One of the challenges to any historian producing a study of the English Reformation bookended by the reign of Edward VI is that it was so short (1547–1553). It leads to a great deal of ‘what-ifs’. What if Edward had not died as a teenager? What if he had lived as long as his sister Elizabeth, which would have put his death in 1607, not 1553? Diarmaid MacCulloch argued convincingly in his study of Edward’s reign, The Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (1999), that the Church of England’s Edwardian trajectory, had it continued, would have resulted in a national church that looked much more like the Church of Scotland or the churches of the Swiss Reformation. ‘Looked like’ is important here, for the Church of England of the Long Reformation did, in many ways, share the soteriology and theology of its European Protestant allies. Bishops might have survived in a ‘reduced’ state as they did for a considerable period in Scotland, but many of the things we think of as so quintessentially Anglican, from the Book of Common Prayer in a form we would recognize, to choral Evensong to surplices, would almost certainly not have survived in a Church of England governed by a King Edward who lived into the seventeenth century.

Stephen Tong’s book is an impressively researched and carefully argued book about the relationship and inevitable friction between the liturgy that governs the worship of the people of God and the theology, the ecclesiology, that defines who the people of God are. He is concerned with the way a key group of reformers navigated the tension created between the ‘visible’ and ‘invisible’ church, the ‘true’ church and the ‘False Church of the unregenerate’ (2,4). That question remains as topical in the Church of England now as it did in the mid-Tudor period.

This uphill theological battle fought by reformers to transform the lumpish, unregenerate into the ‘true’ church is explored in well-argued chapters. First, the role of preaching, the sacraments and an emphasis on Sabbath observance in which he provides an overdue corrective to Patrick Collinson’s view that Sabbatarianism belongs to the Puritan vs conformist disputes of Elizabeth, though he does not give enough weight to Kenneth Parker’s work, which showed how the Laudians turned Sabbath observance into a battleground (112–13). The last two chapters explore the complex and evolving theologies of episcopal ministry. Bishop Hooper’s famous refusal to submit to all the ‘tat’ of episcopal office (which a stint in prison finally convinced him to do after more coaxing efforts failed) nonetheless, as Tong shows, did not stop him from exerting plenty of episcopal welly among his diocesan flock.

Tong’s book is – and this is not a criticism, but it is important to note – a top-down look at Edwardian ecclesiology and liturgy, emphasizing the Prayer Book as a didactic theological text for, of course, all liturgy has a pedagogical purpose. Tong’s interest is in a group of reformers, such as Bale and Hooper, who are due for fresh attention from historians in the field. But it does mean that questions as to how the Prayer Book actually landed in actual parishes among actual worshippers are not explored. The laity are a ‘real absence’. Tong has given much fresh and scholarly insight into the men who shaped the worship and preaching of the Edwardian church, but what we do not have is how this work was ‘received’. To be fair, that is almost impossible given the fact that the Second Prayer Book had less than two years of authorized use before it was suppressed.

My concern in presenting the developments of such a short reign as the foundational building blocks that the title claims, no less than Building the Church of England, is to place more weight on the Edwardian church than it can carry. That said, Tong is absolutely right to argue that a focused examination of Edward’s short reign is a valuable undertaking (247). As he rightly points out, regnal brevity has not stopped considerable scholarship in the past few decades on the even shorter reign of Mary I (1553–1558). Alike in their brevity, both the reigns of Edward and Mary are also alike in the way they draw us into irresistible speculation about what might have been or the different trajectories the Church in England might have taken but did not.