In the February issue of New Blackfriars, Rowan Williams explored the unity of theological discourse. He asked what criteria might be used in setting limits to pluralism—how we can go about deciding what should be allowed to count as a statement of Christian truth. He concluded that we must go beyond the domain of formal theological language and look to the way in which a theology becomes enfleshed: ‘the unity of Christian truth is perceivable to the extent that we can perceive a unity in Christian holiness’.
The limits of Christian truth are perceivable as we engage in the hard work of spelling out the human meanings, the hopes and possibilities, carried in this or that theological utterance ... Does it... continue to offer intelligible roles for the living out of new creation? Does it conserve a hope for shared, unrestricted human renewal/liberation/salvation?
I believe that, in an important though rather complex way, Williams is right, and in this article I would like to explore that complexity and to offer some observations on the understanding of Church which implies and is implied by that insight.
One obvious criticism which could be made of Williams’ position is that it shifts the problem of unity rather than solving it. If ‘the unity of Christian truth’ is to be discerned through ‘a unity of Christian holiness’, this latter unity must be in some way recognizable. And that raises a question.
On this view it is not particularly helpful to say, for example, that what unites Mother Theresa and Simeon Stylites is their shared Christian faith. Rather, it is the other way round. What holds the articulated faith of the fifth and twentieth centuries together is the fact that spending forty years on the top of a column and tending the sick in Calcutta somehow display ‘continuities of Christian patterns of holiness’. I would want to say that in the end it must be so. But how can we know?