Fr. Tom Soroka: Welcome to Ancient Faith Today Live. This is Fr. Tom Soroka, and I’m so glad that you’re with us this evening. We’ll be taking your calls in a bit at 1-855-AF-RADIO; that’s 1-855-AF-RADIO; 1-855-237-2346. Matushka Trudi is back; she’ll be answering your calls tonight, so, please, make sure to turn the show volume off before you come on air. Now, to participate online, the show is being streamed on YouTube this evening. I don’t see it on Facebook, so I’m not sure what is quite up with that, but check us out on YouTube. All you have to do is go to youtube.com/ancientfaithministries, and you will see it live there. Also, you can comment there on the YouTube page; you can also comment by sending us a text message. Try it! 412-206-5012. It’s very popular. We actually have some texts already coming in: 412-206-5012. And of course you can send us an email at aft@ancientfaith.com. So let’s get started!

Well, tonight we’re going to talk about a matter that, honestly, I sort of have to confess that it’s almost unbelievable to me that we have to have a discussion on an Orthodox teaching that is so obvious, at least to me, about male and female, but here we are. The last ten years has seen an explosion of definitions of genders beyond male and female and everything in between. For instance, in 2014, Facebook, in order to be more woke and modern, listed 58 different genders; and more recently, you may have seen in the news, there’s an aggressive campaign to normalize transgenderism, not just among adults but among children, young children, even toddlers, and that has taken hold in various public and private institutions.

Now, I know that on one side there are certain liberal Orthodox academics with some notorious websites that I do not recommend you visit that will accuse me of oversimplifying a supposedly complex matter, or more likely accuse me of being entirely ignorant of the complexities of the matter of gender; and, on the other side, secularists will accuse me of being uncompassionate and unscientific, that the old binaries of male and female are simply vestiges of a dead Western patriarchy that is being smashed by the current thing.

And, lest I sound too cynical, no one, absolutely no one, denies that there are a minute number of people who suffer from chromosomal abnormalities or physical deformities, that they may have psychological consequences from. And, yes, there are people who suffer from gender dysphoria, and I don’t deny that at all. But those difficult exceptions certainly do not disprove that humans are male and female nor do we deny that men and women behave within an entire spectrum of male and female characteristics. Some men may have more effeminate characteristics; some women may display traditionally masculine characteristics. But even here, the bell curve still proves true, and that is there are indeed prevailing male and female characteristics within the vast majority of males and females.

So tonight we’re starting a new occasional series, and that is that we will be talking within this series on various episodes, and this one’s called “According to the Scriptures.” After all, the Scriptures are the primary way in which the Fathers made their doctrinal case when proclaiming the Orthodox Christian faith. So we’re going to look tonight at the issue of male and female as taught by the Scriptures and understood within the Orthodox Tradition. Why is there male and female? Are these two genders simply social constructs, as some might believe today? Or is there something more substantive, even more essential, to the reason for God creating humans as male and female?

There’s no one better to discuss this issue with than Orthodox biblical scholar and theologian Dr. Edith Humphrey. Dr. Humphrey is one of the foremost New Testament scholars in the world today. She taught for 18 years at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, and before that in various institutions across Canada and the United States, while lecturing around the globe in various lay and academic contexts. She was awarded her PhD from McGill University and is the author of numerous books on biblical studies and theology including Scripture and Tradition: What the Bible Really Says, Grand Entrance: Worship on Earth as in Heaven, and Further Up and Further In: Orthodox Conversations with C.S. Lewis on Scripture and Theology. She’s also the author on the wonderful Ancient Faith podcast and blog called A Lamp for Today.

Dr. Edith Humphrey, welcome back to Ancient Faith Today.

Dr. Edith Humphrey: Thank you, Fr. Tom. It’s really good to be talking with you in this forum.

Fr. Tom: Well, I’m happy that we get to talk about this, and this is… These issues are kind of a big deal today, right?

Dr. Humphrey: Absolutely.

Fr. Tom: Yeah, they kind of go to what it means to be human, or—help us understand this, because it’s so disconcerting. It makes you feel like down is up and up is down. How do you see this? Why is this issue so important today?

Dr. Humphrey: So, you know, it’s not the first time that the Church has had to handle really strong challenges to its faith. In the past, we had the whole question of the mystery of the Incarnation and the debate with Arius, and the interrelationship of Persons with the Trinity, and even the Personhood of the Holy Spirit—was the Holy Spirit a Person or a force? The question about holy icons; the possibility of seeing the uncreated energies; and the whole idea of human beings entering theosis—all those things were challenged. And now the challenge seems to be not just in the outside world, but among those who take the name of Christ, the nature of humanity.

In my discipline, we call that theological anthropology: what it means to be a human being. And, you’re right, you’ve talked about this onslaught that’s come against what had been commonly held, but I would want to say on sometimes unexamined assumptions regarding male and female, even in the Church. We’ve certainly accepted what we’ve been taught, because it seems so obvious, as you say, but perhaps it is that now we have this challenge and we have this opportunity to think about the whys and the wherefores, and to drill down in, just like Arius made us have to think about the nature of Christ.

We have a challenge to the Lord’s own teaching. He says—was he simply bound by his culture when he declared from the beginning God created them, male and female, in Mark 10? So this goes beyond just a question about what it is to be human; we’re questioning Christ. Go ahead.

Fr. Tom: I was just going to say one thing, because you kind of reminded me of the idea that when homosexual marriage sort of came to the forefront in the public arena, I believe the Church was kind of caught off-guard. We didn’t feel a need to articulate this in such a way that people could really grasp it and understand it. We just always assumed that everybody kind of accepted this, and now we have the same issue with male and female. It’s like: How do we articulate the idea that this is important for us to not only articulate but defend, that it’s something that we can’t allow the society to accept so easily?

Dr. Humphrey: Right, and not just for the sake of protecting those in the Church, but for society itself. We’ve got a challenge here that’s not simply on the level of ideas, but it’s been accompanied by breath-taking changes in our social fabric, and we have no idea where this is leading, what this is doing to society as a whole. So it’s a matter of both theology or ideology, ideas, and of practice. And people are going to fight hard over things that have a practical impact on their life.

Fr. Tom: Right, indeed. So let’s kind of get to the matter at hand. And of course we open up the Scriptures, we begin with Genesis, God creates the world, and then he creates man. There’s kind of two stories presented in Genesis, and one where God simply says that he creates man, male and female; he creates humans, male and female. And another one says that woman is taken from the side of man. Let’s begin with the first things first. Why—I don’t even know if there’s an answer to this—why are there two genders? Why isn’t there one gender? Why aren’t there three genders? Is there actually something important about there being two genders? What’s the significance of that?

Dr. Humphrey: Sure. So I’m going to give you “yes, there may be a reason, but we’re in an area of mystery here.” I think we have to say we’re going right back to the beginning, and we’re asking a question about the beginning, and that means that the whole creation of male and female is something that is, by God’s intervention, something that he’s done, so we’re in the realm of the mysterious. But we do know that our sexuality is, for example, something we share with the animals. It links us with them in this present age. We might say, “Well, what’s so mysterious about this?” Well, I think it indicates that we have a kind of bridge position, between God and the rest of creation. We’re created to be a bridge between God and the creation, and so humanity names the animals. God gives a charge to them to take care of the creation.

Going back to origins helps, and I just want to point out, too, that in the first chapters of Genesis, we’re presented with the mystery because we have two different stories, but we also have mysterious elements in each of the stories. So in Genesis 1, God seems to deliberate with himself. He says, “Let us do this.” He’s never done this in anything else he’s created, but there there’s something special that’s going on. And then this story says two things. It says he created Adam in his own image; in the image of God he created him, and male and female he created them. All of a sudden we see that we’re complex. We have a unity in Adam—“Adam” can be translated as a human being or as humanity—but we also have a duality at the same time. So it’s those two things.

And then of course the mystery’s deepened in Genesis 2, where we hear from the first time that something is not good. God’s been saying, “It’s good. It’s good. It’s good,” and then he says, “It’s not good for the Adam to be alone,” and so the second chapter goes into fill in the story of how the female was formed.

Fr. Tom: So can we explore that a little bit? Because it is very mysterious that woman is brought from the side of man. And I think there may be scriptural implications for that. So help us understand what’s really going on there.

Dr. Humphrey: I think, first of all, we can’t say that this statement of woman being created from the side of man in Genesis 2 implies that she’s simply an offshoot, that she’s unimportant in herself. Chapter one has already established that part and parcel of being human is that we are male and female, united yet distinct, and that we’re created in the image of God, male and female.

And also, in the second chapter, in this story, God creates Eve from the side of Adam, but at the first thing he created Adam from the earth. So being created from a human being is, if you like, a step up. [Laughter] If we’re worried about Eve being sidelined, I’d say it’s a lot more dubious origin that you’ve come from the same stuff that the earth is—even the cognates in Hebrew are similar between “earth” and “Adam”—than to say that Eve is taken from the side of man. And he recognizes here; there’s immediately a relationship: “Bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.” So that adds to what we’ve learned already in chapter one about God’s unitive and dual creation. It’s not just that Adam is comprised of man and woman but that woman has been taken from man, and therefore shows his glory. That’s something St. Paul’s going to talk about in 1 Corinthians 11.

So the two stories work together to show the mutuality and the order of male and female, both things together, not one more important than the other. And of course, there’s the mysterious creation of the Church from the side of Jesus on the cross. This initial creation of Eve from Adam foreshadows the use of feminine and masculine language that’s in our salvation story, for Jesus is the Bridegroom, the Church the Bride. And notice that in the story of the Church’s birth in John’s gospel, blood and water are involved—not in the story, not in the description of Adam. So there is in the second, birth: a sacrifice of a mother for her baby implied here. Jesus is imaging not simply being the Bridegroom but a kind of mother-love as well. There’s something very, very mysterious going on here.

Fr. Tom: Interesting. I did want to go back, though. Certainly, yes, we see that prophetic woman coming from man, the Church being birthed from the side of Christ on the cross. But I think I kind of want to explore some of the arguments of those who maybe don’t accept our traditional understanding of that. And that is: What can we conclude…? You had mentioned something about glory, but it was sort of said so quickly I’d like you to say it again. What is the significance of woman coming from man, and what are the, if you will, false conclusions? In other words, is woman, then, dependent on man? Is it true that without man there is no woman? And this is why they called her “woman,” because she came from man? And now, of course, we have the sort of political correctness that wants to remove the word “man,” m-a-n, from “woman”: w-o-m-y-n, just to ensure that there’s no dependency there.

So help us understand what the significance of woman coming from man is. And maybe also some of the false conclusions about what it really isn’t.

Dr. Humphrey: This is again complex, and it’s easy for us to fall on one error or another on either side. It’s important to remember that in this story when woman is created out of Adam’s side, that ultimately she is called a helper. And that might suggest to some that woman is of less importance than a man, but “helper” is not a derogatory term It’s a term that’s used of God himself throughout the Bible. It doesn’t mean that woman is of less importance; it rather points to the fact that, yes, in terms of origin, woman comes from man, but man cannot exist without this help. It’s not good for Adam to be alone.

As St. John Chrysostom explains, woman is distinct in her relationship, especially since the Fall, but not in her nature from the man. He says in one of his homilies to the Corinthians:

Had Paul meant to speak of rules and subjection, he would not have brought forward the instance of a wife, but rather of a slave and a master. For what if the wife be under subjection to us? It is as a wife, as free, as equal in honor. And the Son also, but when he did become obedient to the Father, it was as the Son of God; it was as God.

And then later on in that homily, he points out that radical submission was accentuated because of the woman’s disobedience because of the Fall, but it wasn’t foundational. And even towards the end of that homily, he rails against male domination expressed in terms of violence or physical discipline of wives.

The Fathers have in mind 1 Corinthians 11 when he’s speaking about all this where, if we read very carefully, yeah, we’re going to see that both order and mutuality are there between husband and wife as between Father and Son.

Fr. Tom: Edith, let’s remind our listeners two things here. We’re going to remind them what 1 Corinthians 11 is, so we want to— Because this is a very important aspect, especially in Orthodox… I don’t know, not ecclesiology, but certainly in certain Orthodox worship practices and so forth. But also we want to remind our listeners, we would love to hear from you. Give us a call at 1-855-AF-RADIO; or send us a text message, to 412-206-5012.

Okay, so, Dr. Humphrey, tell us about the whole issue with 1 Corinthians 11. You have the discussion there about worship, and you have the discussion about headcoverings. Now, this show is not about headcoverings. However, the way that St. Paul argues for headcoverings for the Corinthian Church, he speaks about it in terms of the differences between male and female. You actually write about this in your book on Scripture and Tradition. Could you go into that a little bit? Just about what is this?

You’ve said that “helper” is—I love that you said “helper” is a good thing; “helper” is not a demeaning term; God is seen as our helper. That’s wonderful; that’s a beautiful explanation. But when we look at 1 Corinthians 11—and let’s be clear, our liberal detractors would say: Look, St. Paul was misogynist; St. Paul was living within a patriarchal society. This is something that absolutely has no meaning today, and in fact not only does it have no meaning but, as one Orthodox writer argued, that it is actually putting women under oppression, that they’re going back to Muslim oppression if they wear headcoverings, and women fought to not wear headcoverings.

I know we’re taking a little bit of a left turn here, but let’s talk a little bit about this. How do you see the differences between man and woman, and what is the significance of 1 Corinthians 11?

Dr. Humphrey: Before I get into the headcovering thing, I just want to highlight a couple of sentences from 1 Corinthians 11, this passage here, where you’ll see that it’s not as one-sided as some would make it. This is what St. Paul says.

Man was not made for woman, but woman for man. Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man.

Now that sounds like what you’ve described in terms of people who would say it’s all subordination, but he goes on.

Nevertheless, in the Lord, woman is not independent of man, nor man of woman, for as woman was made for man, so man is now born of woman, and all things are from God.

And from that we could even slip forward into Galatians 3, where he says that Christ is born of a woman at the right time so that our salvation comes through a woman.

Fr. Tom: Yes.

Dr. Humphrey: So it’s not simply that there’s an order. He’s insisting on holding together true intention, that male is first, yet now the female is first at least in some respects, and in all cases God is first. So there’s both order and mutuality. He’s walking a tightrope here; he’s holding two things that we think are incompatible together. Lest we think that’s just true of human beings, he says that’s true of God as well, because Christ has a head, and yet he’s already established in 1 Corinthians 8 that Christ is the Lord, that we as Christians say we believe in one God, including the one Lord Jesus Christ. So headship is something that is true about human beings, and that is a reflection of headship that is true about the triune God, even while the Persons of the Trinity are each one together God, and completely mutual, the same with human beings: there’s an order. But at the same time, there is a complete mutuality and a complete sharing of the image of God by both male and female.

And by the way, Paul does not say that woman is made in the image of man. He says she’s glory. And he knows as well as any of us that Genesis says that both male and female were created in the image of God, that not— It’s not like it’s step down, step down, step down. There’s something really unusual going on here.

Now about headcoverings. I think that we have to take a look both at Paul’s theological reasons that he gives as well as his reasons having to do with doxology or worship, and the culture, in order to understand what is going on here. The question really isn’t: “Should women put on headcoverings when they go into church?” The question is: These women were taking off what is their normal garb everywhere when they went into the church, in order to prove that they were free in Christ. And Paul’s saying, “Don’t do that. There’s a reason why you have a headcovering. You don’t need to prove your equality with men by doing this. We each have our roles in the Church.”

And, by the way, I think there is a counter-cultural thing for the men, too. I can’t prove this, but certainly we know that the priests wore headcoverings, and how far back it was that males in the Jewish tradition wore headcoverings we can’t demonstrate, but it looks to me like he’s saying, “Men, take off your headcoverings in order to show that Christ has redeemed humanity. Women, leave on your headcoverings in order to remind the whole congregation—not just your fellow women: everybody—that we are creatures and God is the Creator.” And so you’ve got two things going on as the men and the women speak and temporally teach each other in worship, saying, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord”—that’s the women with the headcoverings saying it. Everybody should cover, as the angels cover, in Isaiah. But “The whole earth is full of his glory”—that’s what the men say, because Christ has come and has redeemed humanity. So that’s what I think is going on there.

Now, how we appropriate that in today’s world where women don’t wear headcoverings normatively is another thing. I cover, because I think the theological statement that women are distinct from men is an important thing to make, but I think there could be room for debate over that among the Christian circles, because we don’t wear headcoverings in the marketplace any more, and so it’s putting on something that is foreign. But what we can’t debate is that there is mutuality and order in our understanding of what male and female are together. That’s there, and that’s in the image of God.

Fr. Tom: I love that you said— First of all, you compared the relationship between men and women with the relationship within the Godhead himself. In other words, there is a headship within God; the Father is the source of all things. And even though, then, they are also equal in essence, in divinity. So it’s not a matter of either/or; it’s a matter of both/and. Correct?

Dr. Humphrey: Exactly.

Fr. Tom: I love that.

Dr. Humphrey: Now, in Evangelical conservative circles right now, there’s a huge fight going on over this very passage and its implications. Because of the rigidity of some conservative groups with regards to the role of women, for example, who aren’t allowed to teach at all, not even at Sunday school, and so you’ve actually got a book that’s been put out in the last two years called Trinity Without Hierarchy. It’s been put forward by scholars who think that they have to show that there is no headship of the Father, because if there’s a headship of the Father then it naturally follows that there has to be a headship within the human family as well. And so they are— And they actually say that it is heretical, some of them, to talk about the Father has having monarche.

Well, no, there is an Orthodox way of speaking about the headship of the Father that doesn’t take away from the honor and the dignity of the Spirit and the Son. But the Father isn’t begotten of the Son, and the Spirit doesn’t— And the Father doesn’t proceed from the Spirit. There really is an order even while there is complete mutuality. And so I understand why these guys are doing it, but I think they’re barking up the wrong tree and they’re going to reap the whirlwind, to mix a metaphor.

Fr. Tom: Yeah, because they will change the theology to meet their social goals, and that’s a disaster.

Dr. Humphrey: Yes, exactly.

Fr. Tom: Dr. Humphrey, what we’re going to do— because we’re going to talk a little bit about that after the break. I do want to talk about the priesthood in the Orthodox faith and why is it limited to males. Maybe we need to talk a little bit also about what are the differences between males and females that are revealed in Scripture, but first let’s take a short break. You are listening to Ancient Faith Today. We’re talking with Dr. Edith Humphrey about male and female. This is a really important discussion. Stay right there; we will be right back.

Fr. Tom: Welcome back! We’re talking with Dr. Edith Humphrey; we’re talking about male and female according to the Scriptures. Dr. Humphrey, before we go into the questions of Christ’s maleness and the whole idea of priesthood and why is it limited to males, I want to just go back to the garden for one moment, the narrative in the beginning of Genesis. Another kind of issue: when enemies of Christianity, enemies of the Scriptures, enemies of any kind of traditional norms look at the narrative, they say: Look, this is a good example of the patriarchy, where in Genesis 3 the serpent goes to Eve and tempts her, and she is the one who accepts the temptation and then persuades her husband to disobey God. So my question is: Is the disobedience of Adam and Eve Eve’s fault? Is it the woman’s fault? Why does the serpent address the woman alone and then she gives it to her husband?

Dr. Humphrey: Well, Adam suggests that it was her fault, but I think the whole drama of the narrative is that he’s making excuses. I mean, it might seem so according to, say, a surface reading of 1 Timothy 2, where we hear about woman being deceived, but the Pauline letters actually speak, except for in 1 Timothy 2, everywhere else about Adam falling, not even mentioning Eve, not speaking of the fall of Adam and Eve. Adam isn’t deceived, it seems, but he deliberately chooses against God.

It’s speculative, I think, for us to wonder about why the serpent addresses the woman alone. Some of them says she’s the weaker of the partners, she’s an emotional, she’s unable to use her reason well; but it seems far more likely to me that it’s because Satan is wanting to instigate a civil war, so he speaks to the one who’s the helper, the responsive one, and he puts her in a spot so that she will make Adam choose between her and God. So it’s temptation all the way up. The serpent tempts her; he’s to be a beast under her control. She tempts the man; she should be responsive to him and helping him. And they both as a couple act against God. And if Satan had started with Adam, it wouldn’t have been an attack on order, would it? I mean, Eve maybe could have been perhaps excused, because she would have been helping her husband to accomplish his will.

But the excuses given are like: “Look, I didn’t expect this kind of behavior from a snake” or “from the wife you gave me, it’s her fault, God!” [Laughter] So, yeah, no, I don’t think so. The fault, if anywhere, more often lodged with Adam who seemed to know more what he was doing.

Fr. Tom: Yeah, and I honestly never thought about that, that… And of course it does say the serpent is more cunning, and he displays this cunning by going after the woman. It was clever.

Dr. Humphrey: And then absolutely with us. Our bodies revolt against our appetites, and our appetites revolt against our minds, and our minds revolt against our spirit. It’s always from the bottom up; in terms of order, that’s what he decided to do.

Fr. Tom: Fascinating. All right! Let’s remind you, you can give us a call at 1-855-AF-RADIO. If you don’t want to call, you can also send us a text message, to 412-206-5012.

Dr. Humphrey, we did have a text message that came in. It’s just a tad off-topic a little bit, but it goes to the nature of humanity. I’m hoping that you might just muse on this a little bit. It’s a little bit sensitive, but I’d like to get your idea on this. So it says, “Thank you for your wonderful show. What do you think of the statement that someone may be ‘born gay’ but they were not created that way?” Now, to me, that sounds a little bit contradictory, but let’s put it this way. Whether they’re saying “born gay” because they were created that way or they became gay but they were not created that way, I’m not exactly sure what the writer is asking here. So it says, “What do you think of the statement that someone may be ‘born gay’ but they were not created that way?” In other words, God did not intend them to be homosexual?

Dr. Humphrey: Well, I think the problem is with the way that we talk about “nature.” We use the word “natural” to refer to all kinds of things, and we can use it to refer to what it is natural for us in our fallen state to experience: it’s natural for people to die, for example; it’s natural for illness to come our way. And yet, we also use the word “natural” in a deeper sense, that it’s in the sense of how God willed for nature to be before there was the disruption of the Fall.

So I think the jury is still out with regards to genetics and nurture. It may not be the same answer in every case when we’re talking about people who have same-sex attraction. But what is important is the value of that human being to God, whatever his or her struggles are, just as a person with any concern or any affliction. I think that the statement of Jesus, that God made them male and female, shows us God’s intent, his original intent for human beings.

But just as a personal aside, my mother took a drug that was supposed to prevent miscarriage, DES, with me. And for me it caused some female problems as I grew older, and I got off actually quite lucky; some women ended up with cancer very young. But I know that boys who were exposed to this drug in utero have a disjunction, some of them, between their chromosomes and their physical characteristics. And so there is a war going on within them as a result of that. God knows all about this, and he knows also about those who are same-sex attracted, and he has a plan for us no matter where we are struggling. I think that’s an important thing to keep in mind.

Fr. Tom: Yeah, and I think also that you mentioned that, as Orthodox Christians at least—let’s put it within that context—there is that struggle. In other words, even being born a certain way—you mentioned about, well, the jury is out about the chromosomes and so forth, the genetics—but, really, that is almost secondary to the issue. Regardless of our genetic inclinations, our psychological inclinations, our physical inclinations, we are called to conform to the likeness of God. We are called to struggle with whatever difficulties we may have in understanding the order of the world as God intends it and try to conform to that. So that’s very important, that we put that out there.

All right, that was a tough one. Thank you for the writer for sending that in.

Let’s talk a little bit about Christ now. We’ve talked about male and female. You’ve established the story. We talked about the Fall. Is there a significance to Christ’s maleness in his incarnation? Let me back up and ask you, as a biblical scholar, are there differences—I know this is a ridiculous question, but let’s put it out there—are there differences between men and women? And then the question is: Is there a significance to the maleness of Christ? Could Christ have been a female? God forgive me for asking that, but I’m just—I’m asking.

Dr. Humphrey: [Laughter] Yeah, so the first thing I think to say is as the second Adam, the last Adam, Christ recapitulates both Adam and Eve. Despite their distinctness in gender, and along with the fact that he is a male, he’s taken on everything that is to be human. This we haven’t had a chance to talk about holy Mary, but just remember that all the genetic material came from her! How that happened, that’s a miracle, but, I mean, a woman plays into this miraculous incarnation in a very, very distinct way. Yet Jesus is fully male. He is a particular human being. He was circumcised, not to put too fine a point on it. His humanity is drawn exclusively, though, from woman: from holy Mary, without a human husband, the second Person of the Trinity became incarnate. So we chant, in the theotokion for Pentecost, “every mind is over-awed with your childbearing.”

So as a first step to understanding our nature and how Christ took it upon himself, the unique role of the Theotokos does help us to see how woman is fully involved in the Incarnation. When Jesus takes on humanity, he takes on all humanity, though he is a male, because he has to be one or the other—and there’s more to that than that, but at least that has to happen—and humanity is fully recapitulated in Christ.

Now, as for sacramental priesthood, it’s a matter of the iconic nature of men and women. The bishop, with the priest, is the father of the family. He’s a father who sacrifices for his family as Christ sacrificed for the Church, and women aren’t fathers. One woman, Suzanne Heine, says something very interesting about what happens in the Incarnation. This is what she says.

Now everything gets turned around. What was above is below. God has come to be among us. What was below is raised up. Humanity is given the option to be divinized. Incarnation is a way of conversion. The lowest becomes the uppermost. Jesus, a man, goes the way of lowliness to the victims, to the lost, to women. Jesus, God, goes the way of lowliness to the victims. A woman could not represent the humiliated because she herself is already where these people are. Jesus the man turns things upside-down. Jesa (spelled J-e-s-a, or Jésa), the woman, would always have been at the bottom.

So it was absolutely essential for the one who is greatest to become the least for us. That includes the maleness of Jesus being set aside as he shows his weakness and his vulnerability upon the cross.

Fr. Tom: Wonderful.

Dr. Humphrey: So priesthood is not claiming a right; priesthood is saying, “I stand with Jesus to be sacrificed for my people!” And that’s something iconically, in terms of a picture, that a man can do in society. We expect women to serve; we don’t expect men to do that.

Fr. Tom: So would you say… [Laughter] Obviously, I’m speaking to a female who is a teacher, who is highly educated, who is a leader in her parish, who is serving in many, many different ways. Give me a little bit of a personal reflection here. Does being a female, to you, feel like a—like you are a second-class citizen within the Church because you are “denied” the sacramental priesthood? And I’m asking you this honestly. We’ve never had this discussion!

Dr. Humphrey: Never ask what you don’t know the answer will be!

Fr. Tom: [Laughter] No! I know! I’m bracing myself here.

Dr. Humphrey: Yeah, even in my Anglican days, there was something… Somebody said to me, “You’ll never be taken seriously as an academic in Anglicanism if you don’t become a priest.”

Fr. Tom: Oh my.

Dr. Humphrey: And I just couldn’t. I just couldn’t. Something blocked it. And I’d received communion from women who were priests. I knew godly women who were priests, at least they were called that in the Anglican Church. But there isn’t exactly this same theology, at least it’s not considered simply the same there about the priesthood as with us. And something was a block there for me.

It just seemed wrong in the same way as when I first came here to the States and we’d just been here three weeks, and I got a phone call from somebody trying to enlist my teenage girls in the army. My eyes filled with tears, and I just thought, “Here are my girls. They haven’t yet become women, and somebody wants them to go and fight in a way.” It just seemed indecent or wrong, like a category error. So for me, there’s always—there’s never been a question that women shouldn’t have service in the Church—women can’t even take some leadership roles in the Church—as long as they’re not doing it for the purpose of showing the status of women or claiming their rights. I mean, Philippians 2:5-11 shows Jesus didn’t claim his rights, and certainly we can’t do that.

Fr. Tom: Good point.

Dr. Humphrey: So for me, no. I think that there are other ways in which the Church can satisfy, support, and honor women for the gifts that they have and that the Eucharist is not necessary for us to—or even desirable for us, because we’re not the ones who are showing who the Father is.

Fr. Tom: Agreed. Yeah, part of the reason that I bring that up is several years ago there was quite a scuttlebutt about Metropolitan Kallistos of blessed memory, who apparently had sort of said, well, this is an open question. I sort of felt this was more the scholar, you know, the eminent scholar Kallistos Ware, saying, “Look, you know, this could be an academic question that we could discuss,” and I don’t think necessarily it was Metropolitan, the bishop, Kallistos (Ware), saying, “Oh, sure, let’s open it up.” Did you kind of get that sense also? I hate to— I’m not speaking ill of the dead. His contribution to Orthodoxy in unparalleled in the last century; there’s no doubt about that.

Dr. Humphrey: Absolutely, and he was so important—

Fr. Tom: But this question that came up— Yeah, and this question that came up…

Dr. Humphrey: You see it in the second edition of his The Orthodox Way—I’m pretty sure I’m not speaking out of turn here—where it seems like he says—and I think the language used is there’s no theological reason against women priesthood. He doesn’t say the episcopate, however, which I thought was very interesting. So it may be that he’s thinking in terms of priests as extensions of the bishop and he would not go that far. He does not fill it out. Or maybe what he means is this is an ecclesial and not properly a theological question.

I would beg to differ. I really think it is a theological question, because it has to do with the nature of humanity, so therefore it has to do with the nature of God, because we’re made in the image of God.

Fr. Tom: Right. Well, also I think it would be a category error for him to say, “Well, maybe priests but not bishops,” because, to be honest, when you look at the consecration of a bishop—that’s why we don’t say bishops are “ordained”: they’re actually priests that are consecrated to be bishop. They’re still, in essence, a priest. But anyway, all right. Thank you very much for that aside.

Let’s talk a little bit about—and this is going to touch a little bit on the whole sort of transgender movement and vibe. I think we’ve well established there are differences between men and women. What is the significance of St. Paul’s admonition in Galatians 3 that says, “There is neither male nor female in Christ”? Because it seems to me that certain academics that have this agenda are going to lean into this particular passage and say, “Look! There’s neither male nor female in Christ, so women should be priests, and women should be men and men should be women! It doesn’t matter what gender you are!” So tell us your reflections on… Does this passage in Galatians nullify the difference—the real differences between the sexes?

Dr. Humphrey: Right. We have to read Scripture in context, and we have to read Scripture in such a way that is not repugnant to other passages of Scripture. Galatians 3:26 is about our incorporation into Christ. It’s about who are the sons of God, that is the little messiahs, the little anointed ones? It’s about being one in Christ. And it tells us not just about male and female, but also slave and free, and Jew and Greek, all participate in Christ in the same way: all have the same baptism; they’re all equally significant in the family. Historically, it was the Jews first, but now Christ has come and there is no difference to God. The same is true of our gendered and our social condition: they’re irrelevant to belonging to Christ.

So the verse is about salvation. It’s about our unity in Christ. I think—I’ll go out on a limb here. I think it implies that, for example, a woman’s monthly time should be of no more account in her reception of the Eucharist. I think that that rule is a hangover from Jewish purity laws, but perhaps also the practical nature of the matter in times when it was harder to protect the woman’s privacy. But the same Paul who wrote Galatians 3, “no male and female,” also wrote 1 Corinthians 11, about comportment in church, and he wrote the family codes—or maybe his disciple wrote the family codes—in Ephesians 5-6 and [Colossians] 3-4. So both kinds of passages, the theological and the practical, are important and true.

Are genders something that was created at the beginning? It’s been affected by the fall and it’s been redeemed by God and brought into his purposes. So the maleness or femaleness of a particular human being is neither essential to our humanity, but it’s also not just an outward accident. It is something about what we are. We are distinct as women from men, and yet we are one in Christ. That’s what the verse is about.

Fr. Tom: And do you feel that this— You’ve been involved in various Church organs and offices and of course in your previous denomination you were involved—do you feel that this particular verse, these verses, are being used to bludgeon a kind of an agenda that flattens the differences between men and women?

Dr. Humphrey: For sure. They take a canon within a canon, and: “This is the true Paul; this is really what Paul wanted to say, and all the other stuff were accommodations to his culture.” Absolutely. They read Scripture against Scripture, which is never a very good idea.

Fr. Tom: All right. Dr. Edith Humphrey, thank you so much for this fascinating discussion tonight. It’s very, very important that we understand that this is a very important aspect of our humanity, that there is man and woman, and that these differences… I guess I do want to ask you one last question, and that’s just about the idea of— We didn’t really mention this word, but, again, I think from an academic standpoint, you hear the term “complementarity” diminished. Would you say that men and women are meant to be complementary and that there is a complementarity to male- and femaleness so that there is that union that fits perfectly together?

Dr. Humphrey: So if we’re just taking the word, I would say yes, that’s exactly the word to use—“complement” with an “e,” not an “i”—but the problem is the complementarian movement in the conservative Evangelical tradition carries with it certain associations of a kind of a rigidity of role that… and it also comes—I’m really glad I’m Orthodox and I have a full Old Testament that has all the stories of Susanna and Tobias and Sarah and so on—it comes on the tail-end of a tradition that’s missing that richness of the role of women within the Old Testament.

So I have no trouble with the word; it’s the movement itself. I think that they get some things right; I think that they get other things dreadfully wrong, and it’s because of that that you’ve had this pushback of this book, Trinity Without Hierarchy, that you make… C.S. Lewis used to say that the devil likes to put errors into the world, into the Church, in pairs, and if you don’t make one mistake, you’ll make the opposite one. And I think that that’s kind of what’s been going on in the Evangelical movement over this issue right now.

Fr. Tom: I appreciate that very much because I think unfortunately sometimes when, in popular circles, Orthodoxy doesn’t define these particular issues, we may be tempted to borrow arguments from non-Orthodox sources, and so essentially what you’re saying is: Be careful with that particular complementarity argument, because there are some things that are too rigid and would not fit our theological framework well. Yes?

Dr. Humphrey: And they don’t see the mystery. The whole thing about male and female is to point to Christ and the Church, that there’s too much of a focus upon the social norms and not enough upon what it is to be human and what it is that God has in store for us. And so we could get good things—don’t get me wrong; I think we need to read widely and everywhere—but I think we also contend with the Fathers and the long Tradition of the Church with regards to many things that have been said about this and have good answers for people today, not just pat answers.

Fr. Tom: Do you have any contemporary writers or even patristic texts that you feel would be helpful to our listeners, to the priests that are listening and are facing this issue absolutely in their parishes? People are coming to them, sort of the flattening of the differences of the sexes. Are there certain texts that you might recommend that we look into to bolster our understanding of a truly Orthodox anthropology?

Dr. Humphrey: Right, so contemporary: the two people that I have found most helpful, though I don’t agree with everything that they say, are Paul Evdokimos in his Woman and the Salvation of the World and C.S. Lewis, in particular his pictures in Perelandra and the things he has to say, that he implies with regards to relationship between male and female, how it points to something bigger, this masculine and feminine. So those two I think are really helpful to kind of get the juices flowing.

But in terms of past writers, we have to deal with I think a kind of a tension in the Tradition. You’ve got St. John Chrysostom, whom most people know, who speaks about the eternal significance of marriage, and promises a young woman who’s lost her husband she’s going to get him back all shining and so on, more glorious than the rays of the sun. We’ve got that, but we’ve also got a whole debate over [St.] Maximus. And I would recommend, rather than simply reading at face value some of the things that, for example, have been published in The Wheel with regards to what Maximus says, to really read Ambigua LXI and to see how difficult this discussion is. And actually an article that you pointed out to me, Father, that I found extremely helpful, is by Jordan Parro, available through Pappas Patristic Institute, and there he says we have to really be careful how we read Maximus here and not assume that we’re reading him—when we read him on the surface, that we’re understanding.

We need to come to terms with this tension in our tradition, between where the marriage between a man and a woman continues, where the gender distinctions continue in the eschaton, or whether they are resolved and so on. I think that we really need to think very carefully about these things and that is a long-term study. It’s not—you can’t come to pat answers.

Fr. Tom: Yeah, and again, just like the passage in Galatians 3, we can take St. Maximus sort of out of context, and we can use that as a bludgeon to “prove” our point that, well, there really are no differences between male and female, and that, of course, would be a tragedy, and that is exactly the agenda of the publication that you named there and some other publications like Public Orthodoxy and so forth, which we absolutely don’t recommend that people follow.

All right. Dr. Edith Humphrey, thank you so much for joining us tonight. We love you; we love your knowledge. Keep it coming. Thank you for all you do for our Church.

Dr. Humphrey: Thank you so much for having me, Father. And thank you, Matushka, for your work.

Fr. Tom: Excellent. Before I share a few final thoughts, I want to offer my sincere thanks to Dr. Edith Humphrey for joining us tonight. Thanks to Matushka Trudi for engineering the program; to our show production assistant, Melissa Graff, for her work behind the scenes; for everybody who’s listening in; and for those who will be listening. Just want to read this beautiful passage from Genesis about the creation of woman.

And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam, and he slept. And he took one of his ribs, and he closed up the flesh in its place. Then the rib which the Lord God had taken from man, he made into a woman, and he brought her to the man. And Adam said, “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called Woman because she was taken out of Man.” Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.

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