It is a fair rule that one should not judge a book by its cover. Nevertheless the cover design that holds the authors words together in book form is illuminating, at least post-reading. It offers, as background to the title header, a pleasant blue canvas upon which, at a slightly inclining angle, in lower case italics, we are given a repeated scroll of key words. In no particular order these are: ethics, holiness, faith, virtue, doctrine, ecclesiology, grace, dogma, election, freedom, doctrine, salvation.

The book gives us a snapshot of the theologian at work, gathering as it does, essays written over a period of eighteen months. These, in the words of the author, ‘represent a continuing project of thought, not in a linear way, as if one builds on the one before, but as an attempt to enrich and develop earlier trains of thought’ (vii). We thus have a demonstration of the economies of academic theological practice seeing similar ideas put to use in different contexts through the book. Gunton is also exercised in at least the first three essays with theological method itself and its relation to the church.

The more general reader will be frustrated by the dense academic framing of this theology. I mean by this that despite the welcome emphasis on ecclesiology and ethics the communication of Gunton’s thought to the church is dulled by the academy’s requirements. Would the theologian not be serving the church more helpfully in publishing more accessibly? As it is these elucidations are perhaps less illuminating than they could be. The theological arguments, delving so expertly into the rich inheritance of the tradition, particularly Calvin, would bear being fleshed out. This is my reservation about Gunton’s systematic theology becoming ethics. We are given a confident ethical framework with fine thinking on freedom (see last essay ‘God, grace and freedom’), but are left only with theoretical action not acts or action itself. The buzz words of the cover need to be joined up in the life of the church and the individual, and the theological task would do well to acknowledge and describe this ultimate aim of fruit even as it tends or redesigns the garden (gardening illustration, p. 2). Students of systematics will stand to be enlightened the most by these essays as they see a leading exponent of the discipline at work.

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