I am now happily in a position to share the full text of an article due for publication in the summer of 2023, in Studies in Church History.

It is entitled ‘E. L. Mascall and the Anglican opposition to the ordination of women as priests, 1954–78’.

The article examines the grounds on which the Anglican philosopher and theologian Eric Mascall opposed the ordination of women, in a series of influential publications from the 1950s to the 1970s.

It examines their basis in Mascall’s understanding of the church, the Incarnation and the ontological status of the sexes. In view of the counter-cultural emphasis that Christ had put on the equality of men and women otherwise, Mascall argued, it was not accidental that Christ was incarnated male, and that all the apostles were men. Within the Church, the very manifestation of Christ’s body on earth, the clergy did not act merely as representatives, or even as agents, but as ‘the very organs through whom [Christ] himself acts’; there was an ‘essential identity’ between Christ’s personal ministry on earth and that which he now exercised in the church. As such, it was ‘highly congruous that the manhood through which he acts is male as he is male’. Even more starkly, Mascall argued that this was not a matter of symbolic congruity alone. Beneath all the racial, temperamental and cultural differentiations of human beings, there was not, for Mascall, a single human nature, common to male and female but sexless in nature. At the most fundamental ontological level, there was no essential human being, only men and women. ‘Christ exercises his priesthood in the Church through human beings who possess human nature in the same sexual mode in which he possesses it.’ A women priest was not undesirable, or merely symbolically incongruous; she was impossible.

The article also sets these theological objections in the context of the particular atmosphere of the Anglo-Catholicism of the period, convulsed by ecumenical advance at the Second Vatican Council and (as Anglo-Catholics understood it) the danger of moves towards the Protestant denominations in England. Just as the Anglican Communion approached a point of decision about the ordination of women, Mascall was fighting to fend off what he saw as a misconceived scheme to unite Anglicans and Methodists in England. At the same time, ecumenical prospects both with Roman Catholics and Orthodox seemed brighter than ever before, which the ordination of women threatened to derail. Whilst Mascall allowed that women priests might one day be embraced by the worldwide church, together, the peculiar atmosphere of the period seemed to make it the least auspicious time to make what would be a unilateral and far-reaching decision.

The article also situates Mascall’s interventions in a wider realignment of conservatives within the Church of England, away from older party divisions between evangelical and catholic towards a new divide between conservative and liberal. In Mascall’s words, the most salient division within the church was becoming one between “those who believe in the fundamentally revealed and given character of the Christian religion and those who find their norms in the outlooks and assumptions of contemporary secularised culture and are concerned to assimilate the beliefs and institutions of Christianity to it”.

Download the full article (PDF, 6000 words).

(For the avoidance of doubt, for my own part I don’t agree with Mascall on this issue; for all their sophistication, and the clarity with which they are expressed, I just don’t feel the force of his arguments. But (as I explain) the opponents of the ordination of women have so far either been overlooked or (to a degree) caricatured in the historical literature so far, and I hope this article goes some way to putting that right.)

For more on my ongoing project on the life and work of Eric Mascall, see the project page.