understood as such: Scripture is the sole Rule of Faith.
P1) The Rule of Faith is the sole sufficient measure by which to judge what is and is not the doctrine of Christ
P2) The doctrine of Christ is identical to the doctrine of the prophets and the apostles
C1/P3) Ergo, the Rule of Faith is the sole sufficient measure by which to judge what is and is not the doctrine of the prophets and the apostles
P4) The sole sufficient measure by which to judge that which is and is not the doctrine of the prophets and the apostles is Scripture alone
C2) Therefore, the Rule of Faith is Scripture alone
In defense of premise 1: Sola Scriptura is the belief that Scripture is the sole Rule of Faith for the Church. We need to define what it means for Scripture to be the “sole Rule of Faith.” To say that it is the sole Rule of Faith is to say that the Rule of Faith
Archbishop of Canterbury John Tillotson teaches the following in his book, The Rule of Faith: “For this being known, we have the Rule of Faith; that is, a measure by which we may judge what we are to assent to, as the Doctrine of Christ, and what not. So that when any Question ariseth about any particular Proposition, whether this be part of Christ’s Doctrine, we may be able by this Rule to resolve it.”[1]
Tillotson, acknowledge that we receive our knowledge of the canon through the consent of the Church—along with Whitaker, Field, Cosin, and countless other Anglican divines. But the question at hand is what is that measure by which we may judge what we are assent to as the Doctrine of Christ—as Divine Revelation.
William Chillingworth puts it like this:
“Now, when Protestants affirm against Papists, that “Scripture is a perfect rule of faith,” their meaning is not, that by Scripture all things absolutely may be proved which are to be believed: for it can never be proved by Scripture to a gainsayer that there is a God, or that the book called “Scripture” is the word of God; for he that will deny these assertions when they are spoken, will believe them never a whit the more because you can show them written. But their meaning is, that the Scripture, to them which presuppose it Divine and a rule of faith, as Papists and Protestants do, contains all the material objects of faith, is a complete and total, and not only an imperfect and a partial, rule.”[2]
The Rule of Faith is therefore that which contains all material objects of faith—all that is to be assented to as a matter of Divine Revelation. Now, importantly, a material object of “faith” here references what is called Divine Faith. Hence Tillotson: “So that Divine Faith, which we are now speaking of, is an assent to a thing upon the testimony or authority of God; or, which is all one, an assent to a truth upon Divine revelation”
So as the matter of Divine Revelation simply is the Doctrine of Christ, the Rule of Faith contains all those matters to be assented to on the basis of being Divine Revelation, or the Doctrine of Christ. It seems to me that all other definitions of the Rule of Faith emerge from this one. It will be commonly said that the Rule of Faith is that which of itself can bind the conscience as to what should be assented to as a matter of Divine Revelation. But “of itself” needs further clarification here. If Johnny tells me that x is a matter of Divine Revelation, Johnny’s say-so is not sufficient of itself to prove that it is. But if Scripture says that x is a matter of Divine Revelation, this is because it is sufficient of itself to prove this. That owes to a difference between Johnny’s say-so and Scripture’s say-so. This difference, it seems to me, consists in the fact that the latter is sufficient to tell us what is Divine Revelation—and thereby judge what is and is not—and the former is not. Thus far, I think my opponent and I would agree.
Now, in defense of premise 2: the Doctrine of Christ is the doctrine of the prophets and the apostles. Or what is the same: the teaching of the prophets and the apostles comprises the doctrine of Christ—the matter of Divine Revelation. Here, we will quote Anglican divines and Church Fathers. Whitaker says the following (anticipating the trajectory of my argument):
“For God inspired the prophets with what they said, and made use of their mouths, tongues, and hands: the Scripture, therefore, is even immediately the voice of God. The prophets and apostles were only the organs of God. It was God who spake to the fathers in the prophets and through the prophets, as is plain from Heb. i. 1. And Peter says, 2 Epist. i. 21, that “holy men of God spake as they were moved, φερομένους, by the Holy Ghost.” Therefore the Scripture is the voice of the Spirit, and consequently the voice of God.”[3]
Important for our purposes is Whitaker’s identification of the teaching of the prophets and the apostles with the voice of God. It is because Scripture is their teaching that it is the Word of God. One is reminded here of the Lutheran theologian Johan Gerhard’s words:
“The prophets, Christ, and the apostles, with their teaching, thoroughly moved people’s hearts to embrace what they were proposing, to consider it as divine, and to do all this in faith even without the testimony of the Church. But now the same things that the prophets in the Old Testament and the apostles in the New preached have been reduced by God’s will into Scripture. Thus they have the same force. Preaching and writing are merely the external accidents that have the least effect in changing the internal nature, power, and efficacy of the Word . . . the apostles’ word was received without any witness or mandate of the Church as the Word of God himself (1 Thess. 2:13).”[4]
That Gerhard and Whitaker are right—that the teaching of the prophets and the apostles are the Rule of Faith—is amply affirmed by the fathers.
Tertullian taught that “all doctrine which agrees with the apostolic churches—those molds and original sources of the faith—must be reckoned for truth, as undoubtedly containing that which the churches received from the apostles, the apostles from Christ, and Christ from God.”[5] Churches hold communion with apostolic churches—churches founded by the apostles—because their doctrine is “in no respect” different from that of the apostles.
The writings of the third and fourth centuries exhibit the same emphasis on the apostolic teaching. In Origen’s On First Principles, he wrote that “the teaching of Christ, transmitted in orderly succession from the apostles, and remaining in the churches to the present day, is still preserved, and that alone is to be accepted as truth which differs in no respect from the ecclesiastical and apostolical tradition.”[6] For Origen, then, the teaching of Christ was delivered from the apostles and subsists in those churches that maintain apostolic succession. In like manner, Hippolytus’s Apostolic Tradition, likely written in the third century as well, ends with the following observation: “it is in this manner that many heresies have grown, for those who were leaders did not wish to affirm themselves of the opinion of the apostles, but did what they wanted according to their own pleasure.”[7] Thus, teaching something inconsistent with the opinion of the apostles is viewed as the wellspring of heresy; the rule of faith, then, is the apostolic teaching—so understood to be the teaching of the prophets and the apostles in their integral unity. Hence, Jerome defines “what the prophets and apostles have intended” as the law of God, writing in his Epistle to Paulinus:
“I say nothing of persons who, like myself, have been familiar with secular literature before they have come to the study of the Holy Scriptures. Such men, when they charm the popular ear by the finish of their style, suppose every word they say to be a law of God. They do not deign to notice what Prophets and Apostles have intended, but they adapt conflicting passages to suit their own meaning, as if it were a grand way of teaching—and not rather the faultiest of all—to misrepresent a writer’s views and to force the Scriptures reluctantly to do their will.”[8]
From Premises 1 and 2, Premise 3—the first conclusion—necessarily follows. So it remains to show that the sole sufficient measure by which we can determine what is and is not the doctrine of the prophets and the apostles is Scripture.
First, we need to think through what it means to say that x is a sufficient measure by which to determine what the teaching of y is. If Sally claims that Susie said x, Sally’s say-so is not sufficient to determine that Susie said x. But if Susie says x, this is sufficient to determine that Susie said x. I know of no other mechanism sufficient of itself by which we can know that Susie said x other than her say-so. Hence, if the Scriptures are sufficient to determine what the apostles taught, it will be because the canonical books just are their say-so.
Indeed, as Bishop Thomas Bilson writes,
“To have their mouths and pens directed and guided by the Holy Ghost into all truth, as well of doctrine as discipline, was so proper to the apostles, that no evangelist nor prophet in the New Testament came near it; and therefore the stories written by Mark and Luke were not admitted to be canonical in respect of the writers, but for that they were taken from the apostles’ mouths, and by the apostles perused and confirmed as true and sincere.”[9]
Bilson’s claim is supported from the historical record. For Papias tells us that Mark’s Gospel consists of condensations of Peter’s sermons, and Luke was a travelling companion of St. Paul. The canonical books of Scripture, then, are those that were authorized by the apostles as their say-so. But as it is the canonical writings alone that are authorized as the apostles say-so—for the canonical writings are canonical just because they were authorized by the prophets and the apostles as their say-so—so it is the canonical writings alone that are sufficient to give us their doctrine. And from this, the truth of premise 4 is established—the Scriptures alone are the sole sufficient means by which to determine the doctrine of the prophets and the apostles. And from this follows the conclusion.
We can summarize the case as follows. Anglicanism assumes what I’ve termed elsewhere “Sola Apostolica”—that it is the teaching of the prophets and the apostles that comprises the deposit of faith, thereby containing and delivering all material objects of Divine Revelation.[10] From this, we gather that Scripture is the sole rule of faith as the teachings of the prophets and the apostles reduced to writing either by them or at their express authorization. This is Bilson’s and Whitaker’s argument for the canonization of particular books.
But that Scripture alone is sufficient of itself to bind the conscience as to what to assent to as Divine Revelation does not exclude even the infallibility of other norms and sources which can help us understand what Scripture says. Historically, the chief of these was consensus.
Consequently, the consensus of the Church across various ages and times is the reliable self-presentation of Divine Revelation, and should be taken as such unless there are express reasons showing that consensus was ill won. Richard Hooker explains why:
“Signs and tokens whereby goodness may be known are of sundry kinds, some more certain and some less. The most certain token of evident goodness is when the general persuasion of all men so accounts it. Therefore a commonly received error is never utterly overthrown until such time as we pass from signs to causes, and show some manifest root or fountain thereof, common unto all, whereby it may clearly appear how it has come to pass that so many have been overseen. In such cases, surmises and slight probabilities will not serve, because the universal consent of men is the perfectest and strongest evidence of this kind, comprehending only signs and tokens of goodness…The general and perpetual voice of men is as the sentence of God himself.”[11]
When discerning the good in a given domain, the consensus of the competent authorities is a reliable eventual token of that good. For instance, if one were trying to discern “the good” relative to architectural practice, consulting the community of architects and looking for agreement is the surest sign of that goodness. Hence, Richard Field argues that if a given tradition is held by the whole Church, the most renowned presbyters have taught it in all ages, and the constant testimony of apostolic Churches receive it, it must be accounted as having apostolic authority.[12] It is on this basis that Anglicans rank the apocryphal books as “deuterocanonical”; they are useful for instruction in living, and retained for reading in the lectionary, but are not to be used to establish any doctrine. For the Protestant canon contains those books most widely and universally accepted, with the Deuterocanon disputed all the way to the Middle Ages.[13] Hence, in A Preservative Against Popery—compiled by Bishop Edmund Gibson, containing the writings of multiple Anglican divines of his time—we read the following of councils that are truly general:
“In cases that are doubtful, the judgment of so many wise, learned, and pious men, from all parts of the Christian Church, is a very probable argument of the truth of their decrees; and no modest man will openly oppose what they determine, unless it appears that there was something of faction and interest at the bottom, or that the reasons whereby they were overruled were so weak or ludicrous as to render their judgments contemptible. For if the opinion of one learned man be so considerable, much more is the deliberate judgment of so many great and good men. Secondly, the authority of ancient councils is very considerable, as they were credible witnesses of the apostles’ doctrine and practice, and of the constant faith of the Church in the preceding ages.”[14]
Henry Hammond similarly taught that the consent of the Church in her primitive ages is the ground upon which the authority of the canonical books are made known to the Church, Indeed, through the consent of the Church manifested at general councils—which are made general either in the course of possessing sufficient representatives or garnering assent in the universal Church—is a sufficient way of settling controversies as to the meaning of Scripture.[15] Hammond writes,
“And therefore, of the Scriptures, of the Creed (that regula fidei una, sola, immobilis et irreformabilis—“that one, only immovable and unreformable rule of faith,” as Tertullian calls it), and of those four Councils, as the repositories of all true apostolical tradition, I suppose it very regular to affirm that the entire body of the Catholic faith is to be established, and all heresies convinced; or else that there is no just reason that any doctrine should be condemned as such.”[16]
Similarly, in bounding our reading of Scripture even for matters necessary to salvation, Chillingworth writes,
“Yet thus much I can say, which I hope will satisfy any man of reason, that whatsoever hath been held necessary to salvation, either by the Catholic Church of all ages, or by the consent of Fathers, measured by Vincentius Lirinensis’s rule, or is held necessary either by the Catholic Church of this age, or by the consent of Protestants, or even by the Church of England, that, against the Socinians and all others whatsoever, I do verily believe and embrace.”[17]
Finally, Simon Patrick writes,
“That we reverently receive also the unanimous Tradition or Doctrine of the Church in all ages, which determines the meaning of the holy Scripture; and makes it more clear and unquestionable in any point of Faith, wherein we can find it hath declared its sense. For we look upon this Tradition as nothing else but the Scripture unfolded: not a new thing, which is not in the Scripture; but the Scripture explained and made more evident.”[18]
Whereas Scripture is of itself sufficient to bind us as to what to assent to as Divine Revelation, tradition can nevertheless furnish us with knowledge of what Scripture says. The force of tradition increases given its approach towards universality. The application to the question of women’s ordination is obvious.
Women’s Ordination Ruled Out by the Vincentian Canon
If Congar and others in his camp actually valued the way our formularies derived the canon and specified the Articles, they would be forced to rule out women’s ordination on the very same ground by which Anglicans established a two-tiered canon. He asks “whose tradition”, and yet the answer of the formularies above is clear: the tradition of the Christian Churches, as measured by the Vincentian canon, delivered in its perpetuity and ascertained by universality.
Now, it is true: the Church of Rome claims things for this that obviously do not apply. Nicholas Ridley, Peter Martyr Vermigli, and countless others launch Pope St. Gelasius, St. John Chrysostom, Theodoret, St. Irenaeus, and others in defense of our Eucharistic view (as well as translating Ratramnus and Aelfric). But their false and pretended claims to universality do not eliminate genuine ones. Episcopacy developed everywhere across the branches of the Church Catholic in the first 500 years of Christianity and was maintained beyond that. The canon list enshrined in the Articles was defended by Whitaker on the grounds that the 66 books were the ones that won assent, whereas theologians even like Cardinal Cajetan or commentaries like the Glossa Ordinaria shows the 66 books to have won assent and the Deuterocanon to be viewed as pious books profitable for moral instruction. Rome adjudicates tradition by fiat; that much is true. However, the same consensus we use to support our canon list, episcopacy against the Puritans (like Richard Hooker in Book VII of the Laws), overwhelmingly and unilaterally rule out WO to the Priesthood. You will not find the practice among the Eastern Orthodox, the Roman Catholic or Latin Churches, the Oriental Orthodox, the Assyrian Church of the East, or anywhere in the first 1000 years of Christianity as the approved norm. The only exceptions to this are either a) heretics like the Montanists who everyone recognized as such or b) scattered references to “presbytera” which either refer to Priest’s wives or elderly women who were respected leaders underneath the authority of a Priest; you do not find sacramental function attributed to them. And these references themselves are scarce.
On the other hand, St. John Chrysostom’s explanation for what St. Paul was teaching exactly in 1 Timothy 2 was not:
““In what sense then does he say, “I suffer not a woman to teach” (1 Timothy 2:12)? He means to hinder her from publicly coming forward (cf. 1 Corinthians 14:35), and from the seat on the bema, not from the word of teaching itself. For if this were the case, how could he have said to the woman who had an unbelieving husband, “How do you know, O woman, whether you will save your husband?” (1 Corinthians 7:16). Or how could he allow her to admonish children when he says, “She shall be saved by childbearing, if they continue in faith and charity and holiness with sobriety” (1 Timothy 2:15)? How also did Priscilla come to instruct even Apollos? It was not, then, to cut off private conversation for spiritual benefit that he said this, but rather to restrain teaching before all in the public assembly, which was the teacher’s office to give; or again, in cases where the husband was believing and sufficiently instructed, able also to teach her. But when she is the wiser, he does not forbid her from teaching and improving him. And he does not say “who taught much,” but “who labored much,” because along with teaching (τοῦ λόγου) she performs many other ministries besides—ministries of danger, of financial support, and of travel. For the women of those days were more spirited than lions, sharing with the apostles their labors for the sake of the Gospel. In this way they traveled with them and performed many other services. Even in Christ’s own day women followed him and ministered to him from their substance (Luke 8:3), waiting upon the Teacher.”
The “seat of the bema” was the authoritative seat of the presbyter from which he exposited the apostles’ teaching for the people of God, giving the reading they were expected to hold as true (which is why it such a fearful thing if he gets it wrong). This does not rule out theological work for women; we obviously still had St. Macrina in the tradition alongside the teaching above. Nevertheless, we know the reason the fathers excluded women from the Priesthood: they were convinced that St. Paul taught the authoritative ministry of the Word (which has as its climax Eucharistic consecration) belonged to the Presbyters.
Congar and the other egalitarians will say “well tradition is important but Scripture measures it” without giving any consideration to the formularies above: if there is a universal interpretation of Scripture that prevailed from the earliest ages of the Church and throughout, we are not able to say “nah, Mother Church needs to bend the knee to modern hermeneutical prejudices of the past century and a half”. No. We need to listen to Christ’s Bride—the society of the Spirit in whom we hear the Voice of our Shepherd clarified and preserved faithfully. It is not those who uphold the reading of tradition that are “Anglo-Catholic”; it is the pretended “egalitarian Reformational Anglicans” who are neither Reformational nor truly Anglican.
[1] John Tillotson, The Rule of Faith (O. Gellibrand, 1676), 7.
[2] William Chillingworth, The Religion of the Protestants a Safe Way to Salvation (George Bell & Sons, 1888), 91.
[3] William Whitaker, A Disputation on Holy Scripture Against the Papists (Oxford University Press, 1849), 296.
[4] Johann Gerhard, On the Nature of Scripture and Theology (Concordia Publishing House, 2009), 77–78.
[5] Tertullian, “The Prescription Against Heretics,” in Ante-Nicene Fathers (Christian Classics Ethereal Library, n.d.), 3:523.
[6] Origen, “On First Principles,” in Ante-Nicene Fathers (Christian Classics Ethereal Library, n.d.), 4:422–23.
[7] Hippolytus and Alistair C. Stewart, On the Apostolic Tradition, Second edition (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2015), 43.
[8] St. Jerome, The Principle Works of St. Jerome, trans. Phillip Schaff (Christian Classics Ethereal Library, n.d.), 262.
[9] Thomas Bilson, The Perpetual Government of Christ’s Church (Oxford University Press, 1842), 116.
[10] Sean Luke, “Sola Apostolica : A Proposal for an Ecumenical Principle of Authority,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 59, no. 1 (2024): 27–53, https://doi.org/10.1353/ecu.2024.a922801.
[11] Richard Hooker, The Works of That Learned and Judicious Divine Richard Hooker, ed. Isaac Walton (Oxford University Press, 1845), 172.
[12] Richard Field, Of the Church (Cambridge University Press, 1859), 2:471–72.
[13] Field, Of the Church, 2:472–74; See also Whitaker, A Disputation on Holy Scripture.
[14] Edmund Gibson, ed., A Preservative Against Popery, vol. 1 (The Most Eminent Divines of the Church of England, 1738), 44.
[15] Henry Hammond, The Miscellaneous Theological Works of Henry Hammond (John Henry Parker, 1849), 2:329–40.
[16] Hammond, The Miscellaneous Theological Works of Henry Hammond, 2:344.
[17] Chillingworth, The Religion of the Protestants a Safe Way to Salvation, 28.
[18] Simon Patrick, A Discourse about Tradition: Shewing What Is Meant by It, and What Tradition Is to Be Received, and What Tradition Is to Be Rejected (London: Printed for R. H. and F. G., and sold by Abel Swalle at the Unicorn in St. Paul’s Church-yard, 1685) 19
