This collection of papers is the fruit of an international consultation held in Geneva in 1992, when sixteen women and four men from sixteen different countries explored the case for women's ordination in the face of ongoing resistance or apathy in the churches. The appendix gives telling figures as to how few, even of the Reformed communion, have more than a negligible number of women ordained in the years since it has been legally possible.

It is visibly a Protestant document. Following the keynote affirmation of the community of women and men, and the ensuing commitment to the inclusiveness of Christian ministry, it reiterates the priesthood of all believers, and the linking in Reformed understanding of vocation and validation by the people, for specific tasks of ministry which are functionally necessary rather than constituting a separate order of being in church or creation. The thrust of the collection is democratic, feminist and campaigning.

The most substantial but in some ways rather repetitive section deals with exegesis, as befits a Reformed document. This is followed by a shorter cluster of essays headed 'Systematic Theological Studies', followed by a somewhat isolated, though fascinating, historical study by Jane Dempsey Douglass, 'Glimpses of Reformed Women Leaders from our History'. There follow a series of reflective case-studies from Cameroon, Senegal, Taiwan, Colombia and Egypt, and a concluding essay by Jana and Milan Opocenský, summarizing the affirmations and challenges of the theological demand for the equal humanity of women and men.

I think it depends on who is expected to read this workmanlike volume what needs to be said about it by way of commendation or criticism.

To Protestants of a conservative-evangelical persuasion, if it falls into their hands, it is likely to seem a dismissable work of 'liberal' propaganda, not least because the consultation seems to have included no-one from any Protestant tradition who had theological scruples about the ordination of women. While I share the universal recognition of the contributors that the culture of most theological reflection in European history has been patriarchal; and while I rejoice in a wider public being told about the context of texts and the context of readers as part of the dynamic of hearing the word of God, I think it might have sharpened up the agenda of this volume to have had someone present who genuinely doubted if women should be ordained to the clerical ministry of word and sacrament as defined by the Reformation.

All the exegetical studies show a proper, and under-publicized, awareness of the hermeneutical issue: how do we rescue the core gospel from the cultural baggage of whenever: post-exilic Israel, second-century Christianity, twentieth-century Korea? The linguistic skills brought to bear on the Genesis creation narratives, the use and abuse of them by Paul or his followers, and the subsequent use and abuse (mainly the latter) by post-biblical traditions are certainly good news for people who have been taught since childhood that the Bible is a set of absolute inerrant truths.

But most of the people who engage intelligently with the debate about women's ordination do not come from that fundamentalist background or have grown out of it. Those who engage with it from that perspective will not, I suspect, find this book interesting until they have begun to love a God bigger than their obedient, dutiful absolutes.

For Christians who have not been nurtured by ministers brave enough to raise questions as to how the provisionality of scriptural insight relates to its status as word of God, the book could be revelatory. This is one of its primary virtues. Nirmala Vasanthakumar's opening essay is exemplary in setting out the range of hermeneutical options. The exegetical studies all raise sensitively the recognition of how texts have been abused, deracinated from their socio-political contexts, absorbed into the assumptions of subsequent societies and used as mandates for status quo practice which has little to do with theology and much to do with accepted power politics.

But the essays constantly beg or take the answers for granted to most of the questions that Protestant evangelicals would want room to ask: was the Spirit guiding the church as Paul or the Paulinists hardened from the freedom of Galatians to the caution of the Corinth correspondence, or the strictures of 1st Timothy? Why accept a canon at all if you dismiss half of it as disposable cultural conditioning? How do you know that the half you dismiss is the right half? Why is there almost no reference to the embarrassing fact that the hermeneutics of Luther and Calvin, for all their vision of freedom from the shackles of 'Christendom', left women not much better off in ecclesiological terms than the Orthodox and Roman Catholic traditions?

The theoretical answers are clear and virtually unanimous. The core of the gospel is about reconciliation, that is, about removing the categories of inferior/superior, and replacing them by the good news of equality. All models of male domination of female belong to the Fall, and are under the judgment of Christ. The church's witness to this new order entails the eligibility of women to every office men hold in the church. All resistance to this new order is sub-evangelical, and probably the legacy of the sexism and patriarchal sinfulness of the cultures which have dominated world history, especially in its Christian version, from the dawn of time to the present day.

What is now, I think, called the sub-text in literary circles is the suggestion that a feminist hermeneutic holds the key to transforming this situation. As Elsa Tamez puts it: 'As a general rule, one overlooks the fact that women not only have the required training [for theological contributions to the church's task] but also a new cosmo-vision and creativity with regard to many new subjects concerning the theological, biblical, liturgical and pedagogical recreation.' (p.52). It is fascinating to see how internationalized this perspective is across the Protestant world.

I wonder, however, if this collection of essays is likely to persuade sceptics as well as to sustain the converted. And I find it a little insular that a book of this kind, emerging from one of the Christian world communions, does not really engage at all with some of the tougher questions which emerge from our sister churches, and from the dissidents within our own Reformed traditions. It was, of course, an internal Reformed consultation, but I think that in our ecclesiastical global village, we all live in the presence of one another's questions. On the whole, I suspect those questions are too easily dismissed as rationalizations of patriarchal thinking and feeling. But there are serious ecumenical arguments to be wrestled with about whether ordination is a sacramental act, and about whether the differentiation of men's and women's being is confused if everyone does everything.

The most subtle Orthodox thinkers, for instance, would argue that Baptism is the sacrament which ordains us all, women and men, to the priesthood of all believers, but that there is a further differentiation, or taxis, which is recognized in chrismation and marks the more specific vocation to the laity. To be ordained into clerical orders is a further transformation of the Spirit. This does not of course explain why, in principle, the further transformation should be open only to men, but it is simply clumsy to accuse those traditions of denying the priesthood of all believers. (Ironically, for all our Reformed pride in the anti-clericalism of our tradition, it is possible in our churches to have a communion service consisting entirely of ministers, whereas the Orthodox hold it canonically impossible to have a eucharistic liturgy without lay people being present).

The more radical Protestant traditions, on the other hand, like Quakers for example, might push the logic of this book's argument further, and suggest that the very act of ordaining clergy is a betrayal of the equal vocation of all Christians to witness and to minister. While there is clearly a case capable of being argued for clerical ministries as part of 'good order', it is not actually argued anywhere here, but rather taken for granted.

So much as I find myself at home with much of the spirit of the volume, I know and love men and women of Orthodox, Catholic and Anglican and Protestant traditions who could read it, agree with much of it, and yet feel that it had not done enough to address the questions they would wrestle with. How does one test the guidance of the Spirit in the church? How does one decide what is core and what is periphery? Why ordain at all if it is not an express command of Jesus? How do we know that we are not simply prisoners of our own cultural presuppositions?

The biggest contribution the book makes is in documenting the intricacy of the hermeneutical task. The irreconcilability of such passages as Gal 3.28 and 1 Cor 14.34-35 is candidly recognized, and past efforts to harmonize such different positions rejected. This has, of course, been a commonplace of biblical scholarship since historical-critical reading began, but it is still not often acknowledged in the preaching and educational contexts of our churches. The Lutheran boldness of declaring a canon within the canon is endorsed, with a liberation feminist theological hermeneutic affirmed as the normative one from which the consultation found its common voice. But there is also close textual study, particularly of the Genesis creation traditions in the essays by Isabel Apawo Phiri and Sang Chang, which show how easy it has been for the church to read what it wants to read, rather than what is there.

Although I do myself believe that the basic thrust of the gospel is about freedom and transformed community, there were occasional points where I wondered if the authors themselves were in some danger of overstating their case, or even themselves of seeing what they wanted to see. The unfurling of feminist implications from the scriptural witness seems to me a delicate business. One has only to read the writings of a post-christian feminist like Daphne Hampson to be reminded that there are feminists who find little trace of good news even in the gospels. I don't myself think there is vast theological significance in the Easter narratives making it a woman with whom the risen Christ had the first encounter. Nor do I think that attempts to put significant weight on Adam and Eve's non-communication in Sang Chang's essay are more than speculative reconstruction of myth into psycho-drama.

HS Wilson's essay 'Towards a New Understanding of Ministry' was one of the few contributions which began to move specifically and explicitly towards ecclesiology, and would therefore be central in any ecumenical dialogue. His recognition of the diverse models of church underlying different practices of ordination is, I suspect, crucial. The tantalizingly brief account he gives (p. 80) could stand expansion in many directions. His is also the only paper to raise the vital question of whether women can best make their authentic contribution even as ordained persons within the institution historically shaped for and by men. It's early days yet, but it's certainly not clear in my home context, where women have been ordained for twenty-five years now, that their presence has made for any significant feminization of ministry. This would have been another valuable exploration for the consultation: to try to specify, apart from the justice and equality arguments, what specific generic gifts women might have which make ministry deficient if it is carried out by men only. This is particularly important if ordination is being justified on a functional basis.

There are, as one would expect in a Reformed document, various references to the force of the sense of vocation in individuals. Wilson goes so far as to say 'If individuals (male or female) are of the opinion that they possess the gifts suited for office in the church, their call should duly be respected'. That seems to me to depend somewhat on what's meant by 'respect'. Certainly, any conviction of calling deserves serious exploration, but it cannot surely be taken as self-authenticating, or many a pulpit would be filled by self-appointed lunatics. Of a group of ordination candidates I encountered, the most worrying was one who wrote of himself, 'There is no doctrine of the Christian faith which I fail to adress (sic) convincingly'!

It is however unfair to blame a book for not doing everything. The primary purpose of the consultation was not to talk about criteria for ordination, but about the basic theological and ethical principles behind women's ordination in the Reformed traditions.

From this starting point, the essays here add up to a forceful case, crossing many cultural and geographical boundaries. They would be salutary reading for churches in which the issue of women's ordination is still a live one, and put down a marker for those who have not yet even begun to be open to the possibility.

Elizabeth Templeton of the Church of Scotland is a 'free-lance' theologian, and a speaker at 'Hope and Renewal in Times of Change', the WARC European area council in Edinburgh, 28 August to 3 September 1995.