How effective can we expect systematic theology to be in helping us to find our way to the strange other in love? Amos Yong's Theology and Down Syndrome is ‘an attempt to make sense of my brother’, and replies that systematics can indeed open us to love because ‘it has been precisely in and through the research and writing of this book that I have come to a much deeper understanding of and appreciation for my brother’. Anecdotes about Amos’ younger brother Mark, who has Down Syndrome (DS), open most of the chapters. These narratives, however, are often presented through the voice of his mother since Amos has not lived with his brother for many years. ‘While we try to maintain regular telephone contact, I have understood his verbal communications less and less, having been disattuned from his habits of speech’. How does this increasing physical distance fit with Yong's quest to ‘make sense of’ another person through theological study? The approach Yong pursues is quite different from the influential method of Hans Reinders, who insists that ‘If we are not practically involved, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to understand the practices of care and support for these human beings.’Footnote ¹ On Reinders’ view it is dangerous for theologians to believe that purely conceptual thought about disability can ever displace what is learned from first-person contact.

Theology and Down Syndrome proceeds largely in survey style, providing a broad and deep cross-disciplinary overview and a nearly 100-page bibliography which is a fine resource for scholars and students interested in theology and disability. The first two parts of the book survey a range of discourses which touch on DS. Beginning with the theme of disability in scripture, Yong then moves to show how the medical discourse has named the syndrome and how late modern social models of disability, feminist, cultural and world religious perspectives, have complicated this narration.

The main task of the book is to develop a theological account of DS. Even in the more constructive third part of the book the survey style continues, each of its four chapters opening with hefty surveys of the doctrines under discussion, creation–providence–imago dei, ecclesiology, soteriology and eschatology. Yong explicitly speaks out of a Pentecostal free church perspective and most of the questions which frame his constructive treatment are posed and shaped by the concerns of that tradition (the problem of believer's baptism for the cognitively disabled or healing ministries, to take two examples). Yong's constructive proposal is both important and interesting, not least for his assumption that traditional doctrine matters in discussions of disability, a presumption which is relatively uncommon in disability theology, as is his even more rare interest in the Spirit. The disability theology Yong develops is strongly driven by pneumatology and eschatology, broadly in the tradition of Moltmann, doctrine being understood as providing cues to appropriate forms of lived life.

The most distinctive constructive proposal of the volume is Yong's linkage of pneumatology with the breath given to ha adam to yield what he calls an ‘emergent anthropology’. The Spirit's work is not just to rescue and repair what was given at creation, but to unleash multiple forms of bodily flourishing. This anthropology is developed in what is, unsurprisingly, the most lively and interesting chapter in the book, on eschatology. Here Yong elaborates his anthropology by drawing heavily on Gregory of Nyssa's doctrine of epectasis, the idea that human perfection has no end. Humans will be resurrected in a condition very near their earthly state and begin a dynamic and endless progression of being made ever more perfect. The advantage of this constructive approach is that it allows Yong to make the case, with some force, that eschatological redemption is directed at healing rather than expungement of human bodies and identities. Given his obvious passion for these doctrinal themes it is again little surprise that one of the highlights of the book is the associated discussion of how this view situates a theologically and pastorally sensitive practice of church healing ministry.

Readers will need to make their own assessment of this creative anthropology and eschatology, and the admirable theological density of the treatment will reward close study. I would have liked to see a clearer account of the second-order nature of theological thought as a reflection on primary relationships. As with the Spirit, any true knowledge of persons cannot bypass that physical presence which allows us to perceive persons beyond their ‘syndromes’.