Peter Cameron

Peter Cameron (born 1945) is a former Scottish Presbyterian minister, theologian, lawyer, who was notable for being convicted of heresy.

Early life Cameron was born in 1945 in Scotland, read law at Edinburgh University, and studied theology at Edinburgh and Cambridge before being ordained as a minister in the Church of Scotland.

Career Cameron and his family moved to Sydney, New South Wales, Australia at the beginning of 1991, when he was appointed Principal of St Andrew's College at the University of Sydney, and thus became a minister in the Presbyterian Church of Australia.

Conviction for heresy Cameron was charged with heresy in 1993 for challenging Christian beliefs, by questioning the writings of Paul in the New Testament.

The charge related to a sermon that he preached on 2 March 1992 called "The Place of Women in the Church" to 300 members of a Dorcas Society Rally (a Presbyterian women's organisation) in the conservative Ashfield Presbyterian Church. In the sermon Cameron supported the ordination of women to the ministry, criticised the church's hard line on homosexuality, and attacked fundamentalist Christianity in general. According to Bruce Christian, a member of the Sydney Presbytery in the Presbyterian Church, Cameron was prosecuted for his attitude to Scripture in the lecture, stating: "The point he actually made at the public rally was that there was little value in arguing the hermeneutics of 1 Timothy 2:11-15 on the ordination of women, the simple fact is that Paul got it wrong."

In Australia, most congregations of the Presbyterian Church had left that body in 1977 to join the Uniting Church in Australia. The thirty-six per cent of congregations that stayed tended to be more conservative than the majority that left. This meant that the Presbyterian Church in Australia was a far more conservative body than its 'parent' the Church of Scotland. Thus, Cameron's opinions were far more remarkable in the context of the Australian church than they would have been in the Scottish context. A church spokesman, Paul Cooper noted that:

"though the views that Dr Cameron is spouting would be acceptable in Scotland, they are not acceptable in Australia. We are a different church...an independent Church. Colonialism is dead. Dr Cameron wants the Presbyterian Church to be like the Church of Scotland...but we make our own decisions and our decision is that we don’t want to be that sort of church. We stand under the authority of the Bible."

Cameron returned to Scotland in January 1996, and left the Church of Scotland to be ordained in the Scottish Episcopal Church (a historic Church that is in communion with the Church of England within the Anglican Communion).

Published works Cameron is the author of several books, the most well-known of which, Heretic, , gives his account of the heresy trial.