Peter Carnley

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The Most Reverend Dr Peter Carnley AO (1937-) was the Archbishop of Perth, Australia from 1981 to 2005 and was Primate of the Anglican Church of Australia from 2000 until July 2005. He was born in New Lambton, New South Wales and became warden of St John's College at the University of Queensland before he became a bishop.

He studied in Australia at the Trinity College (University of Melbourne) and in England at St John's College, Cambridge. In the 1970s as a lecturer he experimented with Process Theology.

In the 1980s he supported the ordination of women and ordaining the first women priests in the Anglican church in Perth, saying, "Today, we are peeling away the sickly yellow, faded, silverfish-ridden wallpaper with which the church has surrounded itself and imprisoned women for centuries past in its benign and perhaps well-meaning determination to confine them by role." ^[1]

In 2001, amidst questions about the possability of the church celebrating same-sex marriage, Carnley cautiously suggested the Church might be able to bless gay friendships.

In 2003 Peter Carnley led a united front of all Australian Anglican bishops except Peter Jensen of Sydney in opposing the Australian Government's involvement in the invasion of Iraq.

Since the 1980s he has also served as co-chair of the Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC II) seeking greater union and even full communion between the Catholic Church and Anglican Communion.

These range of views and actions would place him within the Prgressive or Liberal Christianity movement.

[edit] Books

Carnely is notably the author of a study of the Resurrection of Jesus, The Structure of Resurection Belief (Clarendon Press, 1987). In it he outlines several different ways Christians frame their belief in the resurrection and the way the resurrection frames their faith. He explores notions of the resurection as an historical event, as an eschatolocial event and as a non-event. It also explores the role of memory, presence and faith in believing the resurrection.

When Carnley was elevated to Primate in Australia, this book caused controversy, with some saying it showed Carnley himself did not believe in the resurrction. Others objected to comments about how the Christian belief in the uniquness of Christ had been misused to persecute people of other faiths.

Carnley says he does believe in the uniquness of Christ: "I think Jesus Christ is the way, the truth and the life, but that doesn't mean that other religions don't have any truth at all." ^[2] He also says he has an Easter (or resurrecton) faith in the real presence of the living Jesus: "The Christian story, which pre-eminently transmits and celebrates the memory of Jesus and God’s revelatory deed in and through his life and death, should lead us beyond itself to a living encounter with the real presence of all that it celebrates and rehearses: him, whom by story we recall, we actually know as the living Spirit of the fellowship of faith." ^[3]