“Muddling through” is an oft-used description of a distinctively English attitude towards life. The phrase has also carried over as a characterization of the theological posture of that nation's established church and its spiritual offspring—today's beleaguered Worldwide Anglican Communion. Anglicanism, in short, has been a Christian tradition that historically has preferred inclusiveness to precision. Kenneth Locke's study of Anglican ecclesiology both confirms and adds nuance and positive spin to this characterization. Locke, who teaches at the University of the West in California, traces in painstaking detail the development of Anglican approaches to the nature of the church from Tudor origins to present-day ecumenical conversations.

Not surprisingly, Locke frames the development of Anglican thought on the nature of the church as an ongoing dialectic between Reformation notions of the notae ecclesiae—“marks of the church” that include Word, sacrament, and discipline—and a more Catholic–Orthodox emphasis on the indispensability of the historic episcopate. Anglicans have almost unanimously agreed on the rightness of an episcopal form of polity, but have disagreed considerably over the exact nature, authority, and even necessity of such a polity. Locke has mined primary and scholarly sources to trace this debate over the centuries, and the result is a very useful, if often repetitious, survey of a doctrine—or, perhaps more accurately in context, a notion—that has emerged as particularly central in the emergence of a distinctively Anglican ethos. Locke comes to the eventual conclusion that the lack of a firm Anglican doctrinal position to undergird its polity is actually a positive advantage rather than a sign of muddle-headedness. Although Anglicans have typically looked to both scripture and tradition, including the early ecumenical councils, as sources of religious authority, they have generally chosen to see truth as a moving target that emerges in clarity dialectically over time rather than a matter to be formulated on the pins of doctrinal pronouncements. Such pronouncements would be highly problematic in any case, since there is no ultimate earthly authority in the Anglican Communion.

Locke is by no means a disinterested observer, but rather sees his efforts as a contribution towards a clarification of Anglican self-understanding, especially as that understanding has been tested in ecumenical conversations with a variety of partners as well as in the “current unpleasantness” of rancorous intra-Anglican quarreling over issues such as the status of women and gays. (Oddly, Locke makes virtually no mention of the latter as a test case in questions of authority and diversity within the communion today.) In advancing a distinctive normative viewpoint, Locke employs the methods of a rather traditional approach to historical theology, so that attempts to locate the positions of particular thinkers and ideas in cultural context are rare in his pages. His work will thus be of primary interest to Anglicans, but might profitably also be consulted for those seeking a plausible account of the debate over the nature of the church that has characterized Christianity since the days of Luther and Calvin.