With this book Paul Avis launches a new multivolume study that will be, one suspects, the crown of a career devoted to the scholarly exploration of things Anglican and in particular the knotty question of authority. The current volume is limited to questions of method, limited chronologically to the period from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, and limited to Anglican theology. But Anglican theology, in Avis' hands, is not taken narrowly, and the book could hardly be accused of being too short (even if Avis laments having run out of space). Those compassed therein include (among scores of others) not only Anglican greats (Richard Hooker, Joseph Butler) and other Anglican classics (John Jewel, Richard Field), but Martin Luther and John Calvin (in order to see their influence on Anglican method) and, in surprising moves, also Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Edward Gibbon, and John Locke, leading at last to William Law and John Wesley before concluding with Edmund Burke.

Those who read this volume closely will learn why the standard claim about Anglican theological method—namely, that Anglicans find authority in three things: Scripture, tradition, and reason—is historically false and impossibly crude. Each of those terms has been subject to disputed hermeneutics, as Avis notes in detail, even while noting other needful elements in an adequate account of Anglican theological method, not least of which is a characteristic epistemic humility. The classic Anglican view (e.g., in Jewel) is that Scripture contains all things necessary to salvation, and when disputed points arise, one turns to the consensus of antiquity. To identify what in Scripture pertains to the necessities of salvation and what does not, and to identify what the early church held on those matters that are less than clear in Scripture, is in turn itself manifestly an exercise of reason.

And so the book is launched. Avis lays before the reader, through these couple of centuries, how Scripture was interpreted, in what manner antiquity was appealed to, how reason was understood, and so on. These are interesting, interlocking trajectories. For instance, consider how the meaning of “reason” is narrowed over time. Here we see the importance of taking Hobbes and Locke seriously as Anglican theologians, these men who (for all their differences) thought that there should be a one-to-one correspondence between words and things (including ideas), and that reason was essentially deductive. With such a desiccated sense of reason, what place was there for the older accoutrements—devotion, prayer, and moral intuition—for “thinking with” another person and trying to “think within” another time and place? It is no accident that Burke, the quintessential conservative (not, of course, in the debased modern currency of the term), is the culminating figure of this volume. The study of history, Burke teaches us, develops virtues of toleration and patience, of imaginative sympathy, and, if I may repeat the point, epistemic humility.

Avis' book is full of charms. He can turn a phrase. He can lift up a telling detail. And he can be delightfully contrarian—for instance, in finding positive contributions in figures generally considered beyond the theological pale. But in the end his book feels somewhat less than its parts. There are niggling things, a sense of a lack of sufficient editing. Why, for glaring example, does one chapter purport to give us Part II of “Classical Anglicanism,” when the previous chapter gave us Part I of “Classical Anglican Theology”? Why, for another instance, are we told on page 11, as if for the first time, that Jewel listed twenty-seven mostly eucharistic practices that could not be justified by appeal to Scripture or the early church, when the same datum was given just above on page 8? (This is hardly an isolated example.) Perhaps as this projected multivolume work unfolds it will hang together more clearly. Yet as it stands, it is indeed a “search” with splendid parts. The volume is definitely suitable for libraries, as well as for researchers studying any of the figures mentioned, and for scholars who live by hope.