Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 34:2 (Spring 2020)
Article: Women Priests And The Image Of God
Author: Karen Strand Winslow

PP 34:2 (Spring 2020) p. 23

Women Priests And The Image Of God

Karen Strand Winslow

Karen Strand Winslow teaches biblical studies at Azusa Pacific University in southern California. She holds a master’s degree from Asbury Theological Seminary and a PhD from the University of Washington. She has authored and edited numerous publications and is an ordained elder in the Free Methodist Church.

A version of this article will appear as a chapter in the author’s forthcoming book on Christian feminist theology.

In this article, I examine the reasons that C. S. Lewis, a Christian apologist, Anglican layman, and medieval scholar, used to argue against women as Anglican priests, as well as the traditions articulated by Vatican councils that block women from the priesthood of the Roman Catholic Church. I will begin with Lewis and show how his reasons relate to those of the Catholic hierarchy, who do not use selected passages from the epistles to confine the priesthood to males, but rather the maleness of Christ and twelve of his disciples.

Through both his non-fiction and fiction writings, C. S. Lewis remains an extremely influential apologist for Christianity, even though he died in 1963. The popularity of his imaginative fiction for children and adults continues to grow. His apologetic treatises, such as Mere Christianity, are cogent explanations for the logic of Christianity in its orthodox forms. Lewis writes of his personal conversion in Surprised by Joy, his grief after the death of his wife, Joy Davidman, in A Grief Observed, and discusses the problem of pain in his book by that name. The Chronicles of Narnia are his most famous books, and many of us continue to find in them models for increasing our faith and expanding our imaginations in other worlds under God’s care.

I read all of Lewis’s works in college. I wrote my honor’s project on Lewis, along with other authors who provoked imagination and connected it with the Spirit. Clearly, I respected him and considered him a major mentor from afar. Imagine my dismay upon coming across the essay, “Priestesses in the Church?,” which was first published in 1948 as “Notes on the Way” in Time and Tide Magazine.1 The date 1948 is significant, as is the fact that Lewis was a conservative member of the Church of England, which, at that time, held views about the similar to those presently held by officials of the Roman Catholic Church.2 Although 1948 was a long time ago, Lewis’s arguments against women priests have been repeated by other Protestants, who extend them to presbyters and ministers.3