A Trinitarian Saga by Peter Carnley

Archbishop Peter Carnley was a towering figure in the Anglican Church of Australia, similar to the late Archbishop of York, John Habgood, in the Church of England. Both men were tall, highly intelligent and capable of novel and subtle distinctions. Carnley studied at Cambridge, edited an academic collection on Christology with Stephen Sykes, wrote two scholarly books on the resurrection and was appointed by the Archbishops of Canterbury to serve on international Anglican commissions on various controversial issues. Now aged 86, he has written this detailed intellectual memoir.

For me it is a ‘memory’ in the pleasant sense that it brings back memories of my speech on ecclesiology at his diocesan conference in Perth just before his retirement in 2005, and then, shortly after, of a lecture on genetics and ethics at Moore College (on Carillon Avenue, which is the title of this book) in Sydney. In both places I met intelligent, friendly and thoughtful Anglicans.

But it is also a “memoir” in a less pleasant sense: there was considerable hostility between these two audiences, and that hostility helped to derail the 1998 Lambeth Conference and has continued to trouble Anglicanism ever since. This book helps to find out why that is. It is also ultimately very combative and unlikely to defuse an ongoing doctrinal dispute.

For Carnley, the doctrinal dispute revolves around Moore’s commitment to atonement-based substitution theory and male supremacy. This theory, he argues at length, derives its strength from a “heretical” doctrine of the Trinity that sees the Son as eternally subordinate to the Father.Archbishop Peter CarnleyFor Moore’s theological critics, Carnley is the “heretic” because his books on the resurrection do not agree with its physicality, his diocese was the first to ordain women priests, he supported women as bishops, and he described their view that the Son was equal in substance but unequal in function as “Arian.” Moreover, the students I spoke to at Moore College rather than in Perth were conspicuously male and uxoric. A lecture from me on, say, same-sex relationships would have been most unwelcome: genetic ethics was safer territory.

There is a curiosity at the heart of this book. Carnley, normally worldly and liberal, is well aware of Maurice Wiles’s seminal work on Arius, in which he questioned whether Arius was really an Arian (the problem is that Arius’ ideas are known only by his critics), but he persists in using the pejorative labels “Arians” and “heretics”. For ecumenically minded theologians today, this is unnecessarily polemical. Why doesn’t he simply explain why he disagrees with the theology of others?

This intellectual memoir is a fascinating but difficult read. It traces in detail the intellectual links of the Sydney diocese to conservative evangelicalism in Northern Ireland and gives an insight into the background of its various representatives, past and present. A detailed knowledge of the Anglican Church of Australia and the various reports written there would also be helpful. But if you can handle all that, then this may 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 Memory: A Trinitarian Saga
Peter Carnley
Cascade Books £35
(978-1-6667-6518-2)
Church Times Bookshop £31.50