In Costly communion, Mark Chapman and Jeremy Bonner gather a number of expert scholars to investigate issues of ‘ecumenical initiative and sacramental strife in the Anglican communion’. As a collection, it shares the problems and advantages of its form. It also demonstrates the (sometimes puzzling to other parts of the world, and given the global claims of the book) British fascination with Africa. The issues covered are largely embedded in the Anglican struggle to engage African spirituality with Anglican forms. This takes some argument, and for reasons which Joseph Galgalo points out in the last chapter, is only partially successful. The key moment chosen by most of the contributors is the 1913 Kikuyu conference, which saw the confrontation of the then dominant Anglo-Catholic tradition with issues of missions, cultural interpretation and empire. In a sense this limits the generalisability of the book, while at the same time providing an organising point which the increasingly plural nature of the Anglican Communion clearly cannot. There is much which could have, but is not, said about engagements with, for example, Asian, Pacific or even American (both North and South) realities.

This focus does not restrict the authors from making some very telling points. As the editors note (p. 4), the Thirty-Nine Articles were too broad for many of their continental Reformed cousins, while on the other hand they were too specific to the English Reformational moment to act as a basis of theological unity for an expanding empire. No matter how they tried, it remained ‘white man's religion’, until the African revivals of the 1930s. One might say that the rest of Anglican history is an attempt to come to terms with that deep impasse.

The collection opens with reflections on the nature of confirmation (Buchanan) and the eucharist (Bonner): divergent opinions as to the role of the bishop in confirmation, for instance, led to divisions as to how membership in other traditions was to be recognised. The more plural setting of the Anglican missions raised these issues with considerable point (as Chapman notes in passing on p. 143, and Methuen explores in the context of Bell's 1919 publication Documents). Some reflection on related debates – for example, the church union debates in Australia and Canada – would have been helpful. In these debates Gore (as Bowron notes) was a major transitional character. This chapter is suggestive, as I have explored elsewhere, of the linkage between the Anglo-Catholic tradition and the rise of charismatic renewal, through practices such as the laying on of hands, and the emphasis on the spirit. For Africans, of course, talking about the spirit had much wider cosmological implications, which came to a point in the Balokole movement. Quite apart from the Englishness of Anglicanism, or perhaps flowing from its forensic and bureaucratising nature, it would have been good to see here a more culturally aware analysis of how abstraction from historical context actually drives Anglican theology in conflicting directions. Boldt's chapter, for example, passes over casual anachronisms which compare Charles Raven to Maximus the Confessor (p. 45) as if this were uncomplicated. The historian's role is to understand how such connections are contemporaneously plausible, rather than to simply absorb them as fact. The questions around subjects such as Thornton's figuralism really require more epistemological reflection. What is missed in the splendid microscopic exploration of these theological exchanges is, however, enriched by demonstrating how broad the drawing pool of Anglican theologians was by the turn of the century. Boldt's analysis of Thornton – which concludes that ‘he could be criticised for not following his reflections on theodicy and ministry with practical ecumenical proposals’ – poses the question as to why this was also the case with so much of the Anglican theology of the period.

Bowron's paper on eucharistic sacrifice is, by way of comparison, a model of contextual argument. He relocates the Tractarians in the long arc of the development of eucharistic theology, and therefore of the development of the Anglican Communion through to the present. The first generation, he comments (drawing upon sociological analysis), were out to make some noise and to break the furniture. Bowron describes how twentieth-century leaders such as Ramsey and Williams could seek to extract meaning out of the tradition and attach it to something which could be of use in a plural and highly secularised world. Williams's own account of his debt to MacKinnon is drawn upon to describe his position as the loss of any facile optimism about the Church itself, and theology as a mode of trying to ‘find a way out of it’. This is the Anglican tradition as a repository for ressourcement,

Guyer follows this theme in showing how Temple's concept of the ‘sacramental universe’ is appropriated over time to address problems not previously considered by its originator (for example, the environmental crisis). This is Anglicanism (less coherently) as aggiornamento. Guyer's historiographical approach is a helpful way of demonstrating these processes in action, processes which were ‘language games’, but games played in deadly earnest in fitting the inner thought of the Church to its relentlessly changing external reality. His reference to Robinson's relationship to James Pike and thereby to the Californian countercultural revolution of the 1960s, and the appearance of characters such as Teilhard de Chardin, is particularly interesting.

Structurally, as Chapman points out in his chapter on the Kikuyu conference, Anglicanism outside the empire looked a lot more like Eastern Orthodoxy than the consolidated reality which the Roman Catholic Church managed to present up to the 1960s. When stepping into plural settings, Anglicanism would always be challenged in its search for a third way, as ‘neither fish nor fowl’ (arising from what Galgalo refers to as a constitutional pan-Anglican ‘ecclesial deficiency’). At Kikuyu, the indigenising Church came into conflict with Frank Weston's defence of its apostolic identity, weakening ecumenical aspirations. While taken by some of his contemporaries as obstructionist, Weston's critique may well be his post-mortem justification. As Kevin Ward notes, ecumenical theological agreement was seldom adequate and, where adequate, seldom sufficient to produce an effective, dynamic form of church unity in Africa (p. 260). This (as in other ecumenical circles with the rise of the charismatic renewal in the Americas) was left to a grass-roots, experiential movement – the East African Revival. The influence of German theology in a region influenced by German colonisation, on the eve of the First World War, also makes for fascinating reading. The echoes of these debates in Lambeth became the Anglican equivalent of the ‘shot which was heard around the Anglican world’. Galgalo suitably riffs off Weston's core question in the last chapter: ‘For what does the Anglican Communion stand?’

Methuen's paper explores Anglicanism coming to grips with the Faith and Order movement and ecclesial reunion. One notes the silence over the idea of the nation state and its impact upon conceptions of the universal. It was one thing for Lambeth to lay down rules for the recognition of other Churches, but it seems to have learned nothing from the fact that another established Church was in fact in operation within the United Kingdom, under the same crown, north of the Scottish border. The Colonial Office had already had to deal with issues of jurisdiction and the assumptions of the universality of the Anglican order in places as diverse as Livorno, Hong Kong and Australia. As Mombo's paper points out, Presbyterian missionaries were a daily presence in the lives of Anglican leaders in Africa, and the Kikuyu Conference was actually held on Church of Scotland premises. Mombo's theme of unspoken presences, of silences in the Anglican narrative, thus applies to more than just the women who are her subjects. Anglicanism maintained invisible English guide rails even as it was attempting to make explicit its theology of the universal Church outside of Britain.

This, as Bonner points out, was at the core of J. J. Willis's complaint about the approved theology of the sacraments. Denial of the sacraments in non-episcopal settings was ‘a problem which no one living in our country [ie. England] has ever been called upon to face’ (p. 164). Weston's contention that Modernist liberals were ‘not Christians in the accepted sense of the word’ but ‘exponents of a new religion’ (p. 173), after all depended upon who was doing the accepting. To the delight of the reader, Bonner has a particular eye for such apt phrases, a turn of humour, a sparkling archival inclusion, matched with a breadth of context which draws in India (pp. 178–9) and discussions of the particularity/universality of the Church (pp. 182–3). A phrase such as ‘with the conclusion of the First World War, all ecclesiastical truces expired’ (p. 183) exemplifies how this collection is always informative, and (on occasion) reaches real heights.