Euan Cameron has written a very personal meditation on the relationship between his craft as historian and his religious faith. Being personal, it is partial in more than one sense: it reflects its author's liberal Anglicanism and his academic expertise in western European Christianity of the high Middle Ages and the Reformation. So, without apology, Cameron makes the phrase ‘Christian history’ stand for the history of the western Church, leading up to modern European and North American culture – there is no substantial consideration of the history of Orthodox or oriental Churches and indeed minimal mention of Pentecostalism, the most remarkable development in western Christianity over the last hundred years. Within these limits, the book is a wise and helpful treatment of the place of history in a religion focused on historical events of a few decades around an execution in the time of Pontius Pilate. A sketch of western church history over the ensuing two millennia is a masterpiece of compression, and is followed by a chapter seeking to isolate particular emphases within that story, based on Cameron's observation of the ‘innate human tendency to pursue secondary objectives in the religious life’ (p. 102). He illustrates this by alluding to some of the single-issue fixations which have often characterised and shaped religious movements, and which in a later age may seem bizarre: the spiritual athleticism of the stylites in the sixth-century Syrian countryside, the rejection of material possessions and money by the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Spiritual Franciscans, the tearing-apart of the Church of Scotland in the nineteenth century over rights to appoint parish clergy. He notes that the modern western obsession, no less unbalanced than any single-issue obsession of the past, is with counting active membership and using it as a measure of Christian success. The remaining two chapters are paired studies, first of church historians from Eusebius to the present who have formed responses to Christian change and diversity (an excellent survey), then theologians from Schleiermacher onwards who have sought to meet the challenge of western analytical history while preserving their sense of the divine. Cameron traces the bumpy history of theologians' attempts to find an ‘essential’ Christianity which would transcend the particular concerns and emphases of any one period. His own conclusion is formed around the Reformation characterisation of the individual Christian and of the Church as ‘simul justus et peccator’: so no slice of Christian experience at any stage of the Church's development can be said to represent a pure moment to which all others must defer, because it is of the nature of the Church as perceived by humans to be imperfect, and no theology represents ‘an unmediated revelation of the divine’ (p. xii). Not surprisingly, dogmatic Catholicism and Protestant fundamentalism both come in for some sharp remarks, and there is an undergirding of pointed dry humour, as when Cameron notes the western Church's widening of the bounds of canonisation of saints to include ‘even some popes’ (p. 90). His view of his subject is avowedly allied to that of nineteenth-century liberal Protestant theologians, subtracting their optimistic anthropology. Theologians and church historians alike will profit from this austerely clear-sighted study.