WOMEN’S ORDINATION: THE GATHERING STORM

N.T. Wright versus Alice Linsley

COMMENTARY

By David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org  | June 23, 2026

Women’s ordination to the priesthood never quite leaves the table. It simmers beneath nearly every major Christian communion and periodically threatens to split even the sturdiest of orthodox bodies — most recently the Southern Baptist Convention, which voted by roughly 80 percent against allowing women pastors, a clear victory for SBC president Albert Mohler.

Rome remains unmoved, refusing to ordain women to either the diaconate or the priesthood, with little internal pressure to change course. The liberal Protestant churches have gone the opposite direction — ordaining women not only to the priesthood but, in the case of the Episcopal Church, to the episcopacy, and electing women to lead both the Church in Wales and the Church of England.

Within Anglicanism, the question remains very much alive. It resurfaced sharply in May, when the Anglican Diocese of the Western Gulf Coast (DWGC) convened its electing synod at St. Timothy’s Cathedral in Spring, Texas, to choose a successor to Bishop Clark Lowenfield — a diocese that, under Lowenfield, had become known within ACNA for empowering women in ministry through a robust diaconate.

The synod deadlocked across seven ballots between the Rev. Fr. Russell Martin — the son of a female Episcopal priest who nonetheless supports a male-only priesthood while championing the permanent diaconate for women — and the Rev. Fr. Ben Sharpe, who likewise backs ordaining women as deacons while reserving the priesthood for men. Clergy delegates favored Martin; lay delegates favored Sharpe. That this split occurred between two candidates holding nearly identical positions shows just how unsettled the underlying question remains.

Unable to break the deadlock, the convention voted 21–17 among clergy and 23–20 among laity to refer the election to the ACNA College of Bishops — the first time since the province’s 2009 founding that the bishops have had to resolve a diocesan election impasse.

The College met June 15–17 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, alongside has learnede Provincial Council, to select the next bishop ordinary directly, bypassing a new nominating process. The episode lands amid wider strain in ACNA over Holy Orders, following the province’s 2017 “differing principles of ecclesiology” settlement that left women’s ordination to individual dioceses, and amid renewed calls — from dioceses such as Fort Worth — for a province-wide moratorium until the College of Bishops reaches a common mind. The DWGC is now under the temporary ecclesiastical authority of Archbishop Robert Duncan. VOL has learned that Duncan has resigned from that position.

Should Women Be Ordained?

The leading evangelical case for women’s ordination comes from N.T. Wright, the influential scholar and former Bishop of Durham, who has waded into this debate repeatedly and unambiguously on the affirmative side.

His fullest statement remains a 2004 paper delivered at St John’s College, Durham, to the Symposium on ‘Men, Women and the Church,’ later expanded in his popular volume Surprised by Scripture.

VirtueOnline asked Alice C. Linsley — biblical anthropologist, Anglican traditionalist, and former Episcopal priest — to present the contra position. What follows sets the two arguments side by side, drawn from their own words and published writing.

 

Wright Rejects the Terms of the Debate

Wright begins, characteristically, by refusing the vocabulary both sides have settled into. He calls “egalitarian” language a “red rag” that overclaims, risking the implication of identity between the sexes rather than mere equality. He is equally unwilling to cede the word “complementary” to those who use it to mean women are barred from ministry altogether, calling it too good and important a word to surrender to one side of the argument.

Notably, he declines to build his case on the verse most American egalitarians lean on hardest. Galatians 3:28, he argues, is not about ministry at all but about membership in Abraham’s family through baptism. He further contends that the common translation — “neither male nor female” — obscures Paul’s actual wording, which echoes Genesis 1’s “male and female” in a way that argues against using creation order to justify male privilege in the believing community, without erasing sexual differentiation itself.

Wright’s actual case rests on the Gospels and Acts rather than Pauline proof-texts. He points to Mary Magdalene as the first witness to the empty tomb and the first person commissioned to carry the resurrection message — “the apostle to the apostles.” He pairs this with Romans 16:7, where Paul names a woman, Junia, among the apostles, noting pointedly that some modern translators relabeled her a man (“Junias”) without a shred of manuscript support.

On the “women should keep silent” passage in 1 Corinthians 14, Wright leans on Ken Bailey’s Middle Eastern cultural parallel: uneducated women, seated apart and unable to follow a service conducted in formal language, growing noisy during the sermon and being told to ask their husbands at home. Whatever the explanation, Wright insists the passage cannot mean total silence, since 1 Corinthians 11 plainly assumes women are praying and prophesying out loud in worship — Paul is regulating how they dress while doing so, not whether they may.

On headship in 1 Corinthians 11:3, Wright argues for reading “head” as “source” rather than “authority,” drawing on the Genesis 2 imagery of woman taken from man’s side. Importantly — and contrary to how he is sometimes characterized — Wright does not argue for an undifferentiated ministry. He states plainly that this passage “tells, for me at least, quite strongly on the side of those who see the ministry of women as significantly different to the ministry of men,” resisting any push to make women’s ministry a simple clone of men’s.

Wright calls 1 Timothy 2 “the sheet-anchor for those who want to deny women a place in the ordained ministry,” and it is here that his argument is most disputed. He proposes that Paul is writing into Ephesus, home to the great temple of Artemis with its all-female priesthood that, in his words, “ruled the show and kept the men in their place.” On this reading, Paul’s prohibition is not a permanent bar on women teaching but a corrective against a particular Ephesian danger: that converts might import an Artemis-style pattern of female dominance into the church.

His proposed rendering of verse 12 reads: “I’m not saying that women should teach men, or try to dictate to them; they should be left undisturbed.” The Adam-and-Eve reference that follows, in Wright’s view, is not about female culpability for the Fall but an argument for why women, like Eve, need full access to learning — since it was deception born of inadequate instruction, not innate weakness, that led Eve astray.

 

Alice Linsley: The Contra Position

Where Wright argues from narrative and translation, Alice C. Linsley argues from an entirely different foundation. A biblical anthropologist, Anglican traditionalist, and former Episcopal priest who renounced her own orders in 2006, Linsley builds her case for a male-only priesthood on comparative anthropology, patristic consensus, and the structure of the priesthood as it descends from the Hebrew ruler-priests of Abraham’s line.

Her case, set out most fully in her widely circulated VirtueOnline essay “Ten Objections to Women Priests,” does not engage Wright directly — but it answers him at nearly every point he raises, often from premises he never considers.

Linsley agrees with Wright that Galatians 3:28 is not a warrant for ministerial equality, but she arrives there by a different route, and goes further. She notes that the early heretical sect of the Cataphrygians (Montanists) used precisely this verse to install women as bishops and priests — a usage the fourth-century bishop Epiphanius condemned as heretical. For Linsley, the text speaks to the unity of the baptized in Christ, not to who may preside at the table: in her words, the idea of a woman presiding at the Feast “would have been unthinkable.”

The Church Is Not a Democracy

Linsley’s first objection is jurisdictional rather than exegetical: no synod or General Convention has the authority to alter what she calls “the constant and universal Tradition of the Church,” a phrase she draws from Pope John Paul II’s 1994 ex cathedra statement on the male priesthood. A vote, in her view, cannot manufacture authority the Church was never given. This places her case on different terrain from Wright’s entirely — his argument concerns what the texts mean; hers concerns whether any body, however it reads the texts, has standing to change the practice at all.

The Patristic Witness

Linsley marshals the Church Fathers directly against the practice. She cites Epiphanius, who argued that if women could licitly be ordained, the honor would have gone to Mary first — and was not. She cites John Chrysostom’s On the Priesthood, which holds that “the whole female sex must retire before the magnitude” of priestly oversight, and Augustine’s description of the Pepuzians, a sect he faulted for elevating women to priestly honor. Where Wright treats tradition as something open to re-examination and, where mistaken, correction, Linsley treats patristic consensus itself as binding evidence of the Church’s settled mind.

Biblical Anthropology: Blood, Sacrifice, and the Two Genders

Linsley’s most distinctive contribution — and the piece of her argument with no real counterpart in Wright’s paper — is anthropological rather than exegetical. Drawing on decades of research into the Hebrew ruler-priest caste, she argues the priesthood is rooted in a near-universal binary distinction found in archaic religion: men perform the “blood work” of taking life, in combat, hunting, and sacrifice; women perform the “blood work” of giving life, in menstruation and childbirth. On this reading, the male priesthood is not a culturally contingent accident Scripture happens to reflect, but a structural feature of how the priesthood has signified the boundary between life and death since before Abraham — a boundary she argues Scripture itself instructs Israel not to blur (Deuteronomy 30:15–20).

Linsley’s essay also makes historical claims Wright does not address at all: that the 1974 and 1975 “irregular” ordinations of women in the Episcopal Church were bound up from the outset with the homosexual-activist organization Integrity, founded the same year, with several of the women ordained counted among its members; and that the subsequent decades-long rise in female clergy in both the Episcopal Church and the Church of England has coincided with declining male attendance and participation — a trend she connects to sociologist Leon Podles’s 1999 study The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity.

Wright’s case is built almost entirely from the New Testament text — the resurrection narratives, Paul’s letters, the Ephesian context of 1 Timothy. Linsley’s rests on jurisdiction, patristic consensus, comparative anthropology, and sociological trend data, with Scripture cited more as confirming witness than as the central battleground.

Here are two of her best pieces on the subject: Ten Objections to Women Priests https://jandyongenesis.blogspot.com/2019/11/ten-objections-to-women-priests.html

The Church's Consensus on Women and the Priesthood: https://jandyongenesis.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-churchs-consensus-on-women-and.html

The Cost of Fidelity — and the Call to Return

The deeper question is whether the ordination of women can be treated as a secondary matter. We do not believe it can. The stakes are nothing less than the Church’s sacramental identity and her continuity with the apostolic faith.

The evidence of a slippery slope — from women’s ordination to the wider normalization of homosexual practice within the same liberalizing provinces — cannot be waved away. The path back is not through further innovation but through obedience. The Church cannot heal herself by doubling down on disobedience; she must return to the order God has established. Only then will the broken line of succession be mended and the full sacramental life of the Church restored.

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