Regular readers will remember that in recent years I have become interested in the history of religious publishing. It is the point at which religious history most closely meets a slightly separate interest in the history of technology. It is also an area in which digital tools and methods come into their own. Today I want to talk a little about a particular project, on the history of the edited collection of essays as a publishing format.
In other posts I’ve tried to show how edited collections present a unique angle from which to view the networks of scholars and their editors that come together, at a moment in time, around a certain subject, aided by a particular publisher. Some of them represent a group of scholars in one institution or organisation; others capture moments in ongoing debates and controversies about particular subjects. At other times, they are used as a way of kicking the tyres of a particular community, and policing its boundaries; others are an attempt to reach outside particular constituencies and to resolve points of dispute.
This work is based on what is now a large dataset of edited collections, their editors and their contributors, in the fields of theology, religious studies and Biblical studies for the period from the First World War until the millennium. Although it continues to grow, the data now records nearly 4,000 individual essays and chapters, from over 2,300 unique authors. I plan, in time, to write about the big picture that this data represents, of the changing shape of the discipline of theology over time: the subjects that are most salient at particular times; the institutions in which authors are based, their gender profile, and their international spread. But there is considerable interest in smaller corners of the graph, and it is one of these that is the subject of this post: the publishing career of Leslie Houlden, Anglican priest and Biblical scholar, who passed away on December 3rd.
Among these thousands of authors, Houlden is in fact the fourth most prolific contributor of all. Only a couple of dozen authors hit double figures; Houlden’s work appeared in some 16 volumes (that I have so far found). When I extract from the full dataset the contents of just those sixteen volumes, along with the volume published in honour of Houlden on his retirement, it produces a list of just short of 250 essays from 192 different authors.
The career of Leslie Houlden (1929-2022) took him through the whole range of situations in which an Anglican priest might find himself. Ordained as priest in 1956, he ministered in a parish before becoming chaplain, first to Chichester Theological College and then to Trinity College Oxford. He was then principal of Cuddesdon Theological College from 1970, and the first principal of the new college formed by the amalgamation of Cuddesdon with Ripon Hall. In 1977 he moved to King’s College London as a lecturer in New Testament studies, in time becoming professor, and retired in 1994. Viewed chronologically, the volumes show Houlden in the various stages of his career. In the Sixties his work was to be found in several volumes that were attempts to understand the identity of the Church of England, both its mixed traditions (such as Catholic Anglicans Today, 1968), and in ecumenical relation to the other churches. In the mid-1970s he was a contributor to the highly controversial symposium The Myth of God Incarnate (1977), and was a member of the Church of England’s doctrine commission. In the 1980s he continued to write on the theology of the New Testament, as part of a continued rethinking of liberal catholicism within the Anglican church.
Even this much data is rather difficult for the naked eye to interpret. Thanks, however, to Gephi, it is possible to visualise the network of authors and volumes, as in the chart above. Houlden himself appears at the centre of the network, as we would expect; I have also labelled those theologians whose work most often appears in the same volumes. Together they help locate Houlden in both the fields and the institutions in which he worked.
There are names associated with King’s College, most notably the New Testament scholar Graham Stanton. Other Biblical scholars represented include John Fenton (University of Cambridge), and Colin Hickling, also formerly of Chichester Theological College, and (later) another colleague at King’s. There is also a cluster of names associated broadly with the University of Birmingham and The Myth of God Incarnate – John Hick, Michael Goulder and Frances Young – along with Don Cupitt, another contributor to The Myth. But the graph also shows how closely Houlden was connected with those scholars who occupied the commanding heights of the discipline in the 1970s and 1980s. Dennis Nineham was at one time regius professor of divinity at Cambridge; Stephen Sykes was one of the later occupants of the same chair at Cambridge, as well as the Van Mildert professorship at Durham; Maurice Wiles was regius professor in Oxford for twenty-one years from 1970. Wiles, Nineham and Houlden were all members of the Doctrine Commission in the 1970s, as was the last of those named on the chart, John Austin Baker.
There is, of course, much more that could be said about these particular networks, and about the precise character of networks in edited collections in general, which I hope to write about before long. But I hope I have shown a little of the kind of analysis that tools for handling and visualising data can enable.
[A post first published at On History, the blog of the Institute of Historical Research.]
As a publishing format, the edited collection of essays has had a bad press. Collections are widely supposed to contain lesser work than scholarly journals; to be incoherent as volumes, no more than the sum of their parts; and to be less visible to potential readers once published. It’s often claimed that those who make decisions in relation to hiring, promotion, tenure and funding also share this opinion. To publish in or edit an essay collection is thought to risk being penalised for the format, before even a word is read.
But is this a fair assessment?
In my new book, The Edited Collection: pasts, present and futures (Cambridge University Press, £9.99), I attempt a defence of the format. I explore the modern history of the edited collection and the particular roles it has played. I then examine each component part of the critique, showing either that they’re largely unfounded or (if they are of real substance) that they may be resolved.
Though suspicion of the edited collection is found across the disciplines, it’s most trenchantly expressed from within the hard sciences in which both book chapters and indeed monographs figure little. (In 2014, 99.5% of submissions to REF Main Panel A — for medicine and biological sciences — were journal articles, leaving almost no space for alternative formats such as essays or monographs.)
In the arts and humanities, however, the picture is quite different. Here freestanding edited collections remain a far more significant publishing format, and one — moreover — that’s holding its own in relation to the alternatives.
Data from the Bibliography of British and Irish History shows that, as the scale of history publishing has grown, the relative proportions of monographs, journal articles and book chapters remained all but unchanged between 1996 and 2015. In the 2014 REF, for History, one book chapter was submitted for every 1.7 journal articles. As well as individual chapters, editors also submitted whole edited volumes for assessment as a unit; in the same REF one in five of the books submitted to Main Panel D was an edited volume.
But for historians, as for many across the humanities and social sciences, it’s not just a question of numbers.
In my book I adopt a case study approach to demonstrate the creative potential of the edited collection. The studies I explore show a rich interplay in such volumes, as scholars are brought together to add to—and to assess the state of—an issue, or indeed the current state and purpose of a discipline. On occasions this conversation has been confined within the academy; at other times it’s engaged other professionals outside with particular stakes in the matter under investigation. It has proved a natural vehicle for interdisciplinary enquiry. Such collections may either be the natural outgrowth of an existing group of scholars or the creation by an editor or publisher, sometimes bringing together those with opposing views. What emerges overall, however, is a profoundly communal and conversational endeavour.
One of my case studies is of a form of edited collection that is peculiar to history: the institutional history, and within this the histories of cathedrals in particular.
Several of the English cathedral churches date their foundation, or at least the building of their current structures, to the Anglo-Norman period. Consequently, as the end of the twentieth century approached, there was a series of cathedral histories, some of them tied to nine-hundredth or other anniversary commemorations. First off the mark was York Minster, with a volume of essays published in 1977 by the Clarendon Press. The initiative had come from the dean and chapter (the governing body of the minster), against a background of growing interest in its archaeology and its monuments.
An initial editorial committee included Owen Chadwick, regius professor of modern history at Cambridge (and also a priest and person of some influence within the Church of England), who also contributed a chapter. But the volume was also a local affair—edited by Gerald Aylmer, the first professor of history in the still young University of York, and Reginald Cant, canon chancellor of the minster. Most of the other contributors were university-based scholars connected either with Cambridge or York, but the early architecture was covered by Eric A. Gee of the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments, which was based in the city; the chapter on the minster library was by C. B. L. Barr, of the university library, in the custody of which the minster library was kept.
Since then, there has been a crop of similar volumes as the other ancient cathedrals have followed suit. Most of these volumes had some sort of connection with a local university, and involvement from writers associated with the cathedral itself. They have tended to encompass several disciplinary perspectives: national and local history, musicology, archaeology, bibliography and the history of art and architecture. Chichester cathedral from the west. Image: Peter Webster.
The combination of these perspectives has varied, however, as has the relative weight of contributions from the city in question and from the wider university sector. Oxford University Press published the volume for Canterbury Cathedral, the principal church in England, in 1995. More than a decade in the planning, the impetus had come both from the Press and from Donald Coggan, archbishop of Canterbury until 1980. All three editors were connected with Canterbury, including Patrick Collinson, regius professor in Cambridge but formerly professor at the University of Kent. However, the team of contributors was overwhelmingly academic and drawn from the universities.
By contrast, the 1994 volume for Chichester was composed of work from a more diverse and locally focused group. It was edited by the cathedral archivist, Mary Hobbs, with the assistance of a historian at the West Sussex Institute of Higher Education (now the University of Chichester), Andrew Foster. The deputy county archivist (in whose care much of the historic archive rests) dealt with the cathedral’s archives and its antiquaries, and Hobbs herself with the library. The chapters on the medieval and early modern cathedral were from specialists, as were those on the architecture and on the cathedral’s art. The twentieth-century chapters, in contrast, were by clergy with a connection with the cathedral.
The cathedral history, then, has been a meeting point of institutional and local history with religious history more broadly, and the concerns of historians of architecture, music, art and of the book. The edited volume has been found to be a useful — indeed, probably the only — means of brokering that interchange.
Anglican theology has had a long tradition of groups of scholars coming together to publish collections of essays on a particular topic. Every edited volume has its own story, of a discipline at a point in time and of a group of scholars, each with their particular perspectives. Some of these volumes are motivated purely by the logic of a particular line of enquiry. Others are more consciously intended as interventions to shape, or even disrupt, the nature of the discipline itself; to force an acknowledgement of new methods, theoretical frameworks or subjects that had hitherto been marginal. Others still have an overtly political purpose (in the broadest sense of the term), to bring expert insight to a larger issue of public concern, or to push the Church to address that issue.
But I want in particular to draw out the fundamentally conversational nature of the edited collection. Born themselves often from ongoing interactions among groups of scholars, edited collections often display those conversations, with all the elements of consonance and dissonance that entails. In their turn, these volumes often become points of reference in the continuing conversations within the discipline. Theology is a particular case in that it has has an ongoing relationship with those outside the academy – namely, the churches – on the practices of which they dwell and to which they aspire to speak. But even in areas of the humanities with less obvious external readers, the edited collection still facilitates conversations among scholars in a unique way.
In the late 1950s, Alec Vidler was fellow and dean of King’s College, Cambridge, and held one of the commanding heights of the discipline in England, the editorship of the journal Theology. Vidler had been asked by younger colleagues in the divinity faculty to convene a group to address a dissatisfaction with the general state of Anglican theology. His memoirs record regular meetings of a dozen scholars at which papers were read and discussed. After a long weekend conference, the group was convinced that there were fundamental issues in theology that needed to be faced; the result was Soundings: Essays Concerning Christian Understanding, published in 1962 by Cambridge University Press. Its effect in the universities was far-reaching. In 1965, a Cambridge graduate seminar was established in Christology to work through some of the issues that had been raised. Although the two volumes had only one contributor in common, the resulting collection of essays – Christ, Faith and History: Cambridge Studies in Christology (1972) – acknowledged its debt to Soundings.
Soundings was in the planning as the centenary approached of another controversial volume of English theological essays, Essays and Reviews (1860), a bid by a group of scholars, mostly clergy, for the freedom to engage with the revolutionary new findings of biblical criticism. For the Soundings group, the issues were more philosophical, but Vidler, in his preface, explicitly set Soundings in a line of succession from Essays and Reviews, at least in character. In turn there appeared New Soundings: Essays on Developing Tradition (1997), a conscious echo of Vidler’s book. It too was the work of a group of scholars who had taken time and ‘stepped back from the ongoing life of the Church, viewed its preoccupations … this has, perhaps, become something of a tradition in itself.’
Also in Vidler’s line of succession was Lux Mundi (1889), officially censured by the Church just as was Essays and Reviews. The twelve authors, all of them Anglicans and all of them clergy, had been together in Oxford between 1875 and 1885, a number of them meeting each year as a ‘Holy Party’ for several days of study and discussion. They wrote as Christian ministers, accepting the Christian faith as still sufficient as a means of interpreting human existence. But in a time of intellectual and social transformation, there were required ‘great changes in the outlying departments of theology, where it is linked on to other sciences, and … some general restatement of its claim and meaning.’
Lux Mundi has come to be regarded as a milestone in theological history. It also served as a model. On its own centenary in 1989 it attracted not one but two further edited collections, both reflecting on its legacy and the current state of the debate over the issues it raised. Both volumes set themselves the task of the kind of overarching assessment of the field that Lux Mundi had essayed, and adopted a similar structure. Both emerged after several years’ deliberation, in one case a whole decade. As with Lux Mundi, the authors of The Religion of the Incarnation had all been connected with the University of Oxford, and all but three remained so. The contributors to Keeping the Faith in contrast were not all Anglicans, and not all from the UK, and as such had less opportunity to interact in person save for a week-long conference, although debate and mutual refinement continued by correspondence. They saw themselves as in ‘theological fellowship’ with the Lux Mundi men, an explicitly Christian articulation of a sense of community that is latent more widely.
At several times in the last century, then, groups of Anglican theologians came together to address the discipline as a whole, in volumes that have themselves become models to emulate, and landmarks against which scholars could triangulate in changed conditions. But it was also the case that Anglican theology in England, intentionally or not, was part of broader conversations with readers outside the universities, with other disciplines, and with the nation at large.
Possibly the single most controversial work of English theology of the seventies was The Myth of God Incarnate (1977), edited by John Hick, then professor of theology in the University of Birmingham. Its seven contributors were theologians from universities and Anglican theological colleges in Oxford, Cambridge and Birmingham. Two of them were, or had been, holders of the regius chairs of divinity in Oxford and Cambridge. (Two had contributed to Christ, Faith and History.) The authors were motivated by what they perceived to be the need for a fundamental reorientation in Christology. Like Soundings, the book had emerged through a sequence of meetings, five over three years. Even more so than Soundings (over which the public controversy was considerable), it reached far beyond the universities, and the dispute it generated was a significant moment in recent theological history. The book sold some thirty thousand copies in its first eight months.
The far-reaching implications of the argument both inside and outside the academy prompted a rapid response, including several further sets of essays of varying characters. One, a form of rebuttal, was from a group including both bishops and academics including the Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford, John Macquarrie; The Truth of God Incarnate was published in an inexpensive edition by a religious trade press (Hodder) within weeks, and has the character of a set of review articles. The following year, Hick and his fellow essayist Michael Goulder of the University of Birmingham brought together the group with some of their critics. Macquarrie, who had been so incensed by the book that it had ended up in his wastepaper basket, apparently declined an invitation to take part, but another of the Truth group, Brian Hebblethwaite, fellow and dean of Queen’s College, Cambridge, did not. This expanded group met in a sequence of ten meetings over two days; some of them private, some of them debates attended by a hundred or more members of the public. The result was Incarnation and Myth: The Debate Continued (1979), an arrangement of the participants’ original papers and responses to them. Meanwhile another group of scholars in Oxford had begun to meet to discuss the issues raised by Myth, and to find a way of expressing its thrust more positively, the result being the essays in God Incarnate: Story and Belief (1981).
Each of these volumes, then, was an attempt of a group of theologians to speak to sections of the discipline but also to the contemporary Church, while a significant lay readership, without access to university libraries and thus journals, were able to listen in. There has also been a related and equally durable genre of edited volume, in which scholars and religious leaders speak, as it were, to the nation directly, on social and economic issues. Borne of a sense of political and social turbulence was Christianity and the Crisis (1933), its thirty-two contributors drawn together by the Anglican priest and Christian socialist, Percy Dearmer. It proceeded from the theology of human existence and the nature of a Christian society – for the assumption was that this was the natural state of English life – to practical matters of international relations, education, economics, the family, work and leisure. The authors included economists, political theorists, a university vice-chancellor, philosophers and others from outside both the Church and the academy.
Among the contributors to Christianity and the Crisis were both archbishops of the Church of England, one of whom – William Temple, of York – later convened the so-called ‘Malvern Conference’ of 1941, the papers of which were published. Looking forward to the end of the war, the conference brought figures such as T. S. Eliot and Dorothy L. Sayers together with members of Parliament, clergy and theologians to work out ‘what are the fundamental facts of the new society, and how Christian thought can be shaped to play a leading part in the reconstruction.’ The degree to which this model retained a valency is evident in On Rock or Sand? Firm Foundations for Britain’s Future (2015), edited by Temple’s successor at York, John Sentamu. Based on a series of private colloquia at Sentamu’s official residence which began shortly after the financial crisis of 2008, it included clergy and theologians, politicians, economists and senior figures from local government and the voluntary sector. Although squarely aimed at a general readership, it directly references Temple’s Malvern conference as its inspiration.
One particular strand of interventions has been on the relationship between the established Church and the nation, as that relationship came under increased scrutiny. Church and Politics Today: The Role of the the Church of England in Contemporary Politics appeared in 1985, in a climate of increased tension between Church and state which was both symbolised and heightened by the dispute between Archbishop Robert Runcie and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher over the memory of the Falklands War. Edited by the political scientist George Moyser, it brought together clergy, university-based theologians and others actively involved in politics, including one MP. That the particular question of the establishment of the Church of England remains unsettled was evident in The Established Church: Past, Present and Future (2011), edited by three historians in the University of Oxford, and drawing together historians, theologians and political scientists, most (although not all) of whom were also from Oxford.
The edited collection, then, has been a means of brokering conversations of all kinds in Anglican theology. Some were among professional theologians; scholars have been brought together to add to and to assess the state of an issue, or the current state – indeed, the whole purpose – of a discipline. As well as assessing the present, they have also looked to the future. These volumes have also been conversations between those within the academy and those outside who were more directly involved in the contemporary life of the Church of England; others again were between theologians and scholars from other disciplines and professionals in other spheres, as theology and ethics met with economics and politics. Sometimes these volumes have been the natural outgrowth of a common intuition among a group of scholars, as with Soundings; at other times, they have been assembled by an editor or a publisher, sometimes specifically to include scholars with opposing views. What emerges overall, however, is the profoundly communal and conversational nature of the theological task.
Edited collections of essays are widely supposed to contain lesser work than scholarly journals; to be incoherent as volumes, no more than the sum of their parts; and to be less visible once published. It is also often assumed that those who make decisions in relation to hiring, promotion, tenure and funding think the same. To publish in or edit an essay collection is thought to risk being penalised for the format before even a word is read.
In my little book on the edited collection, I examine each component part of this critique, showing that each objection either is largely unfounded or could be met. While edited collection chapters have been less visible than journal articles, the problem is one of information systems rather than anything fundamental to the format; the situation has improved and is likely to continue to improve. In spite of scholars’ perceptions, it is not clear that there has been a generalised loss of confidence in the format amongst publishers. Without much more further research, it is also hard to say that there is any universal citation deficit when chapters are compared to journal articles. And though the systems of quality control commonly used for collections may be different to those for journals, it is not clear that they are any less robust. Much depends on the editor(s).
Despite the lack of empirical evidence, however, this suspicion of the format remains strong, both in the perceptions of scholars and in the way those perceptions are tacitly or openly embedded in systems of research assessment. There is a persistent misalignment between (on the one hand) what scholars believe is in the best interest of their discipline and (on the other) their sense of the professional incentives under which they must work. And such perceptions tend to be self-fulfilling, since a maligned publishing format will attract lesser work from scholars less committed to the task, and thus suffer in terms of quality, significance and impact.
The story of the edited collection in the last three decades is a story of the interplay of technological change, economics, public policy and the changing nature of the scholarly enterprise, where none is wholly cause or wholly effect. But unease with the format predates the disruptions of the last few years; fundamental factors of motivation and personality are in play, as is the relation of individual and collective in academic life. I want to explore these here.
The idea of academic freedom generally comes into view only when it is threatened in a direct way: by the compulsion, whether by governments or indeed universities, to publish certain things and not others, in certain venues and not in others, and at a certain rate. To transpose Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction between two kinds of liberty out of its original context, the freedom from direction or constraint in this way is a form of negative liberty.
The second of Berlin’s two ideas, is that of positive liberty: the freedom not so much from direct constraint as ‘to be a subject, not an object; to be moved by reasons, by conscious purposes, which are my own, not by causes which affect me, as it were, from outside.’ One critic of the edited collection used a highly revealing phrase. To publish one’s work in a edited collection, he argued, is to allow oneself to be distracted by the thematic priorities of others: to divert time and effort into publishing work that, left to one’s own devices, one might not have pursued. Instead, scholars should pursue their own ‘sovereignly set research agenda’. Positive academic liberty, in this sense, is the freedom to take sole control of one’s work, to pursue one’s fundamental intellectual purpose solely in accordance with its own logic.
In an earlier essay Berlin made another distinction, between two kinds of intellectual personality, the hedgehog and the fox. The hedgehog knows one big thing whereas the fox knows something about many things; the hedgehog’s instinct is to relate all things to a single, coherent vision; the fox’s thought is centrifugal, operating on many levels, ‘scattered or diffused.’ The scholarly hedgehog, then, is likely to value his or her academic sovereignty – or, his positive liberty – to a greater extent than does the fox; better to pursue one’s singular vision than to be waylaid by contributing to a project conceived by others.
Berlin published both essays long before many of the contemporary pressures of publishing culture and academic assessment came to bear. However, it may be that, for some scholars, the edited collection will always remain uncongenial for the constraints it must involve and for the distraction it may prove to be from their sovereign research agenda: an infringement of their positive academic liberty.
But the state of the edited collection is an indication of the health of a certain idea of scholarly community, which persists still, though in inhospitable conditions. It may be that the internalisation (in universities) of an imperative of competitiveness that Kathleen Fitzpatrick has outlined – connected to a wider stress on the ‘creative’ marketing of the self – has dulled the inclination to co-operate. Be that as it may, I suspect (although I could not prove) that most scholars, though both ambitious and rightly proud of their work, would aspire to a more generous mode of academic relationship, if the conditions allowed it. The edited collection at its best offers a model of that community.
One’s life in any community involves the acceptance of some mutual obligation, and a realisation that the interests of the whole are sometimes best served by the constraint of one’s own. As a contributor, I may have to accept some shaping of my work as I collaborate with an editor to turn my contribution into something that is in dialogue with the other chapters, and helps the whole collection amount to more than the sum of its parts. This may sometimes be an agreeable intrusion, and one that in fact improves my work in ways in which I did not expect; at other times it may be less welcome, but still necessary. Though perhaps not all would accept it, I would argue that as a contributor I have also an obligation to the other contributors to the book to commit the time and energy required to produce work of the required standard at the times laid down, or to withdraw in good time if I cannot so commit.
At the same time, these obligations are mutual, or ought to be, but without some level of trust between those involved, such a system is bound to fail. As I recognise my obligation to the other contributors, I am required to take a risk: to trust the other contributors similarly to commit themselves. Just as the editor takes a risk to his or her reputation in trusting me to contribute, so I must trust the editor to complete their work in a similar fashion. I trust them also to intervene to create the most coherent and impactful work that there can be, even if it involves rejecting the work of others (or even mine).
And it is here that the misalignment of academic and institutional interests is most obvious. For a university with one eye on its finances and the other on the capriciousness of government policy, to seek to minimise any perceived risk when dealing with centrally-administered research assessment is a rational response. Scholars, competing to secure an academic job, or promotion, or tenure, may also be forgiven for trimming their sails to the wind: for aligning their published work with what are thought to be the criteria on which it will be judged. Again, the attempt to mitigate risk is entirely rational. The suspicion of the edited collection is surely due in part to this risk-averseness. Even if individual works are ostensibly assessed on their own merits, and scholars continue to regard these works as among their best, an ill-defined perception of risk attachs to the format as a whole. The irony is that to dispel that perception, scholars and editors will need to embrace that risk and commit, together, to making the unsuccessful edited collection a thing of the past.
In the first chapter of my forthcoming little book on a neglected aspect of British academic life, I examine the recent history of British theology through an unaccustomed lens: the role of the edited collection of essays. These have worked in several ways: as a means to take stock of the state of a discipline (for example, Lux Mundi, or Soundings) or to address the nation on matters of social and political import (such as the essays from William Temple’s now famous Malvern conference of 1941.) There were also a plethora of volumes on very specific issues of doctrine and practice. But there is another purpose that such volumes played (which I don’t pursue in the book for reasons of space): of both policing the boundaries and assessing the health of the different parties that are a constant feature of Anglican history. In this post, I look at Anglican evangelicals in particular.
Within the groupings or parties in the Church of England, and the networks of theologians in both universities and theological colleges that tended to speak to and for them, the edited collection has often provided an opportunity to take stock at times of particular opportunity or danger. Though I’m particularly interested here in evangelicals, the late 1960s were just such a time for the Anglo-Catholic constituency, in the wake of the Second Vatican Council and concrete moves towards reunion of the churches in England. The party had in the nineteenth century been a ‘a militant minority, feared, vilified’; now, instead it had been accepted – had enjoyed, indeed, a period of some dominance between the wars – but as a result Anglo-Catholics ‘lost their definition as a party’. Catholic Anglicans Today (edited by John Wilkinson in 1968) was an attempt to articulate that distinctiveness afresh.
In Anglican evangelical history, one particularly tenacious interpretation of the fortunes of the party has been one of inter-war obscurity, followed by gradual revival from the Sixties (centred around John Stott) ending in simultaneous dominance and diversification by the late 1980s. The recent collection of essays edited by Andrew Atherstone and John Maiden did much to revise and qualify that narrative, and I don’t intend to defend it in fact. But it is possible to see that story both articulated and made normative in the several edited collections of the period, some of which I examine here.
Take for instance, the volume Evangelicals Today (Lutterworth Press, 1973). Where Catholic Anglicans Today was defensive, Evangelicals Today was bullish, a sign that Anglican evangelicals saw the balance of power within the English church shifting in their direction. The editor John C. King placed particular importance on the National Evangelical Anglican Congress in 1967, the event that became universally known by its venue, Keele University; the Keele conference came to be seen as the moment at which the evangelical constituency decided to engage positively with the wider Anglican church. (The conference itself was prepared by a set of essays, published under the title Guidelines.) King took as his point of comparison another volume, published in 1925 with the title Evangelicalism: ‘a vintage expression of a type of evangelicalism which has all but passed away’: narrow in concern where Keele had been wide-ranging; defensive where King’s contributors were open to new directions of thought. Though King had a normative point to make, the 1925 volume was indeed defensive in character, a response to a general ‘theological unsettlement’ made yet more acute by the effect of the First World War. In its turn some of its contributors engaged directly with two other collections of essays, as representatives of the theological modernism against a defence was required (the two were Foundations (1912), and – from within the evangelical stable – Liberal Evangelicalism: an interpretation (1923).
Twenty years later, the balance of power had shifted even further, such that Michael Saward could declare in 1987 that evangelicals were ‘very firmly in the driving seat of the Church of England.’ Energetic and outward-looking, the future for the party was bright since more than half of the new clergy in training were in evangelical theological colleges. Even though a sense of crisis could be detected in the wider Church of England, Gavin Reid (later a bishop) could in 1986 assemble a group with the common conviction that the answer to the question Hope for the Church of England? (published by Kingsway) was a positive and an evangelical one. And in the late 1980s and early 1990s there was a slew of volumes that attempted to make sense of the new state of affairs. Evangelical Anglicans: their role and influence in the Church today (SPCK, 1993) was the product of one of those busy theological colleges – Wycliffe Hall in Oxford – many of the staff of which were also members of the university’s theology faculty. Their mood was one of ‘a settled confidence, reflecting a sense of belonging and purpose which is becoming increasingly typical of evangelical Anglicanism today.’
Not all Anglican evangelicals were so sanguine, however. Restoring the Vision: Anglican evangelicals speak out appeared in 1990 (MARC/Monarch), edited by Melvin Tinker. ‘Many fear’ argued Tinker, ‘that evangelicalism in the Church of England has become so broad that it has become thin, compromise has replaced conviction and the once crusading spirit has been tamed into a conforming spirit.’ It was under Tinker’s guidance that The Anglican Evangelical Crisis appeared in 1995 (Christian Focus), addressing many of the same themes.
The confidence of the Wycliffe authors was misplaced, Tinker argued in the later volume; just as had been the sense of the editor of Catholic Anglicans Today in 1968, the evangelical movement out of isolation after the Keele conference had come at the cost of a loss of identity and theological distinctiveness. The contributors to The Anglican Evangelical Crisis, all linked to the newly formed conservative organisation Reform, were a more mixed group than the Wycliffe authors, with stronger links to theological colleges and seminaries in the USA and Australia. Its final chapter, by Don Carson, takes the form of a review article on the divergences between the two volumes, works that were ‘so divergent that a complete outsider would find it hard to believe that they emerge from what is widely assumed to be more or less the same camp’. The two ‘camps’ were distinct enough to bring representatives of both together to debate the issues in general, and the existence of Reform in particular. The question was asked: Has Keele Failed?, a volume edited by Charles Yeats, chaplain to University College, Durham, and published in 1995 by Hodder and Stoughton.
It is not a straightforward task to assess the precise impact of these books, especially when sales figures are hard to obtain, and when the culture is not one in which there are citations to be counted. But Anglican evangelicals, like others in the Church of England and the other churches, were often to be found coming together in collections of essays to assess the state of the party, to check its boundary markers, to warn of looming dangers and to suggest ways ahead. The impact these collections had was of a particular kind, distinct from books by individual authors. Historians of evangelicalism have much to gain from a fresh look at its publication culture.
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