Discerning the Signs of the Time: The Vision of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel. - book review

Discerning the Signs of the Time: The Vision of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel
Edited by Michael Plekon and
Sarah Hinlicky
Saint Vladimir Seminary Press, $13.95, 202 pp.

Elisabeth Behr-Sigel must be numbered in that illustrious litany. Still active, Behr-Sigel was born in Alsace and became, in 1926, one of the first women on the faculty of theology at Strasbourg. While studying in Paris, she came in contact with the Russian community and was eventually received into that church largely under the influence of Lev Gillet, a former Benedictine who had become an Orthodox monk as well as the founder of the first French-speaking Orthodox community in France. Since those days she has pursued her life's work as a lay theologian in the Orthodox Church.

The collection of her occasional papers and studies is particularly interesting because we do not often have the opportunity to hear an Orthodox woman speak to the wider Christian world about "women's issues" and, in particular, women's ministry. Behr-Sigel recognizes that Orthodox women are not permitted to preach within the liturgy itself, and that the possibility of ordination to the presbyterate seems a dim prospect. Nonetheless, she has thought deeply on both issues. Because she is active in ecumenical circles she knows other traditions and frames her own reflections in that context.

Two lines of inquiry caught my eye. Behr-Sigel asks whether the ancient order of the deaconess could be restored since it has never been formally abolished in Orthodoxy. She further wonders: What would a restored order look like? Phyllis Zagano has devoted a recent book, Holy Saturday (Crossroad), to the same set of questions from the perspective of Roman Catholicism. Elsewhere, fully aware that Orthodox theology finds ordination of women to be unacceptable for reasons rooted in liturgical symbolism, Behr-Sigel poses the essential question: "Does the ordination of women to the priesthood constitute a genuine heresy, a rupture with the teachings of Christ?" She does not assay an answer but, citing with approval the thinking of the late John Meyendorff, says that such a question is not unrelated to the issue of distinguishing the holy tradition of the church from human traditions that express revelation only obscurely and, often, "even oppose and obscure it."

From this volume of essays we begin to understand why Behr-Sigel is known as the "living memory" of Orthodoxy. The book would have been enhanced by a bibliography and an index. The compact biography of Behr-Sigel by Lyn Breck is useful.

Lawrence S. Cunningham is the John A. O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.

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