Journal: Eikon
Volume: EIKON 01:1 (Spring 2019)
Article: The Fallacy Of Interchangeability
Author: Colin J. Smothers

Eikon 1:1 (Spring 2019) p. 9

The Fallacy Of Interchangeability

Colin J. Smothers

Colin Smothers serves as Executive Director of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood and Associate Pastor at Kenwood Baptist Church in Louisville, KY.

C.S. Lewis opens his 1948 essay, “Priestesses in the Church?” with an amusing exchange from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice:1

“I should like Balls infinitely better,” said Caroline Bingley, “if they were carried on in a different manner. . . . It would surely be much more rational if conversation instead of dancing made the order of the day.”

“Much more rational, I dare say,” replied her brother, “but it would not be near so much like a Ball.”

On its face, Caroline Bingley’s lament seems eminently reasonable. She is proposing, after all, at least literally speaking, the more rational arrangement: sensible conversation in the place of impractical dance, an equality of give and take instead of lead and follow, the engagement of two minds transcending the body.

By the very way she makes her statement, Caroline no doubt realizes she is prescribing a ball that would revolutionize it, and her statement could itself be read as nothing more than a tongue-in-cheek remark.

But the comedy and genius of her brother’s reply are found in his frank accounting of the obvious. To replace dance with conversation at the ball is to no longer have a ball, but something else altogether.

And Austen allows Caroline no reply. Lewis tells us he was reminded of this episode when he confronted the reality that some were calling for female ordination to the priesthood in the Anglican Church. He wrote his essay to chasten the church against the idea, because in it he saw a great upheaval, a revolution that would remake the very nature of the church, possibly into something else altogether.2

Eikon 1:1 (Spring 2019) p. 10

In 1948, a woman of some notoriety was making the now-popular and bluntly rational—in Caroline Bingley’s sense of that word—argument that since men and women are equal, they should share equally in access to the priesthood. Lewis writes,

Lady Nunburnholme has claimed that the equality of men and women is a Christian principle. I do not remember the text in scripture nor the Fathers, nor Hooker, nor the Prayer Book which asserts it; but that is not here my point. The point is that unless ‘equal’ means ‘interchangeable’, equality makes nothing for the priesthood of women. And the kind of equality which implies that the equals...