AUSTRALIA: PRIMATE STIRS STRIFE AMONG FELLOW ANGLICANS

The Primate of Australia, the Most Rev. Peter Carnley of Perth, has issued a stinging attack on the evangelical Diocese of Sydney and its leader, Archbishop Peter Jensen.

“Sydney Anglicanism,” Dr. Carnley argues in his book Reflections in Glass, is out of synch with “mainstream Anglicanism” and holds fundamentalist or erroneous views on Scripture, women clergy, lay presidency at the Eucharist, bioethics, fetal embryo research, ecumenism, and interfaith dialogue.

In his new book, Dr. Carnley takes issue with the prominence that evangelicals give to the doctrine of the atonement.

The Church’s traditional teaching of the atonement—whereby a sinless Christ takes upon Himself the sins of the world and pays the debt of this sin through His atoning death upon the cross—is “uncompromisingly cruel” and a medieval accretion. The Evangelical doctrine of a penal substitutionary atonement, he argues, paints God as a cruel master who demands payment of sin from the innocent Christ, and is unjust.

It is wrong for Evangelicals to make the atonement a core doctrine of the faith, he argues, as it was only fully articulated in the medieval era and was not defined by the creeds and councils of the undivided Church.