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What Episcopalians Believe: An Introduction. By Samuel Wells. Harrisburg, Pa.: Morehouse Publishing, 2011. xiv + 122 pp. $14.00 (paper).
Anglicans are fond of quoting the maxim lex orandi lex credendi ("the law of prayer is the law of belief"). It explains why most introductions to Anglican theology and practice begin by describing the distinctive qualities of Anglican worship. Samuel Wells has shirked this tradition by writing What Episcopalians Believe, a book that instead begins with an introduction entitled, 'The Triune God." He acknowledges that Episcopalians and Anglicans "are notable for the way their doctrine and ethics emerge from the crucible of corporate prayer" (p. xiii), but it is only after wandering through the traditional categories of Christian theology - the Trinity, Christology, soteriology - that Wells lands on familiar Anglican territory such as The Book of Common Prayer or the famous "three-legged stool" of Scripture, tradition, and reason.
Following this tour of Anglican dogmatic traditions, Wells shifts in the final chapter on "The Character of the Faith" from theological exposition to an account of the concrete particulars of Anglican history. He provides a condensed genealogy of the Church of England and the Episcopal Church that is one of the finest of its genre. It explains, among other things, why the...