In the previous chapter it was suggested that the staple ingredients of regular worship act as carriers of the distinctive Christian culture of faith, hope and love. Yet a final paradox remains. This culture provides churchgoers both with a shared means of philosophical justification and with an apparently interminable potential for disagreement on particular moral issues. Precisely because these Christian virtues of faith, hope and love are set at a general level, they can unite churchgoers. Yet once they are particularised and related to actual moral decision-making in a pluralistic society, they soon expose bitter and passionately held moral differences amongst churchgoers and within and between different churches. An account of Christian ethics which emphasised only points of moral unity amongst churchgoers, and which failed also to explore radical moral disagreements, would surely be inadequate.

This final chapter will examine some of the theological and institutional implications of this paradox, using an extended example of troublesome moral decision-making. The thirteenth Lambeth Conference of Anglican Bishops was held on the campus of my own university in the summer of 1998. Since I was involved as a theological consultant on ethics both in the Conference itself and in its lengthy preparation process, I could share and observe at first hand what proved to be a difficult and fractious series of moral debates within and across different provinces of the Anglican Communion.

I will, of course, be careful to use only information which is already in the public domain – it would be quite wrong to disclose confidential negotiations.