Just received this in the mail today. I came across Gary Macy’s work on the Eucharist while translating book 4, chapter 17 of Calvin‘s Institutes of the Christian Religion. While looking up the author, I came across this book, and I remembered that Beth Allison Barr referred to it in her research.

From the dust jacket summary:

“In the early centuries of Christianity, ordination was the process and the ceremony by which one moved to any new ministry (ordo) in the community. By this definition, women were in fact ordained into several ministries. A radical change in the definition of ordination during the eleventh and twelfth centuries not only removed women from the ordained ministry, but also attempted to eradicate any memory of women's ordination in the past. The debate that accompanied this change has left its mark in the literature of the time. However, the triumph of a new definition of ordination as the bestowal of power, particularly the power to confect the Eucharist, so thoroughly dominated Western thought and practice by the thirteenth century that the earlier concept of ordination was almost completely erased. The ordination of women, either in the present or in the past, became unthinkable.“

Power. That sounds right. It has always been about power.

Then, on page 4:

“ The history of Christianity replete with references to the ordination of women. There are rites for the ordination of women; there are canonical requirements for the ordination of women; there are particular women depicted as ordained, and a number of roles limited to women are included among lists of ordained ministries. There is no question that women were considered to have been ordained by a large number of Christians over several centuries.”

i’m looking forward to diving into this book.