Ordaining women is rational: that doesn't make it Christian.

As everyone knows, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger's office) has declared that the ban on women's ordination is something the Catholic church teaches infallibly; it is part of the "deposit of faith."

The announcement, along with the shocked reaction to it that has come from many Catholics, reminds me of Dorothy Parker's famous lines of doggerel:

How odd

Of God

To choose

The Jews.

There is a fancy name for the point Parker was getting at: "the scandal of particularism." If God is the God of all humanity, isn't it shocking that he (please pardon the pronoun) would have a "chosen people"? Shouldn't a universal God, as opposed to a tribal deity, operate by universalistic rules? And don't univer salistic rules dictate that God should treat all his children as equal?

Personally, I have always felt that God, if he had to have a chosen people, should have picked the Greeks, who were much more fun than the ancient Hebrews. I would have preferred an Old Testament made up of Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Plato. Alas, I was not consulted. Or rather, God being omniscient, I suppose I was consulted and my advice rejected.

At all events, a God with particularistic preferences is scandalous. Just as universalism is eminently rational, so there is something irrational--or at all events, nonrational--about particularism. A God with a chosen people offends what William James called our "sentiment of rationality." But so does a God with a chosen gender; and the Vatican is telling us that this is what God has when it comes to the priesthood. Nor is it much consolation to say, "But this exclusion is limited to the priesthood; it doesn't apply to anything else." In a priest-ridden church this is no small exclusion.

But Christianity, it should be remembered, is replete with elements offensive to rationality. To begin with, the central personality in the religion is both human and divine, a combination of attributes that comes close to being a contradiction in terms. Then there is a God who is one and three at the same time, again close to a contradiction. Further near-contradictions follow: bread and wine thatare really the body and blood of Christ, and a church notoriously sinful yet perfectly holy, without spot or blemish. Then, turning to the realm of miracles that are merely physical, not logical, there is a virgin birth; and a resurrection from the dead on the third day; and the appearance of the formerly dead man to hundreds of his followers; not to mention thousands of lesser miracles, from both biblical and postbiblical times.

In the course of history attempts have been made to render Christian doctrine less offensive to reason. In antiquity Docetism was one such attempt, Arianism another, Pelagianism a third. But the really heavy-duty attempt came in modern times, and we are still living in the midst of that effort. Late in the seventeenth century, John Locke, than whom few thinkers have ever been more reasonable, wrote a book titled The Reasonableness of Christianity, in which he did two things: explained how thoroughly compatible with reason the essential doctrines of the faith are, and dropped as inessential those doctrines that did not meet the test of reason.

In the eighteenth century, theistic rationalism divided into two camps. On the one hand were the so-called Deists, who, concluding that Christianity was beyond all hope of rational rehabilitation, opted instead for a purely philosophical religion. Kant, with his Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, represented this movement at its intellectual best; but it never amounted to anything as an independent religion.

On the other was the Christian camp, which continued the pruning work of Locke, discovering, and therefore dropping, more and more traditional elements of Christianity that failed the reasonability test. The Unitarians were the reasonable Christians par excellence. First they gave up the Trinity and the divinity of Christ. Then they gave up Christianity itself. Eventually they even gave up God (though he's still available as an option for those who like to believe in that kind of thing). In a spirit of universalism, they now give equal honor to all great religions, including Native American faiths; they honor the great prophets (for example, Buddha, Jesus, Emerson, Oscar Wilde); they are nonsexist, nonracist, nonhomophobic;they are multiculturalists. In short, they are as reasonable as anyone could possibly want--and as a result they have long been an endangered species in the genus of organized religion.

The road Unitarianism raced down has been followed slowly and reluctantly, with occasional meanderings into the nearby woods, by liberal Protestantism generally. It, too, has become increasingly reasonable; as a result, it, too, has gone into a state of decline, first in Europe, more recently in the United States.

For religion to have an effective hold on people, it appears that it has to have a certain element of the "unreasonable" about it. This is especially true in modern times, with our truncated conception of reason: mind being seen as little more than a receptor of images and a manipulator of symbols, not as an organ for grasping the objective truth about reality. If religion becomes perfectly reasonable, where will its "numinous" element be? And if it has no numinous element, how can it be religion at all?

There is no question that the ban on women's ordination is inconsistent with the canons of Christianity. But this is no evidence that it is inconsistent with Christianity. Indeed it is just the sort of thing you'd expect from a religion that has important elements of nonrationality built into its very essence.

By the way, I personally favor ordaining women, and I feel sorry for the pope that he doesn't agree. But then again, I've always felt sorry for God that he didn't agree with me on making the Greeks the chosen people.