FINDING A COMMON LANGUAGE

If Christians are followers of one Christ, the object of the ecumenical common enquiry must be to know him in one faith, but that faith need not necessarily be expressed everywhere in identical terms. There are all sorts of difficulties about the relationship of diversity and variety of expression to unanimity. We shall be looking at these in this chapter. But I want to put forward at the outset the proposition that we are in search of a single Christian truth.

Then we can argue that it has to be grasped in common. That does not mean that everyone has to describe it in the same words. Yet even if distinct languages (in the broadest meaning of the term) remain as theological vehicles, and it is clearly both inevitable and right that they should, it has to be possible to discuss the one truth in a series of sets of words which give everyone a means of expression and access to understanding. The task is to find a way for everyone to be sure that it is the same truth which is being referred to. It is of course notoriously difficult to establish that faith is inwardly identical. ‘Il est impossible d'être absolument certain qu'il existe chez tous une conviction intérieure totalement identique.’

This is a problem which has grown with the spread of the Gospel. In the early Church the language in which formal or official statements were made was at first predominantly Greek, with Latin the second language for these purposes.