Story of the Church in England

PATRICK Whitworth is an Anglican priest, ordained in 1976. He has exercised a varied ministry in the United Kingdom and as a leader of mission teams in Africa. He has written books on biblical studies, pastoral theology and Church history, including a trilogy on the Early Church from the Apostles to the Council of Chalcedon (451). His latest work - And Did Those Feet: The Story and Character of the English Church AD200-2020 (Sacristy Press, £40) - is perhaps his most ambitious yet, because it sets out to tell the story of the Church in England from its earliest beginnings to the present day and to do so while paying due and proper attention to the "political, social and cultural context" of the times.

After some 580 pages he confesses that "eighteen hundred years of church history, set in the context of the nation's development, is a lot to encompass in a single volume" (page 579). The book is organised chronologically, with a strong narrative structure and it is not overloaded with notes, references and academic apparatus: there are end notes rather than footnotes, a single page of suggestions for further reading and a chapter-by-chapter bibliography available on the author's website rather than in the book itself.

Whitworth scores well on readability. He has an eye for the striking or shocking incident - with which English history is replete! So, for example, two pages are movingly devoted to the trial and execution of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer and there are also accounts of the Elizabethan Roman Catholic martyrs. He is not afraid to use colourful and colloquial language - so that the Anglo Saxon Archbishop Wilfrid is characterised as "the type of man to win an argument and lose an audience" (page 39), while baronial disenchantment with Henry III is ascribed to the assertion that "he seemed a wuss" (page 124).

Readers of the Methodist Recorder will be keen to know how Methodism is treated here. Whitworth makes it clear that the story of the Church in England does not mean the story of the Church of England, so he gives space to post-Reformation Roman Catholicism and to Protestant dissenters of various kinds. The 18th century evangelical revival features in chapter 16 and John Wesley is given a sympathetic portrayal, except for his unhappy marriage. In focusing on John Wesley and saying little about Charles Wesley, George Whitefield and the leaders of Welsh Calvinistic Methodism, the account perhaps reflects an older approach to Methodist history. The same might be said of the references to Methodism in later chapters, where Jabez Bunting is characterised as an authoritarian opponent of revival and the 20th century Methodist story centres on Soper, Weatherhead, Sangster and then steep numerical decline. Looking at the notes, the sense is that Whitworth's approach is to summarise more detailed accounts by scholars like Owen Chadwick (on the Victorian Church) and Adrian Hastings (on the Church in the 20th century). In the process some inaccuracies have crept in and the author has not always been well served by proof-reader and copy-editor in this respect.

Although the book does not claim to advance an overarching thesis, the final chapter does offer some conclusions on "the characteristics of English Christianity". These include a commitment to the Word, in Bible reading, preaching and reflection; worship and music; an openness to the Spirit; social care and justice; and a blend of independence and outreach. As this very readable book draws to its close, the author presents a positive vision of "little colonies of heaven" sharing the good news of Jesus in word and life.

THIS book is a comprehensive reminder that there has been an English Church for many more centuries than there has been a Church of England. That is greatly in its favour.

The careful setting in the changing political, social, and cultural context is also extremely welcome. It allows the author to set in their changing places not only the Roman Catholic Church in England, but also the churches that came into being from the 16th century among Christians whose consciences kept them out of the Church of England once it was Established: the Independents, Presbyterians, Quakers, Baptists, and Methodists. The complexities of the relationship of the Church in England and the Church of England with Christianity in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales are less fully explored, but their presence is felt.

This is an enormous subject, and it fills a big book. The story told begins with the arrival of Christianity in Roman Britain. It introduces what

may be the first use of the word "English" in a quotation from Bede's Ecclesiastical History, written centuries later, after Augustine of Canterbury had brought back Roman Christianity to join the Celtic Christianity which had arrived from Ireland.

The tale continues chronologically from chapters on all this "conversion" to sections on the high Middle Ages. There is a helpful patch of topical treatment of the development of a quadrilateral of areas of church influence. Explorations of monasticism; the diocese and the cathedral; the parish and the clergy are followed by a look at the newly invented universities, where the study of Christian theology was to become the "queen" of the subjects for higher degrees. Plagues came and went. Lollardy and threats of popular revolt found their place.

The domestic realities of a Christianity challenging every individual through the application of the sacraments to each personal life are brought to often vivid life. The centrality of Christianity in English life was accepted without question by a series of monarchs whose own powers depended on it.

Part IV tackles the break with Rome and the internal problems that ensued for an England whose theologians and people were to form quarrelsome parties for generations. This section ambitiously and successfully makes one story of the serial attempts to make Protestantism stick and create the Church of England. During the reigns of the Tudor monarchs, England returned briefly to Rome in Mary's reign while Protestant refugees to continental Europe extended their knowledge of the Reformation taking shape there.

This part of the story is carried onwards through the Elizabethan Settlement and the conflict with Puritan extremism to Civil War and the execution of Charles I. The Restoration was far from restoring the Church of England at a blow. Another settlement was needed. Another, but "Glorious", revolution followed in 1688, when Parliament deposed the Roman Catholic James II and replaced him with the Protestant William and Mary. The non-jurors who would not take the oath of allegiance to the King faced civil penalties for their civil disobedience.

The next main sections bring the Hanoverians illuminatingly together as an 18th-century "enlightenment" gave way to the Victorians. In the 19th century, there was the gradual removal of the civil "disabilities" of non-Anglicans at home, a British Empire, the first Lambeth Conferences, and the creation of the Anglican Communion.

The final section, "A nation slips its moorings", is the most original, and the reader may like to begin with it before beginning to read the story that the book tells. Here, the author traces the process of changing expectation during which the 20th century abandoned the assumption that every child would be taught the basics of the Christian faith at school in a subject often simply called "Scripture".

Schools moved to religious studies and coverage of the main wor