Abstract
Bruce Kaye is a veteran of all things Anglican. He has had a varied and energetic career as an academic in Britain and Australia, as General Secretary of the Anglican Church of Australia for a decade, and as the author or editor of numerous studies of Anglican theology, polity and mission, as well as being the founding editor of the Journal of Anglican Studies. In the present book, Kaye brings to fruition a long-term research project that has taken him well beyond the frontiers of Anglicanism as we know it. He charts the remote origins of the partnership in governance and mission between Church and nation that evolved into the modern form of ‘establishment’, a constitutional, legal and pastoral modus vivendi between the Church of England, the Crown and the state. The monarch was the more powerful partner but was as much within the Church as the Archbishop of Canterbury (thus the collect for the sovereign in the 1662 Holy Communion service says ‘Have mercy upon the whole Church; and so rule the heart of thy chosen servant [Elizabeth] …’).
Kaye rejects the common idea that the Anglican model of Church and nation, Church and state (‘establishment’ in some form), was invented by Henry VIII. Beginning in the early Middle Ages with Bede and King Alfred, Kaye brings forward examples of such collaboration in (for example) education, church building and the regulation of the clergy, between successive kings of England and successive Archbishops of Canterbury: William the Conqueror and Lanfranc; William II and Anselm; Henry II and Becket; the Tudors with Stephen Gardiner and Richard Hooker. Hooker broke new ground because the ‘ecclesiastical polity’ that he produced was backed by and infused with an ecclesiology, the governing conceptual model of which was the relation of the divine and human natures in Christology. Kaye also shows how some of the assumptions of this partnership or arrangement were transplanted to North America and New South Wales and what happened to those assumptions when independence from the British Crown was secured – they were not immediately consigned to the dustbin of history.
Kaye’s plural use of the term ‘Christendom’ is intriguing. Although I sense that he is ambivalent about establishment in its reduced form today, he shows that what it essentially represents – the mutual recognition and mutual obligation of Church and state as two major institutions within the commonwealth – was by no means the creation of Tudor statecraft, but was the normal frame of reference within the kingdom since England became a nation. Moreover, he points out – in case we need reminding – that establishment is not unique to the Church of England, but was the default relationship between Church and Crown, Church and state throughout Christian history until the age of the revolutions that began in France in 1789. (The Byzantine expression of Christendom, in the centuries-long Eastern Holy Roman Empire, eclipsed anything in the West in terms of the divinization of the sovereign, the emperor.) Of course, establishment continues in modified forms in several countries of Europe (including Scotland), and the concordats or similar agreements that the Vatican State has concluded with scores of sovereign states can be seen as forms of establishment. Kaye’s argument is that ‘Christendom’ should not be identified exclusively or even particularly with what the Emperor Constantine brought about, for there have been – and perhaps still are – many ‘Christendoms’ and therefore many forms of establishment.
There is a theological agenda to this book that is deeper than the merely political or ecclesiastical. It concerns the ways in which the presence of God impacts on mundane reality. While Christ’s kingdom is ‘not of this world’ (John 18.36), it impinges on this world and is always ‘drawing near’ or ‘at hand’ (Mark 1.15). So Christian life of necessity takes social and political forms; in other words, it is embodied in institutions. It is through institutions that Christianity continues. But institutions are prone to corruption through the abuse of power – and Kaye is clear that the Constantinian form of Christendom should not be singled out here – and so there is a need for constant vigilance, leading to reform and institutional renewal in the light of Christ’s eschatological kingdom. This book brings valuable light to bear from history on the Church’s relation to nation, monarchy and state.