Here’s an interesting quote:

Consensus cannot be created with verbal formulas. Serious disputes are seldom resolved without a genuine change in the parties’ thinking. And a false consensus may be more productive of conflict than an honest disagreement.
—When Jesus Became God: The Struggle to Define Christianity during the Last Days of Rome, by Richard E. Rubenstein, p. 104

The specific subject of the quotation is the negotiations the Roman Emperor Constantine instigated around the Nicene Creed, but it seems much more generally applicable.

-jsq