Stephen Neill's Anglicanism has been the classic book on Anglican history and tradition for a generation. Books which become classics endure because they exhibit timeless features. Neill's Anglicanism succeeds because he delineates core features of the church's tradition which originated in English circumstances and spread beyond them. The book's endurance also reflects its comprehensive narrative and objectivity. For Neill English precedent left an enduring mark without enshrining English authority. Anglicanism's genius has been its capacity to embrace local variations of expression. Yet Neill foresaw the tensions inherent in post-colonial Anglicanism. The irony of the church's adaptability and growth was the resulting strain on its consensual forms that began in his lifetime. Local variety would extend to a degree that would erode over-arching consensus and strain the structures which would enforce it, as Neill saw plainly.

Christianity and Social Order was a creature of its time and, although influential over several decades, is challenged by today's plurality and globalization. Nevertheless, the ascendancy of Radical and Neo-Orthodoxy repeats imbalances of the Christendom Group which Temple was concerned to counter. Temple's greatest weakness for today is his failure to appreciate the trend towards profound social plurality, and its challenge to his strong idea of nationhood. However, today's global economy suggests that plurality must be held in tension with other aspects of the dominant market model. Temple's work reinforces important critiques of market economics, including scepticism about the alleged impossibility of moral agreement. This in turn suggests that total abandonment of Temple's Middle Axiom approach may be premature. A better-developed theology of correctives would reflect classic Christian vocabulary, cohere with Temple's approach, and offer a route toward the revitalization of the Anglican tradition of public theology.

Understanding Coleridge's classic work On the Constitution of Church and State requires paying close attention to the system of distinctions and relations he sets up between the state, the ‘national church’, and the ‘Christian church’. The intelligibility of these relations depends finally on Coleridge's Trinitarianism, his doctrine of ‘divine ideas’, and the subtle analogy he draws between the Church of England as both an ‘established’ church of the nation and as a Christian church and the distinction and union of divinity and humanity in Christ. Church and State opens up, in these ‘saving’ distinctions and connections, important considerations for the integrity and role of the Christian church within a religiously plural national life.

This article pursues the question of whether William Paley's Natural Theology is an Anglican classic. I place Paley's natural theology project in its historical context of skepticism about Christianity's truth claims and in the context of Paley's ‘system’. His teleological argument is briefly explained and four challenges, past and present, to its thesis are considered. The question of what makes a work a classic is explored in terms of its enduring interest, especially in the light of the controversy concerning Intelligent Design Theory, and its enduring value. It is argued that because of its enduring interest and value Paley's Natural Theology may be judged a classic but not of a peculiarly Anglican kind.

Richard Hooker (1554–1600), while respected in his own time, has become famous in the twenty-first century. For a generally secular age of postmodernism, Hooker offers a remarkably coherent foundational methodology and presents a vigorous case for conservative Christianity. With central attention to Jesus Christ, he celebrates faith, appreciates tradition, and honours reason. Of course, Hooker wrote for his own times. But he has remained relevant, since he cherished truth that does not age. Of the eight books of his Lawes, in Book V Hooker recorded what may be called the most powerful witness for Evangelical and Catholic Christianity in a profound Anglican formulation. While the central orientation to Christ was characteristic of all of Hooker's works, Book V combined his methodological concerns with such central doctrines as the Church, the definition of prayer, Christology, and the holy sacraments. At the same time Hooker also reflected on the theological dimensions of a great variety of liturgical issues. This brief statement, however, precludes a detailed concern with all that is valuable, and focuses on the major doctrines. Moreover, Book V can also be viewed as a creative celebration and defence of the Book of Common Prayer.