This article examines the relationship between sacramentalism and ecclesial authority in the thought of Rowan Williams. His ecclesiology is based in a postmodern or ‘cultural-linguistic’ account of sacramentalism: the function of the church is to signify God through its eucharistic performance of the new humanity. No other human cultural event can communicate God so fully. The church's authority derives from its claim to perform the ultimate sign. Because the church is the locus of this supreme semiotic power, it is the form that Christianity necessarily takes: only here can the new universality of the Kingdom be signified.

But, whether or not it is framed in postmodern terms, a high theology of church is always open to charges of authoritarianism. As the guardian of the sacrament, the church must claim authority to regulate all Christian sign-practice, which is to say that ecclesial orthodoxy is a matter of the policing of signs, which is necessarily violent. Because the church has worldly power, such violence is not merely theoretical. Of course Williams is deeply aware of this shadow side to ecclesial authority: he often insists that the church must always be confessing its sins, must always acknowledge its failure to be the new order that it heralds. But such caution is in a sense merely rhetorical, for the authority of the church has been placed beyond theological criticism. I question whether Williams goes far enough in confronting the charge that every high ecclesiology is the ideological justification of a form of social power.

The performance of social peace

Williams was strongly influenced by the Roman Catholic reception of Wittgenstein: his older contemporaries Fergus Kerr and Nicholas Lash were particularly influential. In his first book, The Wound of Knowledge (1979), the debt is clear. The experience of God, he says, ‘is mediated in the objective form of a shared life and language, a public and historical community of men and women, gathering to read certain texts and perform certain acts’.Footnote ¹ The essence of Christianity lies in the practices of the Christian community. Here are the two basic themes of postmodern Catholicism: practice and community. Williams emphasises the materiality of this religion (with some nods to Marx's understanding of culture): it is always historically and culturally constituted. It is not an abstract theory or ‘inner’ affair, but something that people do. At this stage his theology is generally cautious, apophatic: he is readier to emphasise the fallibility of the church than its precarious identity as the site of the new humanity. In an essay of 1980 he criticises banally enthusiastic theologies of the Spirit: we must retain a sense of the church as ‘sign of the Spirit rather than its domicile’.Footnote ² He concludes with a dictum from Luther: crux probat omnia.

In an essay of 1982 he argues that Christian identity is defined by ‘incorporation into a worshipping – a ritual-celebrating – group’.Footnote ³ The essence of Christian ritual practice is ‘“the paschal mystery” of the death and exaltation of Jesus’.Footnote ⁴ This ‘central symbol’ is the real source of authority in Christianity. The authority of bishop and priest derives from their ability to mediate it, to reactivate this symbolic power in a way that unites Christians. In the early church, Williams explains, the bishop was understood as a symbol of the church's unity, and therefore endowed with intrinsic sacramental power. This essay is a good example of how his cultural-linguistic approach to Christian ritual practice serves a high ecclesiology. In quasi-anthropological vein he shows how Christianity is essentially a symbolic language-system that is centred on the ritual action of the church, and depends for its coherence on the authority of bishops.

Resurrection (1982) is a reflection on the church's re-presentation of Christ. The community makes him present again as it celebrates him, supremely in the Eucharist. ‘The believing community manifests the risen Christ: it does not simply talk about him or even “celebrate” him. It is the place where he is shown.’Footnote ⁵ This is his repeated point: the church is the corporate communicator of God (he is clearly influenced by Eastern Orthodox theology here). At one point in this book he insists that the church makes individual prophets unnecessary, for its function is to make prophetic witness a constant, permanent reality.Footnote ⁶ So authentic Christian practice is again located in the ritual practice of the community, and in the life of the community more generally. And of course Williams makes a very high claim for this corporate practice when he talks of it ‘manifesting’, ‘showing’ Christ. This is beyond ordinary sign-making, such as occurs when a man writes a poem about Jesus, or wears a crucifix. When the orthodox community gathers something of a different order occurs; it is therefore qualitatively different from any other human phenomenon. It alone can claim to mediate God, to participate in God, to blur with God (the latter colloquialism is a useful reminder of just what is being claimed).

Williams's concern with the church's ritual communication of Christ continues in his essay of 1982 ‘Eucharistic Sacrifice – the Roots of a Metaphor’. Here he argues for a particular understanding of the Eucharist as a sacrifice. By commemorating Christ's death with reference to the seemingly dark world of sacrifice, the church defines itself as ‘a place where offering is made’.Footnote ⁷ He draws upon the research of anthropologists to argue that ‘[b]oth giving and receiving gifts indicates – and sometimes creates – participation in a common life or a common reality’.Footnote ⁸ The community therefore demonstrates its understanding that it is founded in God's self-giving. Williams concludes with one of his favourite themes: corporate praise entails ‘the sacrifice, the giving up, of our own sinful and self-protective definition of what we are’.Footnote ⁹ This group therapy cures us of the illusion of individualism, and enables us ‘to reappropriate our new selves’, to remember that we are members of the new humanity.Footnote ¹⁰

In an essay of 1983 he again combines anthropology with ecclesiology in order to reflect on the definition of Catholic orthodoxy.

The church does not just read the Bible but ‘performs’ it, he says (with reference to Lash): in worship, ‘lives are “dramatically” caught up into a classical narrative that is now being enacted, and re-formed through that participation’.Footnote ¹² Worship is a sort of community theatre: the reference to drama recurs in his work and its importance cannot be overstated. Elsewhere it illustrates the concept of analogy, which is largely a matter of seeing ourselves in terms of biblical characters: ‘the roles Christians can take on are the roles created and enacted by the fathers of Jewish faith’.Footnote ¹³ The particular language of Christianity must be animated by communal performance. For a language is a communal thing: for Williams this Wittgensteinian axiom underwrites ecclesiology. An individual cannot fully subscribe to the language of Christian faith unless he is immersed in its regular corporate reperformance: by this means the particularity of Christian language sticks in his soul, forms his soul. (This emerges in his essay on Don Cupitt's theology of 1985. His ‘non-realism’ goes against the linguistic practice of the community, which determines ‘the grammar of faith’; it denies ‘our inescapable insertion into community and what some awkwardly call “linguality”’.Footnote ¹⁴) The essence of Christianity is the linguistic practice of the community, crystallised in ritual. It is only here that Christian language is fully at home.

In his book of 1983, The Truce of God, he explains that the church is ‘a sacrament, an effective, compelling symbol, of a humanity able to live by sharing and by loving, reverent mutual attention’.Footnote ¹⁵ To call the church a sacrament of the new humanity, or the Kingdom, is to assert that here the Kingdom is made present in its representation. And of course such representation is wider than the actual ritual of the Eucharist: the entire life of the church is qualitatively different from that of any other human group. Williams is deeply impressed by the Eastern Orthodox idea of the church as the site of humanity's deification. And of course he is also influenced by secular and religious socialism, from Hegel on. He is post-Marxist, in the sense that he assumes the impossibility of the secular socialist ideal, yet is theologically influenced by it, in his conception of the church as an intrinsically social ideal. In a sense ecclesiology takes on the social idealism that Marxism has failed to realise. Of course Williams would say that it naturally belongs to the church: Marxism was a doomed attempt to secularise it.

So at the heart of Williams's thought is the claim that the church is the divinely perfect society, in embryo. His ecclesiology therefore has a utopian dimension: this social reality, the church, does not just talk about social perfection as an ideal but actually embodies it, embryonically. Yet this claim must be understood in sacramental terms: the church performs social perfection, we might say. This allows an apophatic proviso: like every human society, the church is under judgement, fallible. This high ecclesiology, that might be called ‘semi-utopian’, is mitigated by the sacramental ambiguity. But the ideological danger remains: if the church is the site of Christ's re-presentation, then surely it is above criticism, surely it is endowed with superhuman authority? It is questionable whether Williams fully confronts this danger. He repeatedly offers a vision steeped in stark, earthy, early-church purity, of the worshipping community performing its theatrical rites and so reanimating the presence of Christ. He implies that the church is essentially the company that puts on this bit of community theatre. But in real life this ‘company’ has more dubious aspects to it. It issues laws, which it associates with the will of God, and it makes arrangements with political power. Williams's aesthetically compelling vision of church is charming in the literal sense: it charms us into forgetting the accompanying dangers. It foregrounds the church's power to mediate divine communion, to conjure up Christ by its social rites, and allows the problems of its institutional existence to recede.

His essay of 1987, ‘The Nature of a Sacrament’, begins very generally, and in a largely neutral, analytical voice. The human being has always ‘freely and gratuitously reflected on and enlarged his and her existence in producing significant (communicative) shape . . . We make signs, and we make ourselves through signs . . .’Footnote ¹⁶ He then suggests that a particular community may be understood in terms of its characteristic signs, ‘in which the identity of the specific group is stated, reflected on and communicated, tacitly or explicitly’.Footnote ¹⁷ For example, the rites of ancient Israel communicate the covenant with God. ‘As sign-makers in their observance of the Law, the whole of Israel is a priestly people.’Footnote ¹⁸ ‘In the history that stands behind – and within – the Christian revelation, we see a people signifying, “intending”, a belief in their creation as a people by the hand of God, and making social and ritual signs to embody the nature of the God who has so acted.’Footnote ¹⁹ Jesus must be seen in this context. He is presented to us as ‘a sign-maker of a disturbingly revolutionary kind’:

Jewish culture is a comprehensive signing of God; the story of God's forming of Israel. Jesus continues this, but with a strange difference: his signs refer to, and create, a new sort of culture, one that does not yet exist. ‘He proclaims the imperatives of the kingdom, realizes them in his life and death, and so begins to make the possible community actual in the post-Easter experience of his followers. He is thus an effective sign, a converting sign.’Footnote ²¹ By proclaiming an order that does not yet exist he establishes a form of sign-making that, after his death, enables it to begin to exist. Through dying he becomes a new sort of effective sign. The Kingdom is not just something that is imagined, but something that becomes real when it is signified. The gap between sign and signified drops away. The Kingdom, when properly signed by the church, is made real now. The new order that Jesus pointed to actually arrives through the church, for the church has the super-sign of ‘Jesus’ life and death’. This sign ‘is, so believers have held, unprecedentedly comprehensive: by offering and effecting forgiveness, and forming a community around this reality, human relationships and potentialities are set free from the paralysing and self-intensifying consequences of hostility and aggression to each other and to ourselves, from the lethal symbiosis of violence and guilt’.Footnote ²² So Jesus founded a society that could, after his death, signify the kingdom – and in signifying it begin to realise it. Here, in dense prosaic language, is the characteristic moment of Williams's theology: its sacramental semi-utopianism. The church is the realisation of the Kingdom of God – by means of sacramentalism. In its ritual sign-making, the church does not just signify the Kingdom of God, as something other than itself: it becomes a place of ethical uniqueness, superhuman peace, a divine society, the Kingdom itself.

Sacramental antinomianism?

By the end of the 1980s Williams had become well acquainted with the basic danger of Catholic ecclesiology: its tendency to mere conservatism. The Church of England was divided over whether or not to ordain women to the priesthood. His writing now shows increasing awareness of the potential danger of a high ecclesiology lapsing into neo-orthodox rigidity. In an essay of 1989 he questions the ‘postliberal’ theology of George Lindbeck. The church is not a sealed-off linguistic system, he insists, but is in constant dialogue with secular culture.Footnote ²³ In an essay of the following year he warns against claiming absolute finality for the church. In a sense it cannot claim superiority to Judaism: ‘Insofar as the Church has not ceased to be a people, with the institutional and political defences appropriate to a people, it has no right to question Israel's continuing existence as a people, as “Judaism”.’Footnote ²⁴ Christianity has ‘commonly offered only an ersatz universality, a large-scale tribalism with Christ as source and guarantor of the authoritative and comprehensive system of meaning purveyed by the Church’.Footnote ²⁵ Though the church inevitably impersonates the Kingdom, it must remember that it remains a fallen human tradition. His ecclesiology is marked by this paradox: the church must be distinctive in order to proclaim the new universalism. It does not cast off the contradiction of Israel: a particular people heralds the end of boundaries. A corollary of this is that the church must be a place of order, discipline, authority despite the inevitable violence that such things bring. There is a special sort of tragic economy here: the church is unable to fulfil its mission, for fallen humanity intrudes. Yet the tragic is overcome: the church, even in its failure, communicates God's plan of ultimate peaceful universalism. Ecclesiology is marked by tragedy, but for the time being only. At the end of the 1980s, then, Williams seems to return to the ecclesial caution, the apophatic reserve, which he exhibited at the very beginning of the decade. The church must perform the new humanity without aggrandising itself.

A lecture of 1990 reveals both the height of his ecclesiology and its wariness of triumphalism. In ‘Imagining the Kingdom: Some Questions for Anglican Worship Today’ he explains that the genius of traditional Anglican liturgy is to imagine all of social life in terms of the Eucharist. Because all are invited to partake of the Lord's Supper, a truly social commonwealth is imagined. ‘Our responsibility for a just commonwealth is the same responsibility laid upon us to be partakers of this holy Communion.’Footnote ²⁶ More than any other Christian tradition, Anglicanism relates the Eucharist to a particular polity: the English state. Of course this was dangerous, and we must repent of ‘the ludicrous and tragic chauvinisms of Anglican history’.Footnote ²⁷ But we must not throw out the baby with the bathwater: we must retain the principle of concrete universalism, rediscover it in a more globally conscious age. We must remember that the Eucharist anticipates the in-gathering of all peoples in God's Kingdom, that it refers beyond the present community of worshippers. For Williams, then, a high theology of the Eucharist is fundamental to the identity of the church, but its legitimacy depends on its reference beyond the church, to eschatological universalism.

In 1991 he became a bishop. Soon an important part of his involvement in church politics was his advocacy of reform on the question of the ordination of homosexuals. In fact, it is especially important for our theme. For, in his treatment of sexual ethics, he seems to show a wider understanding of sacramentalism than hitherto, and this seems to put a new question-mark over the church's claim to be the criterion of sacramentalism. In one of his influential addresses on the subject he declares the inadequacy of a legalistic approach to sexual ethics.

This is obviously an important contribution to the debate about homosexual ordination, but it is also crucial to our theme: the relationship between sacramentalism and ecclesial authority. For, in this account, the church as it actually exists is not assumed to be the criterion of all Christian sign-making. Instead the believer can, it seems, have a direct sacramental relationship with Christ. And in this context Williams is criticising the church's claim to regulate sacramentalism, for it implicitly denies the sacramental power of a homosexual relationship. The issue of homosexuality is not just important to Williams because of its high political profile in recent years: it is actually the loose end that threatens to unravel his entire ecclesiology. For it shows that the church's regulation of sacramentalism will sometimes be erroneous, that authentic sacramentalism will sometimes be forced outside its walls: this shakes the foundations of his entire account of ecclesial authority.

Unfortunately, and unsurprisingly, Williams does not pursue this loose end, but returns to expounding the necessity of the ecclesial regulation of Christian sign-making. An essay of 1995, on Michael Ramsey, is one of the clearest guides to Williams's ecclesiology. He begins with a quotation from Ramsey: ‘Christian theology is not only a detached exercise of the Christian intellect; it is the life of the one Body in which Truth is both thought out and lived out’.Footnote ²⁹ He observes that Ramsey was influenced by the Roman Catholic and Orthodox ‘vision of the Church as “epiphany”: what matters about the Church is not a system of ideas as such (though doctrine and dogma have their place) nor the structure of an organisation competent to deliver authoritative judgements and to require obedience (though order is important in its proper context), but what the bare fact of the Church shows’.Footnote ³⁰ For Ramsey,

And he explains that this vision depends on the centrality of the Eucharist. The Church is truly itself here, ‘where human beings renounce their private and protected selfhoods “in a death like his”, so that their self-emptying mirrors the self-emptying of God the Word in Jesus’ life and death . . . Thus the Church is itself precisely where it is transparent to the divine action – which means that the Church is itself in the sacraments.’Footnote ³² And this justifies the authority of ordained ministers. ‘They are there presiding in the assembly in order to show something – the unity of the Church in the cross and resurrection of Jesus. Without the apostolic ministry, the problem is not a defect of “validity” in the usual Catholic sense but a defect of clarity and intelligibility in the symbolic communication of the gospel of God.’Footnote ³³ He is paraphrasing Ramsey, yet of course with a very high degree of sympathy. He now seems to admit that there is a sort of aesthetic idealism at work: this vision of church is based in ‘the picture of an assembly that in its formal structure and its disposition of responsibilities and its language, gesture and process draws you towards a contemplative understanding of the act of God in cross and resurrection and in the eternal love by which God is God’.

The question could surely be more pointed: is not this epiphanic vision an ideological justification for what the church is the rest of the time – a worldly authority? And the question could be directed at Williams himself. He now turns to the definition of authentic theology. For Ramsey it is authentic when it serves the objective fact of the new society of the Church. And now he acknowledges the obvious objection:

Williams seems at last to be facing the most important objection to his own vision. He now admits that there may also be theological authenticity in the voices which claim to be excluded from the church, primarily those of women. Might these theologies not be ‘a “living out of Truth” in the life of the Body’? But Williams does not unequivocally uphold this objection to Ramsey, for ‘there is a crucially important counter-point to be made’.

This is a crucial passage. Ultimately the church must not accept the authority of a form of theology that does not accept its authority. Such a theology is no real theology; it does not serve ‘the Body’, but some form of liberalism. And liberalism is weak; its social vision is abstract and therefore prey to meatier alternatives such as fascism. Instead of attending to external liberal critics, the church must be self-reforming. As he has often said before, the Eucharist should spur it into self-suspicion, endless reformation. Theology can only authentically challenge the church if it is rooted in the ritual life of the church: ‘a theology without anchorage in the showing of God's life that is the Church's liturgy becomes . . . talkative and bold in its own sophistications . . . [I]f there is anything at all to be said for understanding the gospel as a gift, and, more specifically, a gift in the form of a remaking of human bonds, theology will always be stumbling to keep up with something prior’.Footnote ³⁷ This is, in a sense, Williams's ‘bottom line’: authentic theology will arise from authentic Christian practice, which is sacramental, and therefore intra-ecclesial. Authentic theology holds that the gospel takes the form of a new social reality that already exists. The ‘remaking of human bonds’ is already under way, in the church. Because it serves this new social reality, theology will be a reflection of ecclesial authority.

An essay of 1996 returns to the Eucharist's power of dramatic transformation. The sacramental action ‘tells us that where we habitually are is not, after all, a neutral place but a place of loss or need. It then requires us to set aside this damaged or needy condition, this flawed identity, so that in dispossessing ourselves of it we are able to become possessed of a different identity, given in the rite.’Footnote ³⁸ In the Eucharist ‘[t]he Church declares, symbolically if all too seldom in its own social concreteness, that there is a form of common human life that “means” or communicates the meanings of God . . . Because of the assured trustworthiness of God, the possibility of a society characterized by fidelity can be imagined, a society in which mutual commitment consistently judges and limits sectional acquisitiveness.’Footnote ³⁹ Though the presentation is more cautious than a decade earlier, here is the same root idea: the Eucharist shows us social ideality. Because it hosts this performative manifestation of the Kingdom, the church is uniquely authoritative.

Since 2002, when he was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, his reflections on ecclesiology have a new political dimension. The emphasis on the Eucharist recedes somewhat now that his words are being so closely scrutinised by Evangelicals as well as Catholics. His agenda is obviously internally ecumenical: to remind the warring factions of the Anglican Communion what they have in common. A recurrent theme is that the church originates in God's action, his invitation to humanity at large.

In a lecture of 2003 he explains that the issue of the authority of the church is partly ‘a question about the right of the Christian community to decide the boundaries of what's going to count as Christian’.Footnote ⁴⁰ It is also a question about its authority to be heard by the wider culture, he explains, but this will largely depend on its ability to decide what it is: ‘the task of clarifying in the community of Christian believers what's going to count as Christian talk, the task of clarifying what it is that makes this community distinctive, is actually from the first moment part of establishing a community that has some sort of claim, some sort of credibility’.Footnote ⁴¹ The church had better be clear about its boundaries, he says, for it claims to be ‘grounded in the action of God and to be involved in the reconstruction of the human race’.Footnote ⁴² This claim will only deserve a hearing if the church is a disciplined, cohesive community. But of course there's a Catch-22 here (though Williams ignores it): the more united it tries to be, the more reliant it will be on doctrinal and moral rulings, and therefore the more it will resemble a normal violent worldly institution. With reference to the early church, he argues that the church has to define its boundaries, and therefore condemn heresy, in order to demonstrate its origin in the act of God. ‘When people talk about heresy in the Early Church they're talking about those actions and ways of talking which, in the eyes of the majority, seemed to subvert the very idea of being a called, summoned, invited community. Without that you don't have the sense of God's primary action reaching out to the reconstruction of the human race.’Footnote ⁴³ So only an orderly institution can demonstrate that it is rooted in God's action. He makes the same case in Why Study the Past? (2005). The church can only resist evil political ideologies if it is a reasonably coherent unit: ‘definition matters, ultimately, so that resistance is possible to the idolatrous claims of total power that may be made from time to time in the world . . . Inevitably, the Church becomes involved in patrolling its boundaries; not every spirit is of Christ, not every way of speaking and acting is capable of being transparent to Christ. Discipline is exercised, so that what is said and done in the Church displays its accountability.’Footnote ⁴⁴ Only a church which aspires to unity, and exerts internal discipline, can communicate its divine origin. A church which fails to define itself in this way will be taken over by secular values.