For over thirty years Paul Avis has drawn on his rich experience within Anglican and ecumenical councils to contribute scholarship and wisdom to the understanding of ecclesiology. His new book on the vocation of Anglicanism builds on past work but, at a particularly timely moment for the Anglican Communion, he sets previous thinking within a coherent, close-knit and challenging framework. He is not alone in thinking this a timely moment – indeed, as he says, a time of Anglican angst – for the Dean of Christ Church's recent book on The Future Shapes of Anglicanism can well be read alongside Dr Avis's work.Footnote ⁴ The two books complement one another with trenchant analysis of the Church of England today, and especially of the managerial culture which has taken hold during the present archiepiscopacy. They complement, but do not replace each other, for the difference in titles properly indicates valuably different insights and structures. Both should be studied by anyone caring for Anglicanism.

Avis would be among the last people to suggest that Anglicanism can pursue theological truth in isolation from other churches but here he focuses, non-exclusively, on the specific vocation of the Anglican theological method set within a disciplined formation of life and devotion. He quotes the seventeenth-century bishop Jeremy Taylor's saying that ‘Theology is rather a divine life than a divine knowledge’ and relates it to Anselm's eleventh-century method of ‘faith seeking understanding’ to show it flowering in Coleridge, whom Avis hails as ‘the greatest lay theologian of the Anglican Communion’. For Coleridge, the apprehension of truth was grounded in practical reflection not speculative reason. Avis notes that Coleridge, with F D Maurice and Michael Ramsey, dug deep into Scripture, coupled with theological, liturgical and spiritual traditions, to seek a unity of theology, life and world in which Christ is met. I would, however, have welcomed an acknowledgement of Martin Thornton's often overlooked 1960s work on English Spirituality, which systematically outlined ascetical theology according to the English pastoral tradition, before and after the Reformation.Footnote ⁵

The ignorant canard, so often parroted in the media, that the Church of England was founded only 500 years ago to solve Henry VIII's lusts is firmly scotched. Quite apart from Henry's desperation for a secure succession when the destructive Wars of the Roses were still a painful memory, Avis shows the continuity of the English Church throughout that period – as seen in mediaeval parish churches with their unbroken lists of vicars and their ancient fonts and furnishings, the place of sacraments and creeds and threefold ministry, canon law and liturgical symbols. Uniquely in Europe, cathedral foundations were not dissolved but kept functioning.

The vocation of Anglicanism is theological, but is it ecclesial? Is it Church or Communion? With no universal canon law (though, as Norman Doe and Christopher Hill have shown, there are significant areas of overlap, and the Roman Church has only had a universal code since 1917), no central legislative organ or synod, no comprehensive, integrated oversight, no overall disciplinary framework, no common policy-making body, Avis is clear that the Anglican Communion is not a global Church. It is nearer in nature to the autocephalous Orthodox Churches, a communion of churches, though the Orthodox have no equivalent to Anglicanism's Instruments of Communion.

Far from founding a new Church, Luther, Calvin and Cranmer all sought to renew the damaged Church that existed. Avis digs deep to show the indestructible symbiosis of Church and Word, with the Reformed understanding of the Church clustering around three intertwined and profoundly catholic points: the relation between gospel and Church; the authority of Scripture; and the royal priesthood of the baptised. While Anglicanism is both Catholic and Reformed, the latter depends on the former, sharing the four credal marks given to the Church by God in Christ: unity, holiness, catholicity, apostolicity – a structure that Avis has expounded in the past but presents now within a strong framework.

Avis is at pains to claim nothing triumphant for Anglicanism when it is so patently struggling to live up to its calling, but he stresses its vocation to maintain a five-fold balance which can, in other traditions, drift apart: catholic and reformed; episcopal and synodical; universal and local – without the local the universal is meaningless, without the universal the local is cut off from the body; biblical and reasonable – not with secular, individualistic reason but reason springing from a God-based devotional life; and faithful to tradition while open to fresh scholarly insight.

Although Avis does not quote it, the last two balances are close to the vision set out by Bishop John Saxbee in his 1994 book Liberal Evangelism, which uses the analogy of the music of Charles Ives to show a Church able to hear two tunes at once: the music of church tradition and the music of modernity.Footnote ⁶ This is an analogy particularly apt for cathedrals gathered around the bishop's teaching chair, one ear tuned to the daily round of liturgy and the other to the sound of the world inside and outside cathedrals, but hearing beneath those sometimes dissonant tunes the deeper music of what God in His Spirit is teaching today.

The fulfilment of the Anglican vision depends upon the bench of bishops being sufficiently grounded in theology and scholarship, a condition tragically lacking at present, as the demands of increasingly congregational parishes have hijacked selection processes and forced a focus on membership and business models. Although Avis stoutly defends the proposed Anglican Communion Covenant as a means for Anglican Churches and Anglican people to walk together in shared responsibility with mutual commitment and accountability, led by grace, that commitment needs to be grounded in the devotional and liturgical life and scholarly insight which Avis so powerfully commends and for which Anglican bishops, aided by the clergy and the laity of their cathedrals, should be the chief exemplars. It is astonishing that the present archbishops have set up a new quick-fix review of cathedrals when ‘Heritage and renewal’, the painstaking 1994 report of their Commission chaired by Lady Howe, lies episcopally ignored.