Dear Sir,
In the ‘Anglican Update’ column of the April issue of EN, Susie Leafe of Reform reports that she was unfairly associated with the Arian heretics in the diocesan debates over raising women to the Episcopate.
The Arians’ erroneous view of the incarnation, according to scholarly 19th-century bishop Christopher Wordsworth, led to a low view of women as women and ‘there we see women in high places taking the lead in patronising error, and in persecuting the truth’.
It is not the first time that the adversaries of truth like the dean of Sheffield Cathedral have invoked the ‘H’ word. Bishop Joseph Hall, a veteran of the Synod of Dort, notes ‘What heresy is there in all times which [Rome is] not wont to cast up on us? … [including that] we are Pepuzians, that ascribe too much to women’.
Dean Richard Field wrote: ‘The fourth heresy imputed to us … is that of the Peputians, who gave women authority to intermeddle with the sacred ministry of the church’ (Of the Church). While Archbishop Bancroft’s chaplain, Thomas Rogers, wrote: ‘In error they remain, who are of the opinion that … women may be deacons, elders, and bishops, the former the Acephalians, the latter the Pepuzians did maintain’ (on the Thirty-nine Articles).
Why the interest in the subject at the time of Elizabeth I? Starting with ex-Lutheran Heath, Archbishop of York, the Roman Catholic accusation had been that Elizabeth I had been made both a priest and bishop when she became head of the Church of England. The heresy of the Peputians or Pepuzians (a species of Montanism) was adopted by both sides as a byword for this error. The formal answer came in the modification to Article 37 of the Thirty-nine Articles to make clear that the Reformed Church of England did not give to their monarchs, let alone any other women, any authority over the preaching of the Word or administration of the sacraments.
But it seems this was not the first time the English church opposed this error. Around 870AD, Ecgberht, Archbishop of York, adopted ‘a canon of Carthage. Let not a woman, though learned and holy, dare to teach men in the assembly’.
Yours sincerely,
