Why are women not allowed to become priests?

[E.C.]

No, I didn't read the Lewis essay (I'm sorry; I plan to though!) but I have a question.



Along the lines of this, why is the Church seemingly no longer allowed to currently alter or define itself? It has done so over the years, and things have changed and shifted and clarified over 2,000 years, so why not now? It seems to me that suddenly, 2,000 years is the magic number since life and the world have changed so rapidly in the past 100 or so years, and now it's only tradition from the past two millennia only that matter (perhaps out of fear due to such rapid changes in the world? -mere speculation here). Where is the life of the Church if things are suddenly set in stone and may no longer shift?

Simple: no need. In areas of dogma and doctrine it would require a meeting of the entire Church and since its already taken a few decades to begin sorting out an administrative anomaly within the Church... yeah.

But practice? That's a different story. The way the Russians worship now with the length of services and so forth is how the Greeks worshiped 100 years ago (heard this from a respected Greek priest from the Phily area when he gave a series of lectures in the Pacific NW). In PRACTICE the Church does change. Whether one gives out blue eggs on St. George's day or not is practice. Whether it is a man or woman leading the parish as its priest is not practice.



I think the main point that most are missing here is that within the Orthodox Church there is simply no drive to bring about a female priesthood. There is more motivation to recreate the Republics of Texas and Vermont than there is to bring about female priests! In the Anglican Communion there was a drive for female priests, they got together and decided to do it and a few other Protestants followed. We Orthodox have not and probably will not even discuss it until the need to discuss it arises.

I have been Orthodox since 2006 and have yet to meet a woman who wants there to be female priests. I have asked many on this subject and each time I got the same look that said I should be in a mental hospital.

 

[rusmeister]

There is not a single woman priest, either Old or New Testament. God can do whatever He wants. If He'd wanted women priests, He could have gotten one in there whether the culture accepted it or not. He even pulled off a virgin birth for the Son of God to become incarnate. To be honest, I am only interested in the priesthood in Judaism of the OT and Christianity, since they are the only faiths that God established (the others worshiped/worship a false God). It is not the male priesthood that is of men but the idea of women priests which is of men. Anybody that thinks women should be priests or ministers are free to join one of the Protestant churches that does allow this.

I don't say this often, but QFT!

(I'll consider further response after Pascha)