Preliminary observations: Christ is male, Adam was male even before Eve came from him. How this was without making the original Adam a hermaphrodite, I don’t know. Much of female anatomy and tendencies are for the bearing and nourishing of children. She was also made to help man. But unlike the animals, she helps in a human way. Human femininity and masculinity are more about ratios. You could say that a monkey’s difference from a human’s is also about ratios, but on a genetic level, there is enough difference to classify them as separate species. Men and women are both human species. The councils emphasize Christ’s human nature, not his male human nature. In fact He received his male human nature from a woman.

So why can’t women be priests? Perhaps it is because sexually, males, like God, are the givers and women are the receivers. This is not to say that women do not give and men do not receive, even sexually, but without being explicit, most know of a fundamental male giving and female receiving. Perhaps this is why in Orthodoxy, a Priest cannot serve communion without parishioners being present. The people give consent and are there to be receivers. I think I read that St. John Maximovich took communion every day whether anyone else showed up or not. Firstly, it is sad that no one else was there. And secondly, one could make the case that when he received, he was receiving directly from Christ and at that point became one of the people, which Priests are also said to represent. In this way during confession, a Priest is sometimes looked at as representing the witness of the people in a more private way. This is why there is also the distinction with the Catholics that he isn’t granting absolution per se, but interceding for the absolution of the confessing person.

So during communion the Priest is representing the maleness of Christ, and even male laypeople are receiving as the feminine Church. To have a female priest would mean that it doesn’t matter if Christ is male or female, which goes against nature. How does a male communicant not confuse the feminine role of the Church? Perhaps this applies to my point a little further down.

I have heard Fr. Thomas Hopko say that we retain our gender in heaven. Mary will always be female, for example. This points to a fundamentalness of being male or female. When the Bible says we will be like the angels, perhaps it means that we will be more like children, who from infancy display male and female tendencies, but who, before puberty, don’t have a certain type of concupiscence.

Unless one resents the masculine and feminine aspects of sexuality, one should not have a problem with the idea of a male priesthood. Feminists seem to think that the exclusively  male priesthood means that women cannot be as much like Christ as a man can. Perhaps it would be more helpful to think of the Trinity rather than models of Christ and the Church or male/female hierarchy, which can suffer from the fallen connotation of dominance and control (this can also sadly be carried over into our notions of the Son’s relationship to the Father). Men and women having the same human essence  could possibly be compared to the Father and the Son or the Spirit having the same divine essence. The difference is in origination. If we agree that the Father is the eternal source of the deity of Christ, who is given equality with Him at the same time, then maybe we can see that maleness and the male priesthood are not only the source of our humanity (as Eve was taken from Adam), but that it is the source of our divinization (through the Eucharist being both from Christ and the Priest) or union with God.

As Orthodox, we also see that being a member of the Church is an essential part of becoming like Christ. Women can feel validated and necessary by this. As Christ received His human body from Mary, so Christians receive Christ’s body from the Church. The two cannot be separated. There is sourcehood in God, but his union with the Church makes things new. In some ways the distinctions seem erased in that a woman can represent her husband, and in that the Churche’s reception of her children can be equated with receiving Christ. But we do not forget about the distinctions, nor do we get confused.