Bruce Kaye has been one of the leading voices in recent years in reflection on Anglican ecclesiology and identity, and this book is an ambitious and demanding summation of his views which deserves careful reading by all interested in the subject. Taking his cue from Peter Brown, Kaye suggests that the concept of ‘Christendom’ needs to be disaggregated into a number of different ‘micro-Christendoms’ defined by particular historical and regional contexts. The English Christendom – the term is almost always used in this book with the definite article – is one such micro-Christendom, a particular political unit professing to be a Christian polity, as an attempt to respond to the ‘enduring problem in Christianity of the presence of God in the mundane or empirical circumstances’ (p. 3) in which Christians find themselves living. For Kaye, the key characteristic of this English Christendom as it came into being was its apparent remoteness from the Papacy: despite being, after Augustine, drawn fully into the papal communion, England was never part of the Carolingian empire, and displayed from the very beginning an unusually close association of the secular ruler, the monarch, with the work of conversion and with the governance of the Church.

This ‘embryonic form’ is then traced through the history of Anglicanism using three phases or case studies. Through the emerging conflict between Crown and Church from William I through to Becket and beyond, Kaye argues that the English Christendom had to adapt to a growing assertion of absolute papal authority and therefore its potential unbalancing, though Becket himself, as he points out, was not simply an apologist for the Papacy so much as a defender of the liberties of the English Church in England. Thus the distinctive English model of Christendom survived even in tension with the emergent model of papal supremacy. A different kind of unbalancing came in the Reformation, with the assertion of the Royal Supremacy. An unusual turn in the argument is the close attention Kaye gives to Stephen Gardiner’s defence of obedience to the king, which was both an assertion of a certain kind of theocracy and at the same time ‘a form of corruption’ (p. 174). It was Hooker who reasserted the balance or ambiguity that lay at the heart of the English Christendom, attesting both to the importance of the arrangement and governance of actual human affairs, and by implication the relative autonomy of human authority, and to the presence of God in the world. But if Hooker in one sense presented a new or modern understanding of how this ambiguity could be negotiated through an understanding of Law, in another sense he anticipated the ending of the English Christendom, for in the third phase it was conflict over the role of Law that required modification and ultimately abandonment of it, and that took place in the colonial context, in North America and in Australia. The post-revolutionary creation of an autonomous Anglican or Episcopal Church in the United States displayed, to Kaye, a virtuous pragmatism necessitated by a broken relationship with the English monarch. In Australia, or more precisely New South Wales, William Broughton’s attempt to preserve a conventional model of establishment was undermined by the very government whose partnership with the Church he was committed in principle to defending.

This summary cannot really do justice to the complexity of Kaye’s argument. It will need careful assessment and response in years to come, and this reviewer for one will be following other reviewers’ reactions closely to see how the debate unfolds. Kaye’s argument holds out the prospect of a new way of conceiving the question of Anglican identity, and arguably by taking that right back to the English mission of Augustine as recounted by Bede, sidesteps some of the sharper implications of the new wave of ‘Catholic’ revisionism affecting interpretations of the English Reformation in recent years. In effect, Kaye presents new reasons for resurrecting a somewhat older defence of the distinctiveness of the English religious settlement pre-Reformation, and therefore for affirming stronger elements of continuity across the centuries than that revisionism has recently allowed us to consider. Describing the combination of Archbishop Lanfranc’s approach to canon law and tradition, and William I’s conception of his role as a traditional Christian king in his own kingdom, responsible for his people’s material and spiritual welfare, Kaye speaks of the emergence of a ‘pattern of church reform which was both national and independent’ (p. 67). If that thread is followed through the twists and turns of Anglican history, with its effective sidelining of the obvious and usual loci of ecclesiological arguments (such as whether episcopacy is of the esse of the Church, or plene esse, and so on), then Kaye puts back, right at the heart of Anglican identity, the question of the relationship of the Church with secular authority, lay power, and civil society. This is an argument that, to this reviewer at least, has some echoes of the late Dan Hardy’s approach to Anglicanism.

But can it stand? Certainly it needs development and defence in key areas. Kaye leaves largely unresolved the question of national identity and independence in the history of Anglicanism. He implies that this is an important dimension of modern Anglican identity in the very process by which he recounts, in the US and Australia, the separation of the polity of the Church from national institutions of governance via conflict with the colonial authority, but he says little explicitly about it. Moreover, perhaps the key test-bed for his theory is the one period and context which he virtually bypasses, namely the Church of England in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for it is, ultimately, only in England that we can determine whether the English Christendom did indeed die (Kaye suggests it did so at the Restoration in 1660, but at that point he smuggles in a notion of intolerance of dissent to his definition of the English Christendom which is not evidently core earlier in his argument, and goes against much recent writing on the confessional state in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries). More fundamentally, the very concept of ‘the English Christendom’ is surely open to question: can it be held, seriously, that the lineaments of a distinct ‘English’ understanding of the presence of God in human affairs can be traced right back to Bede and beyond, or is it, rather, much more likely that the vicissitudes Kaye traces in the history of the idea as he describes it are actually sharper, more profound discontinuities, and that Anglicanism as we know it today is effectively an invented tradition? Also, could not much the same case be made for other portions of early medieval Christianity on the continent of Europe, albeit with very different outcomes? – in which case, while acknowledging that these would also be micro-Christendoms themselves, the particular lineaments that Kaye traces for England might also be true elsewhere, and therefore not distinctive for England.

For this reviewer, whatever the questions and criticisms might be, Kaye has opened up persuasively a new insight into the nature and history of Anglicanism, and made a strong case for a core continuity. In the process, he has started an argument it will be difficult for others to ignore. The book is very well resourced with notes and bibliography. The style is a little dense in places, and there are quite a lot of typographical errors, which is disappointing in a book so expensive. But it certainly repays careful study.