This book provides a vital new resource for theological education in the Anglican tradition. It will surely become indispensable for the intellectual and spiritual formation of Anglican ordinands in English-speaking parts of the Communion. It offers a course of theological induction that would also stretch and nurture clergy engaged in post-ordination and in-service training. The method is admirable: distinguished scholars (two of them now deceased) from the Episcopal Church and the Church of England cover central theological topics from an Anglican perspective. In each chapter the substantive theological exposition leads into a selection of sources from Anglican writers from the Reformation to the present day, which are briefly introduced. There are lists of recommended further reading. In his editor's introduction, Ralph McMichael describes the project as an ‘invitation to inhabit the Anglican theological imagination’. There are not many activities that are more desirable or more necessary than that for Anglicans at the present time.

The choice of Anglican writers for the sources is interesting. In rough chronological order they are: Thomas Cranmer, John Jewel, John Whitgift, the Homilies, Richard Hooker, Lancelot Andrewes, William Laud, John Donne, George Herbert, Benjamin Whichcote, Jeremy Taylor, Richard Baxter, Joseph Butler, John and Charles Wesley, John Newton, E. B. Pusey, J. H. Newman, F. D. Maurice, Robert Wilberforce, F. J. A. Hort, William Reed Huntington, Charles Gore, W. P. Dubose, William Temple, Oliver Quick, A. M. Ramsey, Gregory Dix, Austin Farrer, Eric Mascall, The Revised Catechism (Church of England, 1982), John Gaden and Rowan Williams. It is good to see Gore being given his due after a period of neglect. Other writers who are touched on in the commentary without being documented at length include William Forbes, Henry Hammond and John Keble. This is no mean basis for a canon of (on the whole) representative Anglican writers – though we can probably all think of other seminal or at least central Anglican thinkers who have an equal or better claim than some of those in the book, such as Richard Field, John Bramhall, John Pearson, Herbert Thorndike, S. T. Coleridge, B. F. Westcott and Leonard Hodgson. The Thirty-nine Articles are strangely absent from the sources, though they are mentioned in the commentary. And if we are going to include the poets Herbert and Donne, why not Eliot and Auden, Anglican poets of the twentieth century? The problem is that the galaxy of eligible writers is so vast that selection is invidious. It is good to be reminded of our excellent inheritance.

In a first, stimulating chapter, on the vocation of Anglican theology, McMichael sets the template for the whole book. Anglican theology is a search for truth that embraces a disciplined formation of life and devotion. It did not begin in the sixteenth century, but takes its tendency from St Anselm's ‘faith seeking understanding’. Jeremy Taylor speaks of holiness as ‘the way of understanding’. Although originally defined in the idiom of argument, apologetic or polemic, Anglican theology seeks both to be faithful to the catholic inheritance of faith, not promoting eccentric doctrines of its own, and to home in on the essential truths of biblical revelation. It is sensitive to context and in tune with the liturgy. It does not exist to justify the Church or to promote a particular theological identity, which would be an ideology. It follows the call of God, who is the truth. Identity must give way to vocation. Coleridge's Aids to Reflection would have been relevant here.

For the late Richard Norris in Chapter 2, ‘the Trinity’ refers not to a doctrine, but to the Three in One whom we worship. Trinitarian theology is here expounded in union with prayer and adoration. This is also the tenor of Rowan Williams's elegant, warm and lucid account of Christology: as a theological topic it arises out of the experience of prayer, not as a theoretical problem. Kathryn Tanner follows a slightly different method when she treats of theological anthropology, theological reflection on human being. After highlighting as axiomatic that, for a significant strand of the Anglican tradition, the primary affirmation to be made about humankind is that we are created for a relationship of intimacy with God, participation in the life of God, Tanner proceeds to give her own account, a sophisticated, insightful and suggestive account, of theological anthropology from an Anglican perspective. She is one of two contributors who – discerningly – brings in the Wesleys’ hymns (she also, rightly, includes a sermon of Pusey).

There is much to engage with in Mark Chapman's chapter on the Church and I think he is right to propose that ‘the key doctrine for Anglicanism is the doctrine of the Church, or, more accurately, the doctrine of authority and order in the Church’ and that, in its formative period, it was ecclesiology that gave the Church of England its distinctive identity. His cameos of Maurice, Temple and Ramsey are spot on. But Chapman claims that Anglican ecclesiology is exceptionally diverse and is more contingent on history, especially the Church's relation to the State, than other Christian traditions. I think he overstates this point. I am not convinced that Anglicanism is significantly more diverse or more determined by non-theological factors than other traditions. The Church is embedded in the world and its character is inevitably shaped by the interaction of its theological foundation with the vicissitudes of history. Chapman claims that the reaction to the Anglican Covenant has shown that ‘there is little agreement about what would count as Anglican sources and norms’. In fact Parts 1–3 of the final Covenant text, which deal in part with norms and sources, have not encountered opposition in the same way that Part 4, which concerns procedures and consequences, has. A published condensation of the principles of canon law common to the churches of the Communion shows extensive agreement. Chapman also suggests that ‘Anglican doctrine emerges from a strange [my italics] combination of text, institution and practice, both ecclesiastical and secular’. But where does Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran or Reformed doctrine emerge from, if not from a similar concatenation of text, institution and practice, secular as well as sacred? Chapman offers here an intriguing insight into how church teaching is formed, but it is not confined to Anglicanism. The wrestlings, arguments and politicking of other churches are sometimes disguised by an authoritarian ideology and rhetoric of unity and continuity, but they are not very different to us underneath. We are more honest and less constrained – is that a bad thing? (I also need to mention that there is a misleading interpretation of Article XIX which would give succour to Sydney Anglicans and members of Reform in England if they were to read it. In the sixteenth century ‘congregation’ did not primarily refer to ‘the local church gathered for worship’ [p. 156], but was used mainly of the national or indeed of the universal Church; see, e.g., the Homily for Whitsunday.)

Ellen Charry on ‘Practical Divinity’ aptly draws on the Collects, the Homilies and the Thirty-nine Articles, as well as bringing into the discussion – though not excerpting – such important seventeenth-century divines as Hammond and Bull. She suggests that Cranmer was ‘not dogmatically engaged’, which may be another over-statement, hard to square with recent work by Ashley Null and Gordon Jeanes, for example. She points out that it was Richard Hooker who first introduced the ‘sacramental ecclesiology’, which has continued to characterize the Anglican understanding of the Church. However, it is unfortunate that this chapter perpetuates the entrenched canard about Martin Luther, deployed mainly by Roman Catholic and Anglo-Catholic writers, that for Luther justification did not bring inward change, but was merely declaratory or forensic; there was no intrinsic connection between justification and sanctification; justification made no difference to a person's moral constitution and spiritual disposition; it did not implant any seed of holiness (pp. 198-200, 202). This disastrous misreading of Luther was perhaps once understandable given his characteristic way of stating theological truths in absolutes, in paradoxes and antitheses. But it is 25 years since the Finnish School of Luther studies, led by Tuomo Mannermaa, corrected this perception by showing that for Luther justifying faith is the transforming presence of Christ within the believer (In ipsa fide Christus adest). Those amply versed in Luther's writings knew this all along.

Finally, Christopher Beeley offers a highly accomplished, pastorally helpful exposition of eschatology, bringing out the ‘sober realism’ of the Anglican perspective on this world, marked as it is by frustrated hopes, failed intentions, the fragmentation of life and community, its brokenness beyond repair and its destiny to pass away. Beeley points out that eschatology is not concerned with ‘the end of the world’, but with sharing in the glorification of Christ. The centrality of Jesus Christ, and our loving relationship to the Father, through the Holy Spirit in him, is the golden thread that binds together this excellent resource for Anglican theological education and formation.