At the present time women are becoming more and more integrated into the public and professional spheres; they are taking posts of responsibility not only within the home, but outside of it, where they are being accepted not just as feminists but as members of the community with particular skills and aptitudes, which are not, moreover, merely ‘womanly’ skills and aptitudes. In many professional situations it is now no longer sensible to ask whether the applicant for a post is a man or a woman; the only criteria applied are those of professional competence. This change within the secular society is not reflected within Church communities. Women are systematically discriminated against; the most crude and powerful symbol of this is their exclusion from the sanctuary. Now, it is argued that ‘tradition’ supports this discrimination and any attack on it is an attack on the living and holy tradition of the Church, and moreover that woman’s place is sharply and strictly defined in scripture. We shall not be able to examine both of these objections, but must content ourselves with a partial examination of the second. Partial because we shall only look at the four Gospels and not at the Old Testament or the other writings of the New Testament. Also much of the work that has been done on this question is based on a study of the role of the Mother of God, but very little has been attempted in the study of the roles of other women mentioned in the Gospel narratives. Therefore, we shall concentrate on this area, hoping to discuss the unique and all-important place of the Mother of God later. Finally we should make clear that in spite of the content, this article is not a statement of a merely ‘feminist’ point of view. Issues will be raised that go far beyond the single problem of the status of women; rather this problem should be seen as one of many which present a moral challenge to the Church and which are all interrelated. Sexual discrimination is only one form of discrimination which may afflict a ‘Christian’ community.

There is a loud cry of complaint. Women have a sense of betrayal, of having been subjected to male purposes in a world where they are forced to play an inferior part. Now many of them feel that the time has come to rise up and conquer this world, man’s world, and make it their own. Battle is joined, the revolution has commenced. But how can the war of the sexes ever be won ? If it is a battle it is one without real victory, for man and woman can never be anything but related, opposite but related—as right and left, day and night, heaven and earth. Women can certainly become as rational as men, they can think their thoughts, do their jobs, wear their clothes . . . unisex even returns the compliment and polarity is dissolved. So women can become as men. They can become specialists, technicians, breaking down universality into the particular, the whole into the isolated part; specializing as men have done, have had to do, in order to produce such a successful society. Women feel underprivileged, they have been left behind. They are still amateurs— inefficient, for only specialization makes for real efficiency. Women improvise, they tend to make do with what is to hand. They often go about things in a devious way which drives men mad. They seem so content to act from within the contingent. They are like Levi-Strauss’s ‘bricoleurs’, they do a variety of jobs with the limited means available. Many women do perform daily a balancing act quite illogical in its demands and immeasurable in its productivity. Of course there is the state, or the kibbutz, to release mothers for more serious business, the public rather than the private sector. There, like men, they can chart their advancement, calculate their progress and earn money. Women may have invented agriculture, cooking, pottery, weaving, in fact most of what makes life tolerable, but that was a long time ago. Now the mere job of living should take care of itself, women want more important work to do, they want to be anywhere but at home.

It seems strange to think in terms of ‘conversion’ when reflecting upon the experience of leaving the priesthood. The transformation, of the priest into the husband and father has been called many things, A ‘betrayal’—that was a bishop; a ‘defection’, an ‘act of madness’ a ‘second adolescence of the late thirties’, a ‘good riddance’, but hardly a ‘conversion’. Yet, for me, that is exactly it.

I think it is worth the trouble to try to explain why. Not least because the witness, both theological and personal, of a growing number of stable, happy husbands and fathers who were once priests may be of positive value in the midst of the Church. We think so, anyway. Our families meet regularly. One resolution we all share: to love the Church and to meet the occasional rebuff without bitterness. Howsoever we may be regarded, and institutional rejection is surely understandable at the moment, there is no doubting that we do increasingly present a new phenomenon in the life of the Church. We are convinced that we have more than embarrassment to offer to the Church, but something creative and fruitful. Perhaps it may lie in the emergence of trained theologians who are also devoted and happily married men immersed in the secular society. Theology has surely limped long enough in the idealistic world of the professional celibate.

Let me offer my own reflections, anyway, as a first contribution. If one word could express the whole new orientation of my own world, it would be ‘incarnational’. And this in an experiential context. My own saddest experience of priesthood was directly contrary. This may be a commentary on my own inadequacy, but yet I feel that it is the obvious defect of the Church ministry as a whole.

Bearing in mind Vatican II pronouncements on the desired relationship between Church and State, the Catholic Church’s relationship with the West German State appears well-nigh ideal. In Western Germany all Churches are by law disestablished, but most of them, including the Catholic Church and the Evangelical Church, enjoy corporate legal status (Gemeinschaften des öffentlichen Rechts) in the same way as trades unions and similar bodies. This gives these Churches legal recognition and allows them to enter into legal agreements with the State. The legal relationships between the Catholic Church and the West German State are laid down in the so-called Reich Concordat of 1933 between the Holy See and the German Reich. Although promulgated under the Nazi government, it is, with a few modifications, still legally binding. Furthermore the West German constitution (Grundgesetz) guarantees freedom of belief, conscience, religious conviction, and the right of the Churches to give religious instruction in State schools. Those Churches with corporate status are allowed to gather Church Tax on the basis of government tax-rolls.

So far, so good. But in fact the picture is more complicated than it appears at first sight, as is shown by increasing criticism from both Catholic and non-Catholic quarters of the Catholic Church’s relations with the State since the war. The German mind is quick to draw the distinction between de facto and de jure (cf. the debate over the recognition of the GDR), and some have said that although there is no de jure establishment of the Churches in Western Germany, the Catholic Church has been as good as established de facto since the war. Such critics draw attention to the close working relationship between the Catholic Church and the Christian Democrat (CDU/CSU) governments of the fifties and sixties, the effects of this relationship on post-war legislation, the Churches’ privileged financial position, and the influence of the Catholic Church on the pattern of German education.

To move away from a dogmatic allegiance, from a commitment to a worked-out system of beliefs, is not unusual today; nor is it unusual, having done this, to retain a profound conviction about the power and richness of the tradition underlying the theology. Many people can no longer assent to Christian theology—not only to the theology they have known, but to any theological system—and yet they may still want to read the Bible and other Christian literature, and, perhaps, to participate in the liturgy. From an older and more established viewpoint their position is curious, even dishonest, for it seems an evasion of the responsibilities of belief and commitment that the Bible and the liturgy are all about. To say this often enough, however, is to provoke an answering attitude which remarks, in tones of pragmatic commonsense, that there is nothing wrong in this at all, for surely the Bible is to be read and the liturgy attended; if the Bible is being read and the liturgy is being attended, then all is well; for the fact of the continuing response not being tied automatically to a dogmatic allegiance does not in itself invalidate the response—whether it does or not is a question which directs attention to the kinds of response which the Bible and the liturgy themselves seem to demand. And to put it like that is to pose not a theological, but a critical, question.

To recognize the question thus is to move much nearer to the non-dogmatic person who isn’t starting out with a set of preconceptions called beliefs. That this person continues to attend to the Bible and the liturgy should suggest areas of meaning which the predominant orthodoxies have not taken into account, but of course the very perplexity of established dogmatism at the sight of this new type of reader or participant comes from an inability to entertain this possibility: what the Bible and the liturgy mean is what theology says they mean—surely there is nothing else! To this point of view the newer type of response is necessarily meaningless.

In a previous article, we were considering the Pentecostal doctrine of the ‘baptism in the Spirit’, and concluded that it all really belongs to the full New Testament understanding of baptism, of what it is to be a Christian at all. Baptism should be—indeed (so far as the evidence shows) clearly was—a real spiritual turning point, leading a person into a whole new world of experience, with its own canons of understanding and behaviour, its own distinctive principles of action, moral and charismatic. We saw that there was an indissoluble complex of faith in the exalted Christ, metanoia (conversion, new heart), renunciation of Satan the Prince of this world (dropping out, apotaxis), the experience of the Spirit of God ‘who explores even the hidden things of God’, who ‘convicts the world’, who ‘leads us into all truth’.

We then had to admit the fact that this is not, generally, our experience of being baptized, and saw that the Pentecostal theory is one way of coping with this situation, though one that we cannot follow, as such. I shall now mention various other ways, and, with the theological basis thus broadened, shall attempt some theological and practical synthesis, showing how I think we can learn much from the Pentecostals, without betraying anything that the Church has always held dear.

Already in the New Testament we find some important guidelines. For instance, there is a very significant shift between Matthew and Mark. For Matthew, faith is a key concept, closely tied to his concluding scene, the exaltation of Jesus. The question Jesus asks is, ‘Do you believe that I can do this?’ (9, 28). The answer must be, simply and totally, ‘Yes, Lord’, an answer that entails a radical abandonment of care, a total upheaval of the normal procedures of social life.