Thanks for the review - sufficiently detailed for me to look out for the book to flick through when I see it somewhere, but not to go out and buy it..

What I have found so disappointing with Dave Tomlinson’s journey is just what a well-worn path he is travelling - down a trajectory re-confirmed by each publication. It’s really pretty much the same ‘reaction against fundamentalism - journey into an orthodoxy-tinged liberalism set the context of Anglican tolerance’ that many have made from Free Churches over the years. Some real theology (hurrah for that!), a bit of liturgy (I reach for my Make Liturgy History wristband), a lot of tolerance and - hey presto! - we have a modern version of old-fashioned latitudinarianism. ‘None the worse for that’ many will say, but even if they are right, lets not anoint it with a significance it doesn’t have. You could line up hundereds of Anglicans who have come that way over the last 150 years. To be sure there are some variations in context and content but basically - it’s the same old road.

Am I being unfair? No, I don’t think so. Just asking for perspective on our age. In every generation there are those who all think our age is unique, that the world is moving so fast that we need a book to guide us on the way. Today this is dressed up not in the langauge of technological progress but the language of post modernity. Some responses move right (affirm old truths!) others left (go with the times!). Lets hear it for Barth, part of whose genius was to recognise that human ills commensurate across generations.

Give me someone, anyone, with a constructive, creative take on how the post-liberal gospel can be made to live in the 21st century and I’ll buy the book today. Don’t sell me more journeys from fundamentalism to latiduinarianism - I want to know where the stop called ‘the future of the historic faith’ is located on the 21st century map.

What we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence