Holding Together: Gospel, Church and Spirit - The Essentials of Christian Identity

The long-awaited and timely new book from a highly regarded evangelical writer explores Christian identity in all its fullness - being and living in a way that holds together the gospel with the life of the church and the life of the Spirit.With the tendency for evangelical Christians to focus primarily on the gospel and catholic Christians to emphasise the importance of church, these traditions have sometimes been unnecessarily forced apart. This bridge-building book explores the notion that biblical gospel, catholic church and powerful Spirit are the fundamental realities of Christian existence that all need to experience together.In different ways, each chapter of "Holding Together" attempts to hold the gospel together with the church, and to hold the gospel and the church together with the Spirit as it explores different approaches to key areas of doctrine and practice: Scripture and tradition; Justification; Church; Mary; Worship; Baptism and Eucharist; and Mission. Here, often sharply contrasting positions in evangelical and catholic theology face each other so that they can listen to each other in the Spirit and discover their fundamental complementarity.Its vision of a catholic evangelicalism in the Spirit is theologically exciting and spiritually compelling.