For over 20 years Peter Carnley has been a thoughtful and at times provocative voice in Australian public discourse, straddling ecclesiastical and secular worlds and issues with aplomb. Now that his retirement as Anglican Archbishop of Perth and Primate of the Australian Church has been announced, Reflections in Glass appears as a not-quite-parting shot. It presents his concerns on issues from theology to bioethics to ministry to religious pluralism, and embodies his mode of leadership not so much as representative conciliator but as an inspirational leader and controversialist.
Carnley’s conflicts with the Anglican Diocese of Sydney have been no secret and are a prominent thread through this book. From the opening pages which narrate the controversy surrounding his 2000 Bulletin article on ‘The Rising of the Son’ to the chapters on women’s ordination and religious pluralism, conservative evangelical Sydney Anglicans are a real or implied opponent in the articulation of Carnley’s ‘progressive orthodox’ Christianity.
This constant subtext of a debate between Anglicanisms—Peter Carnley to the West and Peter Jensen to the East, as it were—could be read as a slanging match between duelling scholasticisms, liberal and evangelical. Some readers will wonder whether the polarity between progressive and fundamentalist tendencies in the Anglican Church might be handled more creatively—whether by rapprochement or just amicable separation. At many points, however, this struggle with a conservative Christianity documented in Reflections in Glass will be enlightening to people of faith, beyond as well as within Anglicanism, who seek alternatives to the conservatism so evident across traditions and denominations in Australia recently. Archbishop Carnley’s thought is actually as different from the liberalism of Bishop Jack Spong as from the fundamentalism this book opposes. He begins with a clear fidelity to key elements of Christian doctrine, but seeks to ask how they can be interpreted in ways that do justice both to tradition and to contemporary realities. In this respect the Australian Anglican Primate can justly be compared with the English one, Rowan Williams.
Three chapters on aspects of leadership and ministry are relatively clearly focused on Anglican issues—the possibility of ‘lay administration’ of the Eucharist (a Sydney proposal to authorise a further order of local elders who have the same liturgical roles as priests), the role of priests, and the possibility of women as bishops. These include some technical discussion of the political and legal processes the Anglican Church faces in dealing with them, but also a