Dear Sir,
In the November en ‘Anglican Update’, David Baker denies that Evangelical Anglicans are tolerating heresy, but this begs the question, by what standard is heresy recognised? More particularly, are women presbyters and bishops something permitted, rejected or something indifferent and therefore allowed?
Back in the 1971 volume of Church Society’s Churchman magazine, Michael Bruce wrote in ‘Heresy, Equality and the Rights of Women’ that ‘many, even those who are strongly opposed to “priestesses”, have fallen into the error of thinking there is no heresy involved in the form of feminism which seeks ordination to the priesthood for women’.
He argues that this heresy is not an easy-to-define single issue heresy like Arianism, but the wholesale multifaceted distortion of reality like Gnosticism. Today we would label this imposed ‘political correct’ worldview ‘cultural Marxism.’ So the question becomes, is the baptised Christian version of cultural Marxism a valid Christian frame or optic or is it a heresy? If it is a heresy, then Evangelical Anglicans accommodating it are tolerating heresy.
Other standards are the Early Church and views expressed at the Reformation. Women presbyters and bishops did emerge within the early church, for example among the Montanists who were condemned as heretical for their gross pretended manifestations of the Holy Spirit. As this pre-dates the Ecumenical Councils, they are only directly condemned by local Councils.
The name of one sect of Montanists, the Peputians or Pepuzians, became the label by which the heresy of allowing women priests became known, particularly at the Reformation.
When Elizabeth I came to the throne, in fear that she might claim her father’s headship of the church after Christ, the once Lutheran but then Roman Catholic Archbishop Heath of York and Bishop Scott of Bristol, speaking in the House of Lords, roundly denounced the idea that a woman could be a pastor in Christ’s church.
Thus Article 37 of The Thirty-nine Articles was framed to distance the Church of England from any such idea: ‘we give not to our Princes the ministering either of God’s Word, or of the Sacraments, the which thing Injunctions also lately set forth testify.’
For generations after this, even to the time of Francis de Sales, Roman Catholics accused the Church of England of heresy under this shorthand label and under this label, Anglicans unceremoniously dismissed the charge.
In Elizabeth’s reign, it was clearly stated to be a heresy against The Thirty-nine Articles in Thomas Rogers’ Commentary on The Thirty- nine Articles, published with archiepiscopal authority, and required by the same authority to be purchased by all parishes in the Province of Canterbury. Further, in James I’s time, this heresy receives a whole chapter in Dean Richard Church’s major defence of the Church of England: ‘Of the Church.’
Yours faithfully,
