This is a fascinating introduction to conciliarism: ‘decision-making by means of councils, that is to say, by means of formally constituted, trans-local leadership assemblies called together to resolve issues affecting the life and ministry of the church … a complex phenomenon, assuming a variety of forms in the history of the Church’ (p 7). The book is by turns informative, intriguing and frustrating.

Paul Vallière is Professor of Religion and Humanities at Butler University Indianapolis, with strong academic interests in Orthodoxy and, interestingly, Pentecostalism. As an experienced academic, his account of conciliarism is highly accessible both in terms of the information he imparts, and the way he imparts it. He has the history at his fingertips and he seems well aware from his acquaintance with Pentecostalism that ‘the conciliar tradition [may be] undercut by the authority of … wonderworkers’ (p 91).

In the first three chapters, he takes his readers sure-footedly, and with lightness of touch, from the New Testament record of the Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15), through the ‘creeds, councils and controversies’ of the patristic period (including the political as well as theological background), via the divergence of West and East at the turn of the first millennium and the disastrous rivalries of the dual papacy between Rome and Avignon in the fourteenth century, to the Reformation (which is sadly where so many of our studies of Church history begin and end). In the fourth chapter, he gives a workmanlike account of the development of a distinctive Anglican polity, emerging from domination by the English Crown (starting with the 13 colonies on the western seaboard of what was becoming the United States of America). He notes how, as political self-consciousness developed in British dependencies, the Anglican churches which had taken root under the protection of the Crown and its bishops began to find their own forms of synodical government. In the process, they recovered something of the conciliar pattern of governance that Vallière shows as having characterised the Early Church (the Church of England itself, of course, lagged a generation or so behind, its own Convocation having been in abeyance for 150 years, and it was finally revived in the teeth of opposition from significant elements in both Church and state).

All this is presented succinctly and attractively, and invites intriguing reflections on the ‘Might have beens’ and ‘What ifs’ in the purposes of God. What if Constantine had not been converted to Christianity, or had not used his imperial authority to call the Council of Nicaea in 325? What if Rome had adopted the 381 Constantinople settlement earlier than the Council of Chalcedon in 451 – or had never adopted it? Vallière does not duck the contingencies of history or settle for simple fundamentalisms, whether scriptural or institutional. Tracing the twists and turns of doctrinal controversy between Nicaea and Chalcedon, he remarks that

But having traced the story through, he concludes that ‘it was the conciliar process … which produced a lasting consensus’ (p 83). Vallière's treatment of the Conciliar Movement of the late Middle Ages is less detailed than the monograph on the same subject by Paul Avis,Footnote ² but it again poses ‘What if’ questions: might the challenges to papal authority by Nicholas of Cusa and others in the fifteenth century, if heeded, have averted the division in the Western Church that we know as the Reformation – and might the Christian Church be the richer or the poorer if it had done so?

It is the helpfulness of all this introduction to the complex history, and the fruitfulness of the reflections that it prompts, which make Vallière's practical analysis of the way forward for the Anglican Communion today somewhat frustrating (for this reviewer, at least). He notes the deliberately non-conciliar structure of the Lambeth Conferences (which cannot claim the jurisdictional authority that he believes a true Council of the Church should have, and which has been a recurrent anxiety at every Conference since 1867); and he notes the similar lack of jurisdiction accorded in Anglicanism to its Primates in their Meeting, and to the Anglican Consultative Council (my emphasis). He does not accept Avis' contention that ‘Anglicanism institutionalises catholic values through ‘a communion that is distributed, an authority that is dispersed, a conciliarity that is not centralised and a collegiality that is not hierarchical’ (p 215Footnote ³). Sadly, there is not space in this review to pursue that debate further.

But what troubled me more, as I reached the end of Vallière's book, was that a kind of romanticism had set in, in relation to the Anglican Communion's current problems. It is not as obvious as he appears to think that a further ‘Anglican Congress’, of the sort held in 1908 and 1963, involving bishops, clergy and laity, would produce a workable consensus (even if it could be afforded). The recent loss of vigour in relation to the Anglican Covenant process suggests that institutional solutions (conciliarist or otherwise) are not likely to harness Anglican energies in the way that we need to, if we are to make a distinctive Anglican contribution to a world in urgent need of reconciliation.

Perhaps this book would have ended on a more interesting note if, instead of trying to apply historic patterns of Church organisation to contemporary challenges, Vallière had looked instead to the Pentecostal and Charismatic strands in Christendom, with which he is familiar, for their very different models of Christian organisation, to see what fresh insights they might have to offer. It is also a pity that he does not include any acknowledgement of the challenge confronting all institutions – political as well as religious – of the worldwide web, and the widespread use of social media. How might any ‘council’ of a church claim authority in a world in which grass-roots groups of adherents can order and re-order themselves so rapidly without reference to historic structures? Pope Francis illustrates the difficulty only too well. For this reviewer at least, the lightweight, networked type of conciliarism which Anglicans have developed over the last two centuries may yet offer greater promise for the contribution of our Communion in Christendom than any attempt at re-creating the formal hierarchies of previous ages. ‘Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire …’