Let's start off with the worst-case scenario. If, 500 years from now, the ordination of women has come and gone, and it is viewed by some scholar as a historical curiosity worth his further investigation, he will find in The Close a revealing hint or two as to why it failed. The book is a key piece of evidence about the minds of so many young women entering the ordained ministry at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Were it not for the fact that I know plenty of women who contradict the stereotype that this book unwittingly reinforces, I would consign the whole project to despair and transfer into a profession that earns more money.

The heartbreak of Chloe Breyer's book is that she should know better. There is so much about her to admire. Raised in a mixed-religion household, surrounded by skeptical friends and a supportive if somewhat uncomprehending husband, Breyer resisted all the forces that tried to pull her away from her faith in order to answer a call (genuine, it seems to me) to the ministry.

Throughout her first year at the Episcopal General Theological Seminary in New York, Breyer yearned to plunge back into her previous life of social activism and service, yet stuck it out in the tiny community of prayer that to all appearances wasn't terribly effective in the areas that mattered to her most. She struggled through Koine Greek, invested herself in biblical exegesis, fell in love with liturgy, and spent a summer doing CPE at Bellevue Hospital (the account of which is far and away the most interesting part of the book). In many ways her experience is utterly typical of seminarians all over America, that in-between lot which is neither lay nor clergy but to whom the entire church looks for its future.

Even more than that, Breyer embodies the spirit of Christians in the much-maligned Generation X, a spirit which perhaps has gone unrecognized by burned-out Boomers. The failed idealism of the sixties is rejected; Breyer wants the full brutality of the Christian experience, all the stops pulled out and no holds barred. There is a sense of longing for the pre-Constantinian days, when Christianity was really and truly a matter of life and death, gloriously countercultural.

Breyer is thus representative of a new breed of seminarian, caring not a whit for status, acceptance, cultural approbation, or social admiration. Indeed, achieving those things may well be an indication that you are doing something wrong or cowardly; the yeast of the Gospel should be exploding complacent comfort zones left and right.

Ironically, it is precisely this evangelical passion that raises the first of many questions about the book. I wonder who Breyer's imagined audience is. If it is the unbelievers and skeptics she cares so much about, I can't help but think that the title alone will be enough to steer them toward something different, Bridget Jones' Diary maybe. If it is everyday ordinary Christians, then much of the book will sound remedial. At the end, one rather wants to ask her, Who cares? What difference does your story make?

And therein lies Breyer's critical miscalculation. She has failed to recognize that what makes her book important, and potentially fascinating, is that it is written by a woman. Astoundingly, there is not the slightest mention of the peculiarity of women's ordination in the entire thing. No mention how recent a development it is; no mention how the motion almost failed in the Anglican communion and is still disputed; no mention that the vast majority of Christians still prohibit women from the ordained ministry. Breyer exhibits no awareness that her story is going to be poked and prodded by those on either side of the de bate as evidence in the case, pro or con.

Take, for in stance, the opening lines of the section "Perils of the Pauline" in the Epiphany chapter:

Like many people of my age and gender, I put most of St. Paul's writings in to the category of things despite which I call myself Christian. My list of disclaimers includes the Crusades, the excommunication of Galileo, the Pope's stand on abortion and birth control, and most of the activities of the extreme religious right.

Still, Breyer tells us, she developed a "grudging respect for the apostle's passionate, practical campaign to bring Christianity out from the umbrella of Judaism," and she concludes that "Paul, had he lived today, would have advocated forms of civil disobedience and supported the rights of gay men and women." In short, Paul gains her "respect" at the cost of be coming a mirror of her own fashionable convictions.

And this brings us to another irony, the deepest and most distressing irony of the whole book. Breyer makes it exceedingly clear that she is a "liberal urbanite" and proud of it, and for her this means she is the bearer of left-wing virtues: tolerance, openness, inclusivity, and an all-embracing love of people regardless of race, sex, creed, or orientation. There would be much in that to commend her for if, in fact, she did bear these traits. But she doesn't. In all too many passages, she manifests the ugly qualities of—and I do not use this term lightly—a bigot, utterly unaware of it and shockingly lacking in critical self-awareness.

Breyer's bigotry leaps off the page now and again, as inappropriate and offensive as foul language in a sermon. Roman Catholics suffer her disparagement (is she perhaps ignorant of the fact that they make up half the world's Christians?), for, in her friend Mary's words, "What can we possibly say to the Roman Catholics? … I mean, what can we seriously say to them about Papal infallibility or the ordination of women? In the car business, those positions would be major deal-breakers."

Fundamentalists, as she labels anyone to her right, are also mocked; she insists that as a Christian she has nothing in common with "anti-abortion fanatics" and "the fundamentalist who contends that 'Jesus is her personal savior.'" If the matter were not so serious, I would find it quite amusing that one who is so passionate about nuclear disarmament can be capable of such cavalier verbal violence.

Breyer's blindness to what is at stake is extraordinary. She takes women in the ministry for granted and marvels that anyone would be intolerant enough to disagree; she refuses to acknowledge a genuine moral issue at stake in abortion; she dismisses large and growing churches out of hand for failing to see things her way. Ultimately she deflates all of her hard-won theological truths, the humility so painfully acquired over the course of her seminary trials, by conveying an unspoken conviction that such wisdom is the exclusive property of liberals like herself. The depressing fact of the matter is that, for all the times I nodded my head in agreement, for all the intensity of my desire to approve of her story for my own reasons, in the final analysis I must use one word to sum up her book: smug.

Let all those who are convicted of the evangelical importance of women in the ministry read this book and take heed. The ordination of women is not a foregone conclusion. It is a young movement, a significant break from previous practice, and by no means widely accepted. Let Breyer's account leave no room for doubt that mere feminism, unchecked and unreformed by the Gospel, is going to derail and destroy the cause for which it cares most. Women are going to fail in the parish and pulpit as long as they are spoon-fed ideology instead of theology and as long as they are taught liberation from patriarchy instead of liberation from sin. Let women in seminaries everywhere understand that a political demand for equal rights to the altar is neither persuasive nor true. And let all of us who believe that the ordination of women is an innovation worth defending turn again to the unpopular St. Paul, whose conviction that "in Christ there is no Greek or Jew, male or female, slave or free" is the most fitting departure-point for ongoing ecumenical debate.

Sarah E. Hinlicky is a student at Princeton Theological Seminary.

Copyright © 2000 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.
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