affiliated to the University of Exeter since the early 1980s. He became an honorary Research Fellow of the Department of Theology in 1995 and honorary Professor of Theology in 2009. He set up the centre for the Study of the Christian Church, which organises ecumenical consultations and, until 2015, held the annual Richard Hooker Lectures at the Cathedral and at the University of St Mark and St John, Plymouth. The journal Ecclesiology is a project of the centre and is also published in association with the Ecclesiological Investigations Research Network. In 1998 Avis was appointed Mary Tanner's successor in the key ecumenical position of General Secretary of the Council for Christian Unity, the Church of England's ecumenical study and advisory commission. He had already served on the Faith and Order Advisory Group (1990–98) and the Doctrine Commission (1989–95) of the Church of England, and has subsequently been a member of the Inter-Anglican Standing Commission on Ecumenical Relations (2000–08). He now serves on the successor body, the Inter-Anglican Standing Commission for Unity Faith and Order. He has also served on a couple of international ecumenical dialogues on behalf of the Anglican Communion. The Queen appointed Avis as a member of the Royal College of Chaplains in 2008. Theology "Among contemporary theological voices, that of Paul Avis is always wide-ranging, constructive and sane, combining scholarship with a nuanced feel for tradition." This appraisal by the Anglican theologian and Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams identifies Avis as a leading contemporary Anglican theologian. Leaving aside his articles, Avis's books can be classified in three areas of theology: systematic, ecclesiological and practical-theological. In each of these areas, Avis makes a distinctive and constructive contribution to some highly disputed themes in contemporary theology and especially in worldwide Anglicanism. Systematic theology Avis' first major excursion into systematic theology was The Methods of Modern Theology (1986), which analysed theological methodology in Friedrich Schleiermacher, Albrecht Ritschl, Karl Barth, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Paul Tillich, Tennant, Bernard Lonergan, and Karl Rahner. Although all his publications contain systematic theology, this is most obviously the case with God and the Creative Imagination. It is an instance of what Williams calls Avis's "wide-ranging" theological approach, that Avis took the burden of stepping back for a while from his theological specialisation to articulate his understanding of the basis of any theological enterprise, namely how we know God and God's revelation. According to Avis, the Christian understanding