The Evangelical Quadrilateral: Volume 1: Characterizing the British Gospel Movement and The Evangelical Quadrilateral: Volume 2: The Denominational Mosaic of the British Gospel Movement

on and developing the preceding contributions. Haymes offers a touchingly personal account of the potential of the communion of saints to overcome our tendency to dichotomise the worlds of body and soul, materiality and the spiritual. Kidd explores the nature of things hidden from our sight, asking how our imagination might explore God’s seeming absence from our human finitude and our limited perception of our neighbours. The final word is taken up by Fiddes who integrates the themes of companionship and prayer to show how, as the communion of saints shaped by an understanding of covenant, we participate in the lives of one another and of God. It is testament to the vision shared between the authors that while each contribution retains much by way of individual character, so too does the book excel as a single piece. Communion, Covenant and Creativity, has been consciously written to continue a conversation the authors first began in Baptists and The Communion of Saints: A Theology of Covenanted Disciples (2014). In this new volume, each author independently asserts (perhaps too often) that the current work does not require familiarity with their earlier study and while that may be true, those fluent in their former arguments will certainly enter this conversation more attuned to the authors’ shared theological intentions. Not least of those ambitions is a desire to take the professed beliefs of the global Church most seriously. Unthinking cerebral affirmations of the Creed will not suffice. Neither will populist imaginings of the sanctorum communio as disembodied souls inhabiting an ethereal afterlife. Instead, the authors offer a compellingly rich affirmation of historical theology; resurrected bodies alive in reciprocating fellowship with those who yet remain more earthbound. In these evocative conversations, a theology of the communion of saints emerges that is not simply something to be confessed in the mind of the individual disciple, it becomes something to be lived and to be known in physical bodies and communities of faith. As such Fiddes, Haynes and Kidd have written so much more than a theological book by Baptists, or even a theological book for Baptists, this is surely an illuminating weaving of theology and the arts, a gift to anyone who hopes to be counted in the company of the saints.