Time was when theology, theologizing, doing theology, studying theology, arguing theology was considered a man’s job, something like waging war, throwing down empires, toppling thrones, and establishing republics. The few women engaged in theological pursuits appeared Amazonian, mannish. The women at Port Royal, Blaise Pascal’s sisters among them, drew the hatred of pope and king, not just for their Jansenism. Anne Louise Germaine de Staël, whose salon was the center of the eighteenth-century literary world, flooded Paris’s bookstalls with pamphlets on republicanism and Protestant faith and was exiled by Napoleon, who believed the female’s principal function was to produce babies. Mary Ann Evans, translator of Strauss’s Life of Jesus, traveled under the name of “George,” and anyone who has seen a photograph of Dorothy Sayers will scarcely denominate her a sex symbol. Theology was a man’s job.

The first genuine, real life female theologian I ever saw was Prof. Bertha Paulsen. She taught at Princeton and Gettysburg. The rumor was that she was terribly bright and attracted great clumps of students to her classes and seminars. But the fact that she had not been born in America, and functioned in a discipline reckoned to be only at the periphery of the actual business of theology—namely, clinical pastoral education—rendered her a non-threat.

It’s not as though we had never encountered the idea of women in theology. One of my professors, Gustav Marius Bruce, pointed to a curious reversal in the history of the editing of the Greek New Testament text. Since 1901, all editions of Nestle’s Greek Testament appear to have followed the division of I Corinthians 14:33–34 as in the American Standard Version. Whereas in the King James, the verses once read, “for God is not the author of confusion, but of peace, as in all churches of the saints. Let your women keep silence in the churches,” the verses now read, “for God is not a God of confusion, but of peace. As in all churches of the saints,let the women keep silence in the churches.” In the first instance, the injunction appears limited to the Corinthian situation; in the second, it functions as a universal rule: “as in all the churches of the saints.” After pointing to the alleged reversal, as well as to the British reviewers’ refusal to adopt the new punctuation, Bruce queried whether or not the American revisers thought they could keep women from pulpits by merely moving a comma. In fact, Nestle may have followed Constantine von Tischendorf’s Greek text, which divides as does the 1901 version. No matter—where Bruce’s sympathies lay was crystal clear.

At a meeting of the Luther Seminary faculty in January 1960, President Alvin N. Rogness read an inquiry from a woman interested in studying theology and securing the B.Div. degree, though not in preparation for ordination. It was suggested that the question be discussed at a coming meeting of seminary faculties of the (about-to-be) American Lutheran Church, since the matter should be faced theologically, not merely administratively. A year earlier, in 1959, the faculty had adopted a resolution recommending to the Church Council of the (then) Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (i.e., the Eielson Synod) the approval, in principle, of the admission of women as regular students at the seminary, but in view of the approaching merger with the ALC, referred the matter to the new Board of Education. At another meeting of the Luther Seminary faculty in September 1960, the admission of a female adult was approved on recommendation of the admissions committee.

After the creation of the ALC, informal conversations were held with the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod. Respecting the ordination of women, the position of the LCMS was that Ephesians 5 settled the matter: “Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church.” From this it was concluded that the “headship” of the man was an inviolable order of creation, and that since the ordained ministry was a matter of authority, to ordain a woman would set her in authority over a man.

In September of 1964, Luther Seminary threw discretion to the winds and admitted its first female candidate of theology. In the year following, another woman applied for admission as a B.Div. candidate with the stipulation that she be permitted to enroll in homiletics as well as in the regular curriculum. The petition was approved, and the second female candidate appeared on campus in September of 1965. In the same year, the third arrived.

Not until February of 1965 did the new Board of Theological Education of the (new) ALC adopt a statement that women qualified for admission to the “Theological Seminary” were eligible to receive the Bachelor of Divinity degree. The statement added that women were not to be accepted for ordination, in accord with prevailing practice. With women’s attendance at seminary and plans for their ordination already under sail, the church with its Board of Theological Education appeared to have fallen astern.

At an informal meeting of professors of theology from the various Lutheran synods at Dubuque, Iowa, a representative of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod voiced his opposition to women’s ordination with the assertion that Christ had come to restore the “orders of creation.” Since to his mind woman’s subservience belonged to those orders, Christ had come to restore that subservience, and thus to exempt the woman from the pulpit. In light of the witness of history, for which the evidence of women’s slipping out of subservience is so scarce and the evidence of the contrary so great that the birth of freedom in the West is scarcely conceivable apart from it, Christ need not have come, at least not on that account. More, in light of the “how much more” that the apostle accented as having occurred with Christ, in contrast to the damage Adam had done, this particular argument against women’s ordination appeared curiously askew. James Burtness of the Luther faculty prepared a response to the LCMS position, arguing that the concept of “headship” in Ephesians 5 was not an order of creation; further, that ministry was not a matter of authority but of service, for which reason biblical support for the exclusion of women was non-existent. Burtness’s response was adopted by the faculty and eventually found its way into the official response of the ALC.

There was nothing romantic about adhering to this decision. Those delegated to study the issue returned with the simple conclusion that neither Holy Scripture nor the Symbols of the Lutheran Church excluded women from altars and pulpits, for which reason the seminary was free to admit them. The issue was dispatched without fanfare. The committee reported, the faculty voted, and the thing was done. Later, a few may have thought the issue was too easily settled; that they might have taken longer poring over I Corinthians 11 (“Christ is the head of every man, and the husband is the head of his wife”); over I Corinthians 14, with or without the newest punctuation; or over Ephesians 5 and I Timothy 2 (“I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man”). They might have sat longer over the argument of Regin Prenter in Aarhus, Denmark, who pointed to the mulier taceat (Latin for “let the woman keep silent,” used for years as a kind of logarithm) in I Corinthians 14 as a command of the Lord, analogous to the command to baptize with water, and insisted that the continuity between the office of ministry and the first apostles had to be made visible in public worship conducted only by males. They might have studied the at times bitter debate over women’s ordination in the Sweden in the 1950s, or might have pondered longer the possible consequences accruing to relations with the LCMS, with Canterbury, or with Rome. Infinitely more hours had been spent putting out fires started by glossolalics.

The arrival of women to the Luther campus found the faculty unprepared. It was one thing to entertain the possibility of preparing women for public ministry, and another to be involved in the actual doing of the deed. Slowly, the prejudices began to wither away. Anyone, it was thought, even a woman, might excel at practical theology, with its invitation to ex tempore interiorizing; perhaps even at systematic theology, with its dabbling in abstractions and notorious inattention to particulars—but encounter with Hebrew or Greek would tell a different story. It did not. The women encountered Hebrew or Greek, and more than once left the males far behind. One man whose wife had earned a master’s in New Testament served as instructor in Greek, superintended the entire Greek program during the absence of its head, for several years was enlisted to teach Bible Introduction, and on top of that was a systematician. The wife of one of the historians mastered Greek, then entered the medical profession. Still another earned a master’s in theology, and the spouse of one of the exegetes received both the M.Div. and Th.D. degrees.

The advent of women to our school could not have occurred at a more bizarre period in its history. It was during the 60s, when hundreds of men swarmed to the seminary during the Vietnam war, then left in droves once peace came. When the draft was cancelled, fifty students from the first did not return for the second year. Through the halls wafted the scent of marijuana. The dean of students surprised bodies in coitus beneath the stairs. Professors were excoriated for examinations requiring the vomiting up of abstruse, inert data “while thousands died of hunger in Asia and Africa,” and scores trooped to the Capitol and about the Twin Cities denouncing “Lyndon’s War.”

Women arrived for the study of theology in a period marked by extreme suspicion toward the seminary on the part of its constituency. It mattered little that the assumption underlying the use of critical method was its capacity for being harnessed in the service of the gospel. What mattered was that the accursed method was used at all. Delegations arrived on campus accusing the faculty of heterodoxy, heresy, and all manner of dereliction. Pamphleteers wrote of our seminaries as “thoroughly polluted with Christ-abusing teachers,” of “fanatic and fantastic… anti-Bible men,” of the “deeply imbedded heresy of higher criticism now being openly taught and advocated.” In midst of its tirades, one little monthly managed to note the request for a study of women’s ordination, and queried how many were aware of this “new theological aberration.”

None believed the admission of women to theological study and ordination would anticipate the Second Coming. What was truly right would not necessarily be salutary. If it was right and proper to yield the altar and pulpit to women, the situation would become more complex. On her way to chapel, one young woman asked how she could address God as “our Father,” when her own parent was a brutish slob. The argument that Christ had enjoined us to call none on earth our father, or that the earthly parent was only a caricature, had little effect in view of the fresh experience of abuse. Masculine nouns or pronouns used of God needed eliminating. Sexuality came to be trajected back into the deity, together with the identification of gender with color of skin or behavior. Convocations applauded the absence of reference to Christ and hailed the re-emergence of the female principle in the figure of Sophia, all reminiscent of some ancient Gnostic persuasion.

An old saying of Luther reads: “Wer die Theologie treibt, kommt manchmals um; wer die Theologie nicht treibt, kommt jedenfalls um,” meaning that whoever engages in theology may come to grief, but whoever does not is sure to do so. Women who enter upon the study of theology may come to grief, some have already done so, but it will take a millennium before whatever they do or suffer can equal that of their sexual counterparts.

Roy A. Harrisville Jr. is Professor Emeritus of New Testament at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota.