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As for my own answer, I should prefer to say that the unity of the church lies in a common faith and witness – -- which is to say, in a shared explicit self-understanding and life-praxis – -- mediated, immediately or mediately; by experience of Jesus as being of decisive significance for human existence. All the forms through which this faith and witness are expressed, however, belong, not to the unity of the church, but to its diversity, if not, indeed, to its division. This is as true, I should insist, of forms of thought and belief as of practice and action or of social organization, so that one can speak, as Knox does, of "a common faith" only by somehow distinguishing, as he also does, between the "basic structure" of faith – -- which is to say, the assertion implied by the self-understanding of faith – -- and the historically conditioned "formula(s)" through which it was expressed and communicated (cf. 74). If the first was indeed "common," the second was, as often as not, diverse from one tradition or community of faith to another.

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