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Truth and Unity: The impossibility of the Last Word

‘Oppression’, wrote Archbishop Rowan Williams in the essay entitled ‘Remorse’ published in his book Lost Icons, ‘is a situation where people don’t talk to each other; where people don’t find each other difficult.’1 It is clear that the Anglican Communion has reached a point in its history at which different individuals, groups and constituent churches are finding each other ‘difficult’ and some may be close to the conclusion that our ability to talk to each other is altogether at an end and that the only option is to close down the conversation. ‘Oppression’ is what many Anglicans would claim to be experiencing from others within the Communion whose epistemology, theological method, and ethical and other conclusions differ from their own. Conservatives see oppression in the actions of liberal reinterpreters of Scripture and tradition while those who stress that a church with pretensions to catholicity must reflect this in a generously inclusive attitude see oppression in the view of those who would allow no place in the sacramental community and activity of the Church to behaviours and lifestyles (and those who live them) that allegedly transgress biblical and traditional norms, including (most obviously) gay and lesbian people. Increasingly, it would seem, the inter-Anglican debate circles around the apparently conflicting claims of ‘truth’ and ‘unity’, with the unspoken assumption that unity – or at least ‘higher’ unity – inheres in and is guaranteed by a significant measure of confessional agreement around the core of what can be regarded as ‘truth’. To compromise the vision of ‘truth’ for the sake of holding folk of differing strands of opinion in ‘unity’ is (such would seem to be the consensus) the highest treason, which ends in betraying gospel truth for a human construct of unity that is ultimately specious. The extent to which it is possible for ‘truth’ and ‘unity’ to be separated from one another and – still more – to be placed in an hierarchical relationship, by which one can be held to make stronger claims on the attention of the community than the other, is debatable. The contention of this paper is that the key characteristic