G.A. Selwyn, first and last Bishop of New Zealand, among many other claims for historical attention, was a pioneer of synodical government in the Anglican world. Where W.G. Broughton, first as archdeacon and then as Bishop of Australia from 1836, attempted to retain the privileged position of the established church in the colony and only reluctantly was brought to realize that in Australia both Roman Catholics and Protestant bodies were treated equally by the colonial government, Selwyn’s debts to his (moderate) Tractarian background made him far less committed to establishment than either Broughton or Charles Perry, Bishop of Melbourne. He was glad in time to surrender his Letters Patent from the Crown seeing his episcopal office as deriving from a different source of authority than a symbol of State and he set about creating synodical government in New Zealand with enthusiasm, looking to early church history and patristic precedents. His synod had three houses and initially he alone represented the bishops’ house: unlike the PECUSA equivalent, the lay house was not permitted to overrule the bishop. Early experiments in 1844 and 1847 came to constitutional fruition in 1857 in a conference based at St Stephen’s Chapel, Judges’ Bay, Auckland, a pleasing photograph of which decorates the cover of Professor Noel Cox’s study. By the time the first General Synod under this constitution was held in 1859 the house of bishops had grown to include Christchurch (1856) and Wellington, Waiapu and Nelson (1858). For Selwyn, legal independence by way of ‘consensual compact’, freed the church from an Erastian inheritance.
Professor Cox, who is professor of constitutional law at Auckland University of Technology, is well equipped both legally and theologically for this specialist study on the constitution of the Anglican Church in New Zealand with reference, for example, to canon law. In his foreword, the Bishop of Auckland, who writes as chair of the ACC, quotes the Archbishop of Canterbury: ‘knowing how to work with Canon Law is a necessary aspect of exercising authority and holding responsibility in the Church’. The author himself wrote: ‘the Church utilises law to pursue catholicity and to maintain its identity’ (p. xi): ‘the law depends on both Church and State for its authority. The relationship between the two sources of authority forms the basis of this book’ (pp. xi-xii). For Cox, the easy assumption that New Zealand has a complete separation of Church and State stands in need of correction. Because of its background in establishment and the legal and constitutional hang-over from days as a British colony in the nineteenth century he regards both ‘established’ and ‘disestablished’ as unsatisfactory descriptions, preferring ‘quasi-established’, a term for which he is indebted to the authority on canon law, Norman Doe (pp. 12, 49 n. 23).
This is a carefully substantiated study and it is reassuring to find that the author has engaged with such important authorities as J.N. Figgis, as penetrating as any on these issues, Ross Border (essential reading on the Australian developments), E.W. Kemp, one of the few recent Anglican bishops to have written in this field, and S.W. Sykes on Anglican understandings of authority. New Zealand, with its three ‘tikanga’ of Maori, Pasefika and Pakeha, is a very special and interesting version of Anglican episcopal government. If there were occasional moments when the reviewer felt that there was a modicum of special pleading for a stronger relation between Church and State in New Zealand than the ‘quasi’ status permitted (much seems here to hinge on the case of Gregory v. Bishop of Waiapu [1975] [p. 142 n. 372 et al.]), this scholarly study will compel attention in New Zealand and beyond in its specialist field. He treats the issue of the ordination of women to the priesthood and the episcopate and pays brief attention to issues of homosexuality (pp. 26–27, 46, 63 n. 21l). There are some misprints: ‘imbued’ (p. xiv), ‘revelation’ (p. 3 l), the title of a book at p. 117 n. 54, ‘mediation’ becomes ‘meditation’ twice (p. 207) and there is need to revise a sigma on p. 146. Whatever is meant at n. 9 on p. 172, in the conventional sense, the adult W.E. Gladstone was never a non-conformist; and while he writes correctly at p. 86 that clergy could not sit in the House of Commons, a different impression is given at p. 62 n. 201: despite the efforts of Archdeacon Robert Dell in the General Synod in the early 1990s in favour of reform, Anglican clergy cannot sit in the House of Commons.
