He then chastised one of the Anglican Church's own bishops, Jack Spong, the liberal and gay rights campaigner who recently retired as Bishop of Newark. Dr Carey accused Bishop Spong of treating the Bible as no better than Aesop's Fables. "For Spong the Bible is merely a witness to the past. It points back, but it has little to say to us today."
Dr Carey said: "There must, of course, be a middle way. We cannot abandon scriptures to the dogmatic voices of either the fundamentalist literalist or the fundamentalist radical. Sanity must prevail."