What Is Ordination? Setting Someone Apart to Act for a Community
By the BrainSnail editorial team. How these articles are written and checked, and how to tell us when one is wrong.
A ceremony that authorises a person to perform religious functions on behalf of others appears across traditions, and the disagreements about who may be ordained and what it confers have caused some of the deepest divisions within them.
What the act is understood to do
Accounts of what happens at an ordination differ substantially and the differences carry consequences. On one view the act confers a permanent change in the person, an indelible character that cannot be removed even if the person is disciplined or leaves, which means their sacramental acts remain valid regardless of their conduct and which was settled in early Christian disputes about ministers who had lapsed under persecution. On another view the act recognises and authorises rather than transforming, so the minister holds an office and a function delegated by the community and returns to ordinary status if it is withdrawn. A third treats the act as commissioning for a task with no claim about the person's state. Those three positions are held by different traditions and by different parts of traditions, and much of what follows about authority, validity and recognition depends on which is held.
The common elements
The ceremonies share components across traditions that developed separately:
- •A period of preparation, training and testing, frequently lasting years
- •Public examination or attestation, where the community or its representatives affirm the candidate's suitability
- •Laying on of hands, which appears in several traditions and is generally understood to transmit something
- •Vows or commitments, which may include obedience, celibacy, poverty or simply faithful service
- •Investiture with distinguishing clothing or objects that mark the new status visibly
- •A claim of continuity, connecting the ordaining authority back through a line to an origin
The succession question
Several traditions hold that the authority to ordain passes only through an unbroken line from a founding moment, which makes the validity of any ordination depend on the validity of every one preceding it. That doctrine settles who may perform certain acts and makes recognition between traditions a substantive question rather than a courtesy, since a body that does not accept another's line does not accept its ministers. It has been the central issue in several long-running divisions, with lengthy documented arguments about particular historical ordinations and whether a specific break invalidated everything after it. Traditions rejecting the doctrine hold that authority derives from the community, from the scriptures or from the calling itself, which removes the historical dependency and creates a different problem about who decides. The dispute is not reducible to either side being unreasonable, since both are answering a real question about where authority comes from.
The traditions without it
Several traditions manage without any ordained class and their arrangements are informative by contrast. Quaker practice has no clergy, holding that anyone present may be moved to speak and that no one is set apart to mediate, which follows directly from the theology and which required developing other mechanisms for continuity and for discipline. Some Protestant traditions emphasising the priesthood of all believers retain ordained ministers while holding that ordination confers function rather than status, which is a middle position. Islamic practice has no ordination in the sacramental sense, with religious authority resting on scholarship, recognition by other scholars and the acceptance of a community, so the leader of prayer is whoever is qualified rather than whoever has been ordained. Jewish ordination confers recognition as a qualified teacher and judge, which is closer to a professional certification than to a change of state.
Who may be ordained
Eligibility has been the most contested question in the last century and remains unsettled across and within traditions. The ordination of women has divided denominations, produced formal separations and continues to be argued in terms of scripture, tradition and reasoning about what the office requires, with some bodies ordaining women at every level, some at some levels and some not at all. Requirements of celibacy differ between traditions and between branches of the same tradition, and have been reconsidered repeatedly. Questions about the ordination of people in same-sex relationships have produced the sharpest recent divisions, with several bodies splitting over them. Requirements about education, about caste or lineage, and about age vary widely. In each case the argument is simultaneously about the specific criterion and about who has authority to change it, which is why such disputes are so hard to settle.
The takeaway
Traditions disagree over whether the act permanently changes the person, authorises them in an office, or commissions them for a task, and everything about validity follows from which. Preparation, public attestation, laying on of hands, vows and distinguishing dress recur. Where authority is held to pass through an unbroken line, recognition between bodies becomes a substantive question rather than a courtesy.