Volume 1, Issue 2, June 1988

The ordination of women belongs in the hierarchy of truths neither in the level concerned with revealed truth about salvation, nor in the level concerned with revealed truth about the means of salvation.  Rather it belongs to a third group of beliefs and practice which are taught authentically, which are not revealed doctrine but which are related to revealed doctrine.  Since the Roman Catholic exclusion of women from ordination is not deigned doctrine, nor a matter of revealed truth concerning salvation or the means of salvation, but rather authentic teaching on a matter whose relationship to revelation is a matter of theological debate, it ought not be seen as a dogmatic barrier towards growth in union with the Anglican Communion.

We cannot write a rounded account of the history or of the religion of the patriarchs.  We can only point to certain elements which the biblical texts preserve.  When we remove the proper name, YHWH, and all characteristics of Yahwism, we are left with a personal God who is the God of the father of the clan (the extended family) and of the clan itself; he has no name; he is just El, God, the high God, the eternal one, the God of this father of this group, the God who appeared at this place.  The father worships this God; he prays and presides at the worship; there is no mediator at the place of worship.  This God preserves the group through a son, and guides the group “on the way”.  It is a simple, uncomplicated religion where God comes directly to the person, and the person goes directly to God.

There is no apocalyptical meaning of the nuclear world annihilation, but only the protest of apocalyptic hope in God against all powers which make that world annihilation possible. God’s stories in the Bible speak and awaken hope where otherwise there is nothing else to hope.  The memories of being rescued from disaster do not deny the disaster.  They speak of the God who made the hopeless disaster of his people his own and who led his people out of it.  The Christian memory represents the suffering and dying of Christ in the abandonment of God and, through the anticipation of his resurrection from the dead, awakens hope for the victory of life over death.

The point of this article is to explore the role of imagination in both the production and interpretation of the biblical texts.  To speak of the metaphoric character of the Bible is to reject all authoritarian notions of interpretation which would claim that there is only one correct interpretation of a text.  The biblical texts demand constantly fresh interpretations, the discovery of new possibilities.  All our reading of the Scripture runs down to the sea of adoration, into the dark moment when we surrender to the infinite possibility which imagination has perceived at the heart of things.  A failure to actualise Scripture in the life of the Church is a failure primarily of imagination.

The key to Balthasar's logic is his understanding of truth as aletheia or unconcealedness.  Theologically, the event of truth happens when the Word becomes flesh.  Only a methodology from above can account for the leap which is implied in Jesus' affirmation: I am the truth. The unveiling of the truth in the Christ-event, and its presence in the Church through the Holy Spirit shows that the ultimate meaning of truth is love, the love of the three persons of the Trinity revealed in the missions of the Son and the Holy Spirit.  Thus Balthasar argues that the only Christian logic is the logic of love, not verified by reason, but grasped through doing the truth in love.