When Women Become Priests: The Catholic Women's Ordination Debate Book

Hauke anticipated, in 1988, many of the arguments of more recent advocates of women's ordination. For me, the highlights of the book include:
- Superb compilation of telling quotations from pioneers of modern feminism (de Beauvoir, etc) revealing their Gnostic war against embodied sexuality.
- Excellent treatment of 1 Cor. 14, thoroughly refuting the ideologically motivated movement within egalitarian higher criticism that would like to excise 14:34-35 as an interpolation.
- Good concluding section on the history of the question of ordination of women within the dogmatic theology of the church in the middle ages.

The weakest parts were:
- Hauke's gigantic biological/sociological/anthropological/comparative religions grand unified theory, which will persuade no one, but which takes up a quarter of the book.
- Over-reliance on the controverted 1 Cor 14 as the core of his scriptural argument, to the neglect of a fuller picture of the relation of the sexes demonstrated from various texts.
- Inadequate use of Jewish sources (mostly just Billerbeck). Much more could have been done to better articulate the historical background of the NT's teaching on women.
- Naive retrojection of the full-blown Roman Catholic theory of "holy orders" onto the earliest church. No cognizance of the house church background.
- Often tendentious Roman Catholicism that will make Hauke's conclusions difficult for many Protestants.

Worth reading, but we really need a defense of male-only priesthood/presbyterate from a Protestant or Evangelical perspective. (And no, CBMW does not do it for me.)