254 Book Reviews
Muriel Porter Sydney Anglicans and the Threat to World Anglicanism (Farnham, Surrey; Bloomington, in: Ashgate, 2011), xvi + 173 pp. isbn 978-1-4049-2027-9 (pbk). £19.99.
There are two bodies which have come to enjoy iconic status as representatives of the current divisions within world Anglicanism. On the liberal side there is The Episcopal Church in the United States and on the conservative side there is the Diocese of Sydney in Australia. For many conservative Anglicans the Diocese of Sydney is seen as the great bastion of orthodox, Evangelical Angli- canism. As they see it, it has remained faithful to the Bible and the traditions of the English Reformation and has played, and continues to play, a vital role in providing leadership and resources for other Evangelical Anglicans both in Australia and around the globe. For many liberal Anglicans, however, the Dio- cese of Sydney represents a narrow and sectarian version of Anglicanism and has been responsible for stirring up controversy and division in Australia and throughout the Anglican Communion. As the title of her book indicates, the Australian Anglican writer Muriel Por- ter takes the liberal side in this division of opinion. She sees Sydney Anglicans as a ‘threat to world Anglicanism’ and her book explains why she thinks this is the case. The book is a revised and expanded version of an earlier book en- titled The New Puritans: The Rise of Fundamentalism in the Anglican Church which was published in 2006 and it updates the story of Sydney Anglicanism and its wider influence to 2011. Although she is now based in Melbourne, Mu- riel Porter was brought up in Sydney and was baptised and confirmed in the Diocese of Sydney. Her view is that since those days in the 1950s and ‘60s the diocese has changed its character for the worse.
Sydney Diocese no longer reflects mainstream Anglicanism in terms of its parish life, worship or leadership because it now wears the (modern) face of sixteenth-century English Puritanism. Now at the heart of the dio- cese is an extremely narrow understanding of Christian belief, a version of the Gospel so limited that it no longer accords with the understanding of most other mainstream Christians or indeed with the Gospel I heard preached in my Sydney childhood. Like its Puritan forebears, Sydney is in no doubt that its version is the only right one. Further, Sydney Dio- cese is now so certain that everyone else’s views are wrong that it believes its God given mission is to impose its version of the truth on others, in the rest of Australia and in the worldwide Anglican Communion. That is what makes the changes that have occurred in Sydney over the past half century, and the current crisis in particular, so serious. (p. xiv)
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The book consists of eight chapters. It begins with an introduction that gives some basic facts about the Diocese of Sydney and its influence in Australia and in other parts of the Anglican Communion. It then moves on to a chapter on ‘Anglicanism in Sydney today’. This chapter looks at the theology and practice of the diocese. It argues that the diocese has largely departed from traditional An- glican norms in its forms of worship and in its patterns of ministry, that it takes a ‘fundamentalist’ view of Scripture and a very negative view of non-Christian religions and exercises a ‘harsher set of rules concerning personal morality than most other Anglican dioceses’ (p. 19). Sydney Anglicans are the direct heirs of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English Puritans, and like their fore- bears, they seek a ‘further Reformation’ of the Anglican Church (p. 27). The third chapter, ‘Sydney Anglicans: How it came to this’, traces the history of Sydney Anglicanism from the arrival of the first fleet in 1790 to the present day. It looks at the reasons why Sydney, unlike other Australian dioceses, has always remained predominantly ‘low church’ and how the present form of Syd- ney Anglicanism has been shaped by the influence of three key leaders, T. C. Hammond, Broughton Knox and Donald Robinson, and the impact of the Billy Graham mission in 1959. It also looks at the development of the constitution of the Anglican Church of Australia and argues that this constitution gave Sydney an ability both to block developments supported by the rest of the Australian church and the freedom not to implement such developments even when they were agreed nationally. Finally, the chapter suggests that the role of women in promoting the teaching of ‘sinless perfection’ in Evangelical circles in Sydney in the 1930s may have a continuing influence in the diocese’s continuing op- position to the ordination of women. Chapters 4 and 5 look at tensions within the Anglican Communion and the Anglican Church in Australia, tensions in which Mrs Porter sees Sydney dio- cese playing a key role because of its opposition to homosexual practice and the ordination of women and its advocacy of diaconal and lay presidency at the Eucharist. In her view, Sydney’s opposition to homosexual practice is ‘re- spectable window dressing for the blatant exercise of power-politics’ (p. 75). It is an issue which gives Sydney political influence elsewhere in the Anglican Communion whilst also shoring up Sydney’s ‘conservative view of the subordi- nate place of women in the church and family’ (p. 75). She also argues that it is an ‘obsession with a certain kind of purity’ (p. 111) that links together Sydney’s views on women, sexuality and lay presidency and that has ‘created an un- bridgeable gulf between the Diocese of Sydney and the rest of the Australian Church’ (p. 111). Chapter 6, ‘Women: Equal but different’, looks in more detail at Sydney’s teaching about the role of women both in the family and the Church. Its ecclesiology 12 (2016) 225-269