The Oxford History Of Anglicanism, Vol. IV

This volume of the Oxford History of Anglicanism dealing with North America, the ‘British Isles’ and Australasia is to be welcomed for providing a distillation of current scholarship about twentieth-century Anglicanism not easily available elsewhere. Rowan Strong, the General Editor, notes in his series introduction that the role of religion, and especially the Church of England, in the British Empire has been only sparsely studied. This series remedies that. He also notes that the Church of England and its later global Anglican expansion has always had a contested identity. The Church, since the New Testament period, like all religions, has always been in tension about the balance between understandings of scriptural authority and contemporary thought and societies. This is frequently forgotten, but is exemplified in twentieth-century Anglicanism. Jeremy Morris edits this volume, and his Historiographical Introduction fixes its starting point at the 1910 Edinburgh World Missionary Conference, which, although not an Anglican event, provides a watershed between the ‘age of empires and mission’ and the twentieth century’s complexities. He identifies four ‘transformations’ in Anglican historiography—the theoretical preoccupation with, and rather different experience of, secularisation; the impact of decolonisation on Western Anglicanism; the development of the history of mission; and the emergence of a debate about Anglican identity—emphasising the diversity and disparateness of Anglican voices. He also notes the impact of developments in historical scholarship on ‘ecclesiastical history’ including studying history ‘from below’, social history and the study of particular communities, for example, gender and racial groups. He observes that the history of a church needs to be the history of a community of belief in the context of other forms of human association

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