Gustavo Gutierrez, in a recent visit to Cambridge, told this story about the Medellin conference of 1968. (This is my recollection of his story and not an exact quotation.) Following that important gathering, the South American bishops received a letter from Rome. ‘We can see’, it read, ‘that your circumstances are very different from those we experience here in Europe. To enable us to help you, please send experts on South American economics, politics, sociology and anthropology to Rome. . . But don’t send any theologians because we have our own theologians here.’Despite the fashionable sound to the phrase, theology has always been done ‘in context’. Augustine was no less contextual a theologian than Bonhoeffer, with each page attesting to the writer’s particular education, formation as a Christian, pastoral concerns and so on. Does this alarm us? Should this alarm us? If we admit to, and even delight in, the diverse contexts for the doing of theology are we ‘going soft’ on any claim to a universally valid Christian message? How do we speak of the truth and yet speak from our particularity? These are the questions I wish to consider here, questions whose significance for contemporary theology, now a global and ecumenical enterprise, need not be underlined.I would like to begin, however, at a place seemingly remote from our own—Europe in the sixteenth century. I should like to look at one of those Reformation debates which, while distant in time and sensibility from those of our century, have repercussions which all Christians to a greater or lesser degree must still feel. For reasons which I hope will become clear, I should like to begin this discussion of ‘truth’ with a look at an exchange of letters in 1539 between Cardinal Sadoleto and John Calvin.