“Gender and Ordination: Male and Female as Archic and Eucharistic Modes of Relation”
Orthodox Canon Law Society of North America (OCLSNA)
Annual Meeting in Boston, MA
October 25, 2025
Our Holy Fathers have left us at least 15 canons respecting the place of women in the Orthodox Church, some concerning all women, others concerning only deaconesses.[1] The question is, how are we to understand these canons? Are they timeless guides to proper relations between men and women, or were they temporary instructions for a culture that no longer exists?
In the debate over the order of deaconesses, one side has taken the mention of deaconesses in the canons as a timeless endorsement of their existence, but dismissed the canonical limits placed on women as culturally contingent and no longer relevant. The other side respects the canons concerning deaconesses as a temporary response to a regional cultural concern for modesty, but views the canonical limits on deaconesses and women generally as timeless guides to proper relations between the sexes.
[1] Canon 19 of I Nicaea; Canon 15 of Chalcedon; Canons 33, 48, and 70 of the Council in Trullo; Canon 20 of II Nicaea; Canons 13 and 17 of Gangra; Canons 11, 15, and 44 of Laodicea; Canon 2 of St. Dionysius; Question 7 of St. Timothy; Rule 46 of St. Cyprian of Carthage; Rule 73 of St. Basil the Great. This list includes only those found in the Pedalion of St. Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain and does not include the canons of four local councils in the West that ruled against deaconesses between 396 and 533 (Nîmes 396, Orange 441, Epaone 517, Orleans 533).
“Gimme That Old-Time Feminism”
Union of Orthodox Journalists, July 19, 2025
St. Maximus the Confessor (+662) is revered by the Orthodox Church as a champion of orthodox Christology and a philosopher and theologian of the first rank—the Orthodox Aquinas, some say. Yet he has said the hardest things about the difference of male and female. He writes in Ambiguum 41 that God never intended man to be male and female; that Christ begins his work of healing all “divisions” by first “completely shaking off from nature . . . the property of male and female”; that He also “drove out from nature the difference and division of male and female,” so that “instead of men and women . . . He showed us properly and truly to be simply human beings.”
For thirteen centuries, the Orthodox treated these words with respectful silence. Only in the late twentieth century did they begin paying much attention to them, and their chief reason for doing so then and now is that Maximus’s argument for “shaking off” male and female is popular with feminists, gays, and transgenders—feminists because it justifies treating women just like men, gays because it places heterosexuality in the same category as homosexuality as unintended consequences of the Fall, and transgenders because it frees men and women from the obligation to live as they were born.
“The Image of God in Male and Female”
The Rule of Faith, Pascha 2025
Are men more like God than women are? That is the implication of many arguments against ordaining women as bishops, priests, or deacons. Whether the argument is that priests “icon” Christ in the Divine Liturgy, acting in persona Christi; or that fatherhood is especially priestly and more priestly than motherhood; or that the order of clergy and laity is like the order of Creator and creature, heaven and earth, or soul and body, the implication is that men and women are not equal: Men are outrank women in the hierarchy of being.
Inequality is inherent in the very concept of hierarchy. As originally defined and still commonly understood, hierarchy is all about mediation between highers and lowers, superiors and inferiors, the more godlike and the less godlike. And yet the first to define the concept—the sixth-century philosopher who wrote in the guise of the first-century St. Dionysius the Areopagite—did not attribute hierarchy to men and women. Neither did he attribute hierarchy to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
In the Trinity, we therefore have a paradigm for interpersonal relations that are equal yet ordered—a taxis without hierarchia. How might such an order explain the exclusion of women from the clergy? That is the question to be answered here by outlining a theological difference between male and female—theological in that it relates male and female to the Persons of the Trinity.
“Orthodox Deaconesses: When History Is Not Tradition”
The Rule of Faith, Spring 2024
For all of the research done on ancient deaconesses, we still know very little about them. There are two main reasons for that. One is that their role was always very limited, so there’s just not much said about them in ancient texts, compared to what’s said about bishops, priests, or deacons. The other reason is that their presence was also always very limited: There weren’t many of them anywhere except in some of the larger cities of the eastern empire like Constantinople. In many places, there weren’t any at all, and for a long time, there weren’t any anywhere in the Orthodox Church.
That’s something to keep in mind when we think about the place of deaconesses in Orthodox tradition: The whole Church has never had a tradition of having deaconesses, but the whole Church has had a tradition of not having them—even after having had them, in some places.
“Church of Whose Granddaughters?”
The Rule of Faith, Spring 2023
How is one to understand a scholar—a theologian no less—who writes a book accusing the Orthodox Church of not living up to its own theology in its treatment of women while deliberately ignoring everything in Holy Scripture, Holy Tradition, and the Holy Fathers concerning both the natural order, according to which the man is made first and the woman from him (Gen 2; 1 Cor 11; 1 Tim 2), and the economic order, according to which the woman is “reasonably subjected to the man” on account of the Fall (St. John Chrysostom, Homily 26 on 1 Cor 11)?
That’s what Carrie Frederick Frost does in her new book, Church of Our Granddaughters (Cascade, 2023). In revealing her vision of the future Church, she makes the barest use of Scripture and the Fathers in defining what she claims is Orthodox theology, taking what the feminist apostate Daphne Hampson derides as the “Golden Thread” approach to hermeneutics, by which snippets of Scripture like “justification by faith” are exalted above measure to become the standard by which everything else in Scripture and Tradition is judged, with all contradictory evidence either dismissed as cultural clutter or ignored altogether. Thus, Frost quotes Gal 3:28 (“neither male nor female”) but neither 1 Cor 11:3 (“The head of the woman is the man”) nor any other verse of Scripture or saying of the Fathers suggesting that men and women are not absolutely equal and un-ordered—except Gen 3:16 (“and he shall rule over you”), which Frost quotes only to use against the Church as a prophecy of the “oppressive structures” resulting from the Fall which the Church has imposed on women (4).
“Male and Female as Archic and Eucharistic Modes of Relation”
Protodeacon Brian Patrick Mitchell, PhD
International Orthodox Theological Association (IOTA) 2023 Conference
Volos, Greece, January 14, 2023
ABSTRACT
This paper marks the tendency of Orthodox personalism, and most other forms of personalism, to ignore or deny the relevance of sex or gender to human personhood. It examines the basis for this tendency in modern personalist philosophy, ancient Greek philosophy, and ancient patristic teaching following the Alexandrian tradition. It then offers a theory of interpersonal relations based on self- giving and thanksgiving, as revealed in Holy Scripture between the Father and the Son, between Christ and the Church, and between the man and the woman. These “archic” and “eucharistic” modes of relation involve neither inequality nor subjection. On the contrary, they are the very basis of equality, freedom, diversity, and unity among persons, divine and human. Recognizing them enables us to distinguish natural human relations from economic human relations consistent with Christian tradition for a better understanding of patristic teaching on personal relations in general and male and female relations in particular.
“A Public Statement on Orthodox Deaconesses by Concerned Clergy and Laity”
January 15, 2018
This statement, signed by 57 Orthodox clergymen and lay leaders, was published originally by Fr. Hans Jacobse’s American Orthodox Institute, where it was posted at https://www.aoiusa.org/a-public-statement-on-orthodox-deaconesses-by-concerned-clergy-and-laity-2/. It was drafted by Protodeacon Brian Patrick Mitchell with the assistance of Fr. Alexander F.C. Webster and Fr. Peter Heers, and it garnered nearly 300 additional signatures while at the AOI address. The footnotes that follow were all in the statement when published.
“Byzantine Empire — or Republic?”
Brian Patrick Mitchell
The American Conservative, August 7, 2015
The textbooks say the Byzantine Empire was a theocratic autocracy uniting church and state under an all-powerful emperor believed by the Byzantines to be God’s viceroy and vicar.
Nonsense, says Anthony Kaldellis, professor of classics at Ohio State University. The Byzantine Empire was a continuation of the Roman Empire and even of the Roman Republic. Its political ideology was fundamentally secular and grounded in the ancient Roman republican belief that government exists to serve the common good. Its people no longer had a legal role in the election of leaders or legislators, but they often played an extralegal role in the making and unmaking of emperors, whose legitimacy depended on popularity and not on a claim of divine right or constitutional correctness. Emperors therefore ruled pragmatically and not fanatically, often disappointing the Church to please the people.
This is fresh air for Orthodox Christians, who have had to bear the accusation of Byzantine theocracy longer than Western Christians have had to bear the accusations of the Crusades and the Inquisition. But Kaldellis’s The Byzantine Republic also provides useful criticism of modern Western political thinking, as well as portentous, if inadvertent, insight into progressive democratic thinking and where it will take us. Read more . . .
“Gay Christians? The Grave Danger Coming Out Poses to Christian Churches”
Brian Patrick Mitchell
Touchstone, January/February 2015
Conflict makes people uncomfortable, so in mixed company, people watch what they say. Instead of speaking their minds on controversial issues, they trim their opinions to fit those around them—sometimes out of charity, sometimes out of prudence, but often out of cowardice.
Gays count on cowardice when they “come out.” They know that announcing themselves as gay will silence most objections to gayness. The person who comes out dares others to disagree with him on the matter, challenging them to either accept him as gay or make him their enemy. Not surprisingly, the closer one is to someone who comes out, the harder it is to maintain one’s disapproval of homosexuality. Read more . . .
“What Is Ethical Conservatism?”
Brian Patrick Mitchell
The American Conservative, July 3, 2014
The modern age is an age of anarchy, an era of habitual rebellion against old ways and existing order in the name of liberty, equality, enlightenment, and progress. It began as a rebellion against religious hierarchy, burgeoned into a rebellion against political monarchy, and finally boiled over in a rebellion against social patriarchy, leaving in its wake a new civilization endlessly at war with civilization itself.
Raised to rebel, the modern, anarchistic, progressive personality is always impatient with the world as it is and ever insistent that it change to suit him. Believing himself innocent, he blames others for the suffering he sees, indicting Society, Civilization, the Church, the State, the Establishment, the System, the Corporations, or the Man for crimes against the People and the Planet. Consistent with the age’s Luciferian culture of grievance justifying rebellion, the progressive lives passionately and impulsively as the hero of his own personal revolution, in which anything that stands in his way—that limits his autonomy, inhibits his self-expression, frustrates his ambitions, convicts his conscience, offends his sensibilities, or denies him satisfaction—can be condemned as unfair, unjust, intolerant, and therefore intolerable. Read more . . .
“Debt and Sovereignty: The Lost Lessons”
Brian Patrick Mitchell
Humanitas, 2011
In an earlier article entitled “The Moral Hazard of Modern Banking,” I, in effect, warned: Beware of bankers. Bankers think they’re smarter than other people and often use their smarts to get the better of others in less than honest ways. While some readers thought I was too hard on bankers, I did not deliver a blanket condemnation of usury. In fact, I noted that a blanket condemnation of usury in the Christian West was misguided, that debt is not always bad, and that we owe most of our modern material blessings to the system of debt we call capitalism. The problem is that, in the pursuit of happiness and the fight against communism, we lost sight of capitalism’s dark side, the inherent danger of debt.
That danger is only now dawning on us once again. It is a danger to each of us individually inasmuch as we all labor under the burden of mortgages and consumer debt. It is also a danger to us collectively as a nation and even as a civilization. Every week we hear new warnings about the threat to the nation’s credit ratings. The national debt is roughly 100 percent of our gross national product, and the people who lend to the federal government are beginning to worry that they will not get their money back. Yet without continuous borrowing, the nation cannot possibly sustain its accustomed lifestyle. Something has got to give. Read more . . .
“The Problem with Hierarchy: Ordered Relations in God and Man”
Brian Patrick Mitchell
St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly, 2010
For nearly two millennia, Christians grew up in families headed by fathers, attended churches headed by priests, and lived in countries ruled by kings. Experience taught them most of what they needed to know about fatherhood, priesthood, and kingship. They understood each intuitively and needed little rational justification for the honor and obedience they owed to each.
Today, however, more and more people are growing up in families without fathers, in countries without kings, and in no church at all. They know fathers, priests, and kings only through images in the major media, images often distorted by a popular prejudice against authority figures, a prejudice expressive of the modern world’s worship of individual autonomy, social equality, political democracy, and moral relativism. Read more . . .
“The Moral Hazards of Modern Banking”
Brian Patrick Mitchell
Humanitas, 2009
In his Essay on Duties, Marcus Tullius Cicero tells a story about Cato the Elder, a wealthy man renowned as a landowner, who lived a century before Cicero. One day Cato was asked, what is the most profitable aspect of property ownership? Cato answered, “Raising livestock with great success.” He was then asked about the second most profitable aspect of ownership. “Raising livestock with some success,” he answered. And what about the third most profitable aspect? “Raising livestock with little success.” And the fourth? “Raising crops.” Then his questioner asked, “What about money-lending?” Cato replied, “What about murder?”
It’s a telling little story, revealing the West’s traditional disdain for money-lending, but also its embarrassed dependence upon the same. Cato, you see, made his fortune through money-lending. His favorite business was investing in ship bottoms. Bottomry, as it’s called, was very risky, so to reduce his risk Cato sought out many partners and invested his profits in land, preferring land offering natural resources like minerals, timber, fish ponds, and pasturage—assets that could not be “ruined by Jupiter,” as crops and ships could be. Read more . . .
