This book has been dedicated to a re-examination of the relationship between music and faith, between modernity and postmodernity, between atheism and belief, between implicit and explicit theology. As such I have emphasised that a life of faith is more about journey than destination. The world is not conclusion, Emily Dickinson wrote, and maybe there should be no conclusion to these conversations, just more conversations. I cannot claim to have reached a definite destination but I can offer some assertions, findings and conjectures.

I have traced a line of continuity between the late medieval experience of religion, through the logocentricism of the Reformation and modern world, to a twenty-first-century Western culture of decline in biblical illiteracy and an incline in the search for non-religious spirituality. I have made a careful distinction between the process or action of faith, deeply embedded in praxis, with propositional, doctrinal belief – between the implicit theology of faith and the explicit theology of the creed. Artists in music and poetry are now discovering a new vocabulary to express spirituality, a language removed from Reformation logocentricism or Enlightenment rationalism. My conclusions have been that music is often a powerful expression of faith because it is not constrained by ideology, reason or cognitive assent. But I also conclude that music can, paradoxically, take us both beyond logocentric rationalism and deeper into an understanding of scripture, doctrine and tradition.