Title Easy-to-understand Christianity for netizens (5)
Contents
Marriage problems of the clergy and the female clergy
■ In Catholicism, priests and nuns do not marry, why?
■ Why do Anglican priests marry when Catholic priests do not marry?
■ Women can become pastors, but why can't they be priests?
priest's marriage
Clerical celibacy was one of the important issues of Christianity until the Middle Ages. The general view is that the view of women at the time played an important role in the ideological background that encouraged clerical celibacy. At that time, there were a lot of claims that demeaned women, saying that “sin entered through women”, and there were scholars who viewed women only as physical beings and made an extreme claim that “women have no soul.” And the fact that Jesus and the apostle Paul were not married, especially the apostle Paul in his epistle, “to unmarried men and widows. It is good for them to be just like me” (1 Corinthians 7:8), and other reasons for promoting celibacy.
This clergy's celibacy has become a symbol of asceticism, a long tradition of Christianity, in that it can be detached from physical desires. It was also meant to show off their relative superiority over ordinary people. In the midst of strengthening the celibacy of the clergy, it is said that the 12th century Lateran Council made the final decision to ban priest marriage as canon law.
However, all the priests in the Old Testament times were married and had wives and children. And in the case of Judaism, marriage and family life are compulsory for a rabbi who is a priest. For Jews, a rabbi was not only a religious leader but also a teacher of the nation. He thought that if he did not marry, he could not fully understand the life of the people. Therefore, it is stated in the Talmud that rabbis must be married.
Orthodox priests take a neutral stand on marriage issues. In the Orthodox Church, both single and married people can become priests. However, once you become a bride, you cannot get married. In other words, a person who has already been married is allowed to become a bride, but once a bride becomes a bride, they cannot marry, and even if a married person is injured, they cannot remarry. The reason is as follows. If an Orthodox priest is to marry, he must marry a member of his denomination, because the priest is spiritually the father of his followers, so the reason is that the father cannot marry his children.
As such, the marriage problem of Christian priests today differs from denomination to denomination. In other words, you may or may not get married according to the traditions and regulations of the denomination. Catholicism is the only denomination that forbids the marriage of priests, and other denominations besides Catholicism consistently allow the marriage of priests. The denomination that allows marriage is not only against the will of God, who created men and women from the beginning, but also against the teachings of Jesus who blessed marriage between men and women. I believe that it does not conform to the teachings of The apostle Paul's words about marriage in 1 Corinthians 7 should be interpreted in the context of the early church waiting for the imminent return of Christ.
women's gender issues
Until the Middle Ages, women's human rights were not a horse. Influenced by the patriarchal culture of the ancient Near East, which treated women as men's 'seed' or 'property list', the Hebrew culture of the Old Testament was taken literally, and a culture that demeaned women became common. At one time, some scholars argued to the extreme that sin entered the world through women and that women have no soul.
“Women should remain silent in the church. Women are not permitted to speak” (1 Corinthians 14:34), a literal misinterpretation of the apostle Paul’s words as the biblical basis for not appointing female clergy or entrusting women to major offices in the church. there have been The words of the Apostle Paul, who spoke in the special circumstances of the early church in the city of Corinth, were imported directly without filtration and used as the basis for demeaning women or sexism.
In order for the Word of God written in the Bible to become the living Word of God given to us today, it must go through a filtering process called reinterpretation. There are many side effects when we take it literally beyond 2000-3000 years of time and space without re-interpretation. In view of global trends, cultures and traditions that discriminate against women in ordination will soon disappear and should be so.
Professor Kang Young-sun, Hanshin University