Ben Quash's aim, in this elegant and stimulating book, is to show how theology works (we might say ‘develops’) as a living discipline, how it finds new ways to speak about God, and, where it does this well, how the Holy Spirit may be identified as the ‘operational condition’ of such ‘found’ theology.

The book turns on three ‘case-studies’ to each of which Quash give a full chapter. Each is followed by a further chapter, in which he develops the discussion further by engaging with some powerful theorists of interpretation. At the heart of the book, then, are three diptychs. For his first case study, he focuses on the translation of the Scriptures at the time of the Reformation, drawing in particular on the excellent work of Brian Cummings who writes about The Literary Culture of the Reformation. For his second example, he turns to a painting of Vittore Carpaccio (c. 1505), which hangs in Berlin and is rather inaccurately entitled Die Grabbereitung Christi (‘The Preparation of Christ for Burial’). Quash focuses on the part played by the figure of Job, who sits in silent contemplation behind the extended body of Jesus. (Unfortunately, his riveting discussion is ill-served by a black and white reproduction of poor quality.) For his third case study, he discusses with great delicacy the sense of displacement and hope in the poetry of Henry Vaughan. The theorists he uses include David Weiss Halivni, a Jewish scholar who writes about ‘maculation’ (imperfection) in the text of Scripture and the opportunities this creates for ‘reparative’ textual interpretation, Hans Jauss, whose reception aesthetics are developed from the hermeneutic theory of Jürgen Habermas, and C. S. Peirce, whose account of abduction was crucial for the thought of the Anglican theologian, Daniel Hardy. Hardy's creative influence comes increasingly to the fore in the latter pages of Quash's book.

Quash acknowledges how important for him have been extended discussions over ten years in Cambridge with Dan Hardy, David Ford and – a Jewish thinker frequently mentioned here – Peter Ochs. These are all central figures in the development of Scriptural Reasoning (not mentioned as such), in which shared interpretation is developed out of the exposition of textual particularity and the meeting of interpretative tradition with contemporary experience. Fundamental for Scriptural Reasoning is the type of reasoning employed: reasoning about particular texts and within a tradition of interpretation, reasoning that is neither primarily deductive (developed on the basis of axioms or propositions) nor inductive (developed out of experience). It is characteristically ‘heuristic’ or, to take Peirce's term, abductive – developed in disciplined response to specific instances. The word I would use to describe this sort of reasoning is that it demonstrates ‘epieikeia’ (fittingness) which is a form of justice (as in ‘le mot juste’). Just as the good poet ‘finds’ exactly the right word, or puts ‘the right words in the right order’, so the good theologian ‘finds’ exactly the trope that fits the situation – and this ‘finding’ is itself a gift of the Holy Spirit.

Quash is a skilled critic who illuminates everything he discusses. At root, it seems to me, he is reworking the characteristic pattern of Anglican theology, operating within a field created by Scripture, tradition and reason (the last in the sense referred to by Coleridge as ‘logos’). What he doesn't do, and about this he is quite explicit, is to offer criteria for good, appropriate or ‘fitting’ theology. His account of ‘found’ theology reminded me at several points of Newman. For example, Newman writes in the Apologia that, given fresh insight, ‘the whole man moves; paper logic is but the record of it’. Quash writes that it is, ‘Not just the mind but the whole self [that] is attracted towards God’. The point, for Newman, is that when ‘the whole man moves’, the person goes beyond the explicit evidence, but in a way that is not irrational. It is the rationality in this ‘going beyond’, rationality which Coleridge called ‘imagination’, that fascinates Quash. His point, following Coleridge (whom he discusses at length), and developed by Newman (whom he does not mention), is that ‘the whole self’ is attracted towards God through the imaginative discernment of what may responsibly be ‘found’ in particular texts, experiences and commitments. ‘Canons, like doctrines’ he says, ‘are fixed in order to bear multiple meanings’. Confident in the receptive discernment of the ecclesial community, Quash sees no need to set official limits to the multiplicity of interpretation.

When Newman failed to find in Anglicanism an answer to the criteriological questions raised by his study of the development of doctrine, he became a Roman Catholic. By contrast, Quash seems to me to model an Anglicanism closer to Judaism: in its commitment to the canon of Scripture, to interpretative tradition, and the novelty of responsible (‘found’) interpretation, it is hospitable and open and non-judgmental. But will that do? As soon as one seeks to relate Quash's account of theology to the public life of the church, the awkward criteriological questions can no longer be postponed: Has the church been right to operate a closed canon (to ‘define’ a limit to the sources of ‘multiple meanings’)? How should disagreements about ‘found’ theology be resolved (or even addressed) or don't they matter? Should the church ever arbitrate on matters of theology or doctrine – as Roman Catholicism did with the previously open questions of transubstantiation or the Immaculate Conception of Mary? If Anglicans maintain that questions like these were prematurely closed, is the same true of the homoousion? And should that of the filioque now be closed – negatively? Quash's account gives us a rich, phenomenological characterization of the way that theology which is open to history and the ‘multiple meanings’ inspired by the Holy Spirit is to be done. However, it seems to me that as soon as one asks the inevitable questions about the links between the ‘found theology’ he so brilliantly illuminates, reception and Church doctrine, the christological, criteriological issues he eschews must be faced. So long as theology is developed in engagement with a canon of ‘Scripture’ and a privileged tradition of interpretation, both of which Quash robustly and consistently defends, such questions cannot be avoided. Or was Newman's problem that he never understood the constitutive affinity between Anglicanism and Judaism?