ARCHBISHOP Peter Carnley, in the Anglican Church of Australia, has been a towering figure similar to the late Archbishop of York John Habgood in the Church of England, both men being tall, highly intelligent, and capable of making novel and subtle distinctions. Carnley studied at Cambridge, editing an academic collection on Christology with Stephen Sykes, has written two scholarly books on the resurrection, and has been trusted by Archbishops of Canterbury to sit on international Anglican commissions on various contentious issues. Now 86, he has written this detailed intellectual memoir.
For me, it is a “memoir” in the pleasant sense of evoking my memories of addressing his Perth diocesan conference on ecclesiology shortly before his retirement in 2005, and then, soon afterwards, giving a lecture in Sydney at Moore College (situated in the Carillon Avenue of this book’s title) on genetics and ethics. In both places, I met intelligent, friendly, and attentive Anglicans.
But it is also a “memoir” in a less pleasant sense: there was considerable animosity between these two audiences, and that animosity had served to derail the 1998 Lambeth Conference, and has continued to disrupt Anglicanism ever since. This book helps to unpick just why this is so. It is also, in the end, highly combative, and unlikely to diffuse an ongoing doctrinal battle.
For Carnley, the doctrinal battle is about Moore’s commitment to a penal-substitution theory of atonement and to male headship, which, so he argues at length, derives its strength from a “heretical” doctrine of the Trinity which regards the Son as eternally subordinate to the Father.
Archbishop Peter CarnleyFor Moore’s theological critics, it is Carnley who is “heretical”, since his books on the resurrection sit loose to its physicality, his diocese was the first to ordain women as priests, he supported women as bishops, and he labels their distinction of the Son as being equal in essence to the Father, but unequal in function, as “Arian”. In addition, the students that I addressed at Moore College, rather than Perth, were noticeably male and uxorious. A lecture from me, say, on same-sex relations would have been most unwelcome: genetic ethics was safer territory.
There is a curiosity at the heart of this book. Carnley, usually urbane and liberal, is well aware of Maurice Wiles’s pioneering work on Arius, which questioned whether Arius really was an Arian (the problem being that Arius’s ideas are known only from his critics), but he persists with the pejorative labels “Arian” and “heretical”. For ecumenically minded theologians today, this is unnecessarily polemical. Why not just state why he disagrees with the theology of others?
This intellectual memoir is fascinating, but tough going. It traces at length the diocese of Sydney’s intellectual connections with conservative Evangelicalism in Northern Ireland and the background of its various exponents, past and present. A detailed knowledge of the Anglican Church of Australia and of the various reports produced there would also help. But, if you can cope with all of that, then this may well be a book for you.
Canon Robin Gill is Emeritus Professor of Applied Theology at the University of Kent and Editor of Theology.
Arius on Carillon Avenue: More than a memoir: A Trinitarian saga
Peter Carnley
Cascade Books £35
(978-1-6667-6518-2)
Church Times Bookshop £31.50